consciousness, as popularly conceived, for consciousness has no
“inside,” as we have seen. Rather, the image is a way of being “in the
world” but in a manner distinct from perception. My image of Pierre
“intends” the Pierre of flesh and blood, but in a manner different from
my perceiving him. The challenge, which Sartre takes up at length
inThe Imaginary, is to determine what that specific difference is. And
when the object imagined is purely imaginative, say a centaur playing a
flute, that object is likewise not “inside” the mind but is the pole of our
act of imagining and so “transcendent” in its very intentional existence,
its inexistence (as Brentano will say) or, as Sartre will state in The
Imaginary, in its very “irreality.” And it seems that the function of
the “hyle ́,” on Sartre’s reading, is to unify and individualize this tran-
scendent object whose form or signification is being conferred by the
intending (noetic) act. Thus the hyle ́could remain the same (one and the
same physical tree, for example) and only the meaning-giving intentional
form, in this case, would distinguish its resultant object as either per-
ceived or imagined (seeIon 150 – 151 ).
Sartre believes that Husserl should have extended his suggestions to
material images such as pictures, designs and photos. It is these that
psychologism tends to distinguish from the so-called mental image
which it claims that material images are said to evoke by association.
The physical portrait of your mother, for example, merely evokes her
“mental” image with its attendant emotional qualities. In other words,
for psychologism, the link between mental and material image is only
associative. Drawing the contrary implications of the Husserlian tack,
Sartre argues that “if the image becomes a certain way of animating a
hyle ́tic content intentionally, one can easily liken the grasp of a pictureas
imageto the intentional grasp of a ‘psychological’ content. It would
simply be a case of two different species of ‘imaging’ consciousnesses”
(Ion 149 ).
Betraying his proclivity for the power of the negative, Sartre restates
the general intentional analysis of imaging consciousness as follows: “So
the noema is a nothingness (un ne ́ant) that has only an ideal existence, the
kind of existence ascribed to the Stoiclekton.^20 It is only the necessary
correlative to the noesis. ‘The eidos of the noema points to the eidos of
(^20) Lektonis the Stoic term for the sense (meaning) of a formula.
90 First triumph:The Imagination