manner that seems observational) and concept (we grasp the definition
immediately). How do we reconcile these seemingly contradictory fea-
tures of the image, its support of a mental “tour” and the immediacy of
its presence/absence? By what Sartre calls the phenomenon ofquasi-
observation. As we examine our imagined object, he insists, we are
producing, not discovering, its features in our tour. “One can never
learn from an image what one does not already know”; the imagined
object “teaches us nothing” (Imaginary 10 ). Recall Alain’s remark about
counting the number of columns in the pediment of the Pantheon in
your imagination.^6 In perception, knowledge is formed slowly as if by
gradually confirmed hypotheses; in the image, knowledge is immediate.
When I say that I’m perceiving a cube, subsequent observation may
prove me wrong. But when I say I’m imagining a cube, assuming I know
the meaning of the word, I cannot be mistaken. It is an example of what
Leibniz would call a “self-presenting state.” It is infallible but, in the
case of the image, at least, its certainty is purchased at the cost of its
“essential poverty.” I can keep an image before me as long as I wish;
I shall never find anything that I did not place there.^7
This feature of quasi-observation does strike one as incompatible with
the profoundly temporal dimension of our consciousness as set forth by
Husserl in his influential lectures onInternal Time Consciousness, lectures
to which Sartre makes positive reference in each of these three studies.^8
It lends credibility to Merleau-Ponty’s observation about the “pointil-
lism” of Sartrean consciousness.^9 In fact, Sartre’s notion of quasi-
(^6) SeeImaginary 87 – 88 and Alain (E ́mile Auguste Chartier),Syste`me des beaux-arts, new edn.
(Paris: E ́ditions de Nouvelle Revue Franc ̧aise, 1920 ), 342.
(^7) Sartre addresses the counterexample of memory images by explaining that the image, while
grasped completely in itself, does contain a cognitive component that could account for its
relation to the past: “In the very act that gives me the object as imaged is included the
knowledge (connaissance) of what it is” (Imaginary 10 ). He will treat this component as well as
an emotive dimension of imaging consciousness when he discusses the aesthetic object toward
the end of the book. In other words, at this stage we are dealing with the “pure” image, not its
8 concrete instantiation which would include both cognitive and emotive aspects.
For example, seeL’Imagination 139 ,Emotions 105 , andL’Imaginaire 146. As we noted earlier
regarding Husserl’s writings on the imagination, the entirety of Husserl’s writing on time
9 consciousness was not available to Sartre at this stage.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty,Adventures of the Dialectic, trans. Joseph Bien (Evanston, IL: North-
western University Press, 1973 ), 105 on S’s philosophy of time; hereafterAD. Ironically, it is
Sartre who speaks of Husserl’s “Pointillism of essences” (cited in Spiegelberg,Phenomeno-
logical Movement,ii: 478 ).
The Imaginary 107