“Absent within its very presence”

The expression absent within its very presence names a defining structure of imaging consciousness: an object is apprehended through what is present to consciousness, yet the object itself is given as elsewhere, unreal, or not yet existing. The formulation rejects the idea that an image is a small replica inside the mind. It instead describes a relation between consciousness, its present substitute, and the absent object toward which consciousness is directed.

Reflection and the Image

The account begins by distinguishing the object of an image from the image as a way that object is given. When someone produces an image of Pierre, Pierre is the object of consciousness; while that consciousness remains unaltered, attention is directed toward Pierre, not toward an image considered as such. To describe the image as image requires a second, reflective act that redirects attention from the object to its mode of appearance. Reflection makes possible the judgment that an image is being experienced.

This method separates immediate description from explanatory theory. Reflective awareness of having an image is treated as certain, whereas psychological hypotheses about the image’s underlying nature remain probable. The task of phenomenological description is therefore to identify the image’s distinctive characteristics by producing images, reflecting on them, and classifying what reflection discloses. In this account, absent within its very presence is not an ornamental paradox but a characteristic to be established through description.

Affective Presence and the Substitute

The example of the hands shows how the structure can combine knowledge and feeling. In a cognitive-affective consciousness, desire posits an object that is not the self, while imaging knowledge identifies what is given as two hands and specifies their whiteness and fineness. The hands are experienced as fully presented through a concrete substitute, but that substitute cannot exist by itself as the hands. It gives them while also directing consciousness beyond itself toward them.

The example clarifies why presence does not mean that the represented object has become physically available. The substitute can carry the hands’ sensible character for consciousness, yet the hands themselves have not come into existence. This structure is especially apparent in images directed toward sensible qualities such as colour, flavour, landscape, or facial expression: affective experience can supply an immediacy that knowledge alone leaves comparatively empty. The object is present in the experience, but its presence is inseparable from its absence as the thing represented.

The Panthéon and the Illusion of Immanence

The Panthéon example gives the expression an architectural form. Imaging consciousness apprehends the building as a Greek temple, with grey colour, columns, and a triangular pediment. Its qualities are present in an affective manner, while the building itself is given as existing elsewhere. For a moment, consciousness experiences the Panthéon as if in its presence, although it is not there.

A tempting explanation is that a miniature Panthéon must be present instead: a lesser grey, for example, standing in for the building’s actual grey. The book identifies this construction as the illusion of immanence. It transfers the represented thing’s qualities to the substitute and then mistakes the imaging act for an inspection of a small, self-contained object. The resulting impression is that the columns can be counted or the building examined. Yet the represented object cannot be observed as a perceived thing: it is visible without being available to sight, and tangible without being available to touch. The substitute functions as a route to the absent object, not as a reduced version of it.

Hallucination and the Limits of Presence

The expression also helps frame the problem of hallucination, though it does not by itself explain why an imagined object may be taken as real. The account distinguishes an imaging consciousness from perception: the imaged object has its own irreal space and is initially given as irreal, while a perceived object claims a place in the shared world. A hallucination therefore cannot be explained simply as consciousness projecting an image into external space. The deeper question is how belief in an object’s reality can alter when the object is, by its constitution, irreal.

The discussion of patients preserves this distinction even in pathological cases. A report by Marie B describes knowing that a claimed identity was untrue while nevertheless feeling partly convinced within an imaginary world. In the analysis of more thoroughgoing hallucinations, the difficulty is associated with a disruption of personal synthesis: scattered, embarrassing thoughts replace concentrated, oriented activity; perception becomes dark and indistinct; and partial, anti-thematic systems arise that cannot be held before attention as ordinary thoughts can. Such voices or faces may be heard but not listened to, seen but not looked at. The account thus treats the problem not as a simple confusion between an inner picture and an outer thing, but as a change in the organization of consciousness and belief.

The Imaginary World and the Work of Art

The conclusion extends the structure beyond individual images. The imaginary appears against the background of the world, but apprehending the real as a world also involves a surpassing toward the imaginary. Imaging consciousness takes the world as the background it negates; awareness of the world, in turn, can motivate imaging by disclosing the particular sense of a situation. On this account, imagination is not an accidental extra capacity: it is an essential condition of consciousness, bound up with the possibility of realizing the world at all.

The work of art makes the difference between material presence and imagined presence especially clear. In a portrait, the canvas, frame, and paint are real, but the aesthetic object Charles VIII is not identical with those materials. It appears when consciousness turns from realizing the canvas to imaging the depicted figure. As with a drawing that can be apprehended as five cubes or six, the two acts are complete but mutually exclusive: the viewer does not apprehend both aspects in the same act. The aesthetic object can move or impress the viewer, but it is not thereby converted into a perceptible object among others. The material work does not carry an image from the artist’s mind into reality; rather, its real marks provide the means through which an irreality is apprehended. The expression therefore gathers together a central distinction: what is present to consciousness can make an absent object accessible without making that object real or physically present.