taking stock of his oeuvre and that tension between image and concept
that has marked his work up to this point.
He first considers symbols and symbolic schemas as possibly mediat-
ing this distance between image and sign noted earlier. But in fact, the
heterogeneity between pure thought (judgment) and image is reaffirmed
and the image itself is assigned symbolic status. Witnessing his commit-
ment to epistemic realism, Sartre explains that thought or the act of
judging registers its object but does not produce it.^29 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
we apprehendonthe intentional object as this or that of its qualities. This can be
expressed in a word: the function of the image issymbolic.
(Imaginary 97 )
So Sartre is drawing a sharp distinction between image and sign or
illustration: “The image is symbolic in essence and in its very structure.
One cannot remove the symbolic function of an image without making
the image itself vanish” (Imaginary 98 ). He turns to “the remarkable and
too little known work of Flach on ‘symbolic schemas in the process of
ideation,’” cited in his DES, to support this claim.^30 But he then goes
beyond Flach to address the philosophical issues of the whence and the
why of the appearance of these schemas in conjunction with certain
forms of understanding.^31 He resists any appeal to associationism, as
he always has, because of his insistence that the image is a consciousness,
(^29) He still accepts the Husserlian thesis that consciousness does “constitute” its object; that is,
it brings it about that “there is” (il y a) an object in the sense of being the term of an
“intentional” relation. The distinction between “production” and “constitution” is what
saves Sartre and Husserl from epistemic idealism. The later Sartre seems to doubt that it is
enough to preserve his robust sense of the real as he moves from a philosophy of conscious-
30 ness to one of praxis (human action in its socioeconomic condition).
On the last paragraph of page 93 , Sartre appeals to quasi-observation and the illusion of
immanence to “correct” Flach’s interpretation of his experiments regarding the relation
between comprehension and the image: “The comprehending consciousness can in certain
cases adopt the imaging structure. The image-object appears in that case as the simple
31 intentional correlate of the very act of comprehension” (Imaginary^103 –^104 ).
Sartre cites August Messer’s experiments to show that comprehension can occur without
either images or words (Imaginary 101 ).
120 Consciousness as imagination