Four positional acts of imaging consciousness

Four positional acts of imaging consciousness are the distinct ways consciousness can take an object in an image: it can posit the object as nonexistent, as absent, as existing elsewhere, or suspend the thesis of its existence. Their importance is fundamental: for Jean-Paul Sartre, the image is not first perceived as a real thing and then mentally demoted. Its way of positing its object is part of what makes imaging consciousness different from perception in the first place.

Definition and structure

Every consciousness posits an object, but not every consciousness does so in the same way. Perception posits its object as existing. Imaging consciousness also includes a positional act, but it has four possible forms: the object may be posited as nonexistent, as absent, or as existing elsewhere; alternatively, the act may be neutralized and make no affirmation that the object exists. These are not four additional judgments applied to an already formed image. They constitute the image-consciousness itself.

The four forms are not equivalent. Positing an object as nonexistent and positing it as absent are both negations. Positing it as existing elsewhere is affirmative in one respect, but implicitly denies that it exists here, in the natural and present way perception would give it. Neutralization is different again: it suspends the thesis rather than asserting either existence or nonexistence. Together, the acts explain how an image can refer to an object while withholding the ordinary perceptual claim that the object is present.

Absence, intuition, and the object

The account depends on a distinction between imaging and both perception and conceptual knowledge. Perception presents an existing object; concepts and knowledge concern natures and relations, and need not affirm the concrete, sensory existence of an individual. A concept of Pierre, for example, can include determinations such as his being on a trip to Berlin. Such relations add positive content to the concept; they do not have the privative force of an image that gives Pierre as absent. Words such as absent or far away acquire that force against sensory intuition: they concern an object that could be encountered, but is not available in the present situation.

An image of Pierre is therefore not simply a non-intuitive thought. It aims at Pierre as a body that could be seen, touched, or heard, with a particular aspect and position in relation to the person imagining him. Yet the image gives that intuitive object as absent: Pierre is precisely not being touched or seen now. Sartre describes this as an intuition of an absent object. The image asserts its object in a way that simultaneously withdraws its present being; even a vivid image cannot, by its vividness alone, make the absent object perceptually present.

This also distinguishes an image from uncertainty about something actually perceived. Someone seeing a man approach may doubt whether the man is Pierre. That doubt suspends identification, but still posits an existing man approaching. By contrast, having an image of Pierre is not merely failing to see Pierre while continuing to perceive something else as its substitute. The intentional object of imaging is given as not there, nonexistent, or not posited as existent. The difference lies in the act’s basic orientation, not simply in how much the viewer knows about the object.

Schematic images and directed movement

The positional distinction also informs Sartre’s account of schematic drawings. A set of black lines can first be taken as lines on a white sheet, organized according to perceptual form. Three segments meeting at a point, a separate point below and to the right, and a curved line may appear as unrelated figures. Under a changed intention, the same marks can be read as a face: the segments become a forehead, eyebrow, and nose; the isolated point becomes an eye; and the curved line suggests the mouth and chin.

That change is not produced by the marks alone. The viewer’s eyes move along the lines, the surrounding white space is reorganized as solid volume on one side and empty ground on the other, and the body helps enact a connecting line that is not actually drawn. Knowledge directs these movements, allowing separate marks to be synthesized into a figure. If the image crystallizes, the viewer sees a man in the lines while remaining aware that the figure has been freely projected there. The drawing’s representative content is thus not simply its physical strokes: it also depends on movements imagined as directions and on the consciousness that sustains the figure as an image.

Perception as a contrast

Not every organized or directed figure is an image. The Müller-Lyer illusion shows how eye movements can alter perception without making the lines into an imaged object. Closed angles impede the eye’s movement, while open angles allow it to continue; the resulting movements are attributed to the segments, which appear to differ in their power of extension. The lines are perceived as vectors with a potential movement. This remains a perceptual transformation: the object acquires a perceived quality rather than becoming an image.

Schematic images work differently. They do not impose a rule for eye movement in the same way. Knowledge prompts exploratory movements, and these movements are projected onto the lines as hypothetical directions. The viewer tests whether a figure will emerge, and may come to see a running man in the marks. The movement remains recognizable as spontaneous and projected, so its direction is apprehended as imaged rather than as an actual property of the perceived lines. The comparison clarifies why eye movement alone does not define imaging: what matters is how consciousness takes the movement and the object it helps constitute.

Consequences for aesthetic objects

The distinction extends to art, where the work’s physical support must be separated from the aesthetic object apprehended through it. A canvas, its paint, and its frame are real; the depicted object that moves or appears beautiful is not simply another real thing located on the canvas. It appears when consciousness adopts an imaging attitude. The canvas serves as a material analogon through which an irreal object is constituted, not as a real object into which an earlier mental image has been converted.

The same analysis applies beyond painting. Fictional characters are presented through verbal analogons, and an actor’s body can serve as the analogon for a character. An actor may use real gestures and even shed real tears, yet those actions are apprehended as belonging to an irreal character rather than as evidence that the actor has become that character in reality. In each case, aesthetic apprehension depends on a consciousness that does not take its object in the ordinary realizing manner. This application reinforces the central point of the four positional acts: imaging is distinguished not by a special kind of physical object, but by the way consciousness posits what it intends.