Half-man, half-horse

The centaur is an example through which Jean-Paul Sartre distinguishes an imagined object from the consciousness that imagines it. Though the imagining consciousness is present and unfolds in time, the centaur itself has no temporal location and does not age. When imagined in motion, it may have an internal sequence of events without becoming part of real time. The example also shows that imagining is not arbitrary: the centaur appears against a world apprehended as one in which it has no place.

Status as an Imagined Object

When someone represents a centaur, the imagined figure belongs neither to the present nor to the past or future. It is not an object enduring in front of consciousness as that consciousness flows. The person imagining it may sustain the image with more or less effort and respond to external invitations, but the centaur does not change from one second of the person’s experience to the next. It does not age or acquire another second of existence.

This separation of object and consciousness is central to the example. The consciousness that imagines the centaur is present; its object is not thereby made present. Sartre uses the centaur to resist transferring the real features of the imagining person’s experience onto what is imagined: the figure has no temporal determination of its own simply because the act of imagining it takes time.

Timelessness and Imagined Sequence

The centaur’s lack of temporal location does not prevent a person from imagining its course. Sartre distinguishes the course of a centaur from an event located in real duration: such an imagined action is neither past, future, nor present. It has an internal before-and-after relation, which orders different states of the action, but is unattached to the person’s duration and to the time of other objects.

Thus a timeless imagined figure and an imagined sequence are not the same case. In the first, the centaur remains invariable as the imagining consciousness moves on. In the second, the represented action has an order of states, yet that order does not make it flow like a real event. The centaur’s example helps establish that the time attributed to an imagined object is itself irreal: it can be extended or contracted without acquiring the irreversible flow characteristic of perceived duration.

The World That Makes the Centaur Imaginary

For Sartre, imagining the centaur is not simply a matter of denying the world or choosing an image at will. The real must be apprehended from a particular point of view: as a world in which the centaur has no place. An arbitrary act of treating reality as a whole would not, by itself, make the centaur appear as an irreal object. Its appearance depends on motivations that lead consciousness to grasp the world in precisely this way.

This account connects the example to Sartre’s broader claim that consciousness must be able to stand back from the real in order to imagine. Such freedom is not mere arbitrariness. The situation in which consciousness apprehends the world motivates the appearance of a particular imagined object and circumscribes what that object is. The centaur therefore serves both as an instance of an object outside real time and as a test case for the conditions under which imagining becomes possible.