Valerie Bernard is a graduate of the University of Toronto’s doctoral program in philosophy. She writes on theories of perception and imagination in philosophy of mind. She has taught at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, New Brunswick and St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. She currently works as an independent researcher and consultant specializing in AI ethics and governance.
A post by Valerie Bernard
Of course, it is indeed the genuine room that I aim at, just as I aim at the genuine Pierre. But it is given as absent; and at the same time its character is deeply modified since the external relation of contiguity that links it to Pierre is transformed into an internal relation of belonging.
Jean-Paul Sartre, The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination, p. 129
It is a peculiar thing to think about what is absent. As I sit in this café, my eyes scan the dark stained maple bookcase, the woman on her phone, the computer in front of me. I try not to hear the awkward conversation at the next table or be distracted by the song playing overhead. I am confronted by these things. They are present, annoyingly, inescapably present. But my eyes are doing something else as I scan this café. My focus shifts in and out, my eyes remain forward but it is as if they are turned around and looking back inside my head. I am thinking about what is absent, about the person I wish was here, but who is not. He is gone. And so I watch the woman on her phone as she jots down notes and I scan the crowd at the counter, but it is as if I am double seeing: I am looking at what is present, but I’m focused on what is absent. My inner eye is not turned toward the present but the past, to what is remembered, to what is imagined.
Edmund Husserl (1931/1977) thought through the way that the intentionality of experience – meaning, minimally, the mind’s directedness towards its objects – goes beyond what is strictly speaking seen or sensorily experienced. By his lights, subjective experience involves an “intentional horizon of reference” that extends beyond what is immediately present to the senses. It involves “potentialities of consciousness” that include what Jonathan Mitchell (2026) calls explicit alongside implicit intentionality. Somehow the mind manages to fill in the gaps so that what is explicitly sensed is complemented by what is implicitly experienced, whether it is the obstructed opposite side of a chair, awareness of what is missing from a scene, or thoughts about what is imagined.
In analytic literature this is referred to as phenomenal or perceptual presence. On Alva Noë’s (2004) account, my perceptual experience of the chair across from me acquires the content of the obstructed backside thanks to my possession of bodily skills. My sensorimotor capacities provide the information to make what is unseen from my vantage point part of my overall perceptual experience of the chair as a three-dimensional object. He calls this an experience of “presence in absence,” arguing that what is occluded is made part of perceptual experience through the active interplay between perceivers and the world.
The question is how what is absent can be part of my intentional experience when I am not moving around trying to see behind the chair. Kant (1781/1998) understands the imagination as playing this role: it is our imaginative faculties that fill in the gaps so that while we may see only three sides of a cube we are implicitly aware that it is a three-dimensional object with three more unseen sides. Amy Kind (2018) draws upon Kant’s theory of the imagination to offer an alternative to Noë, arguing that it is the imagination, not bodily engagement, that furnishes what she calls “imaginative presence.”
But if you focus your attention to your experience of what is imagined – whether it is an occluded side or an object that is not there – you may find that “presence” is an odd word to give to this experience. Try this: imagine that there is a chair in front of you when there is none. When I do this, my eyes move around the imagined contours of the imaginary chair to give me a sense of its dimensions and the space it would occupy. If I squint a bit, I can picture its color and how it would fit into the space. But this activity takes a lot of mental work and as soon as I get bored of doing it, the chair vanishes. It feels painfully clear that there is nothing there. The true defining feature of my imagined chair is its absence, its nonexistence, its nothingness.
Across from my table at this café there is an empty chair. I can see the concave inside of its back rest and, logically, I know there is a backside as well but I cannot see it. Probabilistic thinking and memory tell me that the backside is likely the same as that of all the other chairs I see around me. But what if I play a game with myself and imagine that the back is painted in psychedelic colors and swirls? I can visualize that, but if I examine in myself what my experience is, I find that I am “double seeing” again. I had no problem attaching the backside to the chair when I held it conceptually as an implicit awareness. But once I engage my imagination and try to “see” the psychedelic swirls, my focus on the actual chair blurs while what I visualize is held somewhere in imagined space in a way that allows it to imaginatively face me. What I am visualizing now is not attached to the chair. It is apprehended as a separate thing, an imagined thing, a back-of-the-chair-that-is-not-there thing. I find this even if I now posit that the backside of the chair looks the same as all the rest. Once I try to “see” it in my mind’s eye, it feels separated from the chair somehow.
But the image’s detachment feels abstract when it’s about chairs. It feels visceral and agonizing when it is about Pierre. Here the concept of “imaginative presence” feels like a cruel joke. I can look at the chair across from me and imagine him sitting in it, I can “see” his smile and “hear” his laugh, but there is no way in which that feels like his presence to me. The more I long for his presence in that chair, the more deeply his absence is felt. My mind is transported somewhere else, to moments when he was actually sitting across from me. That is the real Pierre, existing in another time and place. What is before me is an empty chair and no amount of concentrated visualization fixes that. I can use my imagination to make the imagined Pierre happy, angry or sad, but what I cannot do is use my imagination to make him feel present. Even when I dream of him, it doesn’t really feel like true presence. He looks distorted, his actions are strange, it is too fleeting and that dreamed Pierre is somehow not really experienced as external to me. His actions and features are malleable according to my wishes and fears, and I’m not entirely sure that I can truly see his face. It is more subtle, but it is still absence: absence of alterity, of reality, of a true encounter.
This was Jean-Paul Sartre’s (1940/2004) point about the imagination; the imagination deals in absence and that is its fundamental distinction from perception, which deals in presence. Kant describes two levels or kinds of imagination, one a priori and one a posteriori, with the former allowing us to recognize objects as three-dimensional as a condition of experience. This is different from a posteriori sensory imagination, which is what I have been discussing in this post. While it may be that at an a priori level the imagination is filling in the gaps of experience such that I implicitly recognize that the chair across from me has a backside, it is not clear that sensory imagination truly gives me a sense of presence of that backside. I can mentally reach for, so to speak, the backside of the chair with the active use of my imagination, but now I am doing something quite different than perceiving. I’m imagining: I’m effectively guessing at what is there and what it looks like.
The point is that the imagination is giving us something that is unique to it, distinct from perception. The imagination allows us to experience what is absent and make it part of the intentional horizon of reference for a given experience. But in doing so, it is not furnishing a sense of presence. Rather, sensory imagination is enriching experience by allowing us to access intentional objects that are absent and experienced as such. It allows us to do what I above called “double seeing” – we sensorily perceive what is present through perception while also attending to what is absent through the imagination.
References
Husserl, E. (1977). Cartesian Meditations (J. S. Churchill, Trans.). Martinus Nijhoff. (Original work published 1931)
Kant, I. (1998). Critique of Pure Reason (P. Guyer & A. W. Wood, Trans.). Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1781)
Kind, A. (2018). Imaginative Presence. In Phenomenal Presence. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199666416.003.0007
Mitchell, J. (2026, September 9). The Puzzle of Perceptual Presence and Imagination. The Junkyard of the Mind. https://junkyardofthemind.com/blog/2026/9/6/the-puzzle-of-perceptual-presence-and-imagination
Noë, A. (2004). Action in Perception. The MIT Press.
Sartre, J.-P. (2004). The Imaginary: A phenomenological psychology of the imagination (J. Webber, Trans.). Routledge. (Original work published 1940)