Irreality

Irreality names the mode of being of an object constituted by imaging consciousness: the object is given to experience, yet not as a real thing present within the shared world. This distinction explains how a few drawn lines can become a face, why the aesthetic object is not identical with a painting’s canvas and pigments, and why hallucination cannot be reduced to simply mistaking an image for an ordinary perception. Across these cases, an image may be vividly present while remaining essentially irreal.

Definition and Modes of Appearance

Irreality is not a hidden quality belonging to a material object, nor does it mean that nothing is experienced. The irreal object is a correlate of consciousness, but it appears as absent from reality and has its own mode of spatial and temporal presence. In the analysis of hallucination, the distinction is set against perception: a perceived object makes an original claim to reality within the common world, whereas the imaged object is immediately given as irreal. Its space is its own rather than part of the single, infinite space shared by perceived objects. The object can thus be before consciousness without being a real item situated among the things of the world.

The distinction concerns an intentional attitude, not merely the physical material through which an object is encountered. A perceptual attitude and an imaging attitude may take the same material support differently, and the act that apprehends an object as an image is complete in its own right rather than a deficient attempt at perception. To apprehend the image is also to apprehend, non-thetically, consciousness as spontaneous: the object is given as something consciousness forms, not as a real thing imposed on it from outside. This connection between the irreal object and the spontaneity of consciousness is essential to the account.

Schematic Images and the Activity of Seeing

A schematic drawing shows how an image can emerge through interpretation rather than reside ready-made in its lines. At first, a few segments, a point, and a sinuous mark can be organized as an arrangement of lines on a white ground. A change of intention allows the same marks to be read as a face: one segment becomes the forehead, another an eyebrow, and a descending line the nose; the point is taken as an eye, while the sinuous mark suggests mouth and chin. The paper itself changes perceptual function. Space to one side of the lines contributes an indeterminate solid volume, while the other side recedes as empty ground.

The transformation involves more than assigning familiar names to marks. The viewer’s eyes follow determinate paths, and the body helps enact a connecting line that is not actually drawn. The movement from one mark to another supplies that absent connection and synthesizes separate groups into a figure. The drawing’s lines do not by themselves contain a fully represented face; movements projected onto them contribute the directions through which the image takes shape. If the figure crystallizes into a man running, the viewer still apprehends him as imaged and remains aware of having freely projected the movements that make the lines intelligible. The image is therefore neither a simple perception of the marks nor a real person concealed behind them.

This account distinguishes schematic imaging from perceptual illusions in which forms impose or habituate eye movements. In the Müller-Lyer figure, for example, the closed angles impede the eyes while open angles let movement continue; the opposed movements are attributed to the segments as a difference in their power of extension. The lines acquire a perceived force or direction, but that alone does not make them images. Schematic images instead depend on movements experienced as spontaneous and then projected as hypothetical directions. Knowledge guides the movement to test whether an image will emerge; the image, if it does, is constituted through that freely enacted interpretation.

Irreality and Hallucination

Hallucination sharpens the problem because a patient may experience an image as compelling without the theory being able simply to say that the image has been projected into external space. Externality is not the same as reality: an imaged object can already stand before consciousness in its own irreal space. Nor can consciousness itself be turned into an external object. The difficulty is to explain how someone can believe in the reality of an image that, by the account of imaging consciousness, is constituted as irreal.

The distinction is illustrated by a report from Marie B, who recalled claiming to be the Queen of Spain while knowing, at some level, that the claim was untrue. She compared the experience to playing with a doll while knowing it was not alive, yet wanting to be persuaded, and to an actor absorbed in a role without being convinced completely. Her account presents an imaginary world that is powerfully inhabited but not straightforwardly confused with ordinary reality. It therefore differs from the claim that every vivid image is a perception.

The analysis also treats hallucination as involving a change in the organization of consciousness, rather than a simple alteration of the image’s constitutive thesis. Patients with motor verbal hallucinations may know that they speak through their own mouths and that the voice does not change, while their global attitude shifts so that it seems that someone else is speaking. The account extends this distinction to auditory, visual, and psychic hallucinations: patients may not contemplate a fully formed object as an observer would, but instead find their attitude transformed and realize the hallucination. In some cases, expectation and attention to the anticipated phenomenon are part of this process.

