Imaginary feelings

Imaginary feelings are not unreal feelings but real acts of consciousness whose objects are irreal. In Jean-Paul Sartre’s account, this difference changes the structure of feeling itself: an absent or imagined object can give emotion a focus, but cannot answer it, deepen it through new experience, or exert real causal influence. Imaginary feeling can therefore become intense and even physically overwhelming while remaining schematic, self-sustaining, and vulnerable to the arrival of the real.

From Inner State to Intentional Feeling

Sartre begins by rejecting the idea that feelings are inert contents sealed inside the subject, sometimes attached to representations by accidental association. That picture makes affectivity a purely subjective, ineffable shiver, perhaps reducible to awareness of bodily changes, and leaves the relation between a feeling and its object unexplained. Against it, Sartre applies the principle that all consciousness is consciousness of something: joy, anguish, melancholy, hatred, and love are intentional acts, directed toward objects rather than free-floating states.

The direction is affective, not simply intellectual. Hatred is directed toward someone as hateful; love is directed toward the loved person as attractive or charming. A feeling is not primarily a representation of itself. Reflective consciousness can take the feeling as its object, but the unreflective feeling is directed outward, apprehending its object through an affective sense. A person’s qualities are thereby disclosed along a new dimension: perception may remain intact while the world becomes impoverished if those affective meanings disappear, as in depersonalization.

This account also explains why bodily signs alone do not constitute an emotion. A person may tremble, blush, or clench their fists, but those reactions do not amount to hatred or indignation unless consciousness is directed toward someone as hateful or an action as unjust. Feeling is neither detached from the body nor reducible to physiological upheaval: its orientation toward an object gives bodily changes their affective significance.

The Feeling That Constitutes an Irreal Object

In imaging consciousness, feeling can help constitute the object rather than arise later as a reaction to it. Sartre places bodily phenomena—including nausea, vomiting, pupillary dilation, and ocular convergence—in this constituent layer. The body participates in forming the image: convergence does not merely follow an imagined object’s apparent closeness but helps mime that proximity. Likewise, disgust can be animated through bodily phenomena and appear in the Irreal object as its quality of being repugnant.

This constituting feeling must be distinguished from a more independent response directed toward an already formed irreal object. Some people, faced with an account of an accident or an image of misery, produce a simple affective schema: the scene appears dreadful, but the feeling is slight and exhausted in giving the image that character. In other cases, the feeling develops beyond its constituting role. Nausea and vomiting are then not effects caused by a repugnant irreal object; they follow the free, forceful development of the imaging feeling. The distinction prevents every bodily or emotional response associated with an image from being treated as one undifferentiated reaction.

Sartre describes this process as an affective dialectic. With a real object, feeling can discover further details through perception, while the object is itself imbued with affective qualities. Attention and perception keep enriching one another, so the feeling’s course remains open to what the object reveals. With an irreal object, feeling seeks to merge with and feed upon its correlate, but that object is empty: it reflects the feeling rather than supplying comparable new material. Disgust can swell toward nausea, yet its development is sustained by reacting to itself, not by discovering fresh repellent features in a real dish. Its intensity is possible, but it lacks the passivity and enrichment that give real feeling depth; sustaining it can be exhausting, and the resulting upheaval occurs because of nothing on the object’s side.

Tenderness, Distance, and the Limits of Causation

The difference becomes especially clear when someone tries to recover a past tenderness by imagining a gesture that once provoked it. The gesture can be reproduced with tenderness as one of its apparent qualities, and the person may foresee how the feeling is meant to develop. But the irreal object cannot cause that tenderness. The person must determine themself to feel it, making the attempted response an effort or performance rather than a passion nourished by its object.

Sartre compares this relation to dancers moving around a statue. Their gestures may express an approach, an offering, or a retreat, but the statue is not affected. Similarly, a person can make movements and experience distress before an imaged illness without those gestures turning the image into a real cause of suffering. Someone who imagines having cancer may cry, moan, or panic; the distress is real as an experience, but the imagined illness does not provoke it as an actual illness would. The person may expend energy trying to suffer more, yet the cries cannot fill the emptiness of an object that remains inactive.

This absence of causal influence does not mean that the feeling is insincere or merely play-acting. It means that it lacks the receptivity, docility, and unpredictable richness of passion. An imagined object cannot sustain feeling or communicate new force and suppleness to it. The feeling is enacted in tension toward something beyond its reach, while remaining cut off from the real object that might have nourished it.

Annie and the Transformation of Love

The absence of Annie shows how an emotion can keep its name while changing in kind. Knowledge of her qualities and ordinary conduct toward her may continue: correspondence can carry news, and her interests may still be defended. The absence can also bring genuine distress, melancholy, or despair. But these feelings respond chiefly to the real emptiness her absence leaves in life, including gestures and attitudes that now seem useless, rather than to an irreal Annie as though she were present.

The positive impulses of love change differently. Love toward a present person is continually informed and surprised by that person; it must adapt to an independent life that cannot be exhausted by what the lover already knows. The imagined Annie, by contrast, contains no such impenetrability. She is limited to what is known of her and can become increasingly compliant with desire. Attempts to make the remembered image more vivid do not restore the missing person’s independent presence; as the image becomes banal, the feeling attached to it grows impoverished and simplified.

When Annie returns, this formal construction is broken. After a period of readjustment, degraded feeling can give way to real feeling again. The simplicity of the imagined Annie may briefly seem appealing, but that impression depends on forgetting the affective impoverishment that accompanied it. The change is therefore not simply a matter of stronger or weaker love: presence and absence organize distinct relations between feeling and its object.

A Distinct Class of Feeling

Sartre calls these experiences Imaginary feelings because they arise in relation to irreal objects, not because the feelings themselves are unreal. They are degraded, poor, jerky, and schematic, and require non-being in order to persist. A person may mentally pursue an enemy and imagine causing harm, yet become powerless when the real enemy appears. The imagined target had been tailored to the feeling; the living person is new and unpredictable, and presence overwhelms the emotional construction. Likewise, planned actions in imagination have only the consequences assigned to them there: imagined blood need not flow, whereas the prospect of real blood can stop an action. The passage from imagining an act to performing it is thus a passage into a different universe, not merely the completion of a rehearsal.

The contrast does not depend on whether an imagined object is vivid or whether its associated feeling is intense. It depends on the object’s mode of existence and on the relation it can sustain. Real feeling is exposed to a present object that can surprise and enrich it; imaginary feeling turns toward an irreal correlate that cannot act back. Once reality appears, it can displace the feeling organized around the phantom, revealing that the affective construction was never a substitute for the independent person or thing.