Abstract
In this paper, I explore the ontological implication of Sartre’s and Heidegger’s phenomenological accounts of emotion. I start by looking at Sartre’s notion of the ‘magical world’ in his booklet Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions, showing how emotion, for him, reveals the overall structure of ‘human reality’ rather than a dispensable aspect of it. Discussing experiences of the magical world allowed Sartre to ‘bracket’ what he called ‘the determinism of the world’, which predominated naturalist-representationalist psychology of emotion in his time. Then I derive from Sartre’s account of emotion an ontological implication, i.e., that the world is primarily magical. Without at once deciding whether this applies to Sartre, I exhibit how radical it can get by examining Heidegger’s more consistent account of emotion in Being and Time. There, it turns out that the determinist, neutral world championed by representationalism relies on an ‘emotionless emotion’ and thus is not fundamental. Finally, I suggest that, while textual evidences in Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions are inconsistent and allow a strong and a weak interpretation of its ontological implication, the former should be favored in consideration of Sartre’s later development.
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Notes
See, for example, Zahavi 2008.
The term appears for the first time in STE, p. 5. There Sartre equates it to Heidegger’s ‘Dasein’. This means that by ‘human reality’ Sartre is basically referring to human being, but insofar as it is structured as a specific kind of being that questions its own Being. This definition of ‘human reality’ was shown briefly in STE, p. 9, but its full meaning did not come up until Being and Nothingness (Sartre 1992, hereafter ‘BN’, pp. 24, 35–36).
I do not suggest a temporal interval between the ‘first’ and the ‘then’. I only mean that the ‘first’ is a precondition of the ‘then’.
Sartre used the example Janet provided: ‘Here, for instance, is a girl whose father has just told her that he has pains in the arms, and that he has some fear of paralysis. She falls to the ground, prey to a violent emotion which returns a few days later with the same violence, and which finally obliges her to seek help from doctors. In the course of her treatment she confesses that the thought of nursing her father, and leading the austere life of a nurse, had suddenly appeared to her as insupportable’. (STE, p. 18)
Due to lack of space I cannot elaborate on the phenomenological notion of ‘constitution’ that Sartre relied on. Briefly, it means that the Being of the world and worldly entities must be understood as a constant and perpetual becoming in which the constituting consciousness participates, and so the world does not exist in isolation from consciousness. This does not mean, however, that the world is a mere projection, i.e., a capricious fabrication, of consciousness. Instead, there is always more for consciousness to discover about what it constitutes; it cannot predetermine the latter in every detail, but has to follow the latter’s rules and grope gradually. Sartre touches on this theme in The Psychology of the Imagination (1972), pp. 177–179, 199–200, 210–212. The full span of the problem, however, cannot be clarified without studying Husserl’s phenomenology of ‘passive synthesis’ and time.
Sartre has an ontological reason for this: for him, consciousness is a freedom that remains abstract and empty until submitting itself to limits of ‘facticity’; it is caught in its own snare. (BN, p. 620) I have elsewhere termed this quasi-Fichtean ontology a ‘dualist monism’, see Liu 2019.
Richmond (2010) notes that Sartre adopted the term ‘magic’ in STE partly because anthropological discussions at that time characterized primitive people’s worldview as ‘magic’, i.e., different from the rationalistic thought pattern of modern Europeans. Sartre’s usage of the term, however, was less evaluative and biased than, for instance, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl.
Sartre might argue that, due to the fact that thinking necessarily takes time and relies on imperfect expressions, his writing strategy was inevitable. If so, he would be following Bergson to champion an interpenetration between the form and content of philosophy. Whether this is justified or not, the clue it gives us is that claims appearing later in a certain work usually have more weight than earlier ones. This corroborates my preference in ‘Between Two Interpretations’ for the stronger interpretation, which is supported by claims Sartre made towards the end of STE.
For example, BN was some 800 pages of rambling claims, starting from the it-itself [en-soi] and the solipsist for-itself [pour-soi] only in order to overcome them in later Parts. By contrast, BT (especially Division One), despite all the controversy, was highly self-consistent and rigorous.
