structure of the image” ( 57 ). He repeats his critique of Bergsonism in
The Imaginationthat the root of his approach to mental phenomena is
the ambiguity of his ontology; in this case “the constant ambiguity of
Bergsonian dynamism: melodic syntheses – without a synthetic act;
organizations without an organizing power” (Imaginary 60 ). In Sartre’s
view, the famous philosopher has reified an act. He too is a victim of the
illusion of immanence.
We know that in his DES dissertation Sartre had cited approvingly
the psychologist Auguste Flach’s reference to the “symbolic schema” in
a context that mentioned Husserl for the first time. Flach reappears in
The Imaginary. Indeed he is mentioned more frequently than Husserl.
Since Flack was an experimentalist, his name appears in the empirical
portion of the book. But it is the symbolic schemas “that manifest in
their primary wholeness a mass of things that discursive thought must
analyze and juxtapose” which still attract Sartre,^25 though he now
prefers psychologist Albert Spaier’s “dawn of images’ to Flach’s
“symbolic schema” to express what he calls “imaging knowledge”
(Imaginary 67 ).
Sartre describes the act of reading a book as an act of signifying
knowledge, doubtless with a certain imaging element present, which
explains our emotive reactions. But when the book is a novel, the
situation changes fundamentally. As we now expect, the words become
analoga for an “irrealized” or “irreal” world in which the characters
move and the events occur. But knowledge is essential to this phenom-
enon as well.^26
In addition to the knowledge dimension of imaging, Sartre under-
scores the affective aspect. We observed it figure decisively in the
“presence” of the depicted subject. Sartre cites Brentano, Husserl and
Scheler as thinkers whom French theorists of “feeling” would do well to
read because, in his view, “on the subject of affectivity, French
(^25) He quotes from the same essay by Flach that he had cited in his DES, “U ̈ber symbolische
Schemata im produktiven Denkprozess” (correcting the title cited in the French edition and
26 repeated in the English translation).
For example, it contributes to what Roland Barthes called the “reality effect” by suggesting
more than could possibly be captured in the image (the extent of the crowd, the other side of
the tree, and the like), it brings the information from the previous chapters to bear on the
text, not to mention the life experience of the reader that fosters what philosopher John
Hospers calls the “thick aesthetic values” of the work.
The Imaginary 117