“All consciousness is consciousness of something”

“All consciousness is consciousness of something” expresses the principle of intentionality that organizes Jean-Paul Sartre’s account of images, perception, and art in The Imaginary. Consciousness is not a receptacle in which representations of the world sit; it is an act directed beyond itself toward an object. That object may be perceived, thought, or grasped as imaged, but these are different ways of relating to it, not different contents stored inside the mind. The distinction lets Sartre describe imaging without mistaking an image for a little internal copy, and ultimately understand aesthetic experience as an encounter with an irreality through a real medium.

Intentionality and the Phenomenological Method

The principle gives psychology a different starting point from treating consciousness as a thing among things. Following Edmund Husserl, Sartre suspends the disputed question of how consciousness relates to sensory material and begins instead from the directedness of conscious acts. Perception, mental imagery, and thought are not passive containers: each is consciousness of something beyond itself. Psychology should therefore distinguish kinds of intentionality by examining the situations in which consciousness operates, rather than beginning with speculative explanations of an inner image.

That change of approach also determines what counts as secure knowledge. In Part I of The Imaginary, Sartre proposes to produce images, reflect on them, and describe the characteristics reflection discloses. When Pierre is imaged, Pierre—not an internal picture of Pierre—is the object of the current consciousness. While that consciousness remains unaltered, attention is directed toward Pierre as imaged, not toward the image as an object. To describe the image as image requires a second act: reflection turns attention from the object to the manner in which it is given, making possible the judgment that an image is being experienced.

For Sartre, that reflective judgment is certain in a way that explanatory hypotheses are not. He rejects the claim that an intense image might be indistinguishable from a weak perception: reflection immediately presents marks by which imaging consciousness can be recognized. The psychologist’s first task is to make this common essence explicit. By contrast, theories about the image’s nature remain probable, and disagreement among psychologists arises in part because many move directly to hypotheses instead of examining the immediate reflective data. The expression thus supports a methodological distinction between describing an experience and explaining its causes.

The Image as a Relation

Intentionality prevents the image from being treated as an object lodged inside consciousness. Sartre’s example of a chair makes the point: perception and imaging can both be directed toward the same concrete, individual chair, although in one case the chair is encountered and in the other it is absent. The chair is not in consciousness, either as itself or as an imitation. What differs is the synthetic organization of consciousness and the way it relates to the chair.

Accordingly, Sartre defines the image as a relation, or as a way an object appears to consciousness. Imaging Pierre is not being conscious of an image of Pierre: Pierre is directly intended, even though he is not present. The word “image” can therefore mislead if it suggests a mental thing interposed between consciousness and its object. Imaging consciousness itself has a course—it can arise, develop, become organized, and disintegrate—while the object toward which it is directed may remain unchanged. Its life belongs to the act of consciousness, not to a copy of the object inside the mind.

The principle also accounts for why imaging is not simply perception weakened into an indistinct version of itself. An imagined object is intended in a distinct mode, and consciousness posits it as external to consciousness while also withholding ordinary presence. The tree intended by imaging consciousness is a body beyond consciousness, not a piece of consciousness; yet it is not encountered in the way a perceived tree is. Sartre’s account depends on keeping the object and the act separate while recognizing that the object is given only through a particular intentional relation.

Visual Forms, Movement, and Interpretation

Sartre’s analysis of schematic drawings shows how directed consciousness can reorganize the same visible marks. A few lines and points on a white sheet may first be seen as separate geometrical features: three segments meeting at a point, another point below and to one side, and a sinuous line apart from them. Eye movements organize these marks against the sheet as a homogeneous ground; the segments can form a fork, while the remaining marks constitute another figure.

A change of intention can make the very same arrangement appear as a face. The oblique segment becomes a forehead, the segment to its right an eyebrow, the descending segment a nose, the isolated point an eye, and the curved line a mouth and chin. The transformation involves more than assigning labels to unchanged lines. The sheet’s white space is reorganized: the area to one side is taken as filled volume, while the other functions as empty ground. Eye movements follow the lines as contours, and the observer’s bodily activity supplies a connection between separated marks, enacting a line that is not actually drawn. What emerges is a new synthesis of figure, ground, direction, and implied space.

