JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

98Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic WritingsBut we must clarify this requisite. It does not mean that consciousness must ceasebeing consciousness of something. It is of the very nature of consciousness to beintentional and a consciousness that ceased to be consciousness of something wouldfor that very reason cease to exist. But consciousness should be able to form and positobjects possessing a certain trait of nothingness in relation to the whole or reality. Infact, we recall that the imaginary object can be posited as non-existent or as absent oras existing elsewhere or not posited as existing. We note that the common property ofthese four theses is that they include the entire category of negation, though at differentdegrees. Thus the negative act is constitutive of the image. We have already mentioned,in fact, that the theme is not added to the image but that it is its most intimatestructure. But in relation to what is the negation carried out? To answer this questionwe need but consider for a moment what happens when I grasp the portrait of CharlesVIII as an image of Charles VIII. Immediately I stop considering the picture asforming a part of a real world, it is no longer possible that the perceived object on thepicture can be altered by the changes of the milieu surrounding it. The picture itself, asa real thing, can be more or less brightened, its colours can peel off, it can burn. Thisis because it possesses—due to lack of a “being-in-the-world” which is restricted toconsciousness—a “being-in-the-midst-of-the-world”. Its objective nature dependsupon reality grasped as a spatio-temporal whole. But if, on the other hand, I graspCharles VIII as an image on the picture, the object apprehended can no longer besubjected to changes in brightness for instance. It is not true that I can more or lessbrighten the cheek of Charles VIII.In fact the brightening of that cheek has been established in the unreal by thepainter once and for all. It is the unreal sun—or the unreal candle placed by the painterat this or that distance from the face being painted —which determines the degree ofthe brightness of the cheek. All that a real projector can do is to brighten the part of thereal picture that corresponds to the cheek of Charles VIII. Likewise, if the pictureburns, it is not Charles VIII as an image who is burning but only the material objectwhich serves as analogue for the manifestation of the imagined object. Thus the unrealobject appears immediately to be beyond the reach of reality. We therefore see that inorder to produce the object “Charles VIII” as an image, consciousness must be able todeny the reality of the picture, and that it could deny that reality only by retreatingfrom reality grasped as a whole. To posit an image is to construct an object on thefringe of the whole of reality, which means therefore to hold the real at a distance, tofree oneself from it, in a word, to deny it. Or, in other words, to deny that an objectbelongs to the real is to deny the real in positing the object; the two negations arecomplementary, the former being the condition for the latter. We know, besides, that