Imagining attitude

The imagining attitude is the mode of consciousness through which an object is apprehended as irreal, not as another real thing among the objects of perception. Jean-Paul Sartre treats it as more than a special way of looking at pictures or entering fiction: imagination is an essential condition of consciousness, and the attitude that sustains it helps make both the world and its possible surpassing intelligible. In aesthetic experience, this distinction means that a physical support can be present while the object that moves or delights the spectator remains absent from the real world.

Definition and Conditions

Jean-Paul Sartre frames the question of imagination as a question about consciousness itself: is the ability to imagine merely a contingent enrichment of consciousness, or must consciousness always be capable of it? He proposes to approach the problem by regressive analysis, asking what consciousness must be in order to imagine and comparing those conditions with what the cogito discloses about consciousness in general. The issue only arises clearly once the image is not treated as a real thing inside the mind. If images are assigned the same kind of existence as sensations or other worldly objects, their relation to other objects becomes the only apparent problem; the distinctive existential status of imagining disappears.

The conclusion is that imagining and realizing are inseparable possibilities of consciousness. The imaginary appears against the ground of the world, while apprehending the real as a world already involves a hidden surpassing toward the imaginary. An imaging consciousness holds the world as the nihilated ground of its object; consciousness directed toward the world, in turn, can call for an imaging consciousness to grasp a particular sense of the situation. Nothingness is not simply disclosed as a separate object: it is lived in the movement by which consciousness surpasses the world. Sartre therefore presents imagination not as an optional mental ornament but as an essential, transcendental condition of consciousness.

How the Attitude Organizes a Figure

The difference between perceptual and imagining attitudes can be seen in a sparse drawing. A few segments, a point, and a sinuous line may first organize as an arrangement of forms on a white sheet: eye movements follow the lines, and the sheet remains homogeneous ground. Under a changed intention, those same marks can be read as a face. A segment becomes the forehead, another an eyebrow, a descending line the nose, the point an eye, and the curved mark a mouth and chin. The paper itself changes significance: space on one side is apprehended as filled volume, while the other recedes as empty ground.

The marks do not by themselves contain a complete face. The imagining act depends on knowledge that gathers qualities not explicitly drawn, and on bodily participation: the viewer's eyes enact directions and help animate the figure. In this kind of schema, eye movements are not simply imposed by the form as rules of perception. They arise spontaneously as the viewer tests possible organizations, and their directions are projected onto the lines as imaged properties. The figure is an hypothesis until an image crystallizes; even when a running man appears, the viewer apprehends him as imaged and remains aware that the directions have been freely projected. The representative elements are thus not the black lines alone but the movements projected onto them.

This account also distinguishes imagining from a change that remains within perception. In the Müller-Lyer illusion, closed angles impede eye movement while open angles allow it to continue; the resulting difference is projected onto the segments as a potential power of extension. The segments acquire a perceived quality, and can function as signs, but this does not make them images. Schematic images, by contrast, do not supply rules of movement: knowledge directs the eye, and the movement is incorporated into a spontaneous synthesis that may give the figure an imaged direction. The contrast shows why a drawing's visible structure alone cannot explain whether it is perceived as a real arrangement or apprehended imaginatively.

The Artwork and Its Analogon

Sartre applies the distinction to aesthetic experience by calling the work of art an irreality. In the portrait of Charles VIII, the canvas, frame, and paint are real objects, but the depicted king as aesthetic object is not identical with that material support. He appears when consciousness makes a radical conversion into the imagining attitude; the canvas cannot give that object to a realizing consciousness. Apprehending the portrait as Charles VIII and apprehending its material surface are distinct intentional acts, not two aspects that can simply be held at once.

The artist does not transfer a private mental image into a real object that the public can then inspect. Brushstrokes, impasto, canvas grain, and varnish are real, but they are not, in themselves, what aesthetic appreciation addresses. The painter constructs a material analogon through which an irreal synthetic whole can appear whenever a spectator adopts the imagining attitude. Individual strokes serve that whole rather than standing only as isolated marks or components of a merely real construction. Even vivid colour does not become aesthetic simply through its sensory force: the red of Matisse's rug is grasped within an irreal ensemble, with the rug's woollen texture and its relation to the wall's green helping constitute its sense. Cubist painting likewise need not depict familiar things to function as an analogon; its forms can manifest unfamiliar irreal objects with density, matter, depth, and relations of perspective.

The same structure extends beyond painting. Fiction, poetry, and drama present irreal objects through verbal analogons. An actor playing Hamlet lends the whole body to the character as an analogon. The actor need not believe, in the sense of taking the character as a real identity, to be fully mobilized in producing him: feelings, strength, gestures, and even actual tears are apprehended as Hamlet's rather than as ordinary real conduct. Sartre describes this not as the character becoming real in the actor but as the actor being irrealized in the character. The actor's involvement and the character's irreality are therefore compatible.

Music, Absence, and Aesthetic Experience

Music makes the distinction especially clear because its object may seem to be nothing beyond the sounds being played. In listening to Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, the performance is a dated real event, but the symphony as apprehended is not confined to that event. A later performance by another orchestra can still be heard as the same work, better or worse. Listeners may close their eyes or look toward the orchestra without attending to the auditorium, conductor, and performers as their immediate objects; the succession of themes is grasped as the symphony rather than simply as sounds unfolding alongside other events in real time.

The work has an internal time, from its first note to its finale, but is not itself located in the dated time of a particular performance. The performance is its analogon: the work can appear through real sounds that unfold in time, but only when those sounds are apprehended imaginatively. A fire or a conductor fainting could stop the performance, not interrupt the symphony as an irreal object. The work is given as present yet out of reach: it cannot be acted upon, altered, or slowed. It is not, in Sartre's account, a second-world object stored in an intelligible heaven; it is outside real existence and manifests through dated analogons as a perpetual absence.

For this reason, aesthetic contemplation can resemble an induced dream. The transition back to ordinary concerns is not a passage between two worlds so much as a shift from the imagining attitude to the realizing attitude. When a play or symphony ends abruptly, the fascinated consciousness is released from the imaginary and returns to existence; the discomfort of that return can resemble the sleeper's awakening, even after a cruel or realistic performance. Sartre's account culminates in a strict division of aesthetic and moral value: beauty belongs to the imaginary, while the Good concerns conduct in the real world. The imagining attitude makes aesthetic appreciation possible precisely by allowing the real support to serve as a route to an object that is not itself a real thing.