This short work, published at the outbreak of the Second World War, belongs to a series of philosophical texts composed by Sartre between 1936 and 1940 dealing with topics in the philosophy of psychology. In other writings – The Transcendence of the Ego (1936–37), Imagination: A Psychological Critique (1936), and The Imaginary (1940) – Sartre provides treatments of self-consciousness and imagination which parallel the account of emotion in the Sketch. Collectively these early philosophical writings provide a point of entry to the comprehensive philosophical theory expounded in Sartre’s masterpiece, Being and Nothingness (1943), the work which established Sartre’s existentialism as a major force in the postwar years.
Sartre’s analysis of emotion can be grasped, and its penetrating brilliance appreciated, without any prior knowledge of Sartre’s ideas or issues in philosophical psychology. What chiefly sets the Sketch apart from the other early studies is the succinctness and lucidity of its articulation of the basic standpoint of Sartre’s existentialism: it stands as a philosophical counterpart to the literary articulation of existentialism in Sartre’s Nausea, which appeared a year earlier.
Though dealing with only one type of mental phenomenon, and to that extent comprising a mere fragment of the full theory detailed in Being and Nothingness, the Sketch foregrounds two fundamental features of Sartre’s philosophy: its broadly ethical orientation, and its aim to provide a profound reconception of what we ordinarily think of as constituting ‘the mind’. The two commitments are connected strategically: by getting us to acknowledge the necessity of revising our ordinary understanding of what the mental as such amounts to, and of accepting his own alternative account of its nature, Sartre supposes that we will at last take possession of ourselves; having achieved a new transparency in our self-apprehension, the way will be open to a deeper assumption of self-responsibility.
The view of emotion which we naturally form, Sartre reasonably supposes, is that of a more or less indistinct and partially inchoate force which enters consciousness from without, reflecting the contribution of bodily or unconscious sources, the characteristic effect of which is to alter the course of our thoughts and to influence, perhaps even to determine, our will in specific ways which reflect the type of emotional state in question. It is of note that, in order to articulate this picture of emotion, recourse must be made to quasi-physical metaphors, of the sort that we familiarly employ in describing affective episodes in our interior lives: emotions, as we typically report them, obscure or cloud our view of things, seethe and well up in the manner of organic processes, impel or arrest thought and action in the manner of mechanical forces, and so forth.
The natural language of affect demonstrates the extent to which we subscribe pre-reflectively to a conception of emotion as something like a wave of sensation that crashes over the self, suffusing, colouring, and redirecting the diaphanous stream of rational consciousness. Our endorsement of the logical implications of this conception – namely, that responsibility does not extend to the having of emotion as such, but only and at most to what we choose to do in the face of the emotions that happen to erupt in us – finds expression in the conviction, reflected in the legal category of crime passionel, that emotions can mitigate culpability, if not exculpate entirely: strong affect, we suppose, is able to weaken and perhaps even to take full possession of an individual’s power of deliberation. The long history of philosophical reflection on the emotions, extending from the ancient Stoics to the early moderns, offers many different views of the relation of ‘the passions’ to ‘the faculty of reason’, but does not challenge in any fundamental way the assumption that emotions arrive on the scene of consciousness as passively received givens: though of course linked in some way to a person’s character and manifesting their enduring dispositions, emotions are regarded as constraining self-determination and not as themselves instances of self-determination. The romantic privileging of affective life as ethically or cognitively superior to cool reflection exhibits the same underlying assumption in inverse form.
The psychological theories on which Sartre concentrates in the first section of the essay – those of William James and Pierre Janet – are selected in part because of their prominence in the scientific psychology of Sartre’s day, but also and more importantly because they exemplify ways in which the conception of emotion native to ordinary consciousness lends itself to theoretical refinement. Thus James reduces affect to awareness of physiological processes, while Janet identifies emotion with a functionally defined alternative to rational conduct, which comes into operation in contexts of ‘defeat’. The former fails to explain why the conscious registering of bodily events should have any specifically emotional character; in the case of fear, for example, what we are afraid of is not a physiological occurrence. Janet, though he correctly grants the emotions their psychological autonomy, according them an efficacy independent of bodily processes, leaves the phenomenon of emotion unintelligible in so far as the switch of behavioural modality which he postulates is a mere theoretical posit, which has no reality for the subject. Janet has, in addition, no way of accounting for the organization of emotional phenomena, their distinctive internal coherence; the function of, as it were, signing off from rational conduct could be performed just as well by a diffuse, disorganized collapse of behavioural capacity.
Sartre then turns to psychoanalysis, which he sees as supplying the basis for a major advance. Freud offers, not in his theory of affect, which is minimal and crudely mechanistic, but in his theory of symbolization – the process whereby a conscious phenomenon can come to bear an unconscious (repressed or sublimated) meaning – a model which when applied to emotion allows it to be grasped as bearing an appropriately deep, unitary significance. What principally limits Freud, Sartre argues, is the metapsychological formulation of his insight: psychoanalysis holds apart the symbol and the symbolized in different mental regions, rendering their essential unity unintelligible. The argument which Sartre picks here with Freud is resumed and pursued at a deeper level in Being and Nothingness, where the focus is shifted to psychoanalysis’ assumption of an unconscious mind.
