Xiàngshí yìshí

Imaging consciousness is not a faint perception or an inner picture but a distinct, spontaneous way of intending an object as absent or nonexistent. It gives the object through an analogical medium, while maintaining the difference between the real support through which it appears and the imaginary object apprehended. This distinction extends from a few lines read as a face to the aesthetic object encountered through a painting, performance, or symphony.

Definition and Intentional Structure

The image is defined by its intention: an image of Pierre is consciousness of Pierre because its act is directed toward him. Even a seemingly bare intention carries some knowledge, initially as an open expectation and direction. It does not merely aim at Pierre in general; it can intend him as blond, tall, or having a particular kind of nose. Intention and knowledge can be distinguished only by abstraction in this act. The knowledge is not an explanatory addition to an already completed image: it is an active structure that helps constitute it.

An image can therefore not exist without some knowledge through which its object is intended. That knowledge need not be a complete visual description, and it is not itself an image. It may be an undifferentiated mass of intentions about qualities that the image does not distinctly represent. The consciousness aims at the person as a synthesis, while the imagined presentation can gather together aspects that perception would reveal successively. The image’s unity is not reducible to a list of features: the act intends the person as a whole, in a way informed by intellectual and affective experience.

The mental image also differs from an object seen in the surrounding space. A portrait, caricature, or mark on a wall can be perceived as a thing located among other things; a mental image does not take its place beside the table or carpet. Its psychic content is not an external object, though the thing represented is intended as external. The analogical medium must be constituted as an object for consciousness, a relation described as the transcendence of the representative. The error of the illusion of immanence is to transfer the represented thing’s spatiality and sensible qualities to the psychic medium itself. That medium represents such qualities in its own way; it does not possess them as a second, miniature object within the mind.

Schematic Figures and Bodily Organization

The difference between perception and imaging consciousness can be traced in the changing interpretation of a simple drawing. Initially, three segments meeting at a point, a separate point below and to one side, and a sinuous line can be seen as lines on a white sheet. Eye movements organize them into separate forms: the segments make a fork, the lower point adheres to that figure, and the sinuous mark remains apart. The perceptual field is organized, but no face need appear.

To see a face in those same marks requires a change of intention and a bodily contribution. The rising oblique segment is read as a forehead, the segment to the right as an eyebrow, the descending one as a nose, the isolated point as an eye, and the sinuous line as mouth and chin. The white paper also changes its role: space to one side is taken as a filled volume, while the other side recedes as ground. The lines are followed in determinate directions, and the viewer enacts an absent connection between separated marks through eye movement. The face is not simply discovered in the marks; the marks are synthesized into an image through an intentional and bodily activity.

This account distinguishes schematic images from perceptual figures that impose motor directions. In the Müller-Lyer illusion, closed angles check eye movements while open angles allow them to continue; the opposed and facilitated movements are projected onto the segments as qualities of extension. The result remains within perception: the line appears to have a force or direction. A schematic image works differently. Its lines do not themselves prescribe the movements that will organize them. Knowledge guides the viewer’s movements, and those movements are projected as hypothetical directions. If an image crystallizes, the viewer sees a figure such as a running man while remaining aware that the directions were spontaneously projected onto the lines. The representative elements are thus not merely the marks, but the movements imaged through them.

Synthesis, Spontaneity, and Perception

Imaging consciousness is an irreducible synthesis rather than the sum of separable components. Movement, knowledge, and affectivity can be distinguished analytically, but that analysis does not divide the actual image into independent pieces. The consciousness is directed toward its object as a whole, and its directedness gives rise to a distinctive psychic form. The resulting appearance may be stable for a time, then disappear as the form carried by consciousness dissolves. Imagination is consequently not a sensation revived from storage, but a specific function of consciousness correlated with a distinct kind of object: the imaginary object.

Its spontaneity also matters for distinguishing an image from a perception. An image is intended through an activity that is nonthetically conscious of itself as creative; this awareness accompanies the object-directed act. Perception and imaging consciousness are alternating attitudes, not ingredients that can simply be blended to complete one another. A real table and an irreal Pierre, for example, cannot at once serve as correlates of the same act: when the irreal Pierre comes forward, the table leaves the scene of attention. Perception may include unformulated intentions about unseen aspects of a present thing, such as an ashtray’s underside, but these intentions remain attached to the perceived object rather than positing a separate imaginary object.

This distinction informs the discussion of hallucination without reducing it to the simple projection of an inner image into external space. The image’s object already has a form of externality, though it is given as irreal and has its own space, unlike the common space of perceived objects. A report that places an irreal figure on a real chair does not by itself establish that the two spaces have fused. The discussion instead considers whether hallucination involves a loss of awareness of spontaneity and a sudden annihilation of perceived reality. Marie B’s account of claiming to be the Queen of Spain presents a contrasting case: she describes knowing that the claim was untrue while entering an enchanted, role-like imaginary world. The distinction between knowingly sustaining an imaginary world and experiencing hallucination is therefore essential to the analysis.

The Imaginary in Art

The account of imaging consciousness also determines what an artwork is as an aesthetic object. In a portrait of Charles VIII, the canvas, frame, and paint are real things, but the depicted king as an object of aesthetic appreciation is not identical with that material support. He appears when consciousness takes an imaging attitude and apprehends him as an irreal object. Just as a figure cannot be apprehended in two mutually exclusive organizations at once, the canvas as a real object and Charles VIII as an imagined object belong to different intentional acts.

A painter does not transfer a private mental image into a real object that the public can then perceive. The brushstrokes, impasto, canvas grain, and varnish are real; the aesthetic object is not given to perception in the same way. The painting functions as a material analogical medium through which an imaging consciousness can apprehend the irreal object. Its real colors may also please the senses, but sensory enjoyment alone is not aesthetic appreciation. A red in a painting is apprehended within an imagined whole: as the red of a rug, with its tactile and material character, and in relation to other depicted things. The aesthetic significance belongs to that irreal ensemble, not to an isolated patch of real pigment.

The same structure applies beyond painting. In fiction, poetry, and drama, words serve as analogical media; an actor’s body, feelings, strength, and gestures serve as media for Hamlet. The actor need not posit himself as literally being Hamlet in order to be fully mobilized in performing him. Even real tears can be apprehended as Hamlet’s irreal tears: the actor’s conduct is incorporated into the imagined character rather than making the character a real person in the actor. In music, a performance is likewise not identical with the work as aesthetically apprehended. A listener may hear Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony across different performances and regard a poor rendition as concealing or betraying the work. The concert, performers, and sounds belong to the real event, while the symphony as the object of aesthetic attention is apprehended through them as an irreal whole.

Significance

Imaging consciousness explains how consciousness can intend what is absent without mistaking it for a perceived thing. Its objects are not hidden contents that perception must uncover, and its medium need not resemble the object in every quality. Knowledge supplies an active direction, bodily movement can organize and animate schematic marks, and affectivity belongs to the synthesis without reducing it to sensation. The same distinction clarifies why the physical canvas is not the aesthetic object and why a performance can disclose a work that is not identical with the dated event of its performance. Across these examples, the defining operation remains the same: consciousness uses a real or psychic medium to intend an object as imaginary, preserving both the medium’s reality and the object’s irreality.