Essential poverty of the irreal object

Essential poverty of the irreal object names the thinness of an imagined thing in comparison with a perceived one. The imagined object may appear complete, yet it contains only the few qualities and relations that consciousness has actually posited; it has no hidden depth of further detail waiting to be discovered. This limitation governs how an Irreal object can be elaborated or changed, and helps explain why imagined things appear in fits and starts rather than forming a continuous, self-sustaining world.

Definition and contrast with perception

The contrast is illustrated through Pierre. Perceived, Pierre can be approached closely enough for the grains of his skin and the pores to become visible, and those details imply an indefinitely extendable inquiry, even toward examination of his cells under a microscope. The perception already carries this potential infinity: what is currently seen is exceeded by further qualities that could be specified. This inexhaustible reserve gives real objects their solidity.

Pierre as an Irreal object has no comparable surplus. He is reduced to a small number of spatial and temporal determinations, with a sensible aspect but without more content than consciousness has explicitly supplied. The image may seem to present Pierre as a total, absolute object, but its apparent completeness is not the fullness of a perceived individual. It is a sparse construction whose limits are set by what has been posited.

The limitation remains even when the image is imaginatively examined at greater magnification. One can intend to see the imagined Pierre under a microscope, but the newly appearing qualities are not already present as implicit details in the original object. They must be added synthetically, and another act of consciousness must affirm that the newly formed object is the same Pierre seen from a new aspect. Rather than being compelled to unfold, the Irreal object can be curtailed at any moment: it exists only to the extent that it is known and intended.

Alteration and the Law of all or nothing

This poverty places a distinctive limit on imagined change. Giving Pierre a flat or turned-up nose may fail to produce any new aspect of his face at all. But trying to picture him with a broken nose may instead lead to the appearance of a boxer who is no longer Pierre. The change either has no effective consequence for the total form or brings about a radical alteration of identity.

The account calls this pattern the Law of all or nothing. In theory, there would be a threshold below which a modification could not affect the whole form and above which it would produce a new form unrelated to the preceding one. Yet the balanced point at which something could disappear, something remain, and what remained acquire a genuinely new value while preserving the same identity cannot be reached. The desired intermediate transformation stays out of reach.

Claims of more fluent imaginative control do not remove this difficulty. A person may say that a head can readily be imagined beneath a top hat, or Goethe may claim to imagine a flower growing from bud to blossom and then closing and shedding its petals. But the presence of both Pierre and a hat does not amount to seeing the hat’s effect on Pierre’s face. That would require a moment of passivity: consciousness would have to stop producing the synthetic form and take in its result as a spectator. A painter can step back from a painted spot and submit to the result; imaging consciousness cannot adopt that detached position toward its own production.

Synthetic effort and discontinuity

Consciousness nevertheless strains toward the synthesis it cannot hold. It may almost grasp how the hat and face should appear together, then lose the image in irritation; alternatively, a head beneath the hat appears, but it is no longer Pierre’s. The felt closeness of these failures can support the claim that the intended transformation was successfully represented, though the effect itself was missed. The effort marks an ideal limit, not an achieved image.

More generally, an imagined object can be produced at will, or nearly so, without being made to become whatever is wanted. To transform it, consciousness must create another object, leaving a gap between the two. The result is a jerky sequence: the object appears, disappears, and reappears no longer the same. It may remain motionless despite an attempt to move it; movement can be achieved only by producing a movement without the body that is supposed to move, until the object suddenly reappears in motion.

Such changes do not originate in the object itself. The comparison is to the violet spot that remains in the eyes after looking at an electric lamp: its movement comes from spontaneous or willed movements of the eyeballs, not from the lamp. The Irreal object has no positive power of self-development; its force is a negative, passive resistance. Essential poverty thus concerns not only how much detail an image contains, but also its inability to sustain change independently of the acts that produce it.

Consequences for identity and worldhood

The account connects the Irreal object’s lack of detail to its failure to become an individuated thing. Voluntary additions cannot reliably refine a stable individual: they either leave the whole form unaffected or replace it with another. This makes the object’s identity precarious and its existence discontinuous, rather than the enduring, richly specified identity encountered in perception.

A collection of such objects does not automatically make a world. Each carries its own time and space but is presented without necessary solidarity with anything else: it has no environment, acts on nothing, and is acted on by nothing. A longer imagined scene therefore has to be assembled through separate objects produced in isolated bursts, with connections imposed between them by empty intentions and decrees. The gaps are structural, not merely omissions of descriptive detail.

The concept also sits beside a different feature of the imagined object: its ambiguity. Phantom-objects can support contradictory qualities and escape the Principle of individuation, making them suspect and, in nocturnal solitude, a source of fear. Their thinness and their ambiguity are not the same. Essential poverty describes how little determinate content they contain; ambiguity describes their evasion of stable identity. Together, these features explain the peculiar impression of an object that seems absolute and sensible, yet lacks the depth, continuity, and worldly relations that give perceived things their solidity.