The Emotions: Outline of a Theory

INTRODUCTION

PSYCHOLOGY, PHENOMENOLOGY, AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY

Psychology is a discipline which aspires to be positive; that is, it tries to draw its resources exclusively from experience. The age of associationists is certainly gone, and contemporary psychologists are no longer prohibited from asking and interpreting. But like the doctor they want to face their object. When one speaks of contemporary psychology it is still necessary to limit the concept of experience, for, in effect, there can be a host of diverse experiences; for example, one may have to decide whether or not there is an experience of essence or values or a religious experience. The psychologist intends to use only two types of well defined experiences, that which gives us the spatial-temporal perception of organized bodies, and the intuitive knowledge of ourselves that is called reflexive experience. If there are any disputes among the psychologists as to method, they can bear almost solely on the following problem: are these two types of information complementary, should one be subordinated to the other, or should one of them be boldly discarded? But they are in agreement on one essential principle: the inquiry should start, before everything else, with facts.

If we ask ourselves what a fact is, we see that it is defined by that which one should meet in the course of an investigation and that it always presents itself as an unexpected enrichment and a novelty in relation to anterior facts. It is therefore not necessary to count on the facts to organize themselves in a synthetic totality which by itself might yield its meaning. In other words, if one calls anthropology a discipline which claims to define the essence of man and the human condition, psychology—even the psychology of man—is not and never will be anthropology. It does not intend to define and limit a priori the object of its inquiry. The idea of man which it accepts is quite empirical: throughout the world are a number of creatures who present analogous natures to experience. Moreover, other sciences, sociology and psychology, proceed to inform us that there are certain objective connections between these creatures.

No more is needed for the psychologist, in the name of a working hypothesis, to accept prudently to limit his investigations provisionally to this group of creatures. The available sources about them are indeed more easily accessible since they live in society, speak a language, and leave traces of their activity. But the psychologist does not commit himself; he does not know whether the notion of man may not be arbitrary. It may be too vast; we do not have to put the Australian primitive into the same psychological class as the American workman of 1939. It may be too narrow; nothing says that an abyss separates the higher apes from the human being. In any case, the psychologist rigorously guards against considering the men about him as his fellow-creatures. This notion of similitude, on the basis of which one might be able to build an anthropology, seems to him ridiculous and dangerous. He will readily admit, with the reservations made above, that he is a man, that is, that he is a part of the class which has been isolated provisionally. But he will take into consideration that this human character should be conferred upon him a posteriori and that he can not, insofar as he is a member of that class, be a privileged object of study, except for the sake of experiments. He will therefore learn from others that he is man and his nature as a man will not be revealed to him in a particular way by the pretext that he is himself what he studies. Like “objective” experimentation, introspection will furnish only facts.

If it is necessary that there be later a rigorous concept of man—and even that is doubtful—this concept can be envisaged only as the crown of a finished science, that is, one which is done with forever. It would be still only a unifying hypothesis, invented to co-ordinate and grade the infinite collection of facts which have been brought to light. This is to say that the idea of man, if ever it takes on a positive meaning, will be only a conjecture aiming to establish connections between disparate materials and will attain verisimilitude only by its success. Pierce defined hypothesis as the sum of the experimental results which it allows us to foresee. Thus, the idea of man can be only the sum of the established facts which it allows us to unite. However, if some psychologists were to use a certain conception of man before this ultimate synthesis were possible, it would be a strictly personal act, a conducting wire as it were or, better, like an idea in the Kantian sense, and their first duty would be never to lose sight of the fact that it was a regulating concept.

It follows from so many precautions that psychology, insofar as it claims to be a science, can furnish only a sum of miscellaneous facts, most of which have no connection with the others. What can be more different, for example, than the study of the stroboscopic illusion and the inferiority complex? This confusion is not due to chance but to the very principles of the science of psychology. To expect the fact is, by definition, to expect the isolated, to prefer, because of positivism, the accidental to the essential, the contingent to the necessary, disorder to order; it is, on principle, to cast what is essential into the future: “That will do for later, when we shall have assembled enough facts.” In short, psychologists do not realize that it is just as impossible to get to essence by accumulating accidents as to reach 1 by adding figures to the right of 0.99.

