These two can sometimes come into conflict with regard to “the same”
object, as when Peter, whom you know is facing you, is irrealized as being
in Berlin. This leads Sartre to claim that the object of the image does not
obey the principle of individuation. In turn, he is prompted to consider
the object of imaging consciousness as an exception to another meta-
physical principle: the object of the image does not necessarily appear as
obeying the principle of identity. “The knowledge aims at a certain
object; affectivity can provide an analogon for several objects” (Imagin-
ary 91 ). I can imagine an object that is the “contamination” of several
previously perceived objects, or imagine an object in the observational
mode that could not possibly be perceived in that manner. We should
recall this metaphysical exception when Sartre, inBeing and Nothingness,
makes a similar claim in favor of consciousness in general: it is an
exception to the principle of identity.
Admitting that he is not trying to reduce the image to the simple sum
of the foregoing factors, Sartre insists that, despite the demise of a
psychology of faculties, “imagination” has gained in importance as
certainly “one of the four or five great psychic functions” (Imaginary
93 ). He will discuss that function in partiii.
“Part III: The Image in Psychic Life”Sartre now turns to several features of our psychic life that exhibit the
interrelation between image, thought and emotion. As we should expect,
he will parse each of these topics in terms of the essential aspects of
imaging consciousness uncovered at the start. Above all, he is drawing
the implications of the claim that the image is a form of conscious act
that incorporates cognitive and affective dimensions while guarding its
proper nature. Its function is to “irrealize” the perceptual object,
whether actual or possible, constituting it specifically as “irreal,” though
not unreal.^28 So the judgments ingredient in the imaging act, for
example, are of a special type that Sartre calls “imaging assertions”
(Imaginary 97 ). In this part of his book Sartre considers at greater length
the relation between the cognizing and the imaging. In effect, he is
(^28) “In [the] imaging attitude we find ourselves in the presence of an object that is given as
analogous to that which can appear to us in perception” (Imaginary 117 ).
The Imaginary 119