Flach

Flach is a psychologist whose experiments on symbolic schemas give Jean-Paul Sartre a detailed account of images arising in the course of thought. His subjects reported concrete forms that appeared as they worked to understand difficult words and propositions, bringing a solution or conceptual structure into view. Flach’s research distinguishes these schemas from incidental illustrations, but Sartre both extends that distinction and disputes Flach’s account of how a schema conveys meaning: the image is not a device that teaches thought after the fact, but a form assumed by consciousness as it comprehends.

Research on symbolic schemas

Flach’s work, discussed as a study of symbolic schemas in the process of ideation, concerns representations that emerge during comprehension rather than images deliberately summoned for their own sake. In the account of his experiments, a subject trying to clarify a problem or grasp a proposition could experience a more or less vivid representation that arrived together with the solution or understanding. Merely remembering a proposition did not produce the same effect. Nor could the subject reliably bring a schema about by directing attention straight at it: that effort yielded what Flach calls illustrations of thought instead. The task had to remain focused on understanding.

The distinction also depends on the difficulty of the intellectual work. Flach reports that schemas did not appear when a problem was too easy or could be solved from memory. In those circumstances, subjects sometimes showed a verbal-motor response and sometimes produced a simple illustration. The schema therefore marks a particular mode of comprehension, not an automatic visual accompaniment to every thought. Its appearance belongs to the effort of understanding, while easier or remembered material may be handled without such an image.

Flach’s defining claim is that a schema has no independent meaning of its own; its significance is symbolic. A sketch of one could seem meaningless to an observer who had not followed the subject’s thought, because the image contains only those features needed to express that thought’s concrete structure. This makes the schema unlike a conventional picture whose subject can be identified from its visible likeness. Its apparent incompleteness is functional: the image is organized around the relations grasped in comprehension, not around a full depiction of an independently recognizable object.

Examples and the form of thought

The report on exchange gives a particularly explicit account of how an abstract relation can take spatial form. One subject experienced the thought as a ribbon whose movement formed a spiral: in exchange, one person gains what another loses. The curves’ inequality expressed the benefit and loss involved. The schema appeared at once, and Flach treats it as a spatial expression of a logical relation between concepts that share part of their extension or comprehension. Its lines do not simply decorate the idea; their movement makes the relation available in an intuitive form.

A report on compromise makes the image more bodily and less geometrically neat. The subject represented two men through two indeterminate bodies sliding sideways toward one another. Each had protuberances that pushed forward and disappeared into the other until only one body remained. The resulting body was somewhat larger than either original body, but smaller than the two combined. It was greenish grey, specifically a dirty greenish-grey, and the subject made the movement with their hands. Sartre later notes Flach’s account that this colour reflected the subject’s circumstances: she was repeatedly compelled to renew a compromise she experienced as immoral and humiliating. Sartre treats that interpretation cautiously, while using the report to show how an affective quality can be experienced as belonging to the schema itself.

Other examples reveal how varied the imagery could be while remaining attached to a particular act of thought. In a schema for Baudelaire, a subject saw a blue-green splash, likened to vitriol, on a completely dark background. It was about twice as long as it was broad and immediately expressed the poet’s characteristic morbidity and decadence. The subject felt that the image could not be transferred to Wilde or Huysmans. For proletariat, another subject experienced a flat black area above a vaguely rolling sea, whose heavy, dark waves suggested extension throughout the world and a latent dynamism. The examples range from an abstract exchange relation to a poet-specific colour and a broad social concept; their force depends on the thought they embody, not on a stable visual dictionary.

Flach’s theory and Sartre’s criticism

Flach’s account, as Sartre presents it, raises a difficult question about whether the schema precedes understanding or results from it. Flach reports subjects who say that the thought followed the image, or that they read the meaning from it. Taken literally, this makes the image seem to arrive first and the subject to decipher the idea within it. Sartre challenges that sequence. If the subject has not yet understood the concept, it is unclear how the subject could construct a schema containing the concept’s essential features; yet an uninformed observer cannot recover those features from a drawing alone. The account would therefore require an unconscious comprehension before conscious comprehension, followed by a second process that makes the meaning explicit. On that explanation, the schema does no necessary work.

Sartre’s alternative follows his broader claim that an image cannot supply knowledge absent from the consciousness that forms it. The schema does not aid comprehension as a sign, support, or example that is decoded after construction. Rather, comprehension can take an imaging form, and the image-object is its intentional correlate. The subject understands through the act that gives the thought an image, not by extracting a previously unknown proposition from the image. This reverses the apparent order in the reports without denying the subjects’ experience that image and understanding arrive together.

The proletariat example makes the dispute especially clear. Flach’s interpretation could treat the black area and rolling sea as a schematic representation of the idea, functioning as a sign from which the idea might be inventoried. Sartre rejects that reading: the image is not a sign standing in for the proletariat but, in that act of imaging, the proletariat itself as an object of thought. He calls the schema’s function presentifying. Its spatial and affective features give the object to consciousness rather than offering an external aid for analyzing it.

Scope and limits of the distinction

Flach separates schemas from illustrations, diagrams, synaesthesias, and certain hypnagogic or self-symbolizing phenomena. In his classification, those other images have only loose, external connections to thought, often through association, whereas a symbolic schema is a direct product of thought and expresses it exactly in the image. Sartre resists the sharp division implied by this scheme. If an image is itself a consciousness, he argues, it cannot be treated as a meaningless content caused from outside by another consciousness; its occurrence must have a role within its own intentional structure. Even images that do not present themselves as schemas may therefore have a function.

Sartre also finds the border between schema and illustration unstable. Flach’s own example of a subject characterizing Fichte’s philosophy as a worker striking a wall with a hammer is formally an illustration, yet Flach accepts that it can function as a schema. The case suggests that an image’s role cannot be fixed by appearance alone: the same kind of visible representation may participate directly in thought in one act and remain an illustration in another. Sartre accordingly treats schemas and illustrations as connected by transitional forms rather than as images with wholly separate functions.

Flach’s experiments thus provide Sartre with both a vocabulary and a set of concrete cases for examining imaged comprehension, while leaving central questions open. Sartre credits the reports with showing that difficult acts of understanding may take spatial and kinaesthetic form, sometimes colored by affect, but argues that the mechanism cannot be explained by making the image a separate object that thought later interprets. The schemas matter precisely because they are not detachable diagrams of thought: their significance depends on the act of consciousness in which a concept becomes present as an image.