Messer

Messer appears not as a narrated protagonist but as a researcher whose experimental material helps Jean-Paul Sartre describe how thought can lean toward imagery without becoming a fully formed image. His examples give concrete shape to Sartre’s account of intermediate mental states: a direction, a nascent visual possibility, or a schematic aid to understanding. They also support a distinction between different ways of comprehending that cannot be explained simply by the object being thought about.

Identity and Role

Messer’s place in the discussion is defined by his research and the reports associated with it. Jean-Paul Sartre refers to Messer’s experimental work when examining consciousness that is neither ordinary perception nor a complete mental picture. The evidence does not supply biographical details about Messer; it identifies him through the cases and experimental findings that Sartre brings into a philosophical argument.

That role is significant because Sartre is trying to describe image-consciousness from what reflection and psychological reports make available, rather than treating an image as a little copy stored inside the mind. Messer’s materials help mark the borderland between knowing something and picturing it. They show that a subject may be directed toward a sensible or spatial feature even when no clear visual representation is present.

Reports of Nascent Imagery

One report associated with Messer concerns the word mountain. It prompts a subject to have a wordless consciousness of a direction toward something determinate that could be climbed. Sartre stresses that this is not an intuitive mountain presented as a complete visual scene. The consciousness instead functions like a rule or orientation: it points toward an object as climbable, without supplying the object’s full sensible appearance.

Other experimental examples sharpen the distinction. In material discussed in connection with Messer’s work, the word atlas leads a subject to a visual representation of a place on a map, described more specifically as a direction beyond the Mediterranean Sea. At the word nail, another subject reports something visual or conceptual, long and pointed, with the capacity to give rise to a visual impression. The subjects can hesitate over whether to call such states images or thoughts. Their uncertainty matters: these are not simply complete pictures, but neither are they wholly detached, pure significations. They already announce an intimate relation to the sensible.

Sartre characterizes this intermediate condition as degraded knowledge. It remains knowledge, but its entry into the constitution of an image involves a modification rather than the mere addition of a finished picture to an unchanged thought. Messer’s examples thus help identify an early, incomplete phase of image-oriented consciousness: a germ of representation or a directed tendency that can precede a formed image.

Comprehension With and Without a Schema

Messer’s experimental results also help Sartre extend Flach’s account of schematic imagery. A schema can accompany the effort of understanding by presenting the result of that effort in spatial form, but comprehension does not invariably require one. Messer’s experiments include cases in which understanding proceeds through words, as well as direct comprehension without either words or images.

Sartre treats the latter cases cautiously. They can seem like comprehension that has stopped partway through, as though the subject has economized on completing its development. But he distinguishes what has been economized: subjects report economizing on words, not necessarily on an imaged phase. The evidence therefore supports two broad modes, pure comprehension and imaged comprehension; either may or may not make use of words. A schema is not simply an illustration attached to every act of thought.

The same phrase, Sartre observes, can be comprehended with a schema on one occasion and without assistance on another. The difference cannot therefore be assigned solely to the object under consideration. It must be sought in the structure of the consciousness that precedes the act of comprehension—in the position consciousness takes in relation to its object. Messer’s experimental material contributes to this shift from asking which objects produce images to asking under what conditions understanding takes an imaged form.

Significance in Sartre’s Argument

Across these examples, Messer’s contribution is evidentiary rather than biographical: his research supplies cases that resist a simple opposition between abstract thought and complete mental pictures. A climbable direction, a map-oriented sense of beyond the Mediterranean, and the long, pointed form associated with a nail each show thought approaching sensible representation without necessarily reaching a full image.

The comprehension findings extend the same point into the use of schemas. Understanding may be pure or imaged, and the available mode can vary even when the phrase remains the same. Messer’s place in the text is therefore to help make the transitions and distinctions visible: between signification and image-oriented knowledge, and between comprehension that uses a schema and comprehension that does not. Sartre uses those distinctions to argue for describing the activity and structure of consciousness rather than assuming that images are inner objects added to thought.