Notes on Sartre's Psychology of Imagination

"...in the imaginative act desire is nourished from itself...the object as an image is a definite want [lack]; it takes shape as a cavity. A white wall as an image is a white wall which is absent from perception" (161).

"all spatial determination of an object as an image presents itself as an absolute property...it is impossible to count the columns of the Pantheon as an image. The space of the unreal object has no parts" (164).

principle: "the object of consciousness differs in nature from the consciousness of which it is the correlative" (165).
the time of the object of the image is different from the flow of time in the consciousness of the image (165)

"contracted compressed duration" is "'density'" of duration

"objects...run off more slowly than does real consciousness, for consciousness really lives several seconds while the world of the unreal lasts for several hours" (166).

unreal duration is like unreal space, it has no parts (168)
it is impossible to count the instants of an unreal act just as it is impossible to count the columns of an unreal Pantheon (168)
the time of unreal objects is itself unreal (169)

"...I can produce at will--or almost at will--the unreal object I want but I cannot make of it what I want" (173).

"...every unreal object carrying its own time and space occurs without any solidarity with any other object" (173).

"Consciousness is... constantly surrounded by a retinue of phantom objects" (173).

the real imaginative consciousness and the unreal object are of distinctly two natures (175)

the image is a mental form, not a simple content of consciousness among others; therefore "the entire body participates in the make-up of the image" (176) (81)

Notes on Coleridge's B.L.
ίδέα: the visual abstraction of a distant object (original sense of word in Pindar, Aristophanes & St. Matthew's Gospel) when we see the whole w/out distinguishing its parts
Plato's idea is a technical term opposed to έίδωλα, sensuous images, the transient and perishable emblems, or mental words, of ideas. His ideas are exempt from time. Nowadays 'idea' is like 'Ideal', but opposed to 'idea', or image whether of present or absent objects

Descartes: material ideas, configurations of the brain, so many molds to the influxes of the external world

Locke: ideas, adopts Descartes' meaning and extends it to whatever is the immediate object of the mind's attention or consciousness

Hume: impressions: representations which are accompanied w/ a sense of a present object
idea: representations reproduced by the mind itself

thought & attention are parts & products of the blind mechanism of will and not distinct powers that control, determine & modify the phantasmal chaos of association (81)

the soul becomes not a real separable being

contemporaneity is the limit and condition of the laws of mind (85); it is a law of matter (this reiterates Coleridge's "the sole law of association is contemporaneity" (76)

contemporaneity = continuity

contemporaneity : thought : : gravitation : loco-motion

contemporaneity is the condition of the laws of association and is not the cause or essence; time is the cause or essence of the co-existence of images in the mind recalled from present circumstances or operation of likeness & contrast (86)

space is the measure of time and it is our notion of time that makes us distinguish time from space

the act of consciousness = time considered in its essence (not the notion of time)

body & spirit are different modes or degrees in perfection of a common substratum

intelligence & being are each other's substrate (94)

Coleridge considers perception as passive & "merely recipient" (109); thus sensuous

intuition: the immediateness of any act or object of knowledge

the Lowghost: "words which are but the shadows of notions" (168)

"The mathematician does not begin w/ a demonstrable proposition, but with an intuition, a practical idea" (se 171 for demonstration)

subject for Coleridge is defined in the Scholastic sense of "mind or sentient being, and as the necessary correlative of object or quicquid objicitur menti" (174)

"freedom must be assumed as a ground of philosophy, and can never be deduced from it" (185)

"sensation itself is but vision nascent" (187)

"...nothing is deemed a clear conception, but what is representable by a distant image" (189)

"...besides the language of words, there is a language of spirits (sermo interior) [perhaps Breton's "mouth of shadows"?]...the former is only the vehicle of the latter" (191).