This term is almost untranslatable. Literally it means ‘situatedness’ or ‘the possibility to be found “there” [da]’. Our Befindlichkeit refers to the fact that we are always disclosed as particular entities localized and temporalized in a world surrounding us, i.e., in a referential framework that gives meaning to our existence and makes things ‘matter’ to us. Macquarrie and Robinson render it ‘state-of-mind’, which bears an ontological presumption incompatible with Heidegger’s thinking.
In my references to BT, the first page number refers to that in the German original, the second to the English translation.
Heidegger shared this idea. In fact, the German word ‘Stimmung’ literally means that the world is ‘tuned’ like a musical instrument. When I get joyous, everything in the world appears to me as hilarious and blissful; they are tuned, as it were, to a ‘channel’ of joy.
Here I am conflating two terms, ‘emotion’ and ‘mood’, which usually are not conflated in contemporary literature. The reason behind this is twofold. First, for Sartre emotion belongs to the fundamental structure of human being (see the beginning of ‘Between Two Interpretations’). Therefore, it is unlikely that one can be devoid of emotions at any point. This in effect brings Sartre’s notion of emotion closer to what is usually referred to as mood in contemporary literature.
Second, as will become clear in this paper, the term ‘emotion’ has a mechanistic connotation that is incompatible with the role Sartre intended it to play. The word comes from the French verb émouvoir, which in turn comes from the Latin verb emovere. Movere means ‘to move’, while the prefix ‘e-’ indicates that the movement is outward. Thus ‘emotion’ means literally that one is moved out of something, though it is not clear from the word itself (a) what moves the person and (b) out of what the person is moved. This ambiguity in the concept of emotion is obscured in prevalent accounts naturalistic psychology makes of emotion. In order to bring every being into causal relations, psychology interprets emotion as a mental state. It can be caused by physical or psychological factors, last for a while, and cause other things (such as a facial expression, a behavior or a thought—a ‘mental representation’) to arise or vanish. With respect to the aforementioned ambiguities in the concept of emotion, (a) that which moves the person must be locatable in entities we know, or at least can know in principle, whereas (b) that out of which the person is moved is simply one’s ‘normal’, emotion-less state, a state distinguished from the ‘abnormal’, emotional state, yet placed at the same level such that the two may take place alternately.
All of these are problematic to Sartre. The unfortunate inconsistency in STE comes partly from the fact that he actually meant mood (or, more precisely, attunement), but chose to discuss under the concept of emotion.
I do not think Heidegger’s philosophy was anthropocentric at any stage, but it was obvious that BT’s ideal of total clarification by way of Dasein later turned out to be problematic. Even so, Heidegger kept talking about moods, since they promise an unconcealment despite their work of concealment. (Heidegger 1995, pp. 59–68, 359)
This claim has to be qualified though, since Sartre’s French original (dans l’émotion / à travers l’émotion) does not have the temporal connotation that Mairet’s English translation ‘during’ does.
There Sartre subscribed to Gestalt psychology and accordingly fell into the trap of the latter’s naïve realism about the configuration of the picture puzzle before one recognizes any figure out of it. Introducing the body did not solve the issue, but rather revealed that Sartre needed, within the causal network, a real deputy of the conscious attitude, so that the same neutral world-configuration can exhibit different patterns under different attitudes—the pattern is co-determined by the neutral world-configuration and the body as an object. In this way the neutrality of the world at large is saved. (STE, pp. 40–41)
It might be illuminating to note that the Husserlian version of the purgatory was the ‘phenomenological reduction’.
My claim here is that, in BN, the world at large was no longer characterized as ‘magical’. The word ‘magical’ still appeared in the book, but, as Richmond (2010) notes, ‘there are passages in the text where the content of the idea of “magic” remains, but Sartre does not use the word’. Instead, in BN ‘magical’ was retained as a pejorative term that applied to theoretical constructions Sartre rejected, for instance Freud’s ‘materialist mythology’ in psychoanalytic explanation. There was, so to speak, a ‘reversal of the rhetoric’ from STE to BN.
