Imaging knowledge

Imaging knowledge is a transitional, image-oriented form of consciousness that seeks sensible presence without yet presenting a complete image. Jean-Paul Sartre calls it the dawn of the image: knowledge has already shifted away from abstract relations toward qualities imagined as belonging to things, but its intuitive fulfilment may remain incomplete. The concept helps explain how an image can emerge from thought without being an illustration added from outside, and why the image itself does not teach what consciousness knows through it.

Definition and distinction from pure knowledge

Pure knowledge, as Sartre presents it through Karl Bühler’s classification, can consist in an empty consciousness of rules, relations, or arrangements. A mountain, for example, may suggest a direction that could be climbed without appearing as an intuitively present landscape; the blue in a painting may be thought of simply as the fourth primary colour. Such knowledge can be detailed and relate individual objects, yet it remains empty sign consciousness: sensible matter is designated as the support of relations rather than given as an experienced presence.

Imaging knowledge is also empty, but it is not merely another form of sign knowledge. It affirms from the outset an intimate connection with the sensible, as something capable of engendering a visual impression. It does not yet posit a fully formed, determinate object; instead, it strains toward one, seeking to give its content the density of something real. The difference is a change in intentional direction: pure knowledge aims at relations as such, whereas imaging knowledge seeks to make a relation appear as an outside quality of something.

That shift is a degradation of knowledge, not a simple addition of intuitive content to an unchanged thought. The knowledge has already altered before a full image appears. It turns from abstract relations toward substantial qualities and begins to await sensory presentation. This makes imaging knowledge closer in kind to a completed image than to pure sign knowledge, even though it has not yet reached the image’s full bloom.

Experimental reports and the dawn of the image

Experimental introspection gives Sartre examples of the intermediate state. In reports collected by Schwiete, one subject had an indeterminate image of an opening without any determinate form; another reported two objects as dissimilar without assigning them spatial characteristics that could explain the difference. The reports are significant precisely because the subjects describe an image where no developed intuitive object is available. Imaging consciousness is present as an orientation toward the sensible, not necessarily as a clear picture.

Other reports register this orientation as a rudiment of visual content. In material discussed by Burloud in connection with Messer, the word atlas prompted a representation of a place on a map, described more as a direction beyond the Mediterranean Sea than as a formed scene. At the word nail, a subject reported thinking of something long and pointed, while remaining unsure whether the experience was visual or conceptual. These are not full images, but neither are they detached relations: each points toward a possible sensible realization.

Sartre compares this incomplete anticipation with Henri Bergson’s dynamic schema, which prepares for images and can organize a succession of them. But he prefers Spaier’s phrase dawn of the image because it emphasizes continuity between empty imaging knowledge and full imaging consciousness. The difference between them is not an abrupt passage from one kind of consciousness to another. In a reported experience of finding a word, an inner release and a movement of anticipation precede the word’s arrival; the subject senses that understanding is coming before it is complete. Spaier observes that a person may stop at this dawn, economizing on the image to move faster. The image-oriented anticipation can pass without becoming a finished picture, while still having placed consciousness on the side of imagery.

A more developed instance is the image associated with Baudelaire: a blue-green splash against a dark background, longer than it is broad, which the subject experiences as expressing the poet’s morbidity and decadence. The image is not freely transferable to Wilde or Huysmans; the subject reports resistance to those alternatives and finds the image valid for Baudelaire alone. The example shows how an initially image-like formation can acquire a specific representative force. For Sartre, however, its importance is not evidence that a vague dynamic process eventually turns into a picture by itself. Imaging knowledge is already homogeneous with the image it awaits, and the transition is one of development within an image-directed consciousness.

How knowledge organizes schematic images

The distinction becomes visible in the interpretation of a schematic face. At first, three segments, a point, and a sinuous line can be organized as abstract forms on a white ground. A change of intention allows them to be read as a forehead, eyebrow, nose, eye, mouth, and chin. The lines do not, on their own, contain a fully represented face. Knowledge guides the eyes and helps constitute a new synthesis; the viewer also supplies an absent connection between separated lines through enacted eye movement.

