Impure reflection

Impure reflection is the ordinary reflective movement that makes consciousness appear to possess an enduring psychic self. By objectifying the reflected-on consciousness as an in-itself and then claiming to be that object, it produces the psyche as a virtual, substantial-looking unity. The process reveals something real about reflective life, but mistakes a constructed shadow for the non-substantial historicity it cannot simply capture.

Reflection and the psyche

Reflection is not an arbitrary interruption of consciousness. It arises with a purpose: the reflective consciousness seeks to be, for itself, what it is. The distinction between pure and impure reflection concerns how this effort unfolds. Daily life begins with impure, or constituent, reflection, which includes pure reflection as its original structure; pure reflection can be reached only through a modification of reflection itself, described as a katharsis. The account sets that purification aside to examine how impure reflection constitutes psychic temporality and the psyche.

The problem begins with two kinds of time. Original temporality is the temporalizing activity of the for-itself itself; psychic temporality, by contrast, appears as a sequence of facts and as an intersubjective reality that can become an object of science or a goal of action. One may, for example, try to make another person love oneself, as though love were a state that could be conferred. Yet psychic time cannot constitute itself: reflection must constitute it, because it does not appear to unreflective consciousness, which is ekstatic presence to the world rather than observation of a psychic history.

How objectification works

Impure reflection is a spontaneous, though not original, reflective movement. In it, the reflective seeks to be the reflected-on as an in-itself. Its operation combines interiorization and objectivation: it apprehends the reflected-on as a thing with being, then tries to become that thing. Reflection thus establishes a circuit of selfness in which it relates itself to an in-itself it has to be. The resulting structure includes the reflective, the reflected-on, and the projected in-itself that the reflective takes itself to be.

That in-itself is not simply found waiting behind consciousness. It appears when reflection takes the reflected-on as an object, adopts a point of view toward it, and thereby posits itself as not being that object. The reflected-on is made to appear as something determinable and qualified, with a transcendent object behind it: a shadow cast onto being by the reflective act. This shadow is the object the reflective must be, while remaining unable to coincide with it as a fixed thing.

Bad faith and the psychic fact

Impure reflection is in bad faith because it first sets up a separation between the reflective and the reflected-on, only to recover an affirmation of identity afterward. It presents itself as revealing an object that it has made into itself, then asserts that it is that object. The apparent objectivity of the psychic self therefore conceals a movement of construction: reflection makes the object it claims merely to discover.

This objectivation is not, in itself, a separate metaphysical event. The account distinguishes it from being-for-others, which it identifies as a more radical nihilation. Impure reflection is instead an abortive attempt by the for-itself to be other while remaining itself. The transcendent object that appears behind the reflected-on is only a shadow of being: it is made-to-be, and the reflective has to be it precisely in order not to be it. A psychic fact, as studied by the psychologist, is this shadow of the reflected-on, taken as an object that the reflective must be in the mode of non-being.

The psyche as a virtual unity

The psyche is the organized unity of these virtual, transcendent objects. It includes the Ego, its states, qualities, and acts; the Ego, in its grammatical forms of “I” and “Me,” represents the person as a psychic unity. In this register, a person can appear as an active or passive subject, a voluntary agent, or an object of judgments about value and responsibility. These are not descriptions of unreflective consciousness as it lives itself in the world, but of the psychic objects disclosed through reflection.

The reflective consciousness can make acts and relations present by taking a consciousness reflected-on as their object. Friendship with Pierre, for instance, is not apprehended on the same level as Pierre himself: the account says that the two are separated by the breadth of the for-itself. Friendship becomes graspable when sympathy itself is made the object reflected-on. Similarly, the felt presence of love can be intermittent. A person may know that a love exists without feeling it; an earlier love or intellectual atmosphere can be recalled as something aimed at but no longer present. Such examples distinguish the lived consciousness of an experience from its reflective objectivation as a psychic state.

Psychic duration and its limits

Reflection also constitutes consciousness as consciousness of duration, and psychic duration appears along with it. This duration is a virtual projection of original temporality into the in-itself: a phantom flow accompanying the for-itself when reflection apprehends it. It disappears when consciousness remains unreflective or when impure reflection purifies itself. Psychic time is therefore not a pre-established rule imposed on experience; it is a mode of being attributed to concrete temporal objects.

Unlike original temporality, which temporalizes itself, psychic time is composed of objects and must continually be made to be. It can be constituted only from the past: the future is represented as a past that will come after the present past. The empty before-and-after form is thus hypostasized, while psychic “nows” remain in their assigned places and seem to influence one another at a distance. Impure reflection gathers these temporal objects into the apparent continuity of psychic life. Its achievement and its limit are inseparable: it gives reflection an organized self to study, but that enduring psyche is a virtual construction, not the for-itself’s original mode of being.