The “irrealizing” function of consciousness

The “irrealizing” function of consciousness is Jean-Paul Sartre’s name for imagination’s distinctive way of intending an object: consciousness grasps it as imaged, not as a thing presently given in perception. The distinction is not between existing and nonexistent objects. A real person may be intended as an irreal image, while something that is never imaged is not irreal in Sartre’s sense. Imagination does not erase reality; it constitutes an object under a different mode of consciousness.

Meaning and method

The expression identifies imagination as a fundamental function of consciousness and connects it to the imaginary as its correlate. Sartre’s terminology distinguishes irreal from unreal: the latter can suggest things that might exist but do not, whereas an irreal object is an object as imaged. Thus Pierre may be real in the world and irreal when consciousness images him. The relevant difference lies in how the object is intended, not in whether it exists independently.

This distinction also motivates a deliberate choice of English vocabulary. The translator retains irreal and irreality rather than using unreal and unreality, both to preserve a connection with Husserl’s use of irreal and to avoid suggesting that imagination simply removes things from reality. Sartre’s verb irrealize names the constitution of an object as irreal; its contrast with realizing describes different ways consciousness takes an object, not a process by which a real item is made unreal. The translation likewise retains Analogon as a technical term: the material or psychic content involved in imagining is not necessarily a perfect counterpart of the object imagined.

Sartre’s account begins with reflection rather than an explanatory theory of mental images. When someone images Pierre, Pierre—not an inner picture treated as a separate object—is what the consciousness is directed toward. To describe the image as image requires a second-order reflective act that turns attention from the intended object to the way it is given. Sartre treats the reflective recognition of having an image as immediately certain. By contrast, psychological explanations of what images are remain hypotheses and therefore have only a degree of probability. The method is to produce images, reflect on them, and describe their distinctive characteristics before advancing causal explanations.

From perception to the image

The distinction becomes concrete in Sartre’s account of a schematic drawing. A few black lines can first be read simply as lines arranged on a white sheet. With a change in intention, the same marks can appear as a face: an oblique segment becomes a forehead, another a brow, a descending line a nose, a point an eye, and a sinuous mark a mouth and chin. The drawing’s white ground changes its role too. Space beside the apparent face can take on the character of solid volume, while the area on the other side recedes as a void or ground. The image is not supplied by the lines alone; the viewer’s way of organizing and animating them matters.

Eye movements help make that organization. To connect separated marks into one face, the viewer carries the gaze across a line that is not actually drawn, enacting a relation between the visible elements. In ordinary perception, certain forms can impose or habituate movements that are then attributed to the perceived object. Sartre’s example is the Müller-Lyer illusion: the arrangement of closed and open angles channels eye movement differently, and the lines come to appear to possess contrasting powers of extension. This remains a perceptual organization of the object, not an image merely because movement has shaped what is seen.

Schematic images work differently. The lines do not, in themselves, dictate the movements that interpret them; knowledge directs the viewer’s reactions, and those movements are experienced as spontaneous. They can then be projected onto the drawing as imaged directions. If the figure crystallizes, the viewer sees a running man, while still apprehending the image as something freely formed through the projected movements. The representational work belongs not simply to the marks on the paper but to the movements that consciousness makes meaningful through them. Sartre distinguishes this process from perceptual organization while allowing that one set of marks can be approached under either attitude.

The same difference helps explain why perception can disclose more than is immediately visible without becoming imagination. Sartre points to Gestalt research on the persistence of formal structures as a possible account of perceptual constancies across changes of position. He also invokes Husserl’s account of perception as an encounter with a spatiotemporal object whose constitution includes unformulated intentions: an ashtray is perceived as having an underside resting on a table, even when that underside is not seen. Such implicit intentions enrich perception but do not posit a separate image. Their contribution remains bound to the perceived object, unlike an imaging consciousness that intends an object as irreal.

Art and the irreal object

The distinction between a real carrier and an irreal object is central to Sartre’s account of aesthetic experience. In a portrait, the canvas, frame, and paint are real things, but the depicted Charles VIII is not simply another object concealed behind the painted surface. He appears when consciousness turns from realizing the material picture to imaging the figure it presents. The two apprehensions are exclusive in the relevant sense: just as a viewer cannot see an ambiguous drawing as five and six at once, the portrait’s material support and its aesthetic object are not grasped in the same act.

For this reason, Sartre rejects the idea that a painter first possesses a private mental image and then transfers it into reality on the canvas. The brushstrokes, paint, grain, and varnish are real; the object of aesthetic appreciation is not a newly realized thing available to ordinary perception. The painter constructs a material Analogon through which a spectator can take up the image. Each stroke contributes to an irreal whole, and the completed painting is a material object that an imaging attitude can animate with the depicted object. A beam of light illuminates the canvas, not the aesthetic object as though it were another physical thing on its surface.

This account also distinguishes sensory pleasure from aesthetic appreciation. A red pigment can produce a purely sensory enjoyment when encountered as a real color. In a painting, however, the red is apprehended as part of an irreal whole—for example, as the red of a rug near a table. Its tactile implications, including the woollen quality suggested by the painted rug, and its contrast with a stiff, shiny green wall contribute to the scene’s meaning. The color’s aesthetic force depends on its relations within the imaged world, not on the isolated sensation of red. Even cubist painting, though it need not imitate familiar objects, can present an irreal ensemble of things with density, matter, depth, and perspective. The canvas remains a real support; what is apprehended as beautiful is the world manifested through it.

Sartre extends the same account to fiction, poetry, and drama. A novelist or dramatist presents irreal objects through verbal Analogons, while an actor’s body serves as an Analogon for Hamlet. This explains how an actor can be wholly mobilized in a role without taking the realizing position that he is literally Hamlet. The actor’s feelings, strength, gestures, and even real tears can be apprehended as belonging to Hamlet in the irreal world of the performance. The transformation is not that Hamlet becomes real inside the actor, but that the actor is irrealized in the character.

Performance, music, and consciousness

Music tests the argument because a melody can seem to refer only to itself, just as a cathedral may seem simply to be a real mass of stone. Sartre considers an orchestra performing Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. Listeners may care about the conductor or the quality of the orchestra, but ordinarily those concerns are subordinate to the wish to hear the symphony itself. A poor performance can seem to conceal or betray the work through errors of tempo; a successful one lets the orchestra recede as the listener attends to the symphony.

The performance is a dated, real event: one example is the interpretation at the Châtelet auditorium on 17 November 1938. Yet hearing the same symphony later under Furtwängler and another orchestra is not, in Sartre’s account, encountering a different work merely because it is a different performance. The symphony is apprehended as a persisting whole rather than as that particular event unfolding at a particular time. Whether listeners close their eyes or look toward the orchestra, their attention can pass beyond the visible auditorium and the performers to the work they take themselves to hear. The example extends the theory beyond pictures: a real performance can serve as the medium through which an object is apprehended under an imaging attitude.

The account therefore makes imagination more than an occasional supplement to perception. The real world and the imaginary are linked through distinct but mutually implicated ways of intending: the world can provide the ground against which an irreal object appears, while the apprehension of the world can motivate a passage toward the imaginary. The “irrealizing” function names the activity that makes such a passage possible without confusing the imagined object with its material carrier or with a perceived thing. Its reach from a few lines on paper to portraits, acting, and symphonic performance shows how consciousness can encounter an object through what is physically present while apprehending that object as irreal.