As we suggested above, Sartre divides parts one and two of his work
into the “Certain” and the “Probable,” according to the Husserlian
differentiation between the data of reflection that are grasped immedi-
ately at the end of an eidetic reduction, in this case the “essential
structure” of the image, and the probable conclusions hypothesized on
the basis of inductive claims about that essential structure. He will then
address our understanding of the “psychic life” and our imaginary life in
terms of this structure and these probabilities. Sartre’s concluding
observations about the role of imaging consciousness in the aesthetic
realm serve to synthesize his ongoing interest in the imaginary and the
conceptual in our aesthetic consciousness of the work of art.
“Part I: The Certain”“The Intentional Structure of the Image”
Sartre points out that our reductive analysis of the image, a reflective or
second-order act, yields four characteristics of its essential structure.
These features will guide his discussion for the remainder of the work.
First, the image is aconsciousness. It is a way of constituting an object, a
manner of being “in the world.” As with emotional consciousness, this
follows from the basic insight that all consciousness is intentional in
nature. Contrary to popular opinion, the image is neither a “weak”
perception nor a “miniature” of the external world lodged inside our
minds. Sartre’s powerful essay on intentionality revealed that conscious-
ness has no “inside”; it is centrifugal in nature, casting us out into the
world with its facticity and its contingency.
Our habit of thinking in space and in terms of space, Sartre calls “the
illusion of immanence.” This is what leads us to conceive of the image as
a reproduction or portrait of what is in the world. Sartre accuses Husserl
of a certain failure of nerve because of his unwillingness to pursue the
intentionality of imaging consciousness to its logical conclusion. On
Sartre’s reading, Husserl, by retaining a certain “mental” status for the
image, leaves it hostage to the principle of immanence, an ingredient in
epistemic idealism and the object of Sartre’s realist animus.^3 But Sartre
(^3) Later, citing Husserl’s claim that an empty consciousness of the word “swallow” can be
fulfilled with an image that can be the “intuitive fulfillment of the signification [in the absence
of perception],” Sartre points out that the image does not “fulfill an empty consciousness: it is
The Imaginary 105