Summary: The Imaginary (page 4)

This enables Sartre to reveal the essential characteristics of the mental image: a specific manner in which the object is absent within its very presence ¹.

Mental images are not spatially localised. Relative to the table I perceive, they have no spatial position. The image presents itself as lacking any localisation in real space.

The object of the image does not adhere to the principle of identity ('a cat is a cat').

Sartre gives the example of facial merging: the phenomenon whereby two faces merge into one, which takes on an uncanny familiarity.

The image aims to synthesise all aspects of the thing, unlike perception, which reveals only a single profile. Sartre gives the striking example of children who, when drawing a person in profile, depict them with two front-facing eyes.

What is successive in perception is simultaneous in the image ², since the imaged object is presented all at once.

III/ The Role of the Image in Psychic Life

Within the structure of the image, judgements can take on an image-form.

Let us take an example: I remember a house... I imagine it as white, yet I am not satisfied. Then I introduce a staircase into the image, which seems more fitting to me. This act constitutes a judgement, as the defining characteristic of judgements is decision.

A particular type of judgment thus emerges within image-forming consciousness: image-forming assertions.

The image contains the same elements (the same ideative components ³) as thought. However, what is conventionally referred to as thought is a consciousness that affirms various qualities of its object without actualising them within it. The image, by contrast, is a consciousness that seeks to produce its object ⁴.

This is what makes the image intrinsically symbolic in both its essence and structure, and the image cannot be stripped of its symbolic function without vanishing entirely. [...] The image teaches nothing. [...] Understanding occurs within the image but not through it ⁵.

As a result, even though the image is a form of consciousness ⁶, it does not facilitate the unfolding of intelligence. On the contrary, it can hinder it.

The illustrative image resembles the tentative grasp of an underdeveloped thought, and its semantic ambiguities stem from the uncertainties of a thought that has not yet ascended to a clear understanding of what a concept entails ⁷.

Thus, our first answer to an abstract question is always, even if we correct ourselves immediately, an inferior response—both prelogical and empirical ⁸.

Sartre refers here to the encounter between Socrates and Hippias. It is well known that Socrates asks his interlocutor, ‘What is beauty?’ To which Hippias replies, ‘A beautiful woman.’

The initial response of thought naturally takes the form of images. Many people, when asked about the nature of beauty, will spontaneously conjure up the image of the Venus de Milo, as though answering, ‘Beauty itself is the Venus de Milo.’ ⁹

From the illustrative image, two paths emerge: one in which thought dissolves into dreams, forsaking the initial inquiry and resulting in the annihilation of thought at the level of the image; the other leading to genuine understanding: The image serves as an embodiment of impulsive thought ¹⁰.

It is impossible to define perception as an amalgam of sensations and images, since image and perception represent two fundamentally irreducible attitudes of consciousness.

In the image, objects are imbued with an air of unreality. Consequently, our attitude toward the image differs radically from our attitude toward actual things. Love, hate, desire, and will become quasi-love, quasi-hate... Just as the observation of the unreal object is a quasi-observation ¹¹.

This response to the unreal will now form the subject of our study under the name of imaginary life ¹².

¹ ibid., p.144
² I, 5, p.182
³ 3ème partie, I, 1, p.188
⁴ ibid.
⁵ ibid., p.189
⁶ I, 2, p.207
⁷ ibid., p.214
⁸ ibid.
⁹ ibid.
¹⁰ I, 3, p.216
¹¹ I, 4, p.235
¹² ibid.