The irreal

The irreal is an object as it appears to an imaging consciousness: it is manifested through a real support, but is not itself a real object in the world. Jean-Paul Sartre uses the distinction to explain how images, artworks, and musical works can be present to experience without becoming perceptible things. The canvas, sound, or lines are real; the object apprehended through them is irreally constituted, and aesthetic attention depends on maintaining that difference.

Definition and distinction from perception

The irreal is not simply a hidden property of a material thing. Sartre distinguishes the real support from the object that imaging consciousness apprehends through it. In a painting, the canvas, frame, pigment, and brushwork are real, while the depicted figure as an aesthetic object is irreality: it appears when consciousness converts from attending to the material object to imaging. The change is not a passage by which a mental image is made real. Rather, the material support serves as an analogon through which the irreal object can appear.

This account also separates imaging from ordinary perception. A real object can be perceived from changing positions, and its formal structure may persist through those variations; the work of Köhler, Wertheimer, and Koffka offers a possible way to investigate such perceptual constants. But an image cannot simply be inserted into perception as an extra sensory contribution. The irreal Pierre and the real table before the observer belong to radically distinct consciousnesses: when the imaged Pierre appears, the table leaves the scene. The image therefore does not complete perception by adding imagined qualities to a perceived thing.

Schematic figures and the role of movement

A schematic drawing shows how an irreal figure can emerge from marks that, considered perceptually, do not yet depict it. Three segments meeting at point O, another point below and to the right, and a sinuous line can first be organized as lines on a homogeneous white ground. Eye movements trace the segments and group them into forms, while the separate point and curve remain distinct. In this attitude, the drawing is perceived as an arrangement of lines rather than as a face.

A change of intention makes the same marks readable as a face: one segment becomes the forehead’s contour, another an eyebrow, the descending segment a nose, the isolated point an eye, and the sinuous line a mouth and chin. The shift is not supplied by line-shape alone. The observer’s bodily attitude and eye movements help animate and synthesize the marks. The paper to the right of the lines is taken as filled volume, while the paper to the left recedes as ground; the eye follows the nose from top to bottom and carries movement from N to D to enact a joining line that is absent from the drawing. The resulting face is thus not simply a set of features already present in the marks: it is formed through an intentional activity directed by knowledge.

Sartre contrasts this activity with perceptual figures that impose movements. In the Müller-Lyer illusion, the closed angles A' and B' impede the eye, while the open angles A and B permit it to continue. The opposed movements are projected onto the segments, which remain perceived as immobile but acquire a potential power of extension; AB consequently appears longer than A'B'. The object stays within perception, and movement is given as a quality or force of the perceived figure. Schematic images work differently: they do not supply rules for eye movements. Knowledge directs spontaneous movements as a hypothesis about what the lines might form. If the image crystallizes, the observer sees, for example, a running man while still apprehending the projected directions as freely produced. The representative elements are therefore not the lines alone, but the movements projected onto them as imaged properties.

Art and the material analogon

Sartre states that the work of art is an irreality. The portrait of Charles VIII makes the distinction concrete: the painted canvas and its frame are not the same object as Charles VIII apprehended through them. The aesthetic object cannot be given to a realizing consciousness attending only to the material painting; it appears when consciousness adopts an imaging attitude and thereby nihilates the world. As with an ambiguous drawing that can be seen as five or six cubes but not both at once, apprehending the depicted Charles VIII and attending to the real canvas are distinct, exclusive intentional acts.

The painter does not transfer a private mental image into reality. Real brushstrokes, impasto, canvas grain, varnish, and colour constitute a material analogon, through which a spectator may apprehend the image. Each stroke serves the manifestation of an irreal whole rather than existing only for itself or as a component in a real construction. The canvas remains a material thing, visited by the painted object whenever a spectator takes the imaging attitude; the irreal is neither realized nor turned into a real object by the painting.

This distinction clarifies why aesthetic appreciation is not identical with sensual pleasure. A red pigment can produce a sensory enjoyment in isolation, but in a painting it is apprehended as part of an irreal whole. In Matisse’s example, the red of a rug carries its woollen density and tactile character, while the green of a wall covering has its own stiffness and sheen. Their aesthetic force belongs to the depicted relations among things, not merely to colours considered as real sensory stimuli. Cubist painting likewise need not represent a familiar object: its forms can still be apprehended as irreal things with density, matter, depth, and perspective. Even when the painting functions as an analogon for an unfamiliar ensemble rather than a bouquet or clearing, the beautiful object is constituted through the real canvas, not located on it as a real thing.

The same structure applies to fiction, poetry, and drama. Verbal analogons manifest irreal objects, and an actor’s body becomes an analogon for Hamlet. The actor need not realize that he is Hamlet in order to be wholly mobilized in producing the character. His feelings, strength, gestures, and even actual tears are apprehended as analogons of Hamlet’s conduct and tears. The relation is not that the character becomes real in the performer; rather, the performer is irrealized in the character, and actor and audience inhabit the irreal world of the role.

Music, time, and the return to reality

Music shows that the irreal is not confined to depicted or fictional persons. When a listener attends to Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, the performance is not simply identified with the work. The dated event at the Châtelet auditorium on 17 November 1938 is one interpretation; a later performance by Furtwängler with another orchestra can present the same symphony, better or worse. Poor tempo or errors may seem to betray the work, while a successful performance lets the orchestra recede from attention. A listener may look at the conductor or orchestra without attending to them, or close their eyes and disregard the visible event; in either case, the music is apprehended apart from the performance as a current, dated occurrence.

The symphony has an internal succession, from the first note of the allegro to the finale, but this is not ordinary real time: it does not continue a time before its beginning or lead into a time after its ending. The work is given as present yet absent and out of reach. A listener cannot act on it, change a note, or slow it down. Its appearance nevertheless depends on real analogons: a conductor’s collapse or a fire in the hall could stop the performance, though what stops is the performance, not the symphony as an irreal work. The listener apprehends real sounds through an imaging reduction, treating them as analogons rather than as the work itself.

The work’s existence is therefore not relocated to an intelligible heaven or another world. It is outside reality and existence, not a real object stored elsewhere. Aesthetic contemplation can consequently resemble an induced dream: leaving the theatre or music for everyday concerns is a shift from the imaging attitude to the realizing attitude, rather than a passage between two places. The irreal names the distinctive mode of appearance that makes art available through real supports while keeping its aesthetic object beyond the reach of ordinary perception and action.