Image-directed consciousness

Image-directed consciousness names a way consciousness relates to an object, not a mental copy of that object contained within the mind. In Jean-Paul Sartre’s account, Pierre remains the object when he is imagined: the image is the intentional act through which Pierre is given as imaged. This distinction recasts the image as a structured, active consciousness and explains why the imagined object, a drawing’s represented figure, and an artwork’s aesthetic object cannot simply be identified with their material supports.

Definition and Method

When someone produces an image of Pierre, attention is directed toward Pierre, not toward an inner item called an image. While that consciousness remains unchanged, the object can be described as it appears in the imagined mode; describing the image as image requires a further, reflective act. Reflection turns from the object to the way it is given and makes possible the judgment that one is having an image.

Sartre treats the reflective description of this experience as certain, in contrast with explanatory hypotheses about what images are or how they arise. Psychologists who prefer such hypotheses, he argues, often leave the immediate evidence of reflection implicit. A phenomenology of the image therefore begins by producing images, reflecting on them, and describing their distinctive characteristics before attempting to classify or explain them. The task is not to assume that an image is an element inside thought, but to establish what reflection actually discloses.

The example of a straw-bottomed chair clarifies the claim. Whether the chair is perceived with the eyes open or imagined with the eyes closed, it remains the same individual object, outside consciousness and in the room. What changes is the manner in which consciousness relates to it: in perception the chair is encountered; in imagination it is not. There is no second, imitation chair that has entered the mind. The image is the relation itself, or, more precisely, the object as presented through a particular organization of consciousness.

A Complete and Temporal Act

Image-directed consciousness is not a small component embedded in a larger consciousness alongside sensations, feelings, signs, or thoughts. Sartre rejects this spatial picture of mental life. An image-consciousness is a complete synthetic form: it appears as a moment in a temporal synthesis and joins with other forms of consciousness that precede and follow it. The sequence forms a unity, but the image does not sit inside that unity as one more mental object.

This distinction also separates the life of the act from the persistence of its object. An image-consciousness can be born, develop, become organized, and disintegrate while the object it intends remains unchanged. Imagining Pierre and perceiving a chair are therefore not ways of placing copies of things inside the mind; they are different acts directed toward objects that remain beyond consciousness. A real table and an irreal Pierre cannot be fused as contents of one perception: when the imagined Pierre appears, the table disappears from the scene as the correlate of a different, incompatible act.

The act is representative because it reaches toward the object and its sensible qualities, but its representative character is not passive. Unlike perception, in which the representative element corresponds to a passivity of consciousness, imagining actively sustains the qualities of its object. Its object is, in this sense, no more than the consciousness one has of it. This is the basis of quasi-observation: the imagined object is encountered through an act that creates and maintains what it presents, rather than through observation of an independently present thing.

Schematic Figures and the Work of the Eyes

A schematic drawing makes this activity visible. At first, a few marks on a white sheet can be taken as unrelated lines: three segments meet at a point, a separate point lies below, and a sinuous line remains apart. Eye movements organize these marks into shapes against the sheet’s homogeneous ground. The same lines can then be read as a face: the rising segment becomes a forehead contour, another a brow, a descending line a nose, the point an eye, and the sinuous mark a mouth and chin.

That change is not produced by the marks alone. The viewing intention shifts, and the body adopts an attitude that helps animate the arrangement. The white space to one side of the marks is taken as filled volume, while the space to the other side recedes as ground or emptiness. The viewer’s gaze follows determinate paths, supplies a missing connection between separated lines, and enacts that connection through movement. In this reading, the figure is not merely noticed; it is constituted through a synthesis of marks, knowledge, and bodily orientation.

Sartre distinguishes this process from perceptual figures that impose movements on the eyes. In the Müller-Lyer illusion, closed and open angles constrain eye movements differently; those movements are projected onto the line segments as opposed tendencies, so one segment appears to extend more powerfully than the other. The result remains a perceived quality of the figure. A schematic image works differently: its lines do not prescribe the movement. Knowledge guides the eyes, and their movements are projected onto the drawing as imagined directions. If an image crystallizes, the viewer sees a running man in the marks while remaining aware that the directions have been freely projected. The representative elements are thus not simply the lines, but the movements imagined through them.

Difference from Perception

Perception can disclose more than the visible sensory surface, but Sartre argues that this surplus does not require inserting images into perception. Work by Wolfgang Köhler, Max Wertheimer, and Kurt Koffka offers one route for understanding how formal structures persist through changes of position. Perception also draws on unformulated intentions: seeing the upper surface of an ashtray involves an implicit grasp of its underside and of how it rests on the table, even when those aspects are not presently seen.

Such intentions enrich the perceived object without becoming separate images. They remain attached to the object and help constitute it, rather than positing a new object alongside it. Image-directed consciousness, by contrast, is a distinct act with its own object-directed structure. Sartre’s distinction preserves the richness of perception while refusing to explain that richness by treating perception as a mixture of sensation and mental pictures.

Art and the Irreal Object

The account extends from private imagining to aesthetic experience. In a portrait of Charles VIII, the canvas, frame, and layers of paint are real; the depicted king as an object of aesthetic appreciation is not identical with those materials. He appears when the viewer adopts an imaging attitude. The painting does not convert a private mental image into a real object available to everyone. Its material marks serve as an analogon through which viewers can apprehend the irreal depicted object.

The same distinction explains why aesthetic value cannot be reduced to the sensory pleasure of a color. A red on a canvas may be sensuously enjoyable in its own right, but in a painting it is grasped as part of an irreal whole: for example, as the red of a rug, with the material qualities and relations that belong to that represented object. The aesthetic object is constituted through the real canvas, but it is not the canvas itself. In abstract or cubist painting, the analogon may disclose unfamiliar objects rather than recognizable things; their unfamiliarity does not make them real objects on the canvas.

The principle also applies to fiction and performance. A novelist, poet, or dramatist presents irreal objects through verbal analogons. An actor playing Hamlet uses body, gestures, strength, and feelings to present the character without positing himself as Hamlet in the realizing sense. Even actual tears can be apprehended as Hamlet’s tears. The actor is not the character made real; the actor is irrealized in the role, and the audience encounters the character through the performer’s material presence.

Music sharpens the same point. Someone listening to Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony seeks the work itself, not merely a dated performance. A performance at the Châtelet auditorium on 17 November 1938 is a real event, but hearing the symphony again under Wilhelm Furtwängler with another orchestra is experienced as encountering the same work, better or worse performed. The work is not reducible to the particular performance or its sounds as a dated occurrence; aesthetic listening takes the performance as a route to an object apprehended in an imaging attitude.

Across drawing, painting, theatre, literature, and music, the real support remains indispensable without becoming the aesthetic object. Image-directed consciousness explains how a material or verbal analogon can make an irreal object available without realizing it as a worldly thing. More broadly, the imaginary is not an accidental ornament added to consciousness: Sartre presents imagining and realizing as interdependent ways consciousness apprehends its situation and the world.