Matter-Image or Image-Consciousness: Bergson contra Sartre

What brings together Henri Bergson's Matter and Memory and JeanPaul Sartre's Imagination and The Psychology of Imagination is the question of the ontology of the image. Bergson attempts to use the image to bridge the gap between mind and matter by refusing to distinguish clearly between what he calls “matter-images,” “perception-images,” and “memory-images.” By defining both consciousness and the material world as “images,” he hopes to free himself and philosophy in general from the need to deal with the subject/object opposition, i.e., to free ontology from epistemology. On the other hand, one of the central claims Sartre makes in his work is that there is a difference in kind between subjectivity and consciousness and that the former cannot be reduced to the latter. Although Sartre does conceive the image as a negation of the world, there is nothing subjective about the image: it is not a subjective attitude towards the world but a pure, unreflected, hence pre-subjective consciousness. When Sartre speaks of image, he means what we refer to as “a mental image” and to the manifestation of the faculty commonly known as imagination. What Bergson means by image, however, is entirely different. Matter, he argues, is composed of images: we perceive images. Bergson defines matter in this curious way in order to refute the idea that what we perceive is not the real world, that perception is merely subjective. Perception, Bergson argues instead, is ‘outside,’ in matter, insofar as our body is just an image among other images: perception is material just as matter is already perception, although an unconscious one. Similarly, Sartre places consciousness outside, in the world: there is nothing in consciousness. Bergson and Sartre start from the same intuition – the intuition that the mind is not identical with itself, is not a substance – but follow that intuition in different directions. For Sartre, consciousness, though always outside itself, in the world, is never dis-