Intentionality

Intentionality is the directedness of consciousness toward objects beyond itself, a principle that Jean-Paul Sartre uses to reorganize the study of mental imagery and perception. In The Imaginary, consciousness is not a receptacle filled with pictures: it is an act whose object and manner of apprehension must be distinguished. That distinction reaches from the ordinary chair encountered in a room to the imagined figure disclosed through a painting or performance.

Consciousness as directed activity

Jean-Paul Sartre takes as his starting point a phenomenological suspension of assumptions about the natural world and about the sensory matter of images. What remains is the principle associated with Edmund Husserl: consciousness is always consciousness of something. The claim is not a verbal tautology. It means that consciousness is not enclosed within itself; in perception, thought, and imagery, it is directed outward toward an object. Psychology should therefore examine different modes of intentionality in the situations where consciousness operates, rather than treating consciousness as a thing among things.

This approach also separates immediate description from causal or explanatory hypotheses. To establish what an image is like, the investigator produces an image and reflects on it. While imagining Pierre, consciousness is directed toward Pierre, not toward an inner object called an image. A second-order reflective act turns attention from the represented object to the way it is given and makes possible the judgment that an image is present. Sartre treats this reflective evidence as certain, while hypotheses about the image’s underlying nature remain probable. Phenomenological description is thus a first task, not a denial that later research may classify or explain the phenomenon.

The object and its mode of appearance

The example of the straw-bottomed chair clarifies why intentionality is not a relation between consciousness and a miniature copy. Whether the chair is perceived with the eyes open or imagined with the eyes closed, the object intended is the same particular chair, still outside consciousness, in the room before the desk. What changes is the way consciousness relates to it: in perception the chair is encountered; in imagining it is not. The imagined chair does not enter the mind as an imitation object. Imaging names a kind of conscious relation to the chair, not a second chair inside the mind.

The distinction also prevents the life of consciousness from being confused with the persistence of its object. An imaging act can arise, develop, and disappear even when the object it concerns remains unchanged. The object is reached directly, while the image as image becomes describable only when reflection takes the mode of its appearance as its subject. Intentionality therefore holds together two claims that might otherwise seem opposed: the object is not contained in consciousness, yet the way it is presented depends on the character of the conscious act.

Schematic figures and perceptual organization

Schematic drawings show how directed activity can alter the experienced meaning of a visible figure without changing its marks. A few lines and points may first organize as an abstract arrangement: the eye follows three segments as a fork, while a point and a wavy line remain separate. With a change of intention, the same marks can be read as a face. The oblique segment becomes a forehead contour, another a brow, a descending line a nose, the point an eye, and the wavy line a mouth and chin. The white paper itself changes its role: space to one side is apprehended as filled volume, while the other side recedes as empty ground.

This shift involves more than attaching a label to lines. Eye movements trace and organize the figure; the body supplies an attitude that helps animate it, including a movement that joins separated marks where no connecting line is drawn. Knowledge directs these reactions, but the resulting directions are intended as properties of the figure in an imagined form. In schematic imagining, the movements projected onto the lines, rather than the lines alone, serve as representative elements. The figure may crystallize as a man running, while the person imagining remains aware that its vector-like directions have been freely projected onto the marks.

Sartre contrasts this with perceptual illusions such as the Müller-Lyer figure. There, closed and open angles channel eye movements differently; the movements are attributed to the segments as a power of extension, and the lines appear to possess opposing tendencies. That organization remains perceptual: the figure acquires a perceived quality. A schematic image, by contrast, does not prescribe the eye’s movements in the same way. Knowledge prompts spontaneous movements, which are then intended as hypothetical directions and may help an image form. The contrast shows that similar marks can belong to different intentional organizations, and that a perceptual vector is not thereby an image.

Perception and what is not presently seen

Intentionality also explains why perception presents more than the immediately visible sensory detail without requiring images to be inserted into perception. If an irreal Pierre suddenly appears as an image, the real table before the observer vanishes from the scene; the two correlate with radically distinct consciousnesses. The image therefore cannot simply supply extra qualities to the perceived table while remaining the same kind of act. Work by Wolfgang Köhler, Wertheimer, and Koffka suggests one route to understanding stable or anomalous perceptual appearances through the persistence of formal structures as the observer’s position varies.

Perception’s further richness can instead be described through unformulated intentions that belong to the perceived object. An ashtray is apprehended as having an underside, resting on the table, and being made of white porcelain even when those aspects are not currently seen. Such knowledge may derive from memory or from pre-predicative inference, but it remains attached to the perceived object rather than being separately posited as another object. These implicit intentions enrich the perception of the ashtray; they are not imaging consciousnesses. Intentionality thus distinguishes the unseen aspects that perception anticipates from an image that consciousness posits as an object in its own right.

Art and the aesthetic object

The account extends from ordinary consciousness to aesthetic experience. A portrait’s real canvas, frame, and paint are not identical with the depicted Charles VIII. The aesthetic object appears when consciousness adopts an imaging attitude and apprehends the figure through the painted surface. In this sense, the work of art is an irreality: the painting remains a real material thing, but the object appreciated as beautiful is not one of its physical components. The painter does not transfer a private mental image into a real object; brushstrokes and pigments constitute a material image analogical medium through which a viewer can apprehend the depicted object.

This distinction applies even where a painting seems to abandon representation. In cubist work, the forms may not depict familiar objects, yet they can be apprehended as having density, depth, and relations of perspective. The canvas functions as a medium for an irreal ensemble, not simply as a real object contemplated in a realizing attitude. Sensual pleasure in a color is likewise distinct from aesthetic appreciation of that color within the imagined whole. A red can give sensory pleasure on its own, but in a painted rug its aesthetic significance depends on its place in the depicted object, including the tactile character suggested by the wool and its relation to the surrounding colors.

Fiction and drama use comparable means. Words serve as verbal analogical media for the novelist or poet, while an actor’s body, gestures, feelings, and even real tears serve as analogues for Hamlet and the character’s imagined conduct. The actor need not believe, in the sense of taking the character as a real person, to be fully mobilized in producing the role. The performance does not make Hamlet real in the actor; rather, the actor and the audience apprehend the bodily actions as belonging to the character’s irreal world.

Music offers a further test of the distinction. A listener who goes to hear Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony seeks the work itself, not merely the dated concert event or the orchestra’s sound as an isolated physical occurrence. A poor performance may seem to conceal or betray the symphony through errors of tempo, while a successful performance can recede as the listener apprehends the work. Intentionality explains this aesthetic directedness without collapsing the symphony into the notes’ physical production: the work is apprehended as a coherent object through an interpretation, not merely as the real event occurring in the auditorium.