The Poverty and Ambiguity of Images

This flow traces Sartre’s account of the image’s limited detail and unstable identity, and how these features distinguish it from the perceived world.

increasingBearing stren­gth in each eventdecreasing

The Image Has Few Relations

A Sparse Object The perceived world overflows Perceived things maintain many relations to their surroundings and can reveal further features through continued observation. The image, by contrast, contains only the determinations that consciousness has supplied or made relevant. Its details need not be connected into a complete world or to each other in the way perceived qualities are. A difference in kind Sartre calls this limitation an essential poverty, not simply a failure of vividness. An image can be clear in its intended features and still lack the inexhaustible depth of a real object.

The Object Resists Individuation

Several Aspects in One Image A condensed appearance An image can combine features from different times or even merge more than one remembered person. The resulting object may appear coherent enough for recognition while remaining impossible to locate at a single moment. Sartre describes these fusions as evidence that imaginative presentation does not obey perception’s strict individuation. Ambiguity as structure The object is not always one thing with one fully specified set of qualities. Its instability is built into the way knowledge and affectivity contribute to the image.

A World Without Solidarity

Isolation and Incompletion No shared environment Irreal objects do not automatically support one another through a complete network of relations. A scene must be held together by additional imaginative acts, and its objects may remain disconnected or incomplete. This helps explain why Sartre denies that there is a fully constituted imaginary world in the ordinary sense. Thematic significance The image’s poverty and ambiguity distinguish imagination from a second, hidden reality. The irreal is a mode of appearance that borrows from the real without reproducing its solidity.

Early in Part I, Chapter 1, Section III

Part II, Chapter 5, on imaged objects

Early in Part IV, Chapter 1