Irrealization and irreal object

Irrealization and irreal object describe the distinctive act by which consciousness imagines: it intends an object as absent, nonexistent, or otherwise not posited as presently real. For Jean-Paul Sartre, imagination is not perception with a mental picture added, nor a device for treating real things as unreal. It is a fundamental function of consciousness, with the imaginary as its correlate. The imagined object can be a real person considered in their absence, a fictional being, or an object disclosed through a painting; what makes it irreal is the way it is intended, not whether a corresponding real thing exists.

Terminology and scope

Jean-Paul Sartre’s use of irreal and irreality preserves a distinction that the more familiar English terms unreal and unreality can obscure. An irreal object is an object as imaged by consciousness, and the object may also exist in reality: an imagined Pierre can be the real Pierre, intended in his absence. Conversely, something that does not exist but is never imagined is not thereby an irreal object. The term identifies a mode of appearing, not simply a class of nonexistent things.

The related verb irrealize names imagination’s function. Calling imagination an unrealizing function might suggest that it removes things from reality or makes the real seem unreal. The point is instead that consciousness constitutes an object as irreal when it imagines it, just as perception constitutes an object as real. The contrast concerns different ways of intending an object, rather than a change imposed on an object that was first given as perceptually real.

This distinction shapes the account’s scope. Images do not form a separate population of objects alongside the real world: the same objects can function as present realities or as images according to the attitude of consciousness. The imaginary and the real differ through the grouping and interpretation of objects, not through a division into two self-contained inventories. Imagination is consequently presented as a basic function of consciousness rather than an incidental accompaniment to perception.

Positional acts and absence

Perception posits its object as existing, but imaging consciousness has its own constitutive positional act. Sartre distinguishes four forms: consciousness can posit an object as nonexistent, posit it as absent, posit it as existing elsewhere, or neutralize the act so that the object is not posited as existent. These positions are not added after an image has been formed; they help constitute the imaging act from the outset. Treating the image as if it were first built as a real object and only later demoted to an image would miss this difference.

The contrast becomes clear in the example of Pierre. To have an image of Pierre is not simply to perceive a portrait or to entertain a non-intuitive concept. The intention gathers past appearances into an identity and aims at Pierre as a body: someone who could be seen, touched, or heard. Yet in the image he is not present to those senses. He is given as intuitive but absent. The image thus retains an intuitive object while positing the object’s absence, and in that very act its object is not given as presently existing.

The image’s force does not cancel this absence. Consciousness may react to an image as though its object were before it, but such conduct cannot make the immediate awareness of the object’s nothingness disappear. This is why the irreal object is not merely a weak or incomplete perception: it is intended through a different positional act. In Sartre’s account, the object asserts itself as the target of the image while being given precisely as absent or nonexistent.

Analogical media and schematic images

An image may aim at an absent or nonexistent object through a physical or psychic content that serves as its analogical representative. The content is not the object of the intention: it is what consciousness uses to intend that object. A photograph, illustration, caricature, or actor’s imitation can supply physical matter; awareness of movements or feelings can supply psychic matter. Some cases combine external and psychic elements, as when a face appears in a flame or in the patterns of a tapestry, or in a hypnagogic image formed from entoptic lights.

A schematic drawing shows how an image can emerge through an active change in interpretation. A few marks may first be seen as separate lines, points, and shapes. Read instead as a face, the same marks acquire the roles of forehead, eyebrow, nose, eye, mouth, and chin. The sheet’s blank space changes function too: one region contributes to the imagined volume while another recedes as ground. Eye movements help organize the lines, and the body supplies the movement needed to connect separated marks. The imagined figure is not simply contained in the marks as a ready-made picture; it takes shape through the intentional activity directed through them.

This case also distinguishes schematic imagining from perceptual organization. In the Müller-Lyer illusion, the structure of a figure can direct eye movements that are then attributed to the perceived lines as qualities such as extension or force. With a schematic image, by contrast, knowledge directs movements that are experienced as spontaneous and projected onto the drawing as imagined directions. The lines provide the medium, but the movements projected through them do the representative work. A figure may crystallize as a recognizable image, yet it remains an image whose formation depends on that activity rather than a new perceptual object.

Irreality in art

The distinction between a material support and an irreal object becomes central to the account of aesthetic experience. A painted portrait of Charles VIII consists materially of canvas, frame, and layers of paint; the aesthetic object, Charles VIII as depicted, is not identical with that physical construction. It appears when consciousness takes an imaging attitude toward the painting. The canvas is real, but the depicted figure apprehended through it is irreal. Accordingly, Jean-Paul Sartre rejects the idea that an artist first possesses a private mental image and then converts that image into a real public object. The painter constructs a material analogon through which viewers can apprehend an image; the imaginary object is not thereby realized as a perceptual thing.

The distinction also clarifies why sensory pleasure from a real colour is not, by itself, aesthetic appreciation. A red considered as a colour in nature can please the senses, but a painted red is grasped as part of an irreal whole. In the example of Henri Matisse, the red of a rug takes its aesthetic sense within the depicted setting, including the rug’s implied material and its relation to the wall. The colour’s role in that imaginary arrangement, rather than its isolated physical presence on the canvas, is what matters to aesthetic apprehension.

Cubist painting does not escape irreality by ceasing to depict familiar objects. Its forms may present unfamiliar things with density, matter, depth, and relations of perspective; as contemplated, they are still irreal objects manifested through a real canvas. The painting serves as an analogon even when what it discloses is an ensemble of objects with no counterpart in the familiar world. Aesthetic enjoyment is real as an experience, but in this account it is directed through the canvas toward the irreal object, rather than taken simply as pleasure in the canvas’s material colours.

The same structure extends beyond painting. A novelist, poet, or dramatist presents irreal objects through verbal analogons, while an actor uses the body as an analogon for Hamlet. The actor need not posit himself as Hamlet in the realizing sense to be wholly mobilized in producing the character. Real gestures and tears can function as analogons of the character’s conduct and feelings; the actor’s performance does not make Hamlet a real person present onstage. Jean-Paul Sartre’s distinction thus connects the ordinary image, the schematic drawing, and the work of art: each makes an object available through a medium while preserving the difference between the real support and the irreal object intended through it.