“The whole of consciousness as it realizes freedom”

The whole of consciousness as it realizes freedom is Jean-Paul Sartre’s formulation of imagination as a condition of conscious life, not a separate power added to it. The claim links imagining to the ability to surpass what exists, envisage alternatives, and act; it also explains why perception and aesthetic experience involve more than the passive reception of sensory material. In the book’s conclusion, the same account underpins Sartre’s argument that an artwork is apprehended as an irreal object through a real material medium.

Imagination and freedom

Jean-Paul Sartre states the central claim directly: ‘We may therefore conclude that imagination is not an empirical power added to consciousness, but it is the whole of consciousness as it realizes freedom.’ Imagination is therefore not merely one mental operation among others. It is bound to consciousness’s capacity to take what is present as something that could be otherwise, and so to exceed the given world.

That capacity has practical consequences. Sartre connects bad faith to attempts to conceal freedom from oneself: if a person can treat their conduct as dictated by circumstances or social position, they may evade responsibility for choices and for alternatives left unrealized. The example of the waiter makes this evasion concrete. By performing the role in a deliberately stereotyped way, he may try to imagine himself as wholly defined by his occupation, as though its demands were necessary rather than chosen. Yet the role does not eliminate other possibilities. Imagination lets a person conceive the world differently, and that conception can help motivate efforts to change it.

Sartre also argues that imagination partly shapes the meaningful world in which action occurs. A door handle appears as something to turn when someone is oriented toward entering a room; without that aim, it could appear merely as a piece of metal projecting from wood. Likewise, papers become clutter against the imagined possibility of a tidy office. These examples describe a situation formed through the interplay of surroundings and projects: the world is not simply a mass of reality that dictates conduct, because aims help determine what stands out as significant and actionable.

Schemas, eye movements, and perception

The account extends to the way a sparse drawing can become an image. A few marks on a sheet may first be organized as separate lines and points. With a change in intention, the same marks can be read as the features of a face: a segment becomes a forehead, another an eyebrow, and a descending line a nose. The white space changes along with them. One side of the figure can come to function as filled volume, while the other recedes as ground. The shift is not simply a new label for unchanged marks; eye movements and bodily orientation help synthesize the lines into a figure.

Sartre distinguishes this imaginative organization from perceptual illusions such as the Müller-Lyer figure. In that case, the arrangement of angles guides eye movements and gives line segments an apparent power of extension. The movement is attributed to the perceived object as a quality, so the lines function as vectors within perception. A schematic image works differently: it does not impose a rule of movement in the same way. Knowledge directs the viewer’s movements, which remain spontaneous and are projected onto the lines as hypothetical directions. If an image crystallizes, the viewer sees a figure in the marks while remaining aware, in Sartre’s account, of having actively formed it.

This contrast clarifies why the lines alone do not contain the image as a finished object. The image depends on an intentional synthesis that uses the marks as a medium and organizes them through movement. At the same time, Sartre does not reduce ordinary perception to imagining. He points to studies of formal structures as a way of explaining why perception can remain stable through changes of position and why people may perceive more than the immediately visible details. The wider point is that consciousness organizes its relation to the world through distinct attitudes, rather than receiving a single undifferentiated field of sensation.

The real world and the imaginary

Imagination does not simply supplement perception by inserting an image into it. Sartre argues that the real object and its imagined counterpart belong to different kinds of conscious activity: when an irreal Pierre appears, the table currently perceived gives way rather than combining with that image to complete the perception. Perception can nevertheless include unspoken intentions about aspects not presently seen, such as the underside of an ashtray. Those intentions remain attached to the perceived thing; they do not posit a separate object in the way an image does.

The two modes are nevertheless connected. Sartre’s conclusion describes the imaginary as appearing against the world, while the apprehension of the real as a meaningful world involves a surpassing toward possibilities. A person must be able to take the given as something that could be otherwise in order to grasp a situation’s significance and act within it. Imagination and realizing consciousness are thus not independent compartments. Their relation is part of the structure through which consciousness encounters both actuality and possibility.

Art and the irreal object

Sartre applies this distinction to art by arguing that the aesthetic object is irreality, not the physical artwork considered on its own. A painted Charles VIII is not identical to the canvas, frame, and layers of paint. Those are real; the depicted king becomes available when the viewer adopts an imaging attitude. The painting does not convert a private mental image into a real object for public inspection. Instead, its material surface serves as an Analogon through which viewers apprehend an irreal object.

The distinction also separates sensory pleasure from aesthetic appreciation. A red pigment may be pleasurable as a color, but in a painting it is apprehended as part of an irreal whole: for example, as the red of a rug near a table. Its woolly texture and its contrast with the green of a wall contribute to the depicted relations through which the color has its aesthetic sense. Even a Cubist painting that does not imitate familiar objects can manifest an irreal ensemble of forms with density, depth, and relations to one another. The canvas remains a real thing, but the beautiful object is apprehended through it, not as a mere patch of real color.

The same account explains theatrical performance. An actor who plays Hamlet need not take himself to be the character as a real identity in order to be fully mobilized in the role. His feelings, gestures, and even real tears can function as an Analogon for Hamlet’s imagined conduct and emotions. The character is not made real inside the actor; rather, the actor and his actions are apprehended through the character in an irreal world.

Music supplies a further test. A performance of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony takes place as a dated event, but listeners may attend to the symphony itself rather than to the orchestra, conductor, or auditorium. A performance at the Châtelet auditorium on 17 November 1938 is not, in this sense, the same thing as the symphony: another performance, perhaps conducted by Furtwängler, can present the same work better or worse. The example extends Sartre’s account beyond visual art. Across drawing, painting, drama, and music, conscious attention can pass through a real medium or event to apprehend an object that is not identical with that material occurrence.