Henri Bergson

Henri Bergson (1859–1914) was a philosopher whose account of consciousness and mental imagery offered Jean-Paul Sartre both an important starting point and a continuing intellectual challenge. In The Imaginary, Bergson’s effort to understand images as more than weakened perceptions helps frame Sartre’s own phenomenological inquiry; their sharpest disagreement concerns whether the dynamic activity preparing an image is distinct from the image itself or belongs to the structure of imaging consciousness.

Identity and Intellectual Context

Bergson’s Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness first gave Jean-Paul Sartre a taste for philosophy. Although Bergson had published major works such as Matter and Memory at the end of the nineteenth century, his ideas remained conspicuous in French psychology and metaphysics during the 1930s. A 1935 edition of Cuvillier’s manual presented his thought as markedly original in relation to earlier theories, while also registering reservations about it. Sartre approvingly cited the manual in Ecrits de Jeunesse and continued to engage with Bergson while writing The Imaginary, sometimes drawing on his ideas and sometimes arguing against them.

Bergson’s relevance to Sartre’s inquiry rests partly on their shared rejection of associationism: neither treats the mental image as a weakened perception or as an automatic revival of an earlier one. The difference between image and perception, in this approach, is not merely a difference in strength. Bergson also connected the nature of consciousness with the philosophical problem of human freedom. His work therefore offered Sartre a framework in which the image could raise questions about the activity of consciousness, rather than being treated simply as a passive mental trace.

Images, Perception, and Duration

Bergson’s account of perception supplied one of the contrasts through which Sartre explains the image. Perception reveals an object through a succession of partial aspects, requiring the perceiver to move among viewpoints and wait for further appearances. Sartre illustrates this with the cube: its faces are encountered successively, and the object is learned across a multiplicity of profiles. Bergson’s comparison is to sugar dissolving: perception takes time, and the object’s perceived unity emerges through that process.

The mental image, by contrast, gives its object immediately as the object it is, rather than requiring the same perceptual apprenticeship. This difference does not make the image a faint copy of perception. It points instead toward distinct ways in which consciousness relates to an object. Bergson’s interest in duration and in the interpenetration of elements within psychic life helped direct attention to the temporal, synthetic character of consciousness. Sartre’s later account, however, resists making duration the explanatory principle in a way that leaves the act of consciousness indistinct.

The Dynamic Schema

Bergson’s dynamic schema is an intellectual orientation that anticipates images. It may prepare the arrival of a particular image, as in memory, or organize a more extended succession of images, as in creative imagination. The schema presents in a developing, dynamic manner what an image presents as already formed. Sartre recognizes this as a significant advance over an associationist account: the emergence of an image involves organization, not merely the mechanical linking of previously given images.

The schema can appear, in Bergson’s descriptions, as a transitional form that becomes a representation. Intellectual work then carries a representation through different planes of consciousness, from the abstract toward the concrete and from schema toward image. Elsewhere the schema seems instead to be an organizing power that acts while images are being summoned, then withdraws once its work is accomplished. Bergson also associates it with the effort to recall a proper name: a general impression retained of the name guides the search, and that impression may have a particular affective character, such as a distinctive sense of strangeness. These accounts suggest several functions, but Sartre considers their exact relation insufficiently clarified.

For Bergson, the schema is marked by becoming and by the interpenetration of its elements. It is living movement, unlike an image conceived as static, with fixed contours and juxtaposed parts. Sartre identifies this contrast as central to Bergson’s philosophy, but regards the opposition as misleading. In his view, Bergson has not adequately described the intentional act that makes the schema synthetic: organization is present, but the organizing activity remains obscure. At points the schema seems like a force or whirlpool, yet Sartre argues that it is treated more like a thing than an act of consciousness.

Sartre’s Critique and Alternative

Sartre’s disagreement is not that knowledge plays no role in the formation of images. He argues that knowledge does not disappear behind the completed image. Rather, it remains active as part of the structure of imaging consciousness. If the schema and the image were wholly separate, Sartre reasons, images would have to be learned through observation as perceptions are; that learning would itself require schemas, producing an infinite regress. He therefore rejects the idea that the schema is always distinct from images even though it can be realized in them.

Sartre also disputes the picture of the image as a representation made up of juxtaposed parts, which he associates with the illusion of treating mental content as though it occupied space. An image, on his account, is an internal synthesis whose elements can interpenetrate. He points to the polymorphic figures of dreams, which may combine apparently opposed identities, and notes that waking images can display a related multiplicity. Symbolic schemas, too, can present together a mass of material that discursive thought would have to separate and analyze. Such cases challenge a clean opposition between the moving schema and the supposedly fixed image.

Rather than dismissing the anticipatory state Bergson identifies, Sartre describes it as knowledge waiting for images and stresses its continuity with the completed imaging act. He prefers the expression “dawn of the image” to “dynamic schema,” because it names an emerging phase without making it a separate kind of thing. In his account, the waiting is specific: it is directed toward transforming itself into an image. Bergson’s schema thus remains a productive point of departure, while Sartre’s critique redirects its dynamism into the activity of consciousness itself.

Place in The Imaginary

Bergson’s presence in The Imaginary is therefore both constructive and critical. His rejection of associationism, his insistence that images differ in nature from perceptions, and his attention to psychic duration help establish the problems Sartre investigates. The dynamic schema provides a way to think about how images are anticipated and organized, particularly in memory and creative imagination. Sartre’s examination of its shifting descriptions exposes what he sees as a gap between recognizing synthesis and explaining the conscious act that performs it.

This exchange also clarifies Sartre’s broader method. He distinguishes reflective description of what consciousness gives from hypotheses about the underlying nature of mental processes. Bergson’s account supplies concepts and contrasts for that inquiry, but Sartre does not accept its explanatory vocabulary without testing it against the structures of imaging consciousness. Bergson consequently occupies a double position in the book: a major predecessor whose work helps make the image philosophically intelligible, and a critic’s interlocutor whose separation of schema from image Sartre ultimately refuses.