From: Cheshire Calhoun & Robert C. Solomon: What is an Emotion? – Classical Readings in Philosophical Psychology. New York/Oxford: 
Oxford University Press, 1984. pp.244-250.

 (p.244)

 Jean-Paul Sartre
(1905-1980)

 INTRODUCTION

 A philosopher, novelist, playwright, and political activist, Jean-Paul Sartre continued to be one of the most controversial and lively figures in twentieth-century philosophy. His early plays, novels, and philosophical essays in "existentialism" (a label he adopted for his philosophy) are still considered among the most influential books of the century. In his longest and most famous work, Being and Nothingness (1943), he brought to fruition several years of study in both psychology and a new philosophical disciplines called "phenomenology," which he characterized as the study of the essential structures of human consciousness. But before he wrote Being and Nothingness, he had already completed a lengthy manuscript he proposed to call The Psyche. It was never published, and most of the manuscript (which we know about from Sartre's lifetime companion, Simone de Beauvoir) was lost. He did, however, publish two works based on this original manuscript-The Psychology of Imagination (1940) and The Emotions: A Sketch of a Theory (1939). In The Emotions, Sartre critized both the James-Lange theory of emotion as well as various psychoanalytic theories. He went on to sketch his own phenomenological theory of emotion, in which he focused on the way emotions alter our experience of the surrounding world. This theory is reprinted here.

 At the core of Sartre's philosophy, from beginning to end, is the concept of freedom. His intention in Being and Nothingness, for example is to characterize human existence such that it is "without

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excuse."  He argues relentlessly that we are responsible for everything we do and everything we are. And this includes our emotions. Thus Sartre could not disagree more with William James's theory, according to which emotions are largely instinctual, physiological reactions over which we have no control. Our emotions, Sartre says, are "magical transformations of the world," voluntary ways in which we alter our consciousness of events and things to give us a more pleasing view of the world. Typically, Sartre argues, these "transformations" are a form of "escape-behavior," ways of avoiding some crucial recognition about ourselves. Perhaps his most elegant and simple example is Aesop's fable about the fox and the grapes; the fox tries to reach the grapes on the vine, but cannot. He makes light of his failure by deciding "They are sour anyway." But, "it is not the chemistry of the grapes that has changed," Sartre says-it is the fox's attitude. He has come to look at the grapes as sour, to prove he didn't want them anyway. So too, he generalizes, our emotions are strategies we employ to avoid action, to avoid responsibility, to "flee from freedom," in the language of Being and Nothingness.

 Although Sartre never developed a full-scale theory of the emotions, he nevertheless continued to use The Emotions in his later work, in particular, Being and Nothingness. There his view of emotions becomes even more voluntaristic; and some emotions, for example, anguish (angoisse) and shame, become the key to his overall interpretation of the "human condition" and the various ways we took at ourselves and others and come to make ourselves into the kind of creatures we are. His analysis in The Emotions of the way emotions are strategies for avoiding facing up to ourselves and our situation became the prototype for the notion of "bad faith," a central idea in Being and Nothingness.

 From     The Emotions: A Sketch of a Theory

 A Sketch of a Phenomenological Theory

 Perhaps what will help us in our investigation is a preliminary observation which may serve as a general criticism of all the theories of emotion which we have encountered.... For most psychologists

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everything takes place as if the consciousness of the emotion were first a reflective consciousness, that is, as if the first form of the emotion as a fact of consciousness were to appear to us as a modification of our psychic being or, to use everyday language, to be first perceived as a state of consciousness. And certainly it is always possible to take consciousness of emotion as the affective structure of consciousness, to say, "I'm angry, I'm afraid, etc." But fear is not originally consciousness of being afraid, any more than the perception of this book is consciousness of perceiving the book. Emotional consciousness is, at first, unreflective, and on this plane it can be conscious of itself only on the non-positional mode. Emotional consciousness is, at first, consciousness of the world. It is not even necessary to bring up the whole theory in order clearly to understand this principle. A few simple observations may suffice, and it is remarkable that the psychologists of emotion have never thought of making them. It is evident, in effect, that the man who is afraid is afraid of something. Even if it is a matter of one of those indefinite anxieties which one experiences in the dark, in a sinister and deserted passageway, etc., one is afraid of certain aspects of the night, of the world. And doubtless, all psychologists have noted that emotion is set in motion by a perception, a representation-signal, etc. But it seems that for them the emotion then withdraws from the object in order to be absorbed into itself. Not much reflection is needed to understand that, on the contrary, the emotion returns to the object at every moment and is fed there. For example, flight in a state of fear is described as if the object were not, before anything else, a flight from a certain object, as if the object fled did not remain present in the flight itself, as its theme, its reason for being, that from which one flees. And how can one talk about anger, in which one strikes, injures, and threatens, without mentioning the person who represents the objective unity of these insults, threats, and blows? In short, the affected subject and the affective object are bound in an indissoluble synthesis. Emotion is a certain way of apprehending the world.... The subject who seeks the solution of a practical problem is outside in the world; he perceives the world every moment through his acts. If he fails in his attempts, if he gets irritated, his very irritation is still a way in which the world appears to him. And, between the action which miscarries and the anger, it is not necessary for the subject to reflect back upon his behavior, to intercalate

