Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre’s investigation of imagination began as a project in psychology and became a decisive inquiry into what consciousness is. By describing how images are given in reflection, how they differ from perception, and how art presents objects that are not real things, Sartre made imagination central to his account of consciousness rather than a secondary mental faculty.

Identity and Background

In 1934, Sartre was a young schoolteacher in Le Havre, teaching pupils preparing for the baccalaureate. He undertook to write about imagination as part of the psychology he taught. In the French curriculum of the time, psychology covered perception, memory, attention, association of ideas, and emotion, and was formally treated as a positive science of psychic facts and their laws, set apart from practical or aesthetic concerns and from ontological or normative questions.

The Imagination, a short work, appeared in 1936. Sartre wrote The Imaginary at about the same time; it was published in 1940 and might have served as his doctoral thesis. The works therefore emerged within psychology’s formal remit, even as the conclusions of The Imaginary moved beyond it. The historical introduction stresses that Sartre’s understanding of facts and laws was already departing from the official handbook conception of the discipline.

From Psychological Inquiry to Phenomenological Method

Sartre framed his project as a description of consciousness’s irrealizing function: its capacity to imagine, together with the imaginary correlate toward which that activity is directed. He also used consciousness to name a concrete mode of activity, rather than a passive container or a fixed collection of psychic structures. This is why he spoke of perceptual consciousness and image consciousness as distinct, particular forms of consciousness.

His method begins with an example: when Pierre is imagined, Pierre—not a small copy of Pierre stored inside the mind—is the object of the current consciousness. While that consciousness remains directed toward Pierre, it can describe him as imaged, but it cannot yet describe the image as an image. That requires a further, reflective act, which turns attention away from the object and toward the way the object is given. Reflection makes possible the judgment that an image is present.

For Sartre, this reflection provides certain data. He distinguished that immediate description from explanatory hypotheses about the image’s nature, which can offer probability but not the same certainty. In his view, many psychologists relied on hypotheses while leaving their own immediate awareness of imagining unexamined. A psychology of images should therefore first describe and classify the characteristics disclosed by reflection. Sartre called this undertaking a phenomenology of the image: produce images, reflect on them, and determine what distinguishes them.

Image, Perception, and the Work of the Body

Sartre rejected the assumption that an image is an object contained inside consciousness. He called this spatially conceived error the Illusion of immanence: the mind is pictured as a place inhabited by miniature imitations, with the image mistakenly treated as one of them. His alternative shifts attention from an inner object to the act of consciousness and its intentional relation to what it imagines.

His analysis of a schematic face shows how the same marks can be apprehended in different ways. The lines may first appear as simple segments organized against the white sheet. Under a changed intention, they can be read as a forehead, eyebrow, nose, eye, mouth, and chin. The change is not accomplished by the lines alone. The eyes trace and organize them, while the body adopts an attitude that helps animate the figure; the viewer can even enact an absent connecting line through a movement of the eyes. The sheet itself changes its role in the experience: space beside the lines can function as filled volume, while the other side recedes as ground. The drawing’s meaning thus depends on an organized act of apprehension, not merely on marks considered in isolation.

Imagination as a Structure of Consciousness

In the conclusion of The Imaginary, Sartre asks what consciousness must be if it is capable of imagining. The question is not merely whether imagining happens to be one psychological ability among others, but whether the possibility of imagining belongs to consciousness’s essential structure. He considers whether consciousness could be wholly absorbed in intuitions of the real and never imagine, or whether consciousness must always be capable of this activity.

His answer connects the imaginary to the apprehension of the world. The imaginary appears against the world as its ground, while the real, apprehended as a world, carries a movement beyond itself toward the imaginary. Imaging consciousness treats the world as a nihilated ground; awareness of the world, in turn, calls for imaging consciousness to grasp the particular sense of a situation. Neither activity is intelligible in isolation from the other. Sartre consequently presents imagination not as an accidental enrichment of consciousness but as an essential and transcendental condition of it.

Art and the Imaginary Object

Sartre extends this account to works of art, whose aesthetic objects he describes as irreal. In a portrait of Charles VIII, the canvas, frame, and layers of paint are real things; the depicted king as an object of aesthetic appreciation is not identical with that material support. The portrait becomes available as an aesthetic object when consciousness takes an imaging attitude. The painted Charles VIII is therefore an object correlated with imaging consciousness, not a figure concealed inside the canvas waiting to be discovered by ordinary perception.

This distinction also explains why painting does not simply transfer a private mental image into public reality. The painter makes a material Analogon: brushstrokes, pigment, canvas, and varnish through which a viewer can apprehend the image. Those materials remain real, but the object manifested through them remains imaginary. The artist arranges real tones so that an irreal whole can appear; the work is not a passage by which the imaginary object itself becomes real.

The difference between sensory pleasure and aesthetic appreciation sharpens the point. A red pigment can give direct sensual pleasure, but in a painting its aesthetic force belongs to the irreal arrangement it helps constitute—for example, the red of a depicted woollen rug beside a table. Its tactile character and relation to the surrounding colors matter as features of that imagined whole, not just as properties of pigment considered on its own.

Sartre applies the same reasoning to drama. An actor who plays Hamlet need not take up the realizing belief that he is Hamlet, yet his feelings, strength, and gestures can all serve as analogons for the character. Even real tears are apprehended as Hamlet’s tears within the performance. Sartre’s account thus allows an actor to be fully mobilized by a role without claiming that the imaginary character has become a real person in the actor. The work of art, whether supported by paint, words, or a performer’s body, depends on a viewer or audience apprehending an irreal object through a real medium.

Significance

Sartre’s study begins with psychology but presses toward a unified account of the human condition. The historical introduction presents this movement as an important step toward the ontological drama later developed in Being and Nothingness: consciousness has no substance of its own, creates images in the absence of their objects, and negates the real in doing so. The work’s lasting significance in this account lies in its joined claims that imagining is an active relation rather than an inner picture, that it is inseparable from consciousness’s engagement with the world, and that artistic experience depends on the distinction between a real medium and an irreal object.