This account distinguishes schematic imagery from ordinary perceptual organization. In the Müller-Lyer illusion, the structure of the figure imposes eye movements: closed angles impede them, while open angles allow them to continue. The movements are attributed to the perceived segments, which then appear to possess a potential power of extension. The lines become vectors, but the result remains perception: a quality is assigned to the perceived object. A schematic drawing works differently. It does not impose a rule of movement; knowledge directs the eye, and spontaneous movements are projected onto the lines as imaged directions. The viewer may see a running man in the marks while remaining aware that those directions have been freely formed. On this account, the image’s representative elements are not simply the lines themselves but the movements projected onto them.

The difference matters because intention does not merely add a private interpretation to a fixed visual object. It determines how the marks are organized and what kind of object they present. Sartre’s example of a face makes a change from perceptual to imaging intention visible in the eye’s route across the page, in the construction of a solid region from blank paper, and in the bodily enactment of a missing connection. The principle of intentionality thus links consciousness’s directedness to concrete acts of seeing and interpreting.

Perception and Its Unseen Aspects

Sartre also uses intentionality to challenge the idea that perception is built by inserting images into sensation. An irreal Pierre and a real table cannot, in his example, jointly occupy perception as though an image completed the table’s sensory appearance: when Pierre surges up as imaged, the table vanishes from the scene. The two objects correspond to radically distinct acts of consciousness. This makes the traditional explanation of perception through projected, irreal qualities untenable on his account.

Perception nevertheless gives more than is immediately visible. An ashtray is perceived with an underneath, a supporting relation to the table, and an understood porcelain surface, even when those aspects are not presently seen. Sartre describes these as unformulated, antepredicative intentions that adhere to the perceived object and enrich it without positing additional objects. They differ from imaging consciousness: they do not present separate imagined things, but determine the present object through aspects and possibilities that belong to its perceptual constitution. The distinction preserves the richness of perception without making it a composite of perception and mental pictures.

Aesthetic Objects and Irreality

The principle reaches its aesthetic consequence in Sartre’s claim that the work of art, considered as an aesthetic object, is an irreality. A painted Charles VIII is not identical with the canvas, frame, or real layers of paint. Those material things can be perceived in a realizing attitude, but the depicted king as an object of aesthetic appreciation appears only when consciousness converts to imaging and constitutes him through the painting. The canvas is real; the aesthetic object is the correlate of an imaging act.

The painter therefore does not transfer a private mental image into a real object that the public can simply perceive. Brushstrokes, impasto, grain, and varnish are real, but they are not themselves what aesthetic appreciation calls beautiful. They form a material analogue through which an irreal object can be apprehended. A painting is a material thing that is visited by the depicted irreality whenever a spectator adopts the imaging attitude. Even its colours acquire their aesthetic sense within that irreal whole: a red may be apprehended as the red of a woollen rug beside a table, with its tactile density, while a green is understood as the stiff, shiny green of a wall covering. The sensory pleasure of a colour considered on its own is not yet aesthetic appreciation; its place in the imaged whole makes it beautiful.

This account also applies to fiction, poetry, drama, and music. Verbal forms serve as analogues for irreal objects, while an actor’s body, feelings, strength, and gestures serve as analogues for Hamlet. The actor need not posit himself as the real Hamlet in order to be wholly mobilized in producing the character. Even real tears can be apprehended by actor and audience as Hamlet’s irreal tears: the actor is not made real in the character; he is irrealized in it.

Sartre extends the question to Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. A performance occurs at a particular time and place, but a listener may seek the symphony itself rather than the dated event of its performance; a later interpretation can still be encountered as the same work, played better or worse. This distinction continues the essay’s central claim: consciousness does not merely register the material occasion. Through its intentional act, it apprehends an object whose mode of being is not reducible to the real thing or event that makes the experience possible.