George Berkeley

George Berkeley appears in Jean-Paul Sartre’s discussion as a critical point of comparison in the analysis of mental imagery. Sartre challenges the view attributed to Berkeley that general or indeterminate images are impossible, arguing that this conclusion confuses the structure of perception with the distinct way an object is given in an image.

Role in Sartre’s Argument

Berkeley’s place in the discussion is focused rather than biographical: his position helps define what Sartre believes a phenomenology of the image must correct. Sartre’s method begins with producing images, reflecting on them, and describing their distinctive characteristics. He distinguishes this descriptive task, which aims to fix what reflection immediately discloses, from explanatory hypotheses about the image’s nature, which remain matters of probability. Against that methodological background, Berkeley’s account serves as an example of a theory that imposes the wrong conditions on imagery.

The Dispute About General Images

Sartre groups Berkeley with David Hume on the claim that general, indeterminate images are impossible. He counters that vague imagery is recognizable in reported cases: one subject described seeing something that looked like a wing, while another saw a face without knowing whether it belonged to a man or a woman. A further report described an approximate human face that was typical rather than individual. These examples matter because their objects are not fully specified; their indeterminacy belongs to the image as experienced, rather than being a failure to identify an otherwise complete object.

Image and Perception

Sartre identifies Berkeley’s error as prescribing to images conditions that apply only to perception. A hare that is vaguely perceived remains, in Sartre’s account, a determinate hare; vagueness in perception does not make the perceived animal indeterminate in itself. A hare vaguely imagined, by contrast, is indeterminate as the object of that image. The distinction is not simply between a clear and a faint copy of the same fully formed thing: perceptual and imaged objects are given in different ways.

Significance and Scope

The contrast with Berkeley supports Sartre’s broader effort to describe the image from reflective experience rather than treating it as a weakened perception. Vague consciousness of an image is consciousness of a vague image, not merely imperfect access to a determinate object. Berkeley’s role in the book is therefore to mark the consequence of collapsing imagery into perception: such a theory cannot account for the indeterminate images that Sartre’s examples bring into view. The discussion establishes this specific disagreement; it does not provide a broader account of Berkeley’s life or philosophy.