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a reflexive consciousness. There can be a continuous passage from the unreflective consciousness "world-acted" (action) to the unreflective consciousness "world-hateful" (anger). The second is a transformation of the other.

 At present, we can conceive of what an emotion is. It is a transformation of the world. When the paths traced out become too difficult, or when we see no path, we can no longer live in so urgent and difficult a world. All the ways are barred. However, we must act. So we try to change the world, that is, to live as if the connection between things and their potentialities were not ruled by deterministic processes, but by magic. Let it be clearly understood that this is not a game; we are driven against a wall, and we throw ourselves into this new attitude with all the strength we can muster. Let it also be understood that this attempt is not conscious of being such, for it would then be the object of a reflection. Before anything else, it is the seizure of new connections and new exigences.

 But the emotive behavior is not on the same plane as the other behaviors; it is not effective. Its end is not really to act upon the object as such through the agency of particular means. It seeks by itself to confer upon the object, and without modifying it in its actual structure, another quality, a lesser existence, or a lesser presence (or a greater existence, etc.). In short, in emotion it is the body which, directed by consciousness, changes its relations with the world in order that the world may change its qualities. If emotion is a joke, it is a joke we believe in. A simple example will make this emotive structure clear: I extend my hand to take a bunch of grapes. I can't get it; it's beyond my reach. I shrug my shoulders, I let my hand drop, I mumble, "They're too green," and I move on. All these gestures, these words, this behavior are not seized upon for their own sake. We are dealing with a little comedy which I am playing under the bunch of grapes, through which I confer upon the grapes the characteristic of being "too green" which can serve as a substitute for the behavior which I am unable to keep up. At first, they presented themselves as "having to be picked." But this urgent quality very soon becomes unbearable because the potentiality cannot be realized. This unbearable tension becomes, in turn, a motive for foisting upon the grapes the new quality "too green," which will

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resolve the conflict and eliminate the tension. Only I cannot confer this quality on the grapes chemically. I cannot act upon the bunch in the ordinary ways. So I seize upon this sourness of the too green grapes by acting disgusted. I magically confer upon the grapes the quality I desire. Here the comedy is only half sincere. But let the situation be more urgent, let the incantatory behavior be carried out with seriousness; there we have emotion.

 For example, take passive fear. I see a wild animal coming toward me. My legs give way, my heart beats more feebly, I turn pale, I fall and faint. Nothing seems less adapted than this behavior which hands me over defenseless to the danger. And yet it is a behavior of escape. Here the fainting is a refuge. Let it not be thought that this is a refuge for me, that I am trying to save myself in order not to see the wild animal any more. I did not leave the unreflective level, but, lacking power to avoid the danger by the normal methods and the deterministic links, I denied it. I wanted to annihilate it. The urgency of the danger served as motive for an annihilating intention which demanded magical behavior. And, by virtue of this fact, I did annihilate it as far as was in my power. These are the limits of my magical action upon the world; I can eliminate it as an object of consciousness, but I can do so only by eliminating consciousness itself. Let it not be thought that the physiological behavior of passive fear is pure disorder. It represents the abrupt realization of the bodily conditions which ordinarily accompany the transition from being awake to sleeping.