With the ground thus cleared, Sartre is able to present his central, radical thesis concerning emotion, which effectively breaks with two thousand years of philosophical psychology by disposing of the entrenched assumption that emotion is opposed to free choice. Emotion is, Sartre maintains, ‘a transformation of the world’ undertaken in the face of some requirement of action that the world imposes on us or the perceived difficulty which it presents in relation to some project of ours. By means of this transformation ‘we try to change the world; that is, to live in it as though the relations between things and their potentialities were governed not by deterministic processes but by magic’. The transformation, freely initiated at the pre-reflective level, is directed at the qualities and relations of objects, which are reconfigured in such a way as to eliminate dissonance from our relation to the world: in one way or another we are relieved of the burden of action, by dint of extinguishing the worldly source of the problematic practical demand. In the most basic case: the grapes that we cannot reach come to look ‘too green’. In the more complex case of melancholy: the oppressive world at large is reduced to an ‘affectively neutral reality, a system in total affective equilibrium’.
Though our reconfiguration of the world bears only on the phenomenological qualities by virtue of which objects index possibilities and necessities of action, and does not touch the objective relations in which they stand, emotional transformation of the world nonetheless issues in belief: ‘The qualities conferred upon objects are taken as true qualities.’ The physiological accompaniments of emotion are testimony to the involvement of belief: we, as it were, insist through the medium of our bodies on the reality of the affective transformation.
Emotion is, therefore, itself a form of behaviour, an undertaking with means–end structure, distinguished from rational conduct by the fact that the condition into which we transfer ourselves through emotion involves a loss of reality and suspension of practical engagement. What allows us to conceal from ourselves the magical character of the entire strategy is the pre-reflective spontaneity of emotion: in reflective awareness we are presented with the product of our affective operation on the world and not with its origin in consciousness. However, and crucially for Sartre, this makes no difference to its status as an exercise of freedom and hence topic of personal responsibility: emotional actions, no less than our overt public deeds, manifest our choice of mode of being-in-the-world.
The impetus to Sartre’s reconception of emotion and the mental in general came from German philosophy, the transcendental phenomenology of Husserl and the modified phenomenological standpoint or ‘fundamental ontology’ of Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927), which Sartre had studied in Berlin in the early 1930s. Sartre avows the crucial influence of both thinkers and describes the Sketch as an exercise in phenomenology, but does not draw attention to the vital respect in which he modifies the phenomenological method: namely, through referring reflection on mental phenomena back to the practical, first-person standpoint from which I self-consciously seek to determine what I should do, and how or what I should be. The Sketch offers accordingly a view of emotion that is meant to answer to our inalienable interest in living a life that we can affirm as our own.
It is important to bear in mind that the Sketch is intended only as a philosophical ‘experiment’, as Sartre puts it at one point. Though the general anti-naturalistic position on the nature of the mental is regarded by Sartre as securely established, Sartre does not intend his analyses of emotional states to be taken as definitive. Sartre proceeds by citing actual or imaginary instances of emotion and suggesting speculative accounts of their meaning, consistent with his thesis that consciousness is the source of its own motivation, i.e. free. This makes clear the kind of interior, hermeneutical approach that is required, on Sartre’s account, if sense is to be made of emotion, but its limitations reveal themselves when we reflect that no unitary theoretical standpoint from which the diversity of determinate forms of emotion might be understood is proposed. The Sketch does not have the systematic character of Sartre’s study of the different forms of imaginative consciousness in The Imaginary, and only in a few cases (melancholy is perhaps one) does Sartre succeed in making a plausible suggestion concerning the essential meaning of a specific kind of emotion, as opposed to merely identifying a motive that might, contingently, underlie its formation on certain occasions. It is also uncertain how much of emotional life can be squeezed into the relatively narrow self-deceptive mould that dominates Sartre’s thinking: the model of emotion as a crystallization of bad faith appears better suited to explain cases where emotions occupy focal consciousness – full-fledged ‘emotional reactions’, as it might be put – than their more common occurrence in a subaltern, ‘adverbial’ position, as merely qualifying the way in which we do or think about things. It is of note that in Being and Nothingness Sartre begins to develop a broader view of affective consciousness, which allows that affect can do more than simply crystallize bad faith.
In addition to the value that it holds from the standpoint of coming to understand Sartre’s philosophy, the Sketch continues to provide a reference point for reflection on emotion among philosophers who have no interest in or sympathy with Sartre’s project of constructing a philosophy of freedom but who instead wish, as they conceive matters, to understand the mind on its own terms, without ethical or metaphysical prejudice. The challenge facing such theorists, as Sartre lays it down, is to make intelligible the constitution of emotion as a distinct configuration of consciousness. To gloss this merely as the ‘feeling component’ or ‘characteristic subjective correlate’ of a functional state is to return to the kind of position occupied by Janet. The challenge can of course be declined, for it may be held that the sorts of truths about the mind which are of interest to objective scientific psychology cannot be gleaned from the first-person angle, and furthermore denied that such a science is obliged to respect the deliverances of consciousness. The cost of doing so is, in a curious way, to vindicate Sartre: if naturalistic psychology exiles consciousness, then it declares its own inadequacy to the task of self-understanding which, Sartre argues, is inseparable from self-conscious subjectivity. Here, as throughout his writings, Sartre formulates the philosophical options in terms of a stark choice of alternatives: either a naturalism which degrades consciousness to mere mimicry of physical processes, or a humanism which affirms the unconditional reality of freedom.
SEBASTIAN GARDNER
April 2013