Panthéon

The Panthéon, as an object recalled in imagination, exemplifies Jean-Paul Sartre’s account of how an absent thing can be experienced as present without becoming a miniature object inside consciousness. The imagined building is intended with recognizable qualities—a grey colour, columns and a triangular pediment—but those qualities cannot be examined as if the actual building were before the observer. The tension between felt presence and practical inaccessibility exposes a basic difference between imaging and perception, and shows how reflection can misdescribe an image as a picture-like substitute.

An absent object intended as present

Sartre begins with an imaging consciousness directed toward the Panthéon in its sensible character: a Greek temple, grey, with columns and a triangular pediment. These features are not simply assembled into a little building that exists within the mind. The intended object is the Panthéon itself, understood as existing elsewhere. What is present in the experience is therefore, paradoxically, its absence: its qualities are apprehended through an affective presence, while the building remains beyond the immediate situation.

Sartre describes this mode of experience as Possession. For a time, the subject is as if in the presence of the absent Panthéon, though the real building has not entered the scene. This is not ordinary perception of a structure occupying the observer’s surroundings. It is an imaging relation in which the object is intended through its absence, and in which knowing the building’s sensible qualities does not make those qualities available for perceptual inspection.

The miniature and the illusion of immanence

Reflection encourages a more orderly but misleading explanation of this experience. Rather than accept the apparent presence of an absent building, reflective consciousness posits that something present must be a similar object: an image that represents the Panthéon’s qualities without being the building itself. In this account, the image becomes an Image analogical medium, a substitute that seems to possess a reduced, inward version of the building’s grey colour and architectural features.

Sartre identifies this transfer of the represented thing’s qualities to its Image analogical medium as the Illusion of immanence. Reflection makes it seem that consciousness has before it a complex of real but non-externalized sensible qualities, as though the Panthéon existed there in miniature. The apparent grey fulfils the intention reaching toward grey without providing the external, perceptible quality of the actual building. Sartre’s point is not that the absent object has literally been brought inside consciousness: the miniature is the mirage produced when reflection treats the image as a picture and relocates the object’s qualities into its substitute.

The practical limit of the experience makes the mistake visible. The imagined Panthéon seems available to description, inspection and enumeration, but those operations cannot be carried out as they could with the real building before one’s eyes. Its columns are intended as the columns of the Panthéon, yet the subject cannot inspect and count them. The image can thus present an object as if it were visible while withholding the very access that visibility ordinarily allows.

The test of the columns

Sartre invokes Alain’s challenge to people who say that they can readily summon the Panthéon in memory: try counting the columns supporting its pediment. They cannot count them, and, as Alain emphasizes, cannot even begin the operation that would be simple in front of the real structure. The example makes the difference between claiming to have an image and actually perceiving an object concrete. Familiarity with what the Panthéon looks like does not amount to a visual scene that can be searched column by column.

Alain concludes that the image does not exist. Sartre rejects that conclusion while retaining the force of the test. The failed count does not show that imaging consciousness has no object; it shows the paradoxical way its object is given. The columns are currently intended, but they cannot be treated as a set of independently available parts. The example therefore marks a limit, not an absence of all imaginative content: the image is neither a fully inspectable perception nor a miniature perception hidden inside the mind.

The object is also not given in images as a stable arrangement of separable features. Sartre contrasts knowledge’s attention to external objects and their juxtaposed parts with affectivity’s presentation of the object as an undifferentiated whole. At one moment, columns and pediment may be intended as distinct qualities; at another, qualities can run into one another, yielding a temple without clearly separated parts. The imagined Panthéon can thus be apprehended through fragmentary distinctions and through a primitive, blended unity. Sartre calls attention to the contradiction involved in accepting these modes together without clearly recognizing their difference; that contradiction is part of the mirage, not evidence that the image is a small, complete building.

From recalled image to aesthetic object

Sartre’s later account of art clarifies why a physical support should not be confused with the object encountered through imaging. In a portrait, for example, the canvas and its real layers of paint are not identical with the depicted person as aesthetically apprehended. The image becomes available through a material support when consciousness takes an imaging attitude; the support does not turn the imaginary object into a perceptual object. This distinction echoes the Panthéon example: a present medium can make an absent object intended without supplying the object itself for ordinary inspection.

The analogy also establishes the limits of the comparison. A painting’s material analogon can be publicly encountered, whereas the remembered Panthéon is discussed as an object of imaging consciousness; in neither case does the represented object become a real, perceptually inspectable miniature. Sartre’s account of aesthetic appreciation likewise depends on grasping an imaginary object through its material support, rather than confusing that object with the real canvas. Across these cases, the Panthéon serves as a precise test of how imagination relates to what is absent: its object is intended with sensible character, but cannot be handled by the operations that perception makes possible.