Sartre’s reason behind this reversal, I suggest, was this. On the one hand, as we have noted, BN’s ontological framework already allowed the world at large to be ‘full of surprise, wonder and risk’ without invoking anything supernatural. Therefore, the word ‘magical’ may be released from its previous usage in STE. On the other hand, though it is acceptable, and even inevitable, to live and act ‘magically’ (i.e., to disregard logical coherence) in everyday life, Sartre still maintained that one should refrain from doing so when theorizing—otherwise one ends up with (for example) Freud’s category-mistake in his ‘application of an external point of view to the explanation of “my” subjectivity’. (Richmond 2010) In this view, Sartre’s pejorative use of the word ‘magical’ in BN suggests a distinction between the ‘genuinely magical’, namely the lived world with all its wonder, and the ‘bad magical’, namely the tendency among those scientists and psychoanalysts who perform incoherent reasoning in their second-order, theorizing activity while at the same time purporting their theories to be rigorous, i.e., non-magical.
Again, one easily understands the expression ‘the world we actually experience’ in a representationalist manner, as if it were a layer between us and reality. Arguments in favor of this may appeal to (a) the question of ‘experience for whom’, assuming an underlying commonality, and (b) the reference to the regularity of experience. However, the phenomenological notion of the world is not an exhaustive or exhaustible list of things and facts; it is a determinable yet undetermined horizon that can only be fulfilled in the fullness of time. Therefore, discrepancies between experienced worlds can be accommodated without assuming an underlying reality. Moreover, reality cannot be defined with respect to causality or any pre-determined regularity whatsoever, for these originate from our attempts to rationalize reality, to bring it under control and prediction, so as to keep at bay the ‘wonder, mysteries, unpredictability and surprise’ reality involves, though this is never completely successful. Heidegger thus says that the ‘objective’ is where the power of the subject culminates.
In a brief article shortly predating STE and introducing Husserl’s phenomenology to his French colleagues, Sartre already showed an interest in giving phenomenology an ‘emotional’ twist: ‘Husserl has restored to things their horror and their charm. He has restored to us the world of artists and prophets: frightening, hostile, dangerous, with its havens of mercy and love. He has cleared the way for a new treatise on the passions which would be inspired by this simple truth…’ (Sartre 1970, pp. 4–5)
References
Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and time (J. Macquarrie, & E. Robinson, Trans. New York: Harper & Row.
Heidegger, M. (1995). The fundamental concepts of metaphysics: World, finitude, solitude (W. McNeill, & N. Walker, Trans. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Liu, R. (2019). Sartre’s godless theology: Dualist monism and its temporal dimensions. Open Theology, 5(1), 182–197.
Richmond, S. (2010). Magic in Sartre's early philosophy. In J. Webber (Ed.), Reading Sartre: On phenomenology and existentialism (pp. 155–170). London: Routledge.
Sartre, J.-P. (1970). Intentionality: A fundamental idea of Husserl's phenomenology. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 1(2), 4–5.
Sartre, J.-P. (1972). The psychology of the imagination (B. Frechtman, Trans.) London: Methuen.
Sartre, J.-P. (1992). Being and nothingness: A phenomenological essay on ontology (H. E. Barnes, Trans.) New York: Washington Square Press.
Sartre, J.-P. (2002). Sketch for a theory of the emotions (P. Mairet, Trans.) London & New York: Routledge.
Zahavi, D. (2008). Subjectivity and selfhood: Investigating the first-person perspective. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the Department of Philosophy, York University, Toronto, Canada, for letting me present a draft of this paper and receive feedback. I would like to thank especially Kym Maclaren (Ryerson University), Lauren Edwards (York University), Tatyana Kostochka (University of Southern California), and Cynthia Willett (Emory University) for their constructive comments and Alia Al-Saji (McGill University) for discussions on the topic of this paper.
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Liu, R. The ‘Magical World’ of Emotions and Its Triumph: on the Ontological Inconsistency in Sartre’s Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions. SOPHIA 59, 333–343 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-020-00775-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-020-00775-8