Illusion of immanence

The Illusion of immanence names a persistent mistake about mental images: treating consciousness as an interior space populated by small replicas of things, and then treating those replicas as the objects of thought. Jean-Paul Sartre argues that an image is not a picture hidden in the mind. It is a way consciousness is directed toward an object, which remains outside consciousness even when it is imagined. The mistake distorts psychology, obscures the difference between perception and imagining, and makes the imaginary appear to be a collection of inner things rather than a distinctive relation to objects.

Definition and Method

Sartre introduces the term for the assumption that consciousness contains images as a container holds objects. He traces the assumption to a habit of thinking spatially: because an image is called a picture, it is imagined as a likeness lodged within the mind, while the represented object is reached only indirectly. On this account, to have an image of Pierre is to possess a portrait of him in consciousness; Pierre himself is present only as what that inner portrait represents.

The method Sartre sets against this picture begins with reflection. When a person imagines Pierre, the first-order consciousness is directed at Pierre, not at a mental portrait. To describe the image as an image requires a second act that turns attention from the object to the way it is given. Sartre distinguishes this reflective description, which he treats as immediately certain, from explanatory hypotheses about the image’s nature, which remain probable. The Illusion of immanence flourishes when these levels are confused and hypotheses are mistaken for what reflection directly establishes.

Sartre associates the spatial model with David Hume’s account of ideas as faint images of impressions. If an idea is treated as a faint inner object, qualities attributed to the external thing are transferred to the idea itself. The object’s determinate qualities then seem to belong to its mental counterpart as well. Sartre’s objection is not that people cannot imagine a horse, tree, or house; it is that imagining these things does not require miniature versions of them to be installed in consciousness.

The Image and Its Object

The contrast between perceiving and imagining a chair makes the alternative precise. When the straw-bottomed chair is perceived, it is not inside perception; it is the object of a consciousness. Closing one’s eyes and imagining that same chair does not put a second chair inside the mind. The object remains the particular chair in the room, in front of the desk. Perception and imagining relate to it in different ways: in one case it is encountered, in the other it is not. The image is therefore a kind of consciousness, not an inner object that stands between consciousness and the chair.

For Sartre, the Illusion of immanence also encourages the belief that an image is first constructed as though it were perceived and only later marked off as imaginary. He rejects that sequence. The difference belongs to the imaging act itself, including the way it posits its object; it is not an adjustment imposed on an otherwise perceptual inner thing. An image can concern an absent object, an object taken as nonexistent, an object existing elsewhere, or an object whose existence is left unposited. These are different ways of intending an object, not different objects stored within consciousness.

This account also clarifies what a mental image’s support can and cannot explain. A portrait, caricature, impersonation, or mark on a wall can function as an object through which another object is intended. Sartre calls the representative’s role the transcendence of the representative: it is an object for consciousness, but its being an object does not make it the represented thing. In a mental image, the psychic content likewise functions as an analogical representative, while the externality and sensible qualities belong to the represented thing, not to an imagined miniature. When the imaging consciousness disappears, its psychic content leaves no describable residue; reflection cannot inspect it as if it were a surviving picture.

Mistakes in Thought and Experience

The Illusion of immanence makes the image-sign theory seem plausible. If the imagined horse is supposed to be a little horse in the mind, it seems to relate to the real horse only as a sign relates to what it signifies. Sartre argues instead that the verbal sign and the image have different functions. A word can direct thought toward an absent object while remaining empty; an image presents the object in a different, fuller yet still unreal way. The imagined horse is not a miniature that points outward to a horse elsewhere.

The example of the Panthéon shows how reflection can slide back into the error. The building is intended as a Greek temple, with columns, a pediment, and a grey appearance, and is given as existing elsewhere. Sartre describes the experience as a presence of the absent: the object is intended, but it is not actually before the person. Reason may resist that paradox and invent a smaller, present object that supposedly carries the building’s sensible qualities. The result is a mirage: the imagined object is treated as if it had real but non-externalized qualities that could be observed like those of a present thing. Yet the columns cannot be counted as they could be at the building itself; an object that seems available for inspection remains beyond such perceptual operations. Sartre uses this limit to expose the false assumption that an imagined object is simply a weaker object of perception.

The same confusion affects explanations of bodily reactions to images. Dilated pupils, accommodation of the eyes, salivation, and nausea may accompany imaging, but Sartre denies that an unreal object acts on the body as a real stimulus would. He locates the real source of such movements in the actual imaging consciousness and its constituent activity. If a strong reaction becomes the focus of attention, the imagined object may then be remembered as though it had caused the real response. Memory thus encourages a retrospective confusion between the unreal object and a real cause, renewing the Illusion of immanence in a different form.

Visual Organization and the Arts

Sartre’s account extends beyond private mental imagery to the reading of schematic drawings. A few lines on a page can first be seen as separate marks whose directions are organized by eye movements. Under a changed intention, those same marks may become a face: a segment reads as a forehead, another as an eyebrow, another as a nose, while a point and a sinuous line take on the roles of an eye and a mouth. The space around the marks changes its perceived function too, becoming an indeterminate solid region on one side and empty ground on the other. What is imaged is not a little face behind the lines, but a figure constituted through a changed activity of looking and interpreting.

Sartre contrasts this with perceptual forms that guide movement. In the Müller-Lyer illusion, the eye’s movements meet closed angles or continue along open ones; those movements are attributed to the lines as powers of extension, and the lines acquire apparent direction. In schematic imagining, by contrast, knowledge guides spontaneous eye movements rather than simply following a rule imposed by the perceived figure. Those movements are projected as hypothetical directions, and if the image crystallizes, the viewer sees a running man in the lines while remaining aware that the figure is being freely formed. The case reverses the container model: the image is not an object hidden within consciousness but an organization of consciousness directed through a visible support.

The distinction has particular force in art. Sartre calls the work of art an irreality: the canvas, frame, paint, and brushwork are real, but the aesthetic object that moves or appears graceful is not identical with those materials. The depicted Charles VIII appears when the viewer adopts an imaging attitude; looking at the canvas as a material object does not by itself disclose that aesthetic object. The painting does not transfer a private mental image into reality. It establishes a material support through which an unreal object can appear whenever a spectator takes up the appropriate attitude.

The same logic governs fiction, drama, and music. An actor’s real body, feelings, and gestures can serve as representatives of Hamlet without making the actor Hamlet in the realizing sense; the performance presents the character as an unreal object. Likewise, a listener may hear a performance of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony as the symphony itself rather than as a dated event in a particular auditorium. By distinguishing the work apprehended from its real material or performed occasion, Sartre shows why aesthetic experience cannot be explained as an inner copy or reduced to perception of the support. The Illusion of immanence hides this difference; overcoming it reveals imagining as a distinct, constitutive way consciousness encounters what is absent or unreal.