The Search for the Mental Analogon

This flow traces Sartre’s attempt to explain how knowledge, affectivity, bodily movement, and words provide the matter through which a mental image presents its object.

increasingBearing stren­gth in each eventdecreasing

From Certainty to Probability

The Limits of Reflection What description can establish Sartre has shown that an image is an act aimed at an object, but introspection cannot preserve the image’s content for detached inspection. Once the act disappears, so does its psychic representative matter. He therefore marks a methodological boundary: the structure of imaging can be described with confidence, while claims about its hidden material remain probable. Experimental evidence Psychological experiments become relevant, but Sartre evaluates them against his account of consciousness rather than treating their assumptions as neutral.

Knowledge Takes Sensible Form

The Dawn of an Image Knowledge before intuition An image depends on knowledge of what it presents, but that knowledge is not merely attached afterward. It shapes the image from within and explains why the image cannot teach what the subject did not already know. As knowledge approaches imagery, it changes: abstract relations become an expectation of sensible presence. Sartre calls attention to this intermediate, incipient condition. A shift in function The image thus emerges not as a revived perception but as knowledge transformed into an intuitive mode. Its matter is already oriented by what the subject seeks to present.

A Composite Representative Medium

Feeling and Movement Two kinds of contribution Affective experience can give an absent object an intimate, individual quality, while kinaesthetic sensations can lend it form, direction, and apparent movement. These are not separate pieces simply assembled into an image. Each contribution functions within a unified act. Knowledge directs what the feeling or movement is to represent, and the resulting image exceeds any isolated component. A qualified explanation Sartre’s account remains a theory rather than a directly observed fact. Its force lies in explaining how an absent object can seem present without becoming a mental picture.

Opening of Part II

Early in Part II, Chapter 1

Across the middle chapters of Part II