If their only aim is to accumulate details of knowledge there is nothing to be said; one simply does not see what interest there is in these labors of a collector. But if they are animated, in their modesty, by the hope, in itself praiseworthy, that later on, on the basis of their monographs, an anthropological synthesis will be realized, they are in full contradiction with themselves. It will be said that this is precisely the method and ambition of the natural sciences. The answer to that is that the natural sciences do not aim at knowing the world, but the possible conditions of certain general phenomena. This notion of world has long since vanished beneath the criticism of methodologists, and precisely because one could not both apply the methods of the positive sciences and hope that they would one day lead to discovering the meaning of the synthetic totality which one calls world. But man is a being of the same type as the world. It is even possible, as Heidegger believes, that the notions of world and of “human reality” (Dasein) are inseparable. Psychology should resign itself to doing without human reality for precisely that reason, supposing at least that this human reality does exist.

Applied to a particular example, the study of the emotions, for example, what will the principles and the methods of the psychologist give us? First of all, our knowledge of the emotion will be added from without to other knowledge about the physical being. The emotion will present itself as an irreducible novelty in relation to the phenomena of attention, memory, perception, etc. You can, indeed, inspect these phenomena and the empirical notion of them we build following the psychologist; you can turn them about again and again as you please and you will not discover the slightest essential connection with emotion. All the same the psychologist grants that man has emotions because experience teaches him so.

Thus, emotion is first of all and in principle an accident. In textbooks of psychology it is a chapter which follows other chapters, as calcium follows hydrogen or sulphur in textbooks of chemistry. As for studying the possible conditions of an emotion, that is, wondering whether the very structure of human reality makes emotions possible and how it makes them possible, that would appear useless and absurd to a psychologist: what good is it to ask whether emotion is possible precisely because it is?

The psychologist will likewise turn to experience to establish the limits and definition of emotive phenomena. In fact, he would be able to observe there that he already has an idea of emotion, since, after inspecting the facts, he will draw a line of demarcation between the facts of emotion and those which are not such; indeed, how could experience furnish him with a principle of demarcation if he did not already have it? But the psychologist prefers to hold to the belief that the facts group themselves before his eyes by themselves. At present it is a matter of studying emotions one has just isolated. To do that we shall agree to realize affecting situations or to turn to those particularly emotive subjects which pathology offers us. We shall then apply ourselves to determining the factors of this complex state; we shall isolate the bodily reactions (which, moreover, we shall be able to establish with the greatest precision), the behavior, and the state of consciousness, properly so called. Following this we shall be able to formulate our laws and offer our explanations; that is, we shall try to unite these three types of factors in an irreversible order. If I am a partisan of the intellectual theory, for example, I shall set up a constant and irreversible succession between the inner state considered as antecedent and the physiological disturbances considered as consequents.

If, on the contrary, I think with the partisans of the peripheric theory that “a mother is sad because she weeps,” I shall, at bottom, limit myself to reversing the order of the factors. In any case, what is certain is that I shall not seek the explanation or the laws of emotion in the general and essential structures of human reality, but in the processes of the emotion itself, with the result that even when it has been duly described and explained it will never be anything but one fact among others, a fact closed in on itself which will never permit either of understanding a thing other than itself or of grasping by means of it the essential reality of man.

It was in reaction against the inadequacies of psychology and psychologism that about thirty years ago a new discipline was constituted called phenomenology. Its founder, Husserl, was struck by this truth: essences and facts are incommensurable, and one who begins his inquiry with facts will never arrive at essences. If I seek the psychic facts which are at the basis of the arithmetic attitude of the man who counts and calculates, I shall never arrive at the reconstitution of the arithmetic essences of unity, number, and operation. However, without giving up the idea of experience (the principle of phenomenology is to go to “things themselves” and the basis of these methods is eidetic intuition), it must be made flexible and must take into account the experience of essences and values; it must even recognize that essences alone permit us to classify and inspect the facts.

If we did not have implicit recourse to the essence of emotion, it would be impossible for us to distinguish the particular group of facts of emotivity among the mass of psychic facts. Since one has had implicit recourse to the essence of emotion as well, phenomenology will therefore prescribe that we have explicit recourse to it and, by concepts, that we set up the content of this essence once and for all. One understands well enough that the idea of man can no longer be an empirical concept, the product of historical generalizations, but that, on the contrary, we have to use, without mentioning it, the “a priori” essence of human being in order to give a somewhat solid basis to the generalizations of the psychologist. But besides, psychology, considered as a science of certain human facts,could not be a beginning because the psychic facts we meet are never the first ones. They are, in their essential structure, man’s reactions against the world. Therefore, they assume man and the world and can only take on their true meaning if one has first elucidated these two notions. If we wish to found a psychology, we shall have to go beyond the psychic, beyond man’s situation in the world, to the very source of man, the world, and the psychic: the transcendental and the consecutive consciousness which we attain by “phenomenological reduction” or “putting the world in parentheses.”

