“The imaging consciousness posits its object as a nothingness”

“The imaging consciousness posits its object as a nothingness” expresses a decisive feature of Jean-Paul Sartre’s theory of imagination: an image presents its object through a particular act of negation, rather than first giving it as a real object and only afterwards marking it as imaginary. The imagined object can be vivid and richly meaningful, yet its mode of appearance includes its absence or nonexistence. This account makes negation part of what imaging consciousness is, and connects the experience of images to the distinction between the real world and the irreal.

The Positional Act of the Image

Every consciousness posits its object, but not in the same way. Perception posits an object as existing. Imaging consciousness also includes a positional act, which can take four forms: it can posit the object as nonexistent, as absent, as existing elsewhere, or neutralize itself by refraining from positing the object as existent. These are not additions applied after an image has already been formed. They constitute imaging consciousness itself. Treating the image as if it were initially a perception and only later reduced to an image would therefore mistake the experience being described and revive the illusion that images are simply inner versions of perceived things.

This distinction also separates imaging consciousness from conceptual knowledge. A concept such as “man” concerns a nature or essence, not the existence of a particular individual. Even when concrete knowledge places Pierre in a location—for example, on a trip to Berlin—that location adds a positive determination to what is known of him. The image’s absence is different: it has the privative force of a sensory intuition that presents its object as not present. An image of a dead loved one, for instance, can bring grief directly with it; the ache is bound to the way the image gives its object as absent, rather than requiring a separate act of interpretation.

A doubtful perception makes the contrast especially clear. Someone approaching may be seen as a man while the observer suspends judgement about whether he is Pierre. The doubt concerns the man’s identity, not his existence. By contrast, to have an image of Pierre is not merely to fail to see Pierre while still seeing something else: the image presents Pierre as not there, or otherwise withholds a positing of his existence. Its object remains something intuitively envisaged, but is given as absent to intuition.

Absence Within an Intuitive Image

An image of Pierre gathers past appearances into an intentional synthesis: it presents the same person under a particular aspect, such as in profile, at three-quarter view, full size, or as a head and shoulders. The intended Pierre is corporeal—the person who could be seen, touched, and heard—and is understood in relation to a position and distance. Yet the image presents him as not being touched or seen now. In this sense, imagining him is a way of not touching him and not seeing him: the intuitive object is given, but as absent from present intuition.

The image therefore carries a kind of nothingness within its presentation. Its object is not simply a portrait-like content; it asserts an object while giving that object as not existing here and now. The stronger or more appealing the image becomes, the more forcefully it may seem to place its object before the mind, but vividness does not turn it into perception. A person may react to an image as if its object were present, yet that conduct cannot erase the immediate awareness of the object’s nonpresence. The tension between vivid presentation and absence is not a defect in the image; it is central to its mode of being experienced.

Schematic Images and the Work of the Body

The account also clarifies how a schematic figure can come to appear as an image. A few lines may first be seen simply as lines: three segments meeting at a point, a dot below and to one side, and a separate sinuous mark. The eye organizes them as a fork against the white ground. A different intention can reorganize the same marks as a face: the segments become forehead, eyebrow, and nose; the dot becomes an eye; the sinuous line suggests mouth and chin. The shift is not just a new label attached to an unchanged perception. The figure must be interpreted, and the observer’s bodily activity helps animate it.

In this face, the paper to one side of the lines functions as filled volume, while the paper on the other side recedes as empty ground. The eye follows the line of the nose and supplies a connection that is not drawn between separate marks, carrying the gaze from one point to another as if enacting the missing line. Such bodily and ocular movements help organize the figure into an image. Knowledge directs the movements, which are experienced as spontaneous and projected onto the lines as imaged directions. If the image crystallizes, the observer sees a running man in the marks while remaining aware that the directional qualities have been freely projected there.

This process differs from the Müller-Lyer illusion. There, the figure’s angles organize eye movements in a way that is experienced as imposed by the perceived form; movement is attributed to the segments as a perceived quality, and the lines can function as signs. In a schematic image, by contrast, knowledge directs the eye movements, and their spontaneity is incorporated into an imaging act. The drawn lines are not, by themselves, the representative elements; the movements projected onto them help constitute the image. Work on formal structures in perception, including that of Wolfgang Köhler and Wertheimer, may help explain why perception presents more than what is strictly seen, but those unformulated intentions remain distinct from imaging consciousness: they enrich the perceived object without positing a separate imagined one.

Art and the Irreal Object

The same distinction extends from mental images to works of art. A painted Charles VIII is not identical with the canvas, frame, or real layers of paint. Those belong to the material support; the aesthetic object appears when consciousness takes an imaging attitude and apprehends the depicted figure as irreal. As with a drawing that can be seen as five or six cubes but not as both at once, apprehending Charles VIII as imaged is a complete intentional act that excludes treating the same object, in that moment, as a real person present on the canvas.

The painter does not simply transfer a private mental image into a real object that the public can then perceive. Brushstrokes, impasto, canvas grain, and varnish are real, but they are not, in themselves, the aesthetic object. They form a material analogon through which a viewer can apprehend the image. The painting remains a material thing; the irreal object appears through it whenever the viewer adopts the imaging attitude. Thus the real support does not become the imagined object, and the imagined object is not made real by being represented on canvas.

This distinction also explains why sensory pleasure in a painting is not, by itself, aesthetic appreciation. A red seen in nature can give pleasure as a colour. In a painting, the red is apprehended as part of an irreal whole—for example, as the red of a rug beside a table—and its aesthetic force depends on that relation. The depicted rug’s woollen quality and the contrast between its red and a stiff, shiny green wall covering belong to the imagined scene through which the colours take on their sense. Even cubist forms, though they need not imitate familiar objects, can be apprehended as irreal things with density, matter, depth, and perspective. Their being grasped as beautiful depends on the irreal ensemble manifested through the canvas, not on treating the painting as a real object in the ordinary perceptual attitude.

Fiction and theatre make the same structure visible through other supports. A novelist or dramatist presents irreal objects through verbal analogons; an actor uses the body as an analogon for Hamlet. The actor need not believe, in the sense of positing as real, that he is Hamlet. Yet he can be wholly mobilized in producing the character: feelings, strength, gestures, and even real tears become analogons of Hamlet’s conduct and tears. The actor is not made into the real character; rather, his activity is apprehended within the irreal world of the role. In each case, the claim that the image posits its object as a nothingness explains how an object can be compellingly present through a real medium without being posited as a real thing in the world.

The discussion of music begins from a related distinction between a performance and the work apprehended through it. A performance of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony is a dated event, but listeners may seek the symphony itself across different performances and regard errors of tempo as obscuring or betraying it. Even when eyes are closed, or when the orchestra is in view but no longer attended to as the object of attention, the listener can experience the work rather than the current visual and temporal event. This example extends the analysis toward aesthetic objects that are not reducible to the material or dated circumstances through which they appear.