Causal inactivity of irreal objects

Causal inactivity of irreal objects is the principle that an imagined object cannot act as a real cause. In Jean-Paul Sartre’s account, the object of an image may appear complete and present, but it remains out of reach of real action and has no power to alter the physical world. This distinction separates the irreal object from the real activity of Imaging consciousness, while allowing that imagining can reshape feeling and accompany bodily reactions.

Definition and scope

An Irreal object is present to consciousness without belonging to the world of real, causally connected things. It cannot be touched, moved, or otherwise acted upon in the ordinary way; any such interaction must itself be imagined, as when a person imagines using phantom hands to strike an imagined face. The object makes no demands on the person and supplies no action or conduct of its own. Its slight apparent life comes from the spontaneity of consciousness, and when attention turns away, the object is annihilated.

The rule does not mean that imagining is inactive. It distinguishes the real act of forming an image from the irreal object that act intends. The object is a final term: it receives from consciousness but does not give back as a cause. Even apparent developments within an image do not establish causal power in the object. A scene may seem to unfold, but its details are produced by further acts of consciousness rather than by the image automatically completing itself.

Passivity and isolation

The irreal object’s only force is a negative one: passive resistance. It is not individualized as a member of a shared world and has no environment in the way a perceived thing does. Each such object carries its own space and time, without necessary solidarity with other objects; nothing must be accepted alongside it, and it acts on nothing while nothing acts on it. In this strong sense, it has no consequences of its own.

This isolation makes an extended imagined scene discontinuous. To represent a sequence, consciousness must produce separate objects and establish connections between them through empty intentions and decisions. Irreal objects may resemble plants, animals, virtues, kinds, or relations, but their appearance does not give them the causal ties of worldly things. Their intermittent emergence and disappearance help explain why the imagined domain can seem like an escape from the constraints of the world without becoming another functioning world.

Real reactions and their source

Bodily responses can accompany imagery, but their occurrence does not show that an irreal object caused them. Accounts of images associated with pupil changes, accommodation, vomiting, or salivation invite the mistaken view that the image is a weakened piece of perception. The principle instead locates the real source of such movements in the real layer of the complete imagining attitude: Imaging consciousness. It is necessary to distinguish that constituent activity from secondary reactions, such as love, hatred, or admiration directed toward an imagined object.

The distinction also clarifies how imagining can modify feeling. A person may be hungry without salivating, then imagine roast chicken and experience desire becoming more concentrated and precise. The imagined chicken does not cause a real physiological response by acting on the person. Rather, diffuse desire is organized with knowledge in an imaging form; in becoming directed toward an object, the feeling becomes more clearly conscious of itself and may intensify. The object remains causally inactive even as the act of imagining changes the person’s affective state.

Contrast with perception and schematic images

Perceptual experience can also involve movement, but this does not make perceived objects images. In the Müller-Lyer illusion, the angles of a figure guide eye movements: closed angles impede them, while open angles allow them to continue. Those movements are projected onto the lines as a potential power of extension, and the resulting quality is perceived in the figure. The account remains on the ground of perception; it does not establish that an irreal object has acted on consciousness.

Schematic drawings make the distinction especially clear. A few marks may first be organized as simple lines and then read as a face when intention changes and the body adopts movements that animate the figure. The viewer supplies an absent connection between separate marks by moving the eyes along it. In this case, the movements projected onto the lines are the representative elements of the schematic image. Knowledge prompts those movements, and the imagined direction remains a freely projected quality; it is not evidence that the drawn figure has independently caused the activity.

Hallucination and the principle’s limits

Hallucination poses a sharper problem because an image may be experienced as real. The account does not explain this by giving the irreal object causal power or by supposing that its irreality is simply erased. The constitutive thesis of the image remains: the object is formed as irreal through an act whose spontaneity is inseparable from consciousness of that spontaneity. The question is instead how a person can feel passive before images that the person forms, or believe in their reality despite their essential irreality.

The evidence distinguishes cases. Marie B describes knowing that she was not the Queen of Spain even while entering imaginatively into that role; this example shows that an immersive imaginary world need not be mistaken for ordinary reality. In hallucination, by contrast, the proposed explanation involves a provisional collapse of perception and a disintegration of personal synthesis, not an irreal object reaching across and causing a real event. Reports that place a hallucination in a room may be retrospective, after the perceived world has returned; the principle therefore treats location as secondary to the more general problem of altered belief. Across these cases, the causal distinction remains central: the image may reorganize experience, but the irreal object itself does not act.