Essential poverty

Essential poverty is the defining sparseness of an imagined object: it presents only the qualities and relations that consciousness has explicitly posited, rather than the inexhaustible depth of a real thing. In Jean-Paul Sartre’s account, this limitation makes the imaginary pliable and predictable, while setting it apart from perception and shaping both imagined feeling and aesthetic experience.

Definition and contrast with perception

The imagined object is poor not because it lacks every sensible feature, but because its features are stunted: they extend no further than what has been expressly given. A perceived person, by contrast, exceeds each encounter. Pierre can be approached closely enough to see the grains of his skin and pores, and his cells remain theoretically available to examination under a microscope. Even a present perception implicitly opens onto this further inquiry; the real object has a solidity grounded in qualities that perception has not yet exhausted.

The imagined Pierre has no equivalent hidden reserve. Consciousness may picture him under a magnifying glass or microscope, but the newly appearing qualities were not already present in the imagined object, waiting to be uncovered. They must be added through a distinct act, which joins the new appearance to the old one as the same person seen differently. The imagined object exists only as far as it is known and willed; it does not compel consciousness to continue specifying it.

Control, alteration, and identity

This sparseness gives voluntary imagining a distinctive, but sharply limited, power. Changing an imagined feature may leave the object effectively unchanged, or it may transform it so radically that its identity is lost. Giving Pierre a flat or turned-up nose does not necessarily produce a newly transformed face. Trying to imagine him with a broken nose, however, may lead consciousness to complete the altered features as the face of a boxer who is no longer Pierre.

These failed changes illustrate the law of all or nothing. A modification can be too slight to affect the whole form, or so decisive that it produces a new form without continuity with the earlier one. The imagined object does not support the gradual, identity-preserving development possible in perception: the balance point between ineffectual alteration and radical replacement cannot be reached.

Imaginary life and fixed feeling

Essential poverty also explains why an imagined object can suit a feeling without resisting or surprising it. In the account of the morbid dreamer, real experience demands adaptation: an actual person or circumstance arrives with consequences and qualities beyond the desire that anticipated it. Annie, once present, exceeds the version that had served as the correlate of desire, and relating to her requires a new apprenticeship. The imagined counterpart, by contrast, can remain fitted to a prepared feeling.

The dreamer’s feelings are described as solemn and fixed, repeatedly returning in the same form and ceremonial. Imagined objects corresponding to them are likewise frozen. They can be selected like props from a store: ambition today, loving desire tomorrow. Because these objects are poor, they can satisfy a feeling docilely, without surprising, deceiving, or redirecting it, and they can be dismissed when the dreamer’s caprice ends. The resulting imaginary world is not a sparkling abundance that compensates for reality. It is a meticulous, repetitive world in which scenes recur with their details and ceremonies already settled, and nothing can escape, resist, or surprise.

Relation to aesthetic objects

The account of art distinguishes the real materials of a work from the imagined object apprehended through them. In a portrait, the canvas, frame, and paint are real, but the depicted Charles VIII appears as an aesthetic object only when consciousness takes up an imaging attitude. The painting serves as a material analogon through which an irreality is manifested; it does not turn an imagined object into a real one.

This distinction also clarifies why the actual sensory pleasure of a color is not, by itself, aesthetic appreciation. A red on a painted rug is apprehended as part of an imagined whole, with the rug’s woolly texture and its relation to the surrounding scene contributing to its sense. In fiction and drama, words and an actor’s body can likewise serve as analogons: the actor’s real gestures and tears are apprehended as Hamlet’s, without the actor being realized as Hamlet. These examples extend the distinction between material presence and imagined object; they do not erase it. Essential poverty names the limited content of the imagined object, while the artwork’s real carrier provides the means through which that object can be apprehended.