Reflective consciousness

Reflective consciousness is the second-order awareness that turns attention from an object to the way it is present to consciousness. Its decisive role in Jean-Paul Sartre’s account is both methodological and philosophical: it makes the image describable as an image, and it distinguishes immediate evidence about consciousness from explanatory theories about how images arise. Reflection is not an inner inspection of a little picture; it is a change in the direction of consciousness itself.

Definition and Method

When someone forms an image of Pierre, Pierre remains the object of the current consciousness. While that consciousness continues unchanged, the person can describe Pierre as he appears in the image, but cannot yet describe the image as an image. To do that, consciousness must perform another act: it turns away from the represented person and attends to how that person is being given. The resulting judgement that an image is present belongs to this reflective, second-order act.

This distinction establishes the method Sartre proposes for studying images. Rather than begin with hypotheses about the image’s nature, the investigator produces images, reflects on them, and describes their distinctive characteristics. The aim is to make explicit what reflection gives immediately, and to classify those features before moving to explanations. The image is therefore not treated as an object stored inside consciousness. Sartre identifies that spatial picture of the mind as the illusion of immanence: it mistakes the act of consciousness for a container and the image for a small imitation lodged within it.

Certainty and Psychological Explanation

Sartre assigns reflection a special evidential status. Drawing on a point associated with René Descartes, he argues that reflective awareness of having an image is certain: the person is not mistaken about the fact that the experience is an image. This certainty is not presented as an ineffable revelation. The image gives itself to reflection through characteristics that allow the judgement to be made.

That claim does not make every psychological account of images certain. Sartre separates the description of an image from inductive claims about its nature. The reflective description supplies the immediate data; hypotheses that explain those data remain probable, as scientific hypotheses do. In his view, disagreement among psychologists often results from leaving immediate knowledge implicit and substituting explanatory constructions for an explicit account of what reflection discloses. The first task is consequently descriptive: to fix that knowledge in concepts before deciding what theory might explain it.

Reflection, Knowledge, and Comprehension

The distinction between reflective and unreflective awareness also clarifies different forms of knowledge. Pure knowledge can grasp a rule or relation without intuitively presenting the thing concerned. For instance, a mountain may be understood as something with a direction that could be climbed, rather than encountered as a vivid, intuitive reality. Knowledge of the blue in a painting may likewise take it as the fourth primary colour. In such cases, sensible matter serves as support for relations rather than as a fully present object.

Experimental introspection complicates any simple opposition between empty knowledge and complete images. Reports describe states that contain no determinate representative detail yet are experienced as related to the sensible: an indeterminate opening, or two objects grasped as dissimilar despite lacking intuitive qualities that would distinguish them. Other reports describe a direction beyond the Mediterranean Sea or something long and pointed. Sartre treats these as degraded knowledge: they are not pure sign-consciousness, but neither are they fully developed intuitive images. Their significance is that knowledge can acquire an intimate orientation toward the sensible before a complete image is constituted.

Research on comprehension supplies a related distinction. Flach observed that representations could arise together with the act of understanding a difficult problem or proposition, bringing its comprehension with them. They could not simply be summoned at will: trying to produce one directly yielded an illustration rather than the schema associated with comprehension. Easy acts of understanding, or those completed by memory, did not produce schemas in the reported cases. Messer’s experiments further indicate that comprehension can occur through words, through an image, or without either; the same phrase may be understood with or without schemas on different occasions. The mode of comprehension therefore depends on the attitude of consciousness, not simply on the object being understood.

The Reflective Plane and the Image-Based Plane

On the reflective plane, thoughts appear as thoughts while they are formed. Reasoning can be grasped as a sequence governed by rules: premises provide procedures for reaching a conclusion, and formal logic studies the conditions under which thought agrees with itself. This reflective ideation is not accompanied by images. Images would be unnecessary to the explicit operation, and, if they appeared without functioning as consciousnesses of objects, they would lose their signification.

On the unreflective plane, by contrast, thought is directed toward things rather than toward itself. When pure knowledge is transformed into imaging knowledge, understanding a word becomes a way of making its corresponding object present. A symbolic schema can thus function not as an illustration or support added to thought, but as the object of thought as it appears to consciousness. The schema accompanying the word proletariat, for example, is described as a flat black area beneath a vaguely rolling sea; Sartre argues that this schema is not a sign standing for the proletariat but the proletariat itself as given in that act of thought.

This mode of thinking carries a particular risk. If the image is treated as fully adequate to the thought, its material shape can be mistaken for the very nature of the idea. Consciousness may then become enclosed in one schema and allow its spatial arrangements to constrain subsequent thought. Reflective awareness makes another relation possible: thought can be given as thought, transparent to itself, rather than captured in an image. Sartre describes the change between the unreflective and reflective planes as a radical shift of attitude, not a gradual ascent from one image to a final, naked thought. The reflective distinction thus marks both a method for investigating images and a boundary between two ways of comprehending.