Reading Sartre's fascinating early book, trans. as 'The Imaginary'. The following reflections:
If you were speaking of an actual door knob you might say, if you saw it from an odd angle or whatever “I first saw it as a piece of brass, only after a second realising it was a door knob.” You could never say the same about a mental image of a door knob. The mental image is co-extensive with our perception of it. It cannot exceed or surprise us in any way. For Sartre this is one of the definitive qualities of the mental image: there is no quota of the unknown:
The [mental] image does not teach anything, never gives the impression of novelty, never reveals an aspect of the object. It delivers it as a whole. No risk, no waiting: a certainty. My perception can mislead me, but not my [mental] image.
And whereas “the object of perception constantly overflows consciousness" the "object of an image is never anything more than the consciousness one has of it". In the world of perception every "thing” has an infinite number of aspects. But not in the world of the image. It, the image, is fastened to just one 'aspect'. It is that 'aspect'.
So, in the ‘real world’ things always have this ‘more than’. They offer resistance, they reveal only one side of themselves at a time, so inviting us to turn them around, explore them, and discover what in them resists our intentionality .This is what defines 'the real', this quota of the unknown, of a 'more than' which constitutively escapes us. The object in my imagination, however, offers no resistance, I cannot explore it further, it is synonymous with my grasp of it. Again, if you look at the table in front of you, you are seeing an aspect of it, a perspective. But if you imagine a table, you are not seeing a ‘partial viewpoint’ of something.
The mastery we can experience in the world of the imagination, therefore, is no mastery at all because nothing resists, defies us:
'none of these objects calls upon me to act, to do anything. They are neither weighty, insistent, nor compelling; they are pure passivity, they wait. The faint breath of life we breathe into them comes from us, from our spontaneity.'16 There is 'no risk, no anticipation, only a certainty.'
The apparent pure freedom of the imagination – we can apparently do anything and everything without opposition – is not freedom at all. Absolute freedom coincides with its opposite.
It is a poor and meticulous world, in which the same scenes keep on recurring to the last detail, accompanied by the same ceremonial where everything is regulated in advance, foreseen; where, above all, nothing can escape, resist or surprise.
This ‘poverty’ of the imaginary is a constant Sartrean theme. And Sartre extends this analysis to fictional objects. Again, if someone tells you they are about to go up the stairs you might reasonably ask how many steps the staircase has. If a novelist describes a character ascending a staircase, you cannot ask this question. Imaginary objects are not amenable to interrogation. This seems obvious enough, but Sartre seems to draw more poignant conclusions, portraying a world of sad and deficient things, lacking the completion of matter. The key Sartrean motif is that art works are in a sense 'untouchable'. His oft quoted example is that whereas a record can be scratched the tune is not scratched. The tune resides beyond matter and its accidents. A more contentious example occurs when he implies that although we might burn a painting, the image does not burn, because the image is not made of material stuff:
If the picture burns, it is not Charles VII as imaged that burns but simply the material object that serves as an analagon for the manifestation of the imagined object.
Strikingly, Sartre refers here to a ‘being that cannot be given to perception and that, in its very nature, is isolated from the universe [emph. added]. The tune or the image is ‘trapped’ in a world without weight, pigment, roughness, or any of the nitty gritties of substance. We have here an almost ‘tragic’ account of imaginary beings, a ‘sadness’ of separation.
Now granted, Sartre's account is highly partial. My suggestion here is only this: do we not sense, in certain imaginative or fictional worlds, that the beings of those worlds are somehow aware of their inviolable solitariness, their irreparable lost contact with the world. Imaginary beings are, to mis-use a phrase from Heidegger ‘poor-in-world’ and yet, Sartre implies, often depicted as somehow dimly aware of this predicament. There are certain authors who give to their imaginary beings a dim presentiment of the pathos of being only imaginary.