David Hume

David Hume is presented by Jean-Paul Sartre as a pivotal example of the Illusion of immanence, the assumption that an image is a faint object lodged inside consciousness. Sartre draws on Hume’s account of ideas and impressions to show how a theory of representation can turn consciousness into an imagined inner space. Hume’s importance here is not biographical: he supplies a particularly clear formulation of the model that Sartre’s phenomenology sets out to challenge.

Identity and Role in Sartre’s Argument

Sartre introduces Hume while examining what reflection discloses about an image. In ordinary imaging consciousness, Pierre is the object toward which consciousness is directed; the image is not first encountered as a small portrait inside the mind. To describe the image as an image requires a further, reflective act, which turns attention from the object to the manner in which it is given. Against this account, Sartre sets the familiar conception he associates with Hume: an idea is a faint image in thinking and reasoning, contrasted with impressions that enter with greater force and vividness.

That contrast gives Sartre a compact example of the theory under examination. If ideas are faint images, it becomes tempting to picture consciousness as a place containing representations, with the represented object reached only by a further relation from within. Sartre calls this spatialized picture the Illusion of immanence. Hume’s formulation is its clearest expression in the discussion, not because Sartre offers a full account of Hume’s philosophy, but because the distinction between forceful impressions and faint ideas makes the inner-copy model especially legible.

Ideas, Objects, and the Example of the Chair

Sartre also emphasizes a further claim in Hume’s account: forming an idea of an object and forming an idea as such are treated as the same act. The reference from an idea to an object is, on this account, external to the idea and leaves no mark within it. Yet an idea cannot be wholly indeterminate; just as an object has some particular quantity and quality, its idea must also be limited in those respects. Sartre sees a tension in this combination. The idea is said to refer outwardly, while the determinations of the object are also attributed to the idea.

His chair example makes the tension concrete. A present idea of a chair refers to an existing chair, but it is not that earlier perceived chair: it is not the particular thing made of straw and wood that distinguished it from a table or an inkwell. Nonetheless, the idea is genuinely an idea of a chair. Sartre argues that, within Hume’s model, the object’s determinate character is consequently carried into the idea. To have an idea of a chair comes to be understood as having a chair in consciousness. The example exposes how easily an account of reference becomes an account of an inner object that resembles, and inherits properties from, what it represents.

The Illusion of Immanence and Its Costs

For Sartre, this is not merely an imprecise way of speaking. It misconstrues the structure of consciousness by treating an image as though it were a material portrait contained within it. The portrait model makes the representation itself the immediate object of consciousness and places the represented person at a further remove. Sartre argues instead that imaging consciousness is directed toward its object; the portrait, when used as image matter, does not replace that object as the target of the act.

The spatial metaphor also creates a problem of integration. Consciousness, as Sartre describes it, has a synthetic unity and continuity. If opaque, material-like images were inserted into it as internal objects, they would interrupt that unity, like screens that break contact and transparency. Sartre notes that other psychologists, including Spaier, Bühler, and Flach, tried to make the image more active by describing it as suffused with life, feeling, or knowledge. But, in his assessment, enriching the supposed inner object does not solve the underlying problem: an object placed inside consciousness remains heterogeneous to consciousness and difficult to reconcile with its unity.

Significance for Description and the Sign–Image Distinction

Hume’s role also clarifies Sartre’s distinction between phenomenological description and explanatory theory. Sartre argues that reflective awareness of having an image provides certain data, whereas hypotheses about the image’s nature remain matters of probability. He therefore proposes first to produce images, reflect on them, and describe their distinctive features, without beginning from a theory that treats them as contents in an inner container. Hume serves as a case through which Sartre identifies the assumptions that such description must put aside; the discussion does not by itself establish that Hume’s account exhausts every version of the image theory.

The same account bears on the difference between an image and a sign. Sartre observes that when the relation between an image and its object is treated as purely external, the image is made to function like a sign. In the example of a station placard, black lines become the sign Assistant Manager’s Office through an intention shaped by convention and habit; attention passes through the inscription toward an office that is not present. Sartre’s point is that this account of signification should not simply be transferred to imaging. By linking Hume’s external relation between idea and object to the sign model, he shows how the Illusion of immanence can blur distinct ways in which consciousness is directed toward what is absent.

Hume thus functions as a diagnostic figure in Sartre’s argument. His account makes visible the conceptual move by which a directed act of consciousness is recast as an inner copy, and an object’s relation to that copy is treated as external. Sartre’s critique turns on restoring the distinction between consciousness and the things it apprehends: the image is not a little object housed within consciousness, but a way consciousness is directed toward its object.