Pure knowledge consciousness

Pure knowledge consciousness is awareness that can aim at an object or relation without forming an image of it. In Jean-Paul Sartre’s account, it is not a faint or incomplete picture but a distinct mode of consciousness: relational, often empty of sensible matter, and capable of remaining free rather than becoming part of an image. Its importance lies in the contrast it establishes between knowing a relation and intuitively presenting something, and in the transformations that occur when knowledge becomes directed toward imagery.

Definition and varieties

Knowledge in a free state can be detailed without becoming pictorial. Drawing on Karl Bühler, Sartre describes three kinds of awareness: awareness of rules, relations, and intentions, with the last term used for consciousness of order, arrangement, or system. In pure knowledge, sensible matter is designated rather than intuitively presented; the awareness is empty in this sense, even when it synthesizes many relations or concerns individual things. It can also precede or accompany judgement and be associated with signs, while remaining an empty sign-consciousness.

Bühler’s example of the Sistine Madonna makes the distinction concrete. A subject first recalls the Madonna and Saint Barbara, then considers whether blue appears in the painting. The subject has the notion that blue is represented there as the fourth primary colour without forming an image of it. The awareness is directed toward blue as a relation within the painting, but does not intuitively supply the colour. Messer’s mountain example similarly concerns a rule or orientation: the word prompts a wordless awareness of a direction toward something that could be climbed, not an intuitive mountain presented in full.

Such knowledge can also be pre-objective. Sartre describes it as sometimes conveying an imprecise awareness of a subject’s own capacities—an implicit sense of knowing, being able to know, or needing to look in a particular direction—and sometimes including objective relations such as long, pointed, or fourth in a series of primary colours. Pure knowledge therefore has an ambiguous character: it can be empty awareness of relations while also being full awareness of a state or capacity of the subject. Its content is not yet a fully presented object.

From free knowledge to imaging knowledge

Sartre distinguishes this free, pre-objective mode from imaging knowledge. Imaging knowledge seeks to transcend itself and posit a relation as external, not by asserting its truth in a judgement, but by aiming at a certain density of reality as a representative. The represented real is not itself given; it is anticipated as something to be reached intuitively. Imaging knowledge is thus an effort to determine an indeterminate something, a movement toward intuitive presentation.

The transition is not simply the addition of an image to unchanged knowledge. Sartre argues that knowledge is radically modified as it enters the constitution of an image, and that the change can begin before an image is fully formed. Reports collected by Schwiete describe an indeterminate image of an opening and two indeterminate, dissimilar objects. These cases have no determinate form, and the objects lack intuitive spatial characteristics by which they could be distinguished, yet the subjects report them as imaged. The examples expose the difficulty of drawing a clean boundary between pure knowledge and image: some awareness remains empty but already presents itself as intimately related to the sensible.

Burloud’s examples show the same threshold. At the word atlas, a subject reports a visual representation of a place on a map, but describes it more as a direction beyond the Mediterranean Sea. At the word nail, another reports something long and pointed—visual or conceptual, but capable of giving rise to a visual impression. Sartre calls this kind of awareness degraded knowledge: it remains knowledge, but is already oriented toward a possible sensible realization. Unlike pure knowledge, it presents itself as awaiting the visual.

Knowledge in comprehension and schemas

Knowledge also supplies the basis from which comprehension may take an imaged form. For Sartre, comprehension is an act, not the passive reproduction of a meaning. A word that can be understood carries knowledge formed through past acts of comprehension; knowing a word is, in this account, a kind of memory of ideas that implies the possibility of further comprehension without itself being a current act of understanding. René Descartes’s distinction between ideas and memories of ideas helps frame this point. The relevant question is how the intention present in knowledge leads comprehension toward an image or leaves it without one.

Flach’s observations distinguish symbolic schemas from illustrations deliberately summoned to accompany thought. Schemas arise with the effort to understand a problem or proposition, bring its solution or comprehension with them, and cannot be produced simply by trying to make them appear. They are absent when the intellectual task is too easy or can be solved from memory. Messer’s experiments add that comprehension can occur through words, through pure understanding without words, or through an imaged schema; the same phrase may be understood with a schema at one moment and without one at another. Sartre therefore locates the difference not in the object understood, but in the structure and orientation of the antecedent consciousness.

A schema’s sensible form may be static or moving, but its constitution involves visual apprehension of kinaesthetic sensations, organized through anticipation and retention. Knowledge is transformed into anticipation and then into the retained movement. In this way, it provides the origin of a symbolic schema without making the image a separate instrument that teaches or accomplishes the comprehension. The comprehension occurs as an act; the image-object is its intentional correlate.

Perception, imagery, and philosophical significance

Sartre’s account of schematic drawings illustrates how knowledge can direct the formation of an image without being identical to the visible marks. A face-like arrangement can first be perceived as three segments meeting at a point, with another point below and a separate sinuous line. Eye movements organize these marks according to figure-and-ground relations. When the perceptual intention changes into an imaging one, the same marks can be read as forehead, eyebrow, nose, eye, mouth, and chin. The viewer’s bodily attitude and eye movements help synthesize lines into a face; the image is not simply contained in the marks as a ready-made object.

The contrast with perception clarifies why this is not merely a matter of adding a picture to thought. In the Müller-Lyer illusion, the perceived figures direct eye movements that are objectified as qualities of the lines, such as extension or force. Sartre treats this as a perceptual organization, not an image. Schematic images differ because they do not provide rules that compel movement in the same way: knowledge directs the movements, which are projected onto the lines as hypothetical directions. If a figure crystallizes, it can appear as a running man, while the viewer remains aware of having freely projected movement onto it. The representative elements are those projected movements, not the lines considered in isolation.

The distinction ultimately informs Sartre’s wider question about consciousness. The conclusion of the book asks what consciousness must be if it is capable of imagining, and whether the capacity to imagine is a contingent addition or a constitutive structure of consciousness. Sartre proposes approaching this through a regressive analysis of the conditions that make imagining possible, then comparing the result with the Cartesian intuition of consciousness disclosed by the cogito. Pure knowledge matters within this inquiry because it prevents thought from being reduced either to images or to signs: consciousness can apprehend relations without an image, while its orientation can also transform that knowledge toward intuitive presentation.