Husserl

Husserl is a principal philosophical interlocutor in Jean-Paul Sartre’s phenomenological account of images and consciousness. His analysis of temporal experience supplies a precise description of how a moving object is apprehended as a continuous trajectory, while his account of images as fulfilling signification becomes a target for Sartre’s criticism. Across these discussions, Husserl’s importance lies not in biographical detail but in the methods and distinctions through which consciousness can be described without treating an image as a little object stored inside the mind.

Method and Reflective Description

Sartre’s account begins from the claim that when a person forms an image of Pierre, Pierre—not an image-object hidden inside consciousness—is the object of the present act of consciousness. While that act remains unaltered, its object can be described as it appears in imaging. To characterize the image as an image requires a further act: reflection turns attention away from Pierre and toward the manner in which Pierre is given. This second-order act makes the judgement that one has an image possible.

The distinction establishes the method Sartre adopts. Reflective awareness of having an image is treated as immediately certain, whereas psychological explanations of what images are remain hypotheses with only a degree of probability. Sartre invokes René Descartes in presenting reflective certainty as an established philosophical point, and argues that disagreement among psychologists arises partly because they leave this immediate knowledge implicit and substitute explanatory constructions for its description. The task, as he frames it, is first to make explicit the common features reflection discloses.

Husserl’s influence is visible in this commitment to disciplined description rather than premature causal explanation. Sartre proposes to produce images, reflect on them, and classify their distinctive characteristics before attempting to place image-consciousness within a broader family of consciousnesses or hypothesize about its inner nature. The method therefore separates two kinds of inquiry: what reflection can establish with certainty about an experience, and what scientific investigation may infer, less certainly, about its nature. Husserl functions here as more than a source of terminology; his phenomenological orientation helps define what counts as evidence.

Intentionality and the Image

A central premise of Sartre’s analysis is that consciousness is always consciousness of something. The image is not a container occupied by a miniature copy of its object; imaging consciousness is itself an act directed toward an object. This premise shapes the way Sartre uses Husserl’s work: phenomenological description must attend both to the act and to the object as that act presents it, rather than confusing the object with an item lodged within consciousness.

That distinction also informs Sartre’s treatment of knowledge. In discussing Karl Bühler’s categories, the book describes pure knowledge as consciousness of rules, relations, and arrangements. Such knowledge can be highly elaborate and can concern concrete relations between individual things, yet remain empty of sensible matter: an object may be known through a designation or relation without being intuitively present. A sign or group of signs can support this knowledge without turning it into an image.

Sartre then sets out a theory associated with Husserl: empty signification can be fulfilled by an image, which supplies an intuitive presentation. Thinking of a swallow may begin with a word and an empty signification; when an image appears, a new synthesis makes the signification full of the swallow. Sartre objects that this account risks treating the image as a supplement arriving to complete an otherwise separate act of knowledge. The image is already a consciousness, he insists, so its appearance cannot be described simply as an added intuitive component. He further asks whether knowledge is radically modified when it becomes part of imaging consciousness, rather than merely being fulfilled. The disagreement marks a limit in Sartre’s reception of Husserl: he draws on Husserl’s framework while refusing an account that, in his view, reinstates the very confusion between consciousness and an inner image that phenomenological description should overcome.

Retention, Protention, and Experienced Movement

Husserl’s most concrete contribution in these passages is his description of temporal intentions. Sartre illustrates the problem by tracing curves and geometrical figures in the air with the index finger of his right hand while watching it. The positions are distinct presents, but experience does not leave them as isolated contents and associate them only afterward. Synthetic acts connect the present position to what has just passed and what is about to occur. Husserl calls these orientations toward the immediate past retentions and those directed toward the future protentions.

A retention is not itself an image of the vanished phase. Sartre presents it as an empty intention directed toward what has just disappeared, allowing the current visual sensation to be experienced as an after of a particular quality. Protention is expectation: it makes the present sensation also appear as a before. The expected next sensation is less fully determined than the one retained, except when the movement has been defined in advance, but the expectation can still be precise—for instance, anticipation of the visual sensation produced as the index finger moves from a definite position. Together, retention and protention give the present impression its temporal sense.

These relations concern objects constituted from impressions, not merely the impressions considered one by one. In the example, what is intended is the trajectory of the finger: the path already traversed and, more vaguely, the path still to come. The completed portion may appear as a faint luminous trail, partly associated with the persistence of retinal impressions. The description shows why temporal synthesis matters to Sartre’s argument. The experienced movement is not a pile of successive sensations; it is a structured object whose continuity depends on intentions spanning past, present, and anticipated movement.

Bodily Movement and the Limits of Explanation

Sartre also distinguishes visual experience from the kinaesthetic sensations of skin, muscles, tendons, and joints that accompany the finger’s motion. With the eyes open, these bodily sensations are subordinate to the clearer visual impressions and support the temporal intentions only in the background. When the eyes are closed and the finger traces a figure of eight, Sartre does not find that kinaesthetic sensations become newly vivid. Instead, a form appears in the process of being made, resembling letters forming on an advertising screen. It is given at the fingertip but appears as a visual figure rather than as a kinaesthetic one.

This example belongs to a broader problem about images that may arise as the conscious translation of muscular attitudes. Sartre outlines a proposed sequence: an idea of a movement to be performed leads to a muscular attitude that objectifies the motor intention without itself becoming conscious as such, and an image then registers that reaction in a quality different from the bodily elements that occasioned it. He says that existing explanations, including the account offered by Dwelshauwers, do not adequately explain these phenomena. Husserl’s analysis of retentions and protentions helps describe the synthetic structure of the movement, but description does not by itself settle every question about the genesis of mental images.

The distinction between description and explanation remains decisive in the book’s wider phenomenological project. Its concluding question asks what consciousness must be if it is capable of imagining, and whether imagination is a contingent addition or a constitutive possibility of consciousness. Husserl’s method makes reflective description of such structures possible; Sartre’s account nevertheless keeps open the difference between what phenomenology can disclose about consciousness and what further metaphysical claims would require. Husserl thus appears both as a source of the analysis and as a thinker whose account Sartre tests, revises, and sometimes rejects.