psychology remains contemporary with The ́odule Redul.”^27 Sartre
views the emotions in French literature in the same light. The relation
between my love and the loved person for Proust and his disciples is
fundamentally just a link of contiguity. For psychologist and novelist
alike, we are left with “a sort of solipsism of affectivity.” In both cases,
the reason is the same: both groups overlook the intentional nature of
all conscious acts; feeling has been isolated from its signification
(Imaginary 68 ).
The synthetic act of imaging includes kinaesthetic sensations as an
essential aspect. Sartre’s description of the act of inscribing the figure
8 imaginatively with the motion of the finger brings this aspect to the
fore. Appealing to Husserl’s theses of “protention” and “retention” in
his analysis of internal time consciousness mentioned earlier, Sartre
carries out his description within the conditions of imaging conscious-
ness set forth at the outset. Again, this places him at odds with his
contemporaries, who argue, for example, that the physical movement
of the finger “evokes” the image of the figure. Without pursuing his
nuanced analysis of how the same kinaesthetic sensations direct the
perceived and the imagined figure, let it suffice to summarize with
Sartre: “Movement can play the role of an analogon for an imaging
consciousness. This is because when a movement is given by a sense
other than sight, the consciousness that apprehends it has an imaging
structure and not a perceptual one” (Imaginary 80 ). So there can be
“two analogical matters for an imaging consciousness: the kinaesthetic
impression, with its corte`ge of protentions and retentions, and the
affective object...These two types of analogon can therefore very well
exist concurrently as correlates of the same act of consciousness”
(Imaginary 81 ).
After distinguishing the mental image from the word (sign), Sartre
concludes the second part of his study with further reflections on the
phenomenon of belief or positional consciousness as an ingredient in our
imaging act. It is at the reflective consciousness that another kind of
belief appears, belief in the existence of the image. The cognitive dimen-
sion of an imaging consciousness isbelief; the affective aspect ispresence.
(^27) A psychologist who published on the emotions in the late 1800 s(Imaginary 68 ). On the
philosophical role of “feeling” in Sartre’s first philosophical publication ( 1927 ), see “The
Theory of the State in Modern French Thought” (Contat and Rybalkaii: 22 – 26 ).
118 Consciousness as imagination