 Passive sadness is characterized, as is well known, by a behavior of oppression; there is muscular resolution, pallor, coldness at the extremities; one turns toward a corner and remains seated, motionless, offering the least possible surface to the world. One prefers the shade to broad daylight, silence to noise, the solitude of a room to crowds in public places or the streets. "To be alone with one's sorrow," as they say. That is not the truth at all. It is a mark of good character to seem to meditate profoundly on one's grief. But the cases in which one really cherishes his sorrow are rather rare. The reason is quite otherwise: one of the ordinary conditions of our action having disappeared, the world requires that we act in it and on it without that condition. Most of the potentialities which throng it (tasks to do, people to see, acts of daily life to carry out) have

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remained the same. Only the means of realizing them, the ways which cut through our "hodological space" have changed. For example, if I have learned that I am ruined, I no longer have the same means at my disposal (private auto, etc.) to carry them out. I have to substitute new media for them (to take the bus, etc.); that is precisely what I do not want. Sadness aims at eliminating the obligation to seek new ways, to transform the structure of the world by a totally undifferentiated structure. In short, it is a question of making of the world an affectively neutral reality, a system in total affective equilibrium, of discharging the strong affective charge from objects, of reducing them all to affective zero, and, by the same token, of apprehending them as perfectly equivalent and interchangeable. In other words, lacking the power and will to accomplish the acts which we had been planning, we behave in such a way that the universe no longer requires anything of us. To bring that about we can only act upon our self, only "dim the light," and the noematical correlative of this attitude is what we call Gloom; the universe is gloomy, that is, undifferentiated in structure. At the same time, however, we naturally take the cowering position, we "withdraw into ourselves." The noematical correlative of this attitude is Refuge. All the universe is gloomy, but precisely because we want to protect ourselves from its frightening and limitless monotony, we constitute any place whatever as a "corner." It is the only differentiation in the total monotony of the world: a stretch of wall, a bit of darkness which hides its gloomy immensity from us.

 We must first note that the few examples we have just cited are far from exhausting the variety of emotions. There can be many other kinds of fear, many other kinds of sadness. We merely state that they all are tantamount to setting up a magical world by using the body as a means of incantation.

 True emotion is ... accompanied by belief. The qualities conferred upon objects are taken as true qualities. Exactly what is meant by that? Roughly this: the emotion is undergone. One cannot abandon it at will; it exhausts itself, but we cannot stop it. Besides, the behavior which boils down to itself alone does nothing else than sketch upon the object the emotional quality which we confer upon it. A flight which would simply be a journey would not be enough to establish the object as being horrible. Or rather it would confer

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upon it the formal quality of horrible, but not the matter of this quality. In order for us truly to grasp the horrible, it is not only necessary to mimic it; we must be spell-bound, flooded by our own emotion; the formal frame of the behavior must be filled with something opaque and heavy which serves as matter. We understand in this situation the role of purely physiological phenomena: they represent the seriousness of the emotion; they are phenomena of belief. They should certainly not be separated from behavior. At first, they present a certain analogy with it. The hyper-tension of fear or sadness, the vaso-constrictions, the respiratory difficulties, symbolize quite well a behavior which aims at denying the world or discharging it of its affective potential by denying it. It is then impossible to draw exactly a borderline between the pure difficulties and the behavior. They finally enter with the behavior into a total synthetic form and cannot be studied by themselves; to have considered them in isolation is precisely the error of the peripheric theory. And yet they are not reducible to behavior; one can stop himself from fleeing, but not from trembling. I can, by a violent effort, raise myself from my chair, turn my thought from the disaster which is crushing me, and get down to work; my hands will remain icy. Therefore, the emotion must be considered not simply as being enacted; it is not a matter of pure demeanor. It is the demeanor of a body which is in a certain state; the state alone would not provoke the demeanor; the demeanor without the state is comedy; but the emotion appears in a highly disturbed body which retains a certain behavior. The disturbance can survive the behavior, but the behavior constitutes the form and signification of the disturbance. On the other hand, without this disturbance, the behavior would be pure signification, an affective scheme. We are really dealing with a synthetic form; in order to believe in magical behavior it is necessary to be highly disturbed.

Thus the origin of emotion is a spontaneous and lived degradation of consciousness in the face of the world. What it cannot endure in one way it tries to grasp in another by going to sleep, by approaching the consciousness of sleep, dream, and hysteria. And the disturbance of the body is nothing other than the lived belief of consciousness, insofar as it is seen from the outside.

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