10. Thinking About Emotions: James & Sartre

For many critics James’ model of the emotions falls short as it does not explicitly demonstrate the role of emotion in higher cognition. Indeed, Sartre’s Esquisse d’une Theorie des Emotions attacks James’ conception of emotions as being too concerned with physiology. For Sartre, emotions are––whether we are willing to admit it or not––our own actions; they are ways in which we make prereflexive choices about how we deal with the world; they are acts which allow us to escape from the world or transform it according to our desires: spite, resentment, love, fear, joy and sorrow are kinds of “magical transformations of the world.”

Sartre was profoundly influenced by Hiedegger, and by Husserl, who influenced them both. For Heidegger, Husserl’s philosophy was incomplete because it did not take into account the historical being for whom such questions about existence and consciousness make philosophy possible in the first place. Heidegger views experience as necessarily situated in a world and in ways of being—Dasein is the being that cares about Being. Heidegger argues that Dasein, finding itself thrown into the world amidst things and with others, is thrown into its own possibilities, including the possibility and inevitability of its own mortality. The need for Dasein to assume these possibilities––the need for it to be responsible for its own existence––is the basis of Heidegger’s notion of authenticity.

Heidegger created the term “thrownness”––which is also used by Sartre––to describe the idea that human beings (Dasein) are “thrown” into existence without having chosen it. Existentialists consider being thrown into existence as prior to any other thoughts or ideas that humans have or definitions of themselves that they create (there are of course great differences here between Atheist and Christian points of view). In Kierkegaard’s words:

How did I get into the world? Why was I not asked about it and why was I not informed of the rules and regulations but just thrust into the ranks as if I had been bought by a peddling shanghaier of human beings? How did I get involved in this big enterprise called actuality? Why should I be involved? Isn’t it a matter of choice? And if I am compelled to be involved, where is the manager—I have something to say about this. Is there no manager? To whom shall I make my complaint?

Heidegger’s conception of authenticity, simply stated, revolves around the individual’s “throwness” into the world and the integrity and honesty with which the individual creates his own authentic subjectivity, only to reintegrate it back into the world. Sartre systematises Heidegger in his own way by positing that for humans, existence preceeds essence: thrown into the world, man makes himself because man asks ontological questions (Being for itself). Objects do not engage in ontological questioning, thus for objects essence preceeds existence (Being in-itself). But also Sartre believed that humans can also engage in Being for Others: A person who cannot embrace their freedom to confront existential absurdity and define their life seeks, in effect, to be “looked at”—to be made an object of another’s subjectivity. This creates a clash of freedoms whereby person A’s being or sense of identity is controlled by––in the mind of A at least––person B’s thoughts about A.

Like Heidegger, Sartre leans towards the view that consciousness and the world are a unified phenomenon and that there is no separating them; that even in attempting to ‘bracket’ conscious phenomena out of common notions of reality we cannot neglect the innate unity of what we have separated. However, Sartre also continues the tradition of the Cartesian dichotomy between the consciousness and the world. Creating what often seems to be an infuriating paradox, on one hand Sartre embraces Heidegger’s Dasein, on the other he extends the Cartesian/Husserlian distinction between Mind––or perhaps more acurately in Sartre’s case, the freedom of the will––and World. Despite the virtuosic and often confusing double talk Sartre employs to deal with this apparent contradiction, he is always clear about the ultimate point of his thought which rests firmly in his concepts freedom and responsibility. For Sartre consciousness is freedom and responsibility is the idea that we are the sole authors of our actions; we must accept the consequences of our actions—there are no excuses. In order to understand the apparent incoherence in Sartre’s position we must realise that he has no wish to justify his philosophy in terms of scientific or logical truths. For Sartre the only truth is action in “good faith.” Sartre is, above all else, concerned with individual and political honesty; the individual and the individual alone creates his own essence:

“If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. Only afterward will he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be.”

Existentialist phenomenology, as put forward by Sartre, critiques and extends the Husserlian method by taking the position that a phenomenological examination of consciousness must take the world into account in terms of action, not simply passive intention. Like Husserl, Sartre’s concept of consciousness requires intentionality–-it is always about the things of the world. And again, like Husserl, Sartre is concerned with making the distinction between the phenomenal experience in the conscious mind and the immediate experiencing of material objects of the world. But, for Existential phenomenology, abstract consciousness is not a passive Husserlian realm like the transcendental ego, rather it is an active, dynamic engagement with or towards the things of the world. Thus Sartre views emotion as imposing itself on the world, transforming it according to a subjective scheme that works in accordance with the modified notions of being and authenticity that he took from Heidegger.

By postulating being as nothingness Sartre tries to separate it from the realm of worldly causality. In order to protect his conception of freedom, it is crucial for Sartre maintain consciousness as independent from the causal relations of the word, as distinct from the deterministic laws of physics. Introducing his own version of epoché, Sartre takes the position that, as we see ourselves as something distinct from the causal categories we impose on matter, we are obliged to make the distinction between the objective or scientific view, and the perspective of active, subjective, first person engagement. Therefore, from the point of view of Existentialist phenomenology, consciousness itself can be in no way considered as an object of itself––hence the break with Husserl––and, more importantly, it cannot be understood as being caused. For Sartre, consciousness is freedom itself.

