corollary to one of the essential features of the image that Sartre’s eidetic
reduction inThe Imaginarywill reveal, namely, that “the image teaches
us nothing.” On Sartre’s reading, the image contains nothing more than
what we have placed there. Appeal to schemata, whether Kantian or
Bergsonian, Sartre concludes, is a ploy (un truc) to join the activity and
the unity of thought with the inert multiplicity of sensation in a vain
effort to reach concrete reality, whereas a careful appeal to the intention-
ality of consciousness will suffice, as his major workThe Imaginarywill
explain in detail. Sartre’s search for warranted experience of concrete
reality, can be taken henceforth as a leitmotif in his thought
“The Contradictions of the Classical Conception”The point of this chapter of Sartre’s book is to reveal the inadequacy of
attempts by then recent authors to deal with the limitations of associa-
tionism by simply combining image and thought into an image-sign. In
Sartre’s mind, that simply covers over the problems rather than facing
them. For Sartre’s operative thesis throughout this discussion remains
the claim that the basic identity of image and perception follows on from
a metaphysics which generates the problems that he has been discussing.
Given the identity claim of their metaphysics, these theorists must
account for the commonly acknowledged distinction between perception
and image at the psychological level. A familiar solution explains the
image as a “false” perception. But this raises the question of a “true”
image. After reviewing the respective responses of Hume, Taine and
Spaier, whom he sees progressively backing away from their stated
mechanistic and physiological theories toward a quasi-mentalistic (that
is, judgment-oriented) account under pressure of contrary evidence,
Sartre remarks that the resultant criterion of “truth” for the image is
not a realist correspondence with the perceptual world but a coherence
among the images/signs themselves. In other words, this trio has set
aside a naive realism in order to sustain the identity of image and
perception. While admitting that his account of Spaier’s position may
not be completely accurate, Sartre insists that he is describing “a direc-
tion and an attitude that is generally accepted today” (Ion 103 n.) And
we should not forget that after a year of study in Berlin, Sartre is in the
process of establishing the case for a phenomenological solution to these
inadequacies.
86 First triumph:The Imagination