It is this consciousness which must be interrogated, and what gives value to its responses is precisely that it is mine. Thus Husserl knows how to take advantage of this absolute proximity of consciousness in relation to itself from which the psychologist had not wished to profit. He takes advantage knowingly and with full security, since every consciousness exists to the exact extent to which it is conscious of existing. But there, as above, he refuses to interrogate consciousness about facts; on the transcendental level we should again find the confusion of psychology. What he is going to try to describe and fix by concepts is precisely the essences which preside as the transcendental field unrolls. Therefore, there will be, for example, a phenomenology of emotion which, after having “put the world in parentheses” will study emotion as a pure transcendental phenomenon—and will do so not by turning to particular emotions but by seeking to attain and elucidate the transcendental essence of emotion as an organized type of consciousness.

Heidegger, another phenomenologist, likewise took as his point of departure this absolute proximity of the investigator and the thing investigated. The thing which differentiates every inquiry about man from other types of rigorous questions is precisely the privileged fact that human reality is ourselves. “The existant which we must analyze,” writes Heidegger, “is our self. The being of this existant is mine.”¹ Now it is not a matter of indifference that this human reality is I precisely because, for human reality, to exist is always to assume its being, that is, to be responsible for it instead of receiving it from the outside like a stone. “And as ‘human reality’ is essentially its own possibility, this existant can ‘choose’ itself in its being; it can win itself and can lose itself.”² This “assumption” of self which characterizes human reality implies an understanding of human reality itself, however obscure this understanding may be. “In the being of this existant, the latter relates itself to its being.”³ In effect, understanding is not a quality coming to human reality from the outside; it is its characteristic way of existing. Thus, the human reality which is I assumes its own being by understanding it. This understanding is mine. I am, therefore, first, a being who more or less obscurely understands his reality as man, which signifies that I make myself man in understanding myself as such. I may therefore interrogate myself and on the basis of this interrogation lead an analysis of the “human reality” to a successful conclusion which can be used as a foundation for an anthropology. Here, of course, it is no longer a question of introspection, first because introspection meets only the fact, then because my understanding of human reality is obscure and not authentic. It must be cleared up and explained.

In any case, the hermeneutic of existence will be able to found an anthropology, and that anthropology will serve as a basis for any psychology. We are, therefore, in a situation which is the reverse of that of the psychologists, since we start from the synthetic totality that is man and establish the essence of man before making a start in psychology.

At any rate, phenomenology is the study of phenomena—not facts. And by phenomenon must be understood “that which manifests itself,” that whose reality is precisely appearance. “And this ‘self-manifestation’ is not any sort of manifestation … the being of the existent is not something ‘behind which’ there is still something ‘which does not appear.’”⁴ In effect, for human reality to exist is, according to Heidegger, to assume its own being in an existential mode of understanding; for consciousness, to exist is to appear, in Husserl’s sense of the word. Since appearance is here the absolute, it is appearance which must be described and interrogated. From this point of view, Heidegger thinks that in every human attitude—for example in emotion, since we were speaking of it a little while ago—we shall find the whole of human reality, since emotion is the human reality which assumes itself and which, “aroused,” “directs” itself toward the world. As for Husserl, he thinks that a phenomenological description of emotion will bring to light the essential structure of consciousness, since an emotion is precisely a consciousness. And conversely, a problem arises which the psychologist does not even suspect; can types of consciousness be conceived which would not include emotion among their possibilities, or must we see in it an indispensable structure of consciousness? Therefore, the phenomenologist will interrogate emotion about consciousness or about man. He will ask it not only what it is but what it has to teach us about a being, one of whose characteristics is exactly that he is capable of being moved. And inversely he will interrogate consciousness, human reality, about emotion: what must a consciousness be for emotion to be possible, perhaps even to be necessary?

We can understand, at the present time, the reasons for the psychologist’s mistrust of phenomenology. The psychologist’s first precaution consists, in effect, of considering the psychic state in such a way that it removes from it all signification. The psychic state is for him always a fact and, as such, always accidental. And this accidental character is just what the psychologist holds to most. If one should ask a scientist, “Why do bodies attract each other in accordance with Newton’s Law?” he will reply, “I know nothing about that; because it happens to be so.” And if one should ask him, “What does this attraction signify?” he will reply, “It signifies nothing. It is.” In like manner, the psychologist, when questioned about emotion, is quite proud of answering, “It is. Why? I know nothing about that. I simply state it. I know nothing about its signification.” For the phenomenologist, on the contrary, every human fact is, in essence, significative. If you remove its signification, you remove its nature as human fact. The task of a phenomenologist, therefore, will be to study the signification of emotion. What are we to understand by that?

