Abstract

First of all, as we have seen, Sartre gives prominence to the theme of the imaginary having a certain weight: he frequently draws attention to the ordinary fascination with images, and is particularly interested in dreams, the phenomena of obsession and quasi-presence, along with the development of a truly specific imaginary life and of an imaginary self as correlative to imaginary objects. His thinking concerning the analogon also leads him very close to the idea of a spiritual matter. To be sure, Sartre’s original intention in The Imaginary is to limit as much as possible the role played by the thickness of the analogon because, consciousness being pure activity, it is inconceivable for the image to be outlined by the things themselves. On the other hand, however, Sartre holds a theory of the analogon in order to account for a dimension of the image’s presence that he should actually deny, if he wanted to do what it takes to save his definition of the imagination as nothingness. He then develops some lines of thought that come into tension with the dualistic principle of his ontology, but which make it easier to think about the complexity of images. The analogon must thus embody the intimate yet impossible union of material transcendence and intentional activity. Sartre even puts forward the theory of a “spiritual” matter of the mental image. He admits that the precise nature of the analogon in the case of the mental image is not obvious and only proposes various hypotheses. First of all, he thinks, it could involve schematic gestures. But this raises the question of knowing how consciousness as pure nothingness could control the movement of the body as a being. Sartre proposes another hypothesis: the analogon of the mental image could consist in what he calls an “affective mass.” Here too he ventures beyond the initial dualism. The affective substitute “is transcendent but not external,” it is not quite an object, that is, a reality of the world that would be recognizable or possess an objective position. As the correlate of a feeling, it is transcendent because the feeling, like any lived experience, is intentional and cannot be confined within our pure inner self. As pleasant, loathsome, or sad, etc., the object is not a well-defined substance, but becomes a “tonality,” a style of being that can travel in objects and in ambient moods. The affective mass of Pierre-as-loathsome can thus be given in his hands, in his room when he is not there, or in a landscape that I gaze upon. Further, the object clearly appears as modelled by my feeling and intentionality, and as not imposing itself on me in the way that a being in itself would. It would therefore seem that the affective mass is something subjective-objective, a spiritual matter. This preordains it to play the role of analogon, but it should lead Sartre to reconsider his fundamental opposition between being and nothingness.