Thesis of irreality

The Thesis of irreality is Jean-Paul Sartre’s account of how imaging consciousness relates to its object: an image appears not as a real thing before consciousness but as an object marked by absence or negation. This distinction separates imagining from perceiving, clarifies why hallucination cannot be reduced to mistaking an inner picture for an external object, and underpins Sartre’s claim that the aesthetic object in a work of art is irreally manifested through a real medium.

Definition and structure

The thesis begins with a difference in how an object is posited. A realizing consciousness takes its object as real; an Imaging consciousness gives its object as irreal. If someone forms an image of Pierre, the imagined Pierre may be thought of as being in Berlin or London, yet as imaged he is given as absent. That absence is not a gap that could be filled by more vivid imagery. It is the essential nothingness that distinguishes the imaged object from something encountered in perception.

Irreality can take several forms. An imaginary object may be posited as nonexistent, as absent, as existing elsewhere, or without being posited as existent at all. These different acts share a negative structure, though they do not amount to the same claim about the object. The negation is not an extra judgement added after an image has formed: it belongs to the image’s innermost constitution. Consciousness remains intentional—it is still consciousness of something—but it must be capable of setting an object apart from the totality of reality by giving it a character of nothingness.

This account also distinguishes an absent object from an aspect of a perceived thing that is merely out of view. The concealed arabesques of a tapestry remain understood as existing behind an armchair, even while they are not intuitively visible. They are given as veiled, not absent. Likewise, a real future can be anticipated as grounded in the present, as when someone’s actions presuppose Pierre’s arrival at 7:35 p.m. But the same future can be isolated from present reality and given as not yet, as absent. For Sartre, this capacity to posit irreality is an essential condition of imaging.

Perception, images, and visual organization

The thesis marks a boundary between perception and imagining, rather than treating images as sensory contents that supplement perception. A real table and the irreal Pierre cannot jointly function as correlates of one unchanged consciousness: when the imagined Pierre surges into view, the table leaves the scene. The two objects belong to alternating, radically distinct attitudes. Perception can nevertheless include more than is immediately seen, because unformulated intentions help constitute a present object and its hidden aspects. Those intentions adhere to the perceived thing; they do not posit a separate imaginary object.

Schematic drawings show how a shift from perceptual to imaging activity changes what lines can mean. A few segments, a point, and a curved line may first be organized as independent forms on a white ground. With a change of intention, the same marks can be read as a face: a segment becomes a forehead, another an eyebrow, a descending line a nose, and the point an eye. The space around the marks changes with that reading: one side can function as the dense volume of an indeterminate solid, while the other recedes as empty ground. The viewer’s eyes also enact a missing line, joining separated marks into a single figure. The drawn strokes alone do not contain a finished face; the image depends on the viewer’s directed activity.

This process differs from the way perceptual forms can impose movements on the eyes. In the Müller-Lyer illusion, closed and open angles constrain or permit eye movement, and those movements are projected onto line segments as qualities of extension or contraction. The segments remain perceived objects with newly attributed properties. Schematic images, by contrast, do not prescribe movement in the same way. Knowledge directs the eye movements, which remain spontaneous and are projected onto the marks as hypothetical directions. If the image crystallizes, a running man may appear, but the viewer continues to apprehend him as imaged and recognizes the freely projected movements that make the figure legible. The distinction helps explain why a perceptual organization, even one shaped by eye movement, does not by itself amount to an image.

Irreality, spontaneity, and hallucination

The image’s irreality is bound to consciousness’s awareness of its own spontaneity. When Pierre is imaged, he comes with an irreal space of his own and is positioned before consciousness, rather than existing as a content enclosed inside it. The object of an image is therefore already external to consciousness in the relevant sense; hallucination cannot be explained simply as the mind projecting an otherwise internal object into the perceived world. What differentiates this object from a perceived one is that its space is its own and that it is immediately given as irreal, while a perceived object initially claims reality.

This account makes hallucination a problem about belief or thesis, not about turning an image into a perception by adding externality. The object’s immediate irreality cannot simply be erased, because the spontaneity that produces the image and consciousness of that spontaneity are inseparable in Sartre’s analysis. He therefore holds that neither hallucination nor dreaming destroys the imaged object’s irreality as the immediate correlate of imaging consciousness. At the same time, this conclusion leaves a difficulty: how can a patient believe in the reality of an image that is essentially given as irreal? Sartre treats alteration of belief as central but argues that explanations based on a diminished awareness of one’s activity do not fully account for visual, psychic, and some auditory hallucinations. The discussion reaches an impasse rather than claiming to have settled the problem.

The image and the world

The Thesis of irreality gives imaging a distinctive relation to the real world. In grasping a portrait as an image of Charles VIII, consciousness no longer treats the depicted king as an object subject to the actual conditions that alter the canvas. A real projector can illuminate the painted cheek, but it cannot change the cheek’s depicted illumination; that is determined within the irreal scene, by its irreal light source. If the picture burns, the material picture burns, not Charles VIII as imaged. The portrait’s material support belongs to the world, while its depicted object is out of reach of the world’s causal changes.

This separation does not mean that the imaginary floats free of reality. Sartre describes the imaginary as appearing against the ground of the world, while apprehending the real as a world entails a surpassing toward the imaginary. Imaging consciousness maintains the world as the nihilated ground from which an irreal object emerges; awareness of the world, in turn, motivates imaging by giving a situation a particular sense. The two attitudes are distinct but mutually implicated. Imagination is therefore not an accidental mental supplement: Sartre presents it as an essential condition of consciousness.

Art and the aesthetic object

The account’s consequences are clearest in Sartre’s treatment of art. The painting of Charles VIII is a real canvas, frame, and layer of pigment, but the aesthetic object is not identical with any of these material things. It appears when consciousness adopts an imaging attitude and apprehends the depicted king as an irreal object. The canvas does not conceal a real Charles VIII waiting to be discovered; the aesthetic object cannot be given to a realizing consciousness. As with a figure that can be seen as either five or six cubes, apprehending the image and apprehending the material object are complete but exclusive intentional acts.

The artist, on this account, does not first possess a private mental image and then transfer that image into reality. Brush strokes, the texture of the canvas, and varnish are real; they form a material analogon through which an irreal whole can be manifested to a spectator. The artwork neither realizes nor turns the imaginary object into a real object. When the spectator takes up the imaging attitude, the material thing is visited by the irreality it enables. Sensory pleasure in a color is not by itself aesthetic appreciation: a red encountered as part of a painted woollen rug takes its aesthetic sense from the irreal whole, including the rug’s implied texture and its relation to other depicted forms. Even a cubist painting that does not imitate familiar objects can manifest irreal things with density, depth, and relations of perspective.

The same structure extends beyond painting. A novelist, poet, or dramatist manifests irreal objects through verbal analogons, while an actor’s body, feelings, strength, and gestures serve as analogons for Hamlet. The actor need not believe, in the sense of taking the character as real, that he is Hamlet. Yet he may be entirely mobilized in producing the character: even real tears are apprehended as Hamlet’s irreal tears. Sartre reverses the familiar idea that the character becomes real in the actor; instead, the actor is irrealized in the character.

Music tests the thesis in another medium. A performance of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony is a dated real event, but listeners may seek the symphony itself rather than the particular orchestra or conductor. A poor performance can seem to conceal or betray the work, while another performance presents what is recognized as the same symphony. In this example, the work is not simply identical with the concert event. The distinction between the real performance and the work apprehended through it extends the thesis beyond visual images: aesthetic experience, too, constitutes an object as irreal rather than merely registering a real thing.