Jean-Paul Sartre–David Hume intellectual relationship

Jean-Paul Sartre’s engagement with David Hume is a sustained criticism of treating an image as a dim object housed inside the mind. Hume supplies Sartre with a particularly clear formulation of that model: ideas are faint counterparts of forceful impressions, and an idea is assumed to possess the determinate qualities of the thing it represents. Sartre argues that this account confuses the object of consciousness with a supposed object inside consciousness. Against it, he describes the image as an active way of intending an object, not a little copy that consciousness contains.

Hume’s account and the Illusion of immanence

Sartre presents Hume’s distinction between impressions and ideas as a central expression of the Illusion of immanence. In Hume’s account, ideas are faint images of impressions in thought and reasoning. Sartre emphasizes the further implication: if forming an idea of an object is simply forming an idea, then the object’s reference is treated as external to the idea, while the idea itself must still carry determinate quantity and quality. An idea of a chair, on this view, is effectively a chair in consciousness, with its own specifications.

Sartre makes the hidden assumption concrete by distinguishing the chair imagined from the chair previously perceived. The current idea does not contain the straw-and-wood chair encountered in the external world, nor does that remembered chair internally supply the difference between an idea of a chair and an idea of a table or inkwell. Yet the conventional model treats the image as though it were a portrait presently occupying consciousness, with the actual person reached only indirectly as what the portrait represents. Sartre’s objection is structural: a material image inserted into consciousness would be opaque and separate from it, interrupting consciousness’s unity rather than explaining how consciousness intends its object.

The force of Hume’s example for Sartre is therefore not merely that it gives an unsatisfactory psychological description. It shows how an image can be mistaken for an inner thing when spatial habits are carried over into an account of consciousness. Sartre groups this assumption with a broad psychological and philosophical tendency, and with common sense, but singles out Hume’s formulation because it makes the supposed identity between idea and object-as-idea especially explicit.

Sartre’s method of criticism

Sartre approaches the issue by separating reflective description from explanatory hypothesis. When someone produces an image of Pierre, Pierre, rather than an inner portrait, is the object of that current consciousness. While the consciousness remains directed toward him, it can describe Pierre as he appears in the image; to describe the image as an image requires a further, reflective act that turns attention toward the way the object is given. Sartre holds that this reflection provides certain data, whereas theories about the image’s underlying nature remain probable hypotheses.

This distinction determines how he uses Hume. Rather than beginning by accepting an explanatory theory and asking how images are manufactured, Sartre asks what reflection discloses about imaging. He argues that psychologists often leave this immediate knowledge implicit and substitute hypotheses for a description of the image’s distinctive characteristics. Hume’s account is thus examined not as a neutral classification but as an explanation that exceeds what reflective evidence warrants. Sartre’s method also sharpens the disagreement: what Hume treats as an idea bearing the object’s qualities is, for Sartre, an act of consciousness whose object is intended in a particular manner.

From inner copy to intentional act

Sartre’s alternative turns on the difference between having an image and having a thing inside consciousness. Imaging consciousness aims at an object while remaining a unified, temporal form of consciousness. It does not contain an imitation of the object as one item among sensations, feelings, or thoughts. Its object is given as imaged, and the image’s characteristics become describable through reflection on this mode of giving.

This account also explains why the image need not be fully determinate. Sartre rejects the claim, associated with Hume and George Berkeley, that general or indeterminate images are impossible. A vaguely perceived hare is still a determinate hare in perception; a vaguely imaged hare, by contrast, can be indeterminate because the object is intended through imaging consciousness. Sartre supports this distinction with reports of a vague wing-like appearance and a face that could not be identified as male or female. In another report, the image was approximate and typical rather than an individual face. These cases challenge the demand that every image reproduce the precise qualities expected of a perceived object.

Sartre calls the resulting structure Quasi-observation: the image presents its object without offering the open-ended inspection available in perception. Its indeterminacy is not evidence of an incomplete copy concealed in the mind. It belongs to the way the object is imaged. In this respect, Sartre’s critique of Hume reaches beyond the contrast between strong impressions and faint ideas: it disputes the premise that the image must inherit perception’s determinate object-like form at all.

Signs, drawings, and the broader alternative

Sartre further argues that Hume’s account makes the relation between image and object extrinsic, thereby treating the image like a sign. A printed word such as Office directs attention toward a place or institution not present in the inscription. Its black lines are matter for a signifying act, and their connection to what they signify depends on convention and habit. Sartre distinguishes this from an image, even though both involve matter transformed by an intention and an absent object toward which consciousness is directed. The distinction exposes a consequence of Hume’s formulation: if the image’s reference is merely external to it, the account risks reducing imaging to signification.

Sartre’s analysis of schematic drawings shows what his positive account adds. A few lines can first appear as an arrangement of segments and points; a change of intention, accompanied by directed eye movements and bodily activity, can reorganize them as a face. The lines do not themselves contain a miniature face. Rather, movements are projected onto them as imaged directions, allowing a figure to crystallize while the observer remains aware of actively forming it. Sartre contrasts this with perceptual illusions, where a figure can impose movements and make them seem like qualities of the perceived object. The comparison makes the activity of imaging explicit and gives it a role that the inner-copy model obscures.

The same distinction underlies Sartre’s account of aesthetic objects. A painting’s canvas, frame, and real layers of pigment are perceptible material; the depicted person apprehended through them is an irreal object constituted by imaging consciousness. The painting does not turn a private mental image into a real object. Its material serves as an Analogon through which viewers can apprehend an image. Sartre’s treatment of art is not a separate direct argument against Hume, but it displays the reach of the alternative developed against the idea of an image as a faint inner thing: consciousness can use material supports to intend an object without confusing that object with the support or placing it inside the mind.