perceptual or imaging, is subject to the same principle of “inner time
consciousness” that Husserl expounded and Sartre has adopted.
Appealing to his basic principle that “the object of consciousness differs
in nature from the consciousness of which it is the correlate” (Imaginary
129 ), he distinguishes between the temporal flow of the image conscious-
ness and the time of the imaged object. His argument turns on the
evident contrast between atemporal objects like centaurs, objects that
contain a sort of timeless synthesis of particular durations (like Pierre’s
smile), or objects that flow more quickly than consciousness (as occurs in
our dreams). The duration of irreal objects is a correlate of our act of
belief (a positional act): “I join present scenes with past scenes by means
of empty intentions accompanying positional acts” (Imaginary 131 ). So
whatever duration these objects present is assigned by my “belief ” rather
than discovered as in perceptual acts. We have noted that such belief is
accompanied by an unreflective awareness of the sustaining power of
consciousness and its corresponding freedom. Sartre will parse this
experience for its moral significance as he elaborates the “existential”
character of consciousness in general in Being and Nothingness and
thereafter.
Sartre insists that irreal duration, like irreal space, is “without parts.”
This again follows from the phenomenon of quasi-observation. And he
assures us that, rather than approximating to Bergson’s famousdure ́e,
such irreal duration is closer to the spatialized time that Bergson
describes in hisTime and Free Will. Such is the time of the image. Such
too is the imaginary “world”; since it is isolated from the real world, the
only way I can enter it is by “irrealizing” myself, as Sartre will illustrate
with his example of an actor playing a role.
In fact there is no “world” of irreal objects for the simple reason
that a “world,” in Sartre’s understanding, is an dependent whole in
which each object has its determinate place and maintains relations
with other objects: “they must be strictly individuated; they must be
balanced with an environment...[and]noirrealobjectfulfillsthis
double condition” (Imaginary 132 ). This is why images offer us an
escape from all the constraints of the world. Despite Sartre’s admis-
sion in a note that every image must be constituted on the ground of
the world [Heidegger’sin-der-Welt-sein],“theyseemtobepresented
as a negation of the condition ofbeing in the world, as an anti-world”
(Imaginary 136 and 201 ,n. 7 ).
The Imaginary 123