Binet

Binet appears in Sartre’s account not as a narrated personality but as a psychologist whose claims help expose a central problem in the theory of images: how can images contribute to reading and thought without being treated as hidden mental objects? Sartre invokes Binet’s latent images and the conclusion that images obstruct thought, then revises both ideas. What seems to lie dormant is instead imaging knowledge; what seems to impede thought is thought’s own wavering development.

Identity and Role in the Argument

The evidence identifies Binet through two claims attributed to him. In the discussion of reading, he is associated with the idea of latent images: readers may form more precise images than they realize, including an unrecognized sense of stage position and setting. Later, he is grouped with psychologists who took the image’s capacity to divert thought as evidence that the image obstructs thinking. These references place him at two points in the argument, first as a source for explaining what readers seem to supply unnoticed and then as an example of a mistaken diagnosis of the image’s relation to thought.

The text does not provide Binet’s biography, describe a personal encounter, or set out a complete account of his work. His significance here is therefore specific: his name marks positions Sartre considers worth addressing, but does not establish that Binet held every view discussed around those positions. In particular, the broad account of psychologists who treat images as inert traces arranged by thought is presented as a general tendency, not as a detailed statement of Binet’s individual theory.

Latent Images and the Experience of Reading

The problem arises because reading plainly involves more than decoding signs. A reader of a play may take sides, become indignant, or even cry; the reading experience presents a world with the complete, though irreal, existence associated with the theatre. Words in a novel are not merely intermediaries carrying pure meanings to consciousness. They provide the point of contact through which the reader encounters an imagined world.

The example of the stage setting makes Binet’s latent images especially concrete. A reader may have an unusually precise sense of positions and scenery without noticing that this spatial arrangement has been formed. Sartre suggests drawing a plan of the scene: doing so can make the reader conscious of an already felt setting, including an internal sense of resistance. The detail matters because the supposed image is not simply a picture deliberately summoned and inspected. It is an implicit organization of the imagined scene that reading can disclose.

Sartre nevertheless refuses to explain this by positing a latent consciousness. For him, an image is itself a consciousness; to speak of a consciousness that remains latent would therefore contradict the account’s basic terms. He allows that something performs the explanatory role assigned to latent images, but names it imaging knowledge. Binet’s proposal helps identify a real feature of reading, while Sartre’s alternative changes what that feature is: not an unconscious image waiting in the mind, but knowledge functioning through imaging consciousness.

Images, Thought, and the Risk of Diversion

The later discussion places Binet’s other association within a distinction between an image and the thinking that develops through it. Sartre describes a common psychological model in which thought selects and organizes images drawn from the unconscious, combining them as a chess player moves pieces into a desired arrangement. Under this model, the image is a material, inactive element, and its symbolic function is added from outside. Sartre rejects that separation: the image is symbolic in its very structure, rather than a neutral object later put to symbolic use.

An illustration image can arise when thought first approaches an abstract question through a concrete instance. The response is initially empirical and pre-logical, and it may remain divided among several insufficient ways of reaching a concept. Such an image can gather examples without clarifying what they demonstrate. Asked to characterize an artistic period in a museum, for instance, someone may look toward a nearby work; without the work in view, thought may try to make one present. At that early stage, it remains unclear whether the image is itself the concept, merely an example of it, or evidence from which the concept might be understood.

The image can thus support two different developments. Thought may move beyond the illustration toward a clearer comprehension, or it may lose its original task and drift into daydream. That possibility explains why Binet and other psychologists could regard the image as an obstacle: the movement away from the question is visible at the level of the image. Sartre’s counterargument assigns responsibility elsewhere. The image does not independently derail a stable thought; the thought is already uncertain and loses its balance through its own unresolved tendencies.

Sartre’s Reassessment of Binet

Across these references, Binet functions as a useful point of departure rather than a final authority. The notion of latent images draws attention to unrecognized spatial and imaginative organization in reading, but Sartre preserves that observation without accepting a hidden consciousness. The claim that images obstruct thought, meanwhile, mistakes a possible failure of thought for a defect inherent in the image.

The distinction also guards against treating an image as a passive mental container. Imaging consciousness presents thought through determinations apprehended on its object; the image is involved in how the thought takes shape, not merely a piece of material selected after the thinking is complete. Binet’s appearances therefore sharpen the argument’s larger reversal: what first seems to be a concealed image or an external impediment is reconsidered as a mode of conscious activity, or as a difficulty belonging to thought itself.