In genuine hallucinations, this shift is connected to a more thorough disintegration of personal synthesis. Scattered and troubling thoughts, a decline in concentrated attention, and a dimming of perception accompany the formation of a partial, absurd psychic system. Such a system cannot become a stable theme for focused consciousness: it is experienced furtively, as words heard but not listened to or faces seen but not looked at. The unity of consciousness is not simply erased, but the personal organization that would make thoughts available for sustained observation and reflection is disturbed. On this account, the question is not whether the patient has merely mistaken an image for an object. It is how a disruption in personal synthesis affects the relation between imaging consciousness, spontaneity, and belief.

The Work of Art and Its Analogons

The principle that the work of art is an irreality becomes clear in the distinction between a painting’s material support and its aesthetic object. The canvas, frame, layers of paint, brushstrokes, and varnish are real. Charles VIII as depicted is not identical with these materials: he appears when consciousness takes an imaging attitude and constitutes the figure as an irreal object. Just as a drawing cannot be apprehended under two incompatible organizations at once, the painting’s material presence does not itself amount to the aesthetic appearance of its subject. The aesthetic object is what the image presents, not another real thing stored inside the canvas.

The painter does not first make a private mental image and then convert that image into a real object available to the public. The work’s material elements form an Analogon: a real support through which viewers can apprehend an image. Each stroke contributes to a real arrangement intended to manifest an irreal whole. The painting is thus a material thing that can be visited by the painted object whenever a spectator takes the imaging attitude; the irreal object is neither the paint itself nor a real object produced behind it.

This distinction also clarifies why the sensory pleasure of colour is not, by itself, aesthetic appreciation. A red can be enjoyed as a real sensation, but in a painting its aesthetic force belongs to the irreal whole in which it is apprehended. A red rug is not merely a patch of colour: its woollen character and tactile density matter to the depicted object, just as the stiffness and shine of a wall covering shape the contrast with it. Forms and colours acquire their aesthetic sense through the objects and relations that the image constitutes. Even cubist works that do not imitate familiar things can manifest irreal forms with density, matter, depth, and relations of perspective. Their departure from representation does not make them merely real objects to be perceived; the canvas continues to function as an Analogon for an irreal ensemble.

The same structure extends beyond painting. In fiction, poetry, and drama, words serve as analogons for irreal objects; an actor’s body and gestures serve as an analogon for Hamlet. The actor need not believe in the realizing sense that he literally is the character, yet can be wholly mobilized in producing the role. Even real tears are apprehended as Hamlet’s tears within the imaginary world. The relation is not that the character becomes real in the actor, but that the actor’s real conduct is irrealized through the character.

Music, Aesthetic Attention, and Return to Reality

Music makes the distinction especially visible because a performance is a dated, real event, while the work heard through it is not simply that event. A listener attending a performance of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony seeks the symphony itself, not merely the particular orchestra, conductor, or occasion. A later performance can present the same work, even if it is played better or worse. A performance that seems too fast, too slow, or in the wrong tempo may be experienced as concealing or betraying the work it should manifest.

In aesthetic attention, the auditorium, conductor, and orchestra can recede even when they remain in view. The listener apprehends the symphony through the real sounds but not as a dated occurrence confined to the hall or to a particular moment in history. Its internal succession runs from the first note of the allegro to the final note, yet the work is not simply an event unfolding in ordinary time. The performance is its Analogon, and the symphony appears through that real, temporally unfolding support while remaining outside the real. It is given as present to appreciation and, at the same time, as absent and out of reach: the listener cannot act on it, alter a note, or slow its movement.

That dependence on a real support does not mean the work itself is interrupted when a performance stops. If a conductor faints or a fire halts the concert, what ends is the performance, the dated event through which the work was being manifested. Aesthetic apprehension requires an imaging reduction: sounds are taken as analogons through which the work appears, rather than simply as real sounds occurring at the listener’s location. The work is not placed in a second, intelligible heaven; it is outside existence as a real object, while still appearing through the performance.

Aesthetic contemplation is consequently described as an induced dream, and the return to ordinary concerns as an awakening. The discomfort at the end of a play or symphony is not necessarily relief from its subject matter; even a realistic and cruel play may be followed by a disturbing return. What changes is the attitude: fascinated consciousness is released from the imaginary and regains contact with existence. Irreality thus does not mark a marginal realm reserved for fantasy. It names a mode of appearance that organizes schematic interpretation, the difficult experience of hallucination, and the aesthetic encounter with works that are present through real supports yet never reducible to them.