Irreal object

The Irreal object is the object as given in an act of imagination: not a small picture inside the mind, but the object itself presented as absent and irreally present. Its defining tension is that it appears before consciousness while remaining out of reach. This account distinguishes imagining from perceiving and explains why an imagined object can seem vivid without acquiring the practical existence of a real thing.

Definition and mode of appearance

An image-consciousness aims at its object, rather than at an inner image that could be inspected in place of it. The object is therefore transcendent to consciousness, yet its mode of appearance is irreality. To imagine Pierre is to intend Pierre himself, not a second, mental Pierre alongside the person who lives in Paris. The one Pierre is invoked, but he does not appear in the room where the imagining takes place: his absence is part of how he is given.

The imagined object is present in a distinctive, totalizing way. Unlike a perceived thing, which appears from a particular angle, it is not tied to one stable point of view. It may be presentified under several aspects at once, as in a child’s drawing that shows both eyes on a face turned in profile. Its outline of a viewpoint fades rather than fixing the object within a perceptual perspective. The result is quasi-sensible: an object intended as complete, but not available to the senses as a real thing.

Inaccessibility and dependence

The Irreal object cannot be touched or moved by ordinary action. Imagining an action upon it requires the imaginer to act irreally as well, as though using phantom hands. The object makes no demand, exerts no pressure, and initiates no action; it is passive, and its slight appearance of life comes from the spontaneity of consciousness. When attention turns away, the object is liable to vanish. Even the sequence of imagined events is produced by consciousness rather than by an independent causal activity of the objects themselves.

This dependence gives imagination a peculiar relation to desire. Imagining a friend can offer a momentary semblance of seeing that person, but it does not satisfy the desire, because the friend is not actually there. Instead, the image can sharpen what is wanted: a general wish to see Pierre may become a desire for a particular smile or appearance. The imagined object both limits and intensifies desire. It is constituted as a lack, like a white wall imagined in the absence of perception, rather than as a substitute that supplies what reality withholds.

Space, time, and the imagined world

The object’s spatial and temporal determinations share its irreality. Pierre can be intended as being in Rue d’Ulm, three hundred real kilometres from the imaginer, while his current appearance remains irreally present. In other cases, an imagined object has only incomplete or indeterminate location. The apparent space of an image is not simply the shared space in which perceived objects stand.

Irreal time likewise differs from perceptual duration. It does not flow like a piece of sugar dissolving; it can be extended or contracted at will without ceasing to be the same imagined time, and it is not irreversible. A centaur’s course or a naval battle may unfold through a before and after without belonging to the imaginer’s past, future, or present. Such objects have an internal succession, but no necessary temporal attachment to the real world. The account consequently denies that these objects form a world in the strict sense: they are not securely individuated and balanced in a common environment. They can be ambiguous, elusive, or bear contradictory qualities, rather than occupying determinate places among other stable objects.

Schematic figures and perception

The distinction between imagined and perceived objects also appears in the reading of schematic drawings. A few black lines may first organize as a fork against the white sheet. With a change in intention, they can instead be read as a face: one line as forehead, another as eyebrow, a descending line as nose, a point as eye, and a curved stroke as mouth and chin. The sheet’s white space is no longer homogeneous: one side functions as filled volume and the other as ground or void. Eye movements help enact the absent connections and give the figure a coherent form.

In perception, some forms impose movements on the eyes. In the Müller-Lyer illusion, closed angles interrupt movement while open angles seem to allow it to continue; those contrasting movements are attributed to the line segments as qualities of extension. A schematic image works differently. It does not itself provide a rule that compels the eye’s movement: knowledge guides the movement, and its spontaneous direction is projected onto the lines as an imagined property. If the figure crystallizes, a person may appear to run in the marks, while the viewer remains aware of having freely animated them. The image’s representative elements are thus not simply the lines, but the movements projected onto them. This contrast helps prevent the imagined object from being confused with a perceptual object whose qualities are organized in the shared world.

Hallucination and the limits of belief

The distinction matters for the analysis of hallucination. Patients may describe an image as though it were perceived, but this does not by itself prove that the image has been converted into an ordinary external object or that image-space and perceptual space have fused. Reports about where an hallucination occurred may be shaped after the episode, when the surrounding world has reappeared. The more general problem is how a person can believe in the reality of an object that, in the account’s analysis, is constituted as irreal.

The proposed explanation does not treat hallucination as a simple mistake about an image’s location. Imaging consciousness is accompanied by an awareness of its own spontaneity; the object’s irreality and the consciousness’s creative activity belong together. In some cases, patients know that their own mouths produce speech, yet experience a changed global attitude in which it seems that someone else is speaking. The account describes more thoroughgoing hallucination as involving a disturbance of personal synthesis: consciousness loses its organized, concentrated orientation, perception becomes obscure, and subject and object recede together. Hallucination therefore tests the distinction between perception and imagination without erasing it. The Irreal object remains central to that distinction precisely because its appearance, its absence, and the activity that sustains it cannot be reduced to one another.