Image object posited as nothingness

Image object posited as nothingness is Jean-Paul Sartre’s account of how imaging consciousness presents what it intends: not as an object existing here before the observer, but under a position of absence, nonexistence, elsewhere-ness, or suspension of existence. The image can be vivid and intuitively formed, yet its object is given as not present to perception. This absence is not a defect that weakens an otherwise perceptual copy; it is part of the image’s structure and the decisive difference between imagining an object and perceiving one.

Method and the Reflective Description of Images

Sartre approaches the image by separating what reflection can establish from theories that attempt to explain how images arise. When someone produces an image of Pierre, Pierre is the object of the current consciousness. That consciousness, while it remains directed toward Pierre, does not describe the image as image. To identify the image’s characteristics, reflection must turn from the object to the way it is given; only in this second-order act does the judgement that one has an image become possible. Sartre treats this reflective datum as certain, unlike inductive explanations, which remain probable.

The method is therefore to produce images, reflect on them, and describe and classify their distinctive characteristics before building explanatory hypotheses. Sartre argues that psychologists often leave this immediate knowledge implicit and instead disagree because they begin with theories about the image’s nature. The distinction matters to the account of nothingness: the image’s mode of being must be described from how it appears to reflection, rather than explained as a perception that is later reduced or corrected into an image.

The Positional Act and the Image’s Object

Every consciousness posits its object, but perception and imagination do so differently. Perception posits an object as existing. Imaging consciousness, by contrast, can posit its object as nonexistent, as absent, or as existing elsewhere; it can also neutralize its position and refrain from positing the object as existent. These are the four forms Sartre identifies. The acts of nonexistence and absence are negations; positing an object elsewhere implicitly denies that it exists naturally and presently here; neutralization suspends the existential thesis.

Crucially, these positions are constitutive of image consciousness, not operations added to an already completed image. The image does not first establish its object in the world of things and then drive it out. If perception and image were not distinct in their own nature, Sartre argues, external criteria would not suffice to tell their objects apart. The image’s own positional act supplies the distinction and prevents it from being assimilated to a perception followed by a corrective intervention.

This account also distinguishes imaging from thought about a concept. Thinking of a person through a concrete concept may involve relations and determinations such as location, but these contribute positive content to the concept; they do not carry the privative character of an image’s positing of absence. Words such as absent or far away acquire their specifically negative force on the ground of sensory intuition, where the object is presented as one that could be seen or encountered but is not there. The image thus retains an intuitive relation to a concrete object while presenting that object as unavailable to present perception.

Pierre: Intuition Without Presence

Sartre’s example of Pierre shows why the image is not simply an empty thought. An image of Pierre gathers past appearances into an intentional synthesis that identifies the same person across different aspects: in profile, in three-quarter view, full size, or as head and shoulders. What is intended is Pierre in bodily form, the person who could be seen, touched, or heard. The image retains this intuitive bodily character, including a position and distance in relation to the one imagining him, but presents Pierre as not now being touched or seen.

Pierre is therefore not non-intuitive in the image. He is given as intuitive yet absent: the image presents the very person who could be encountered while withholding that encounter. Sartre describes the image as asserting its object and, in that assertion, negating its presence. However lively or compelling the image may be, it gives its object as not existing here before the observer. Someone may respond to an image as if its object were present, but such conduct cannot undo the immediate awareness of its absence. In the example of a dead loved one appearing abruptly in an image, the ache is not a separate inference: Sartre identifies it as a direct consequence of the object being given through this nothingness of being.

Schematic Images and the Work of Intention

Sartre’s discussion of schematic drawings shows that imaging depends on an active organization of what is seen, not merely on lines treated as small pictures. In a simple face schema, a viewer can first see separate marks: three segments meeting at a point, another point below and to the right, and a curved line. Eye movements organize these marks as a fork against the white sheet. Under a different intention, the rising segment becomes a forehead contour, another a brow, a descending line a nose, the point an eye, and the curve a mouth and chin. The paper itself changes its role in the organization: space to one side functions as filled volume, while the other is left as ground or empty space.

The face does not emerge through passive inspection alone. The viewer’s eyes follow lines in determinate directions, and the body enacts a missing connection between separated marks, synthesizing them as one figure. Knowledge guides these movements; the viewer projects them onto the lines as imaged directions and may come to see a running man in them. The representational contribution is not simply the ink marks, but the movements projected through them. The schema becomes an image when these freely produced directions crystallize into an imaged figure, while the viewer still knows that the figure has been made through this spontaneous activity.

Sartre contrasts this process with perceptual figures that impose motor patterns. In the Müller-Lyer illusion, the arrangement of open and closed angles organizes eye movements, and movement is attributed to the line segments as a potential force or direction. Such a result remains a perceived quality, not, by itself, an image. In a schematic image, by contrast, knowledge directs the movements, and their spontaneity is incorporated into a larger imaging synthesis. The contrast supports Sartre’s broader claim: an image is not a thing-like content inserted into consciousness, but an intentional act that organizes its material while giving the resulting object a distinctive mode of presence and absence.

Limits and Significance

The distinction also bears on attempts to explain perception by inserting images into it. Sartre argues that an imagined Pierre and a real table before the eyes cannot simply combine as two contents of one perception: when the irreal Pierre surges up, the table vanishes from the scene, and the two objects alternate as correlates of radically distinct consciousnesses. Perception may disclose more than the observer sees, but Sartre points toward formal structures and unformulated intentions that enrich the perceived object without becoming separate images. Wolfgang Köhler’s work, along with that of Wertheimer and Koffka, is mentioned as a possible route to explaining certain perceptual constants through the persistence of forms as viewing position changes.

In the conclusion, Sartre places the capacity to imagine within the structure of consciousness rather than treating it as an accidental addition. Imaging consciousness maintains the world as the ground from which the imaginary is apprehended, while apprehending the real as a world involves a hidden surpassing toward the imaginary. This reciprocal relation gives the image object’s nothingness broader significance: absence is not merely a missing feature of one mental representation, but part of how consciousness can distinguish the real world from what it freely makes present as imaginary.