The Imaginary by Sartre Jean-Paul

Author:Sartre, Jean-Paul
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Humanities
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2010-02-25T16:00:00+00:00

Part III

The Role of the Image in Psychic Life

I. THE SYMBOL1

The image plays neither the role of illustration nor that of support for thought. It is not something heterogeneous with thought. An imaging consciousness includes knowledge, intentions, and can include words and judgements. And by that I do not mean to say that one can judge about the image, but that judgements in a special form, the imaging form, can enter into the very structure of the image. If I want, for example, to represent to myself the staircase of a house that I have not been to for a long time, I ‘see’ at first a staircase of white stone. Several steps appear to me in a fog. But I am not satisfied, something is missing. I hesitate for a moment, I search in my memories, without leaving for that the imaging attitude; then, all at once, with the clear impression of engaging myself, of taking my responsibilities, I make a carpet with copper rods appear on the stone steps. This is here a good case of an act of my thought, of a free and spontaneous decision. But this decision did not pass through a stage of pure knowledge (connaissance) or a simple verbal formulation. The act by which I engaged myself, the act of affirmation was precisely an imaging act. My assertion consisted exactly in conferring on the object of my image the quality ‘covered by a carpet’. And I made this quality appear on the object. But this act is evidently a judgement since, as has been well shown by the research of the Würzburg school, the essential characteristic of judgement is decision. Into the imaging consciousness there enters therefore a particular type of judgement: imaging assertions. In a word (we will see later that one can even have reasoning in images, which is to say necessary connections of imaging consciousnesses) the ideational elements of an imaging consciousness are the same as those of the other consciousnesses for which one ordinarily reserves the name thoughts. The difference resides essentially in a general attitude. What one ordinarily calls thought is a consciousness that affirms this or that quality of its object but without realizing it on it. The image, on the other hand, is a consciousness that aims at producing its object: it is therefore constituted by a certain way of judging and feeling of which we do not become conscious as such but which we apprehend on the intentional object as this or that of its qualities. This can be expressed in a word: the function of the image is symbolic.

For some years much has been written, no doubt under the influence of psychoanalysis, on symbolic thought. But one is always struck by a conception that makes the image a material trace, an inanimate element that afterwards plays the role of a symbol. Most psychologists make of thought an activity of selection and organization that would fish for its images in the unconscious, to arrange and

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