Realizing attitude

The Realizing attitude is the stance in which consciousness apprehends things as real objects in the world, rather than as irreal objects presented through imagination. Its importance in Sartre’s account lies in the contrast it establishes: the physical canvas is not the painted figure, a concert performance is not the symphony heard through it, and a real object contemplated aesthetically is not simply apprehended in the ordinary practical way. The shift between realizing and imaging is therefore not a change in the object alone, but a change in how consciousness takes it.

Perception and the Organization of Objects

The Realizing attitude is not a bare reception of sensory data. Perception already organizes what is seen into objects, with aspects and relations that extend beyond what is immediately visible. A face, for instance, can be apprehended as a whole even though only some of its features are directly presented. Perception also carries unformulated expectations about an object’s unseen sides and its place among other things. Such intentions enrich the perceived object without forming separate images of those hidden aspects.

The discussion of a schematic face makes the difference between perceptual and imaging attitudes concrete. At first, a few marks on a white sheet can be organized as lines and points: the three segments meet like a fork, while a wavy mark remains a separate figure. When the intention changes, those same marks can be read as a forehead, eyebrow, nose, eye, mouth, and chin. The paper itself changes its role in the experience: space to one side appears as filled volume, while the other side recedes as ground. The viewer’s eye movements and bodily orientation help synthesize the marks into a face, including a line that is not actually drawn. The marks do not, by themselves, dictate one such object; the shift in attitude lets them support a different organization.

Ordinary perception can also assign movement and direction to objects, but its motor organization differs from the way a schematic image is formed. In the Müller-Lyer illusion, the closed and open angles channel eye movements differently. The line between the open angles seems to possess a greater power of extension, while the other appears gathered inward. The movement is projected onto the segments as a potential force, and the segments are perceived as vectors. This remains a perceptual effect: the lines acquire a quality within the perceived world, and the resulting object may function as a sign, but not, on that account, as an image.

Schematic images work otherwise because the figure does not impose a necessary rule for eye movement. Knowledge guides the viewer’s movements, which remain spontaneous, and their directions are projected onto the lines as hypotheses. If an image crystallizes, the lines can disclose a running man; yet the viewer still apprehends the projected directions as freely produced. The representative elements are thus not merely the lines, but the movements projected onto them. The distinction helps locate the Realizing attitude: it apprehends qualities as belonging to a real perceived object, whereas an image depends on a different synthesis that recognizes its object as imaged.

The Real Object and the Aesthetic Object

The distinction becomes decisive in the account of art. A painting is a real thing: it has a canvas, frame, layers of paint, brushwork, grain, and varnish. But the aesthetic object does not appear to a consciousness that takes only those material features as real. In the portrait of Charles VIII, the depicted king is not identical with the canvas or its paint. He appears when consciousness converts to the imaging attitude and apprehends the figure as an irreal object. The two attitudes are exclusive in the relevant act: apprehending one aspect does not mean that the other is merely concealed behind it.

The painter, on this account, does not transfer a private mental image into reality. The actual work constructs a material support through which an image can be apprehended. Its brushstrokes serve an irreal whole rather than existing only as components of a real, self-contained object. When a spectator takes the imaging attitude, that material support is visited by the painted object; it does not turn the imaginary into something real. Even the sensual pleasure of a particular colour is distinct from aesthetic appreciation considered on its own. A red on a canvas can be apprehended as part of an irreal whole—for example, as the red of a woollen rug beside a table—and the imagined tactile character of the rug helps give the colour its aesthetic sense.

The same distinction applies to fiction and performance. A novelist, poet, or dramatist presents irreal objects through verbal means, while an actor’s body serves as the medium through which Hamlet appears. The actor need not take himself to be Hamlet as a real identity in order to mobilize his feelings, strength, and gestures in the performance. Even actual tears can be apprehended by actor and audience as Hamlet’s tears: the performer’s real response is taken up into the irreal world of the character, rather than making the character a real person in the actor.

Music presents a parallel case. A listener may attend a performance of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, but the symphony is not identical with the dated event in the concert hall. Another performance can present the same work, even if it is played better or worse. The orchestra and auditorium can fall from attention as the listener apprehends the symphony itself; the work has an internal succession from its opening to its finale, but is not thereby a real event unfolding in the listener’s present time. The performance is its material support, dependent on real sounds and circumstances, yet the symphony as heard aesthetically is apprehended in the imaginary, beyond the real performance that makes it accessible.

Aesthetic Absorption and the Return to Reality

Aesthetic contemplation depends on the imaging attitude. Its characteristic disinterestedness does not arise from a special way of appreciating real things as real; it follows from apprehending the aesthetic object as irreal. The work may depend on a canvas, words, a body, or a performance, but the object appreciated as beautiful is not simply the material support encountered by perception. The real enables the appearance of the aesthetic object without becoming identical with it.

That distinction also explains the abruptness of leaving a play or a concert. The transition is not a passage from one world to another, as though the theatre’s world and ordinary reality were adjoining places. It is a shift from the imaging attitude to the Realizing attitude. Aesthetic absorption can resemble a dream: when the play ends or the symphony stops, consciousness is released from the imaginary and regains contact with existence. The discomfort of that return is compared to awakening, even after a realistic or cruel play. The end of the performance is not an interruption within the symphony as an aesthetic object; it is the end of the real performance through which the work had been apprehended.

Sartre’s account also distinguishes aesthetic contemplation of a real object from ordinary perception and practical engagement. A person may contemplate an object or event in the real world, but in doing so may take a step back from it: the object ceases to be apprehended simply as a present thing and functions as an image of itself, neutralized and held at a distance. A beautiful woman, for example, can be contemplated as an irreal object; that stance is incompatible with physical possession, which belongs to the realizing plane of existence and desire. The object has not ceased to be materially present, but it is apprehended under a different aspect and becomes, in that sense, untouchable.

This aesthetic distancing is contrasted with paramnesia, in which a real object functions as an analogical presentation of itself as past. Aesthetic contemplation involves nihilation, while paramnesia involves pastification; the difference parallels that between imagination and memory. Across these examples, the Realizing attitude marks the return to objects as existing in the world, while the imaging attitude makes possible the aesthetic object that the real support alone cannot provide.