The Philosophy of Sartre by Anthony Hatzimoysis

Author:Anthony Hatzimoysis [Hatzimoysis, Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2014-12-18T00:00:00+00:00

XIV

Near the end of his monograph, Sartre gives a counter-example to his own theory: “the immediate reactions of horror and wonder that sometimes possess us when certain objects suddenly appear to us” is not explained by the theory of emotions so far presented (STE 51). That critical remark is followed by a diagnosis for the apparent failure of the theory to account for those cases (STE 55–7), and a proposal as to how we could accommodate them in a phenomenological theory of emotions (STE 57–61). That proposal, though, may strike someone as as being at a significant distance from the main path of argumentation unfolded in the Sketch. It has been claimed (i) that there are two lines of reasoning in the text, which (ii) are in conflict with each other, and (iii) with the latter line being clearly the most satisfactory of the two.32

It appears to me that the above interpretation is not necessitated by the textual evidence; the Sketch is open to at least one different reading that avoids attributing to Sartre a major inconsistency. Let me first state briefly where the alleged inconsistency lies, and why – in my view – if it did exist, it would be a major one. The alleged inconsistency lies in the difference between the ways in which “magic” figures in the analysis of emotion. In the main line of reasoning presented in the Sketch, emotional experience is explained in terms of magical behaviour, which purports to change one’s situation not by effecting changes in the world, but by changing the meaning of the situation; the behaviour is “magical” because the agent, by means of his body, affects the way the situation is laid out before him, without acting