The surrounding sheet changes meaning in the process. Space on one side of the figure is apprehended as filled volume, while the other side functions as empty ground. The movement of the eyes helps organize the elements into a figure, but the lines themselves represent only limited structural relations. What makes the face appear is not simply the addition of information visibly drawn on the paper. It is an intentional activity in which knowledge directs bodily movement and anticipates a coherent intuitive figure.

Sartre distinguishes this process from the way eye movements organize some perceptual figures. In the Müller-Lyer illusion, the closed and open angles constrain movements differently; those movements are projected onto the line segments as opposing tendencies, making one segment seem to have greater extension. The result remains a perceived quality of the object, such as potential movement or force. Schematic images, by contrast, do not impose the same necessary rules of movement. Knowledge directs the viewer’s movements, and their spontaneity is objectified as an imaged direction. The movements projected on the lines, rather than the lines considered by themselves, are the representative elements of consciousness of the schematic drawing.

An image may crystallize when these projected directions form a stable new figure, such as a running man seen in several black lines. Yet the viewer continues to apprehend the figure as imaged and to recognize the role of their own spontaneous activity in producing it. This example clarifies the function of imaging knowledge: it guides an effort to see whether something will emerge, while the anticipated direction belongs to the image rather than becoming an ordinary perceived property of the marks.

Comprehension, symbols, and reading

Imaging knowledge also helps explain why some acts of comprehension take a schematic form. Flach’s reports describe representations that arise with the act of understanding a difficult proposition or problem and bring its solution or comprehension with them. They cannot simply be summoned at will: an attempt to produce one directly yields an illustration of thought instead. Easy comprehension, or recall from memory, may produce no schema. Messer’s experiments likewise distinguish pure comprehension, with or without signs, from imaged comprehension, which may also use words. A person can comprehend the same phrase with a schema on one occasion and without one on another; the form depends not simply on the object being understood but on the antecedent structure and position of consciousness.

A symbolic schema develops from knowledge through an act. Words that can be used in an effort to comprehend are already penetrated by the memory of past comprehensions. That knowledge is not itself the current act of understanding; it is the point from which understanding proceeds. Depending on the intention present in that knowledge, comprehension may become imaging comprehension: knowledge changes into an anticipation, followed by symbolic movement. The image does not perform the comprehension or supply its truth. As Sartre puts it, the image teaches nothing; comprehension is realized in an imaged form, but not by means of the image as a store of information.

The same distinction appears in reading. The words of a novel remain signs, but imaging knowledge can make their physiognomy serve temporarily as a representative of the object. A character’s office, the building containing it, and the street containing the building are apprehended through a synthesis that gives relations the character of qualities belonging to things. The result is a hybrid consciousness, partly sign and partly imaging: the words signify, while also beginning to represent the qualities they evoke. This image-directed anticipation may disappear without becoming a clear picture; readers may not be able to decide afterward whether they experienced a flash-image, an image’s dawn, or a concept.

Theoretical significance

Imaging knowledge occupies a middle ground without collapsing the distinction between thought, sign, image, and perception. In perception, unformulated knowledge can enrich a present object by anticipating aspects not currently seen: an ashtray is apprehended as having an underside resting on a table, although that underside is not before the eyes. Such intentions adhere to the perceived object and help give perception fullness; they do not separately posit an image. Imaging knowledge, by contrast, seeks to transcend itself by aiming at a sensible presence and a quality that can be represented as outside.

This distinction supports Sartre’s broader account of the image as an intentional form of consciousness, rather than an inner picture that is simply added to thought. An image-oriented state can precede a complete image, guide the movement by which a schema is interpreted, or give the words of a novel an incipient representative role. It can also stop short of intuitive fulfilment. Its importance lies in that directed, unfinished character: it shows how consciousness can already be moving toward the image before there is an image fully formed.