To signify is to indicate another thing; and to indicate it in such a way that in developing the signification one will find precisely the thing signified. For the psychologist emotion signifies nothing because he studies it as a fact, that is, by cutting it away from everything else. Therefore, it will be non-significative from its beginning; but if every human fact is really significative, the emotion studied by the psychologist is, by its nature, dead, non-psychic, inhuman. If, in the matter of the phenomenologist, we wish to make of emotion a true phenomenon of consciousness, it will, on the contrary, be necessary to consider it as significative from the first. That is, we shall affirm that it is strictly to the extent that it signifies. We shall not first lose ourselves in the study of physiological facts, precisely because, taken by themselves and in isolation, they signify almost nothing. They are—that’s all. But on the contrary, we shall try, by developing the signification of behavior and of the affected consciousness, to make explicit the thing which is signified. We know what the thing signified is from its origin: the emotion signifies, in its own way, the whole of consciousness or, if we put ourselves on the existential level, of human reality. It is not an accident because human reality is not an accumulation of facts. It expresses from a definite point of view the human synthetic totality in its entirety. And we need not understand by that that it is the effect of human reality. It is the human reality itself in the form of “emotion.” That being so, it is impossible to consider emotion as a psychophysiological disorder. It has its essence, its particular structures, its law of appearing, and its signification. It cannot come to human reality from the outside. On the contrary, it is man who assumes his emotion, and consequently emotion is an organized form of human existence.

We have no intention of entering here upon a phenomenological study of emotion. Such a study, if one had to sum it up very briefly, would deal with affectivity as an existential mode of human reality. But our ambitions are more limited. We should like to see a study of emotion in a precise and concrete case, if pure psychology can reasonably extract a method and some lessons from phenomenology. We agree that psychology does not put man into question or the world in parentheses. It takes man in the world as he presents himself through a multitude of situations, in the café, with his family, at war. Generally speaking, what interests it is man in situations. As such, it is, as we have seen, subordinate to phenomenology, since a really positive study of man in situations should first have elucidated the notions of man, world, being-in-the-world, and situation. But, after all, phenomenology has scarcely been born and all these notions are quite far from their definite elucidation. Should psychology wait until phenomenology reaches maturity? We do not think so. But if it does not wait for the definitive establishment of an anthropology, it ought not lose sight of the fact that this anthropology is realizable, and that if one day it is realized, the psychological disciplines will have to have their source there. For the time being, it should not aim so much at gathering facts as at interrogating phenomena, that is, to put it exactly, psychic events, insofar as they are significations and not insofar as they are pure facts. For example, it will recognize that emotion does not exist as a corporeal phenomenon, since a body cannot be affected, for want of power to confer a meaning on its own manifestations. It will immediately seek something beyond vascular or respiratory disturbances, this something being the feeling of joy or sadness. But as this feeling is not exactly a quality imposed on joy or sadness from the outside, as it exists only to the extent to which it appears, that is, to which it is “assumed” by the human reality, it is consciousness itself which it will interrogate, since joy is joy only insofar as it appears as such.

And precisely because it seeks not facts but significations, it will abandon the methods of inductive introspection or external empirical observation to seek only to grasp and fix the essence of phenomena. It will, therefore, also proclaim itself an eidetic science. However, through the psychic phenomenon it will not aim at the thing signified as such, that is, the human totality. It does not have sufficient means at its disposal to attempt this study. What will interest it solely is the phenomenon insofar as it is significative. In the same way I can try to grasp the essence of the “proletariat” through the word “proletariat.” In that case, I will be practicing sociology. But the linguist studies the word proletariat insofar as it signifies proletariat and he will be uneasy about the vicissitudes of the world as a carrier of signification. Such a science is perfectly possible.

What does it lack to be real? To have shown proofs. We have shown that if human reality appears to the psychologist as a collection of miscellaneous data, it is because the psychologist has readily taken a point of view from which its reality had to appear to him as such. But that does not necessarily imply that human reality is anything other than a collection. What we have proved is only that it cannot appear otherwise to the psychologist. It remains to know whether it can bear a phenomenological investigation at its roots, that is, whether emotion, for example, is truly a significative phenomenon. The following pages should be regarded as an experiment in phenomenological psychology. We shall try to place ourselves on the grounds of signification and to treat emotion as a phenomenon.

¹ Sein und Zeit, p. 41.

² Ibid., p. 41.

³ Ibid., p. 43.

⁴ Sein und Zeit, pp. 35-36.