Sartre’s conception of freedom allows him to hold the position that all action is chosen, and that the emotions are the pre-reflective choices which inform and permit action. Sartre removes causality from emotions, and––perhaps in an attempt to find a middle ground between physical determinism and the freedom of consciousness––describes them as “the terms by which” we make the choices that we do. An obvious argument emerges at this point: if emotions set the terms by which by which we make conscious choices, does that not imply––at least indirectly––causality? Sartre responds that emotions are not causes of behaviour but rather that they are “spontaneous out pourings of consciousness in which one takes the world in a certain way.” For Sartre, emotions are a way of structuring consciousness and he rejects any form of determinism with regards to the acts of the mind––the Freudian sub-conscious is impossible in Sartrian psychoanalysis; and the idea that emotions are fundamentally naturally selected responses to natural stimuli is rejected.

Sartre’s reading of James seems to reduce to James’ concept of emotions to naturally determined physiological responses that inform psychological states; and he criticises James for not giving enough weight to the free mental evaluations that cause emotions. Indeed, James’ essay on the emotions, taken alone, seems to describe only the essential mechanism of emotion and feeling; and while this explains ‘primal’ or early emotional responses that are completely concerned with survival, it does not explain emotional responses which are born out of more complicated mental processes. From this perspective James’ conception of emotion seems reductive and omissive when it fails to provide an alternative to the bodily means by which emotion can be generated in the organism and when it does not take the influence emotion on cognition and behaviour into account.

However, James’ views on emotions very complicated when viewed in the larger context of his work. James’ Principles of Psychology describes the relation of subjective consciousness in relation to the world and society and offers extensive examinations of how the phenomena of experience, including emotions, are interpreted by the individual and evolve with experience; The Will to Believe offers a view of the function of metaphysical mental states and their necessity in the creation of belief, which is in James’ view, of practical necessity to understanding the phenomena of experience spiritually. Emotion is seemingly always present, albeit sometimes tacitly, in the work of James. A broader reading of James indicates that, although emotions and feelings may be phylogenetic in origin and fundamentally physiological in nature, they are experienced, and enter the stream of consciousness where they are interpreted with regards to the highest interests of the individual. As James makes clear, experience is an unbroken stream that unifies the world, the body and the mind; it willfully looks backwards and projects forward in time and thereby constructs meaning, belief and truth out of existence.

Indeed, James’ view would seem to imply the following: the environmental context and physical manifestations of emotions, as they come to be represented as phenomena of experience, develop into mental states which are themselves recalled and reinterpreted; now not only with regards to the demands of the environment and the primal needs of the organism, but also in relation to each other. This creates the internal psychological states that create ideas of right and wrong, good and evil, personal belief and normative social values, and, indeed, subjectivity––the self in its various forms. Higher emotions––and this is not clearly stated by James––seem to emerge from conflicts between these mental states which may be only indirectly caused or influenced by events or stimuli considered external to the mind such as threats to the body and self, the extended self (ie. family, society, possessions etc), or belief and values. And, as Sartre also implies, these conflicts often seem imply choices which are driven pre-reflexively by the emotion that accompanies them. However, Sartre views any kind of implication of causal relations between biological/natural necessity and emotions as a negation of the soveringnty of the will; he rejects the existence of any kind of biological, psychological, historical or normative social determiner on the mind, asserting that this view ultimately leads to a deterioration of true conceptions of freedom and individual responsibility.

Sartre managed to instrumentally employ the structural and theoretical aspects of Husserl and Heidegger to critique the late 18th and early 19th century malaise and complacency brought on, in part, by Darwinian biological determinism, the historical determinism of Hegel, and later, the Psychological determinism of Freud. Sartre understood this condition to be a negation of human nature which is, above all, burdened with the responsibility of total freedom. Sarte’s “Existential Idealism” is born our his reaction to the action (and inaction) of his countrymen during the second world war; he accepts no excuses for collaboration with the Nazi’s, nor does he accept excuses for the absence of action against them. For Sartre freedom is transcendent; it cannot be repressed by science or logic and ultimately rests in the soverignty of the subjective will; emotions are the intentional assertions that the subjective will projects on to the world. But this unrelenting assertion that individual existence is the responsibility of freedom––which is rationalised by the seemingly unvalidated claim that consciousness is freedom precisely because it is not caused––raises problems.

The question that looms largest concerns meaning. Because Sartre’s conception of consciousness appears to move psychically in one direction––the emotions assert themselves pre-reflectively and intentionally towards the passive matter of the world, “magically transforming” it according to subjective choice, and thereby allowing the will to act––it is difficult to to know how or in what context the Sartrian notion of conscious freedom is to exert itself. Indeed, context would imply a causal influence, as a goal would imply a need or a desire. And what about ethics and cultural differences?

Whereas James describes consciousness as caused by an evolutionary process akin to natural selection that favours conscious traits in the survival of an organism—as a complex system of mind, body and world which informs and feeds back upon itself, thus creating understandings and beliefs out of the phenomena of experience which function in the highest interests of the organism—Sartre offers his concept of “bon foi”, which represents the universal spirit of existential responsibility. Where James’ pluralistic view gives play to individual, environmental, and social factors with regard to the interpretation and cause of emotion, Sartre’s philosophy seems to put all its faith in the subject…
TBC

What is an Emotion? William James (1884)

Jean Paul Sartre: The Emotions (fragment)

This is 1 out of 7 in a BBC series on Sartre