Knowledge Meets Affectivity

The Imaginary

This flow traces Sartre’s account of how knowledge and affective life can cooperate or conflict within the presentation of an imagined object.

increasing

Bearing strength in each event

decreasing

Feeling Has an Object Feeling Has an Object from "The Imaginary". Affectivity Beyond the Subject Against private residue Sartre challenges views that reduce feeling to an inner shiver attached to ideas by association.

Feeling Has an Object from "The Imaginary". Affectivity Beyond the Subject Against private residue Sartre challenges views that reduce feeling to an inner shiver attached to ideas by association.

Affectivity Beyond the Subject Against private residue Sartre challenges views that reduce feeling to an inner shiver attached to ideas by association. Love, hate, and indignation are directed toward objects and help give those objects an affective sense. To love a person is not merely to register a private state; it is to encounter that person as lovable. A change in emphasis Feeling can therefore contribute to how an object appears. This claim prepares Sartre’s account of affectivity as part of the matter through which imagination presents its object.

An Affective Presence An Affective Presence from "The Imaginary". The Feeling That Stands In A person without full perception Sartre considers a feeling directed toward the absent beauty of someone’s hands.

An Affective Presence from "The Imaginary". The Feeling That Stands In A person without full perception Sartre considers a feeling directed toward the absent beauty of someone’s hands.

The Feeling That Stands In A person without full perception Sartre considers a feeling directed toward the absent beauty of someone’s hands. Even without a complete representation, the affective experience can make something individual and meaningful present to consciousness. Knowledge and feeling may join so that the affective object serves as a representative for the hands themselves. A synthesis with tension The result is not an inner object unrelated to its target. It is a concrete substitute that presents the absent object while also preserving its absence.

Conflicting Aspects of Pierre

One Person Across Unequal Impressions Knowledge and feeling diverge An image may intend Pierre as seen on one occasion while its affective medium recalls another. The image can present him in a familiar setting even when the subject knows he is elsewhere. Different aspects become fused without being reconciled into a single perceptual moment. The image’s inner contradiction Sartre treats this tension as characteristic rather than accidental. The image can gather incompatible features because it is governed by an imaginative synthesis, not the strict individuation of perception.

Opening of Part II, Chapter 2

Middle of Part II, Chapter 2

During Part II, Chapter 5, on the object’s appearance