Imaging consciousness

Imaging consciousness is Jean-Paul Sartre’s name for a distinctive way of intending an object: consciousness aims at something as imaged, often something absent, through an analogical content, rather than perceiving a picture-like item inside the mind. Its significance is both methodological and philosophical. It can be described through reflection, differs fundamentally from perception, and constitutes a sui generis psychic function whose objects are irrealis rather than ordinary things in the world.

Method and Reflective Description

The account begins by distinguishing the object of an image from the image as image. When a person produces an image of Pierre, Pierre is the object of the current consciousness; while that consciousness remains directed toward him, it does not describe its own imaging character. To determine what makes the experience an image, consciousness must turn reflectively from the object to the manner in which it is given. This second-order act permits the judgment that an image is being had.

Sartre treats the data of such reflection as immediately certain. A person who reflectively recognizes an experience as imaging does not mistake it for perception, even though psychologists have proposed that an intense image may be indistinguishable from a weak perception. The disagreement, on this account, arises because psychologists often leave their immediate awareness implicit and substitute explanatory hypotheses for a description of what reflection discloses. Description and induction therefore have different standing: reflection supplies certainty, whereas hypotheses about the image’s nature remain probable. The proposed method is to produce images, reflect on them, and identify their distinctive characteristics before explaining them.

Analogical Content and the Image’s Presentation

Imaging consciousness is not itself a mental picture that can be seen alongside surrounding objects. It aims at a real thing through psychic content that functions as an analogical representative. A portrait, caricature, impersonation, or mark on a wall can serve as such a representative because each is an object for consciousness. A mental image likewise has content, but that content is not located in external space: one does not see it between a table and a carpet or on one side of the room. The represented thing may be external; its psychic analogon need not be.

This distinction also explains why an experiment comparing the loudness of a mental sound with an actual sound misconstrues its subject. Such a comparison would make sense only if the image were a faint perception. But the experience is given as an image, not as a sensory object whose volume can be placed beside the stimulus on the same scale. The content of imaging consciousness represents sensible qualities in its own way; it does not simply possess the externality and sensory properties of the thing represented. Transferring those properties to the psychic content produces what Sartre calls the illusion of immanence.

Schemas, Movement, and Perceptual Organization

The difference between perception and imaging can be traced in the way a schematic drawing is apprehended. A few lines may first appear as a fork against a white ground: the eye follows three segments meeting at a point, attaches a nearby isolated point to the figure, and leaves a sinuous line as a separate shape. The same marks can then be read as a face. The rising segment becomes a forehead, another a brow, a descending line a nose, the point an eye, and the sinuous mark a mouth and chin. The paper’s space changes with this organization: one side of the lines is apprehended as filled volume, the other as empty ground.

This transformation does not result from the lines alone. The eye moves along them, supplies a connection between separate groups of marks, and helps constitute a unified figure; bodily activity enacts what is not literally drawn. Knowledge directs these movements, which remain spontaneous rather than being imposed as fixed rules by the diagram. In schematic imaging, movement is projected onto the lines as a hypothetical direction. If an image crystallizes, the viewer sees a running man in the strokes while still apprehending the figure as something freely animated by the viewer’s own activity. The representative elements are thus not simply the lines, but the movements projected onto them.

The contrast with the Müller-Lyer illusion clarifies the point. There, the angles organize eye movements so that one segment seems to have greater power of extension than another. The movements are attributed to the perceived figure as a quality or force, and the lines become vectors within perception. In schematic imaging, by contrast, the figure does not prescribe the movement in the same way: knowledge guides the eye, and its spontaneous movement is objectified as an imaged direction. The distinction is not merely between two kinds of marks, but between perceptual and imaging attitudes toward them.

Irreality and the Limits of Perception

Imaging consciousness and perception are irreducible attitudes that exclude one another. While a person looks at a real table, the image of Pierre is not simultaneously formed as another object of the same perceptual field. If the irreal Pierre appears, the table leaves the scene as the correlate of the perceptual attitude gives way to the correlate of an imaging attitude. An image therefore cannot be added to perception as though it were a sensory ingredient that completes an otherwise incomplete object.

Perception nevertheless includes more than what is immediately seen. An ashtray is apprehended with an underside, a supporting relation to the table, and other aspects that are not currently visible. These are empty intentions that remain merged into the perceptual act and help give the perceived thing its fullness. They do not posit separate objects. To imagine the hidden pattern of a tapestry behind a cupboard, by contrast, those implicit intentions must be detached and made explicit as an autonomous object; this conversion into an image occurs only at the cost of perceptual consciousness.

The imaged object is not merely an unseen side of a real object. An unseen side is apprehended as existing but veiled; the image is given as absent. Imaging consciousness can intend Pierre as existing elsewhere, in Berlin or London, while presenting him here as absent. The image’s own space is distinct from the common space of perceived objects, and its object is immediately given as irreal rather than making the original claim to reality associated with perception. Imaging consciousness is also nonthetically aware of its spontaneity: its activity in forming the image accompanies, rather than becoming a separate perceived object within, the intention toward what is imaged.

Psychic Function and Aesthetic Objects

An image is not a reborn sensation or an accidental illustration attached to thought. It is an irreducible form of consciousness, and its movements, knowledge, and affectivity cannot be assembled into an image by simply adding them together. The image arises as a new psychic synthesis: consciousness becomes directed toward its object in a way that can produce a temporarily stable appearance, after which the form disintegrates and the appearance vanishes. Sartre consequently assigns imagination the standing of a major psychic function and recognizes a distinctive class of imaginary objects.

Imaging also gives thought an intuitive form when thought seeks to make an object appear before it or to possess it. This effort is not a separate faculty opposing thought; imaging is a species of thought. Yet the imagined object remains irreal, so the effort to encounter it as one encounters a real thing cannot succeed on the same terms. Love, desire, or observation directed toward an irreal object are consequently quasi-forms of those relations. The imaginary is not a decorative addition to psychic life but a particular way consciousness pursues an object and encounters its absence.

The theory extends to aesthetic experience. In a portrait, the real canvas, frame, paint, and brushwork are not identical with the depicted person apprehended as the aesthetic object. The image appears when consciousness adopts an imaging attitude toward the material analogon; the painted person is an irreality, not a real figure hidden behind the paint. The artist does not transfer a private mental image into a real object for the public. The material work enables viewers to constitute the image, which remains imaginary even when its analogon is external. Sensual pleasure in a pigment is not by itself aesthetic appreciation; a red is apprehended aesthetically through its place in an irreal whole, such as the represented color and texture of a rug.

The same structure applies beyond painting. A novel, poem, or drama presents irreal objects through verbal analogons. An actor uses feelings, strength, gestures, and even real tears as analogons for Hamlet’s conduct and feelings; this does not mean that the actor realizes himself as Hamlet. Rather, the actor is irrealized in the character, and the audience apprehends the tears as Hamlet’s. In music, too, the listener may attend to the Seventh Symphony rather than to the dated concert event or the orchestra performing it. Across these examples, the material or bodily vehicle remains real, while the aesthetic object it makes present belongs to imaging consciousness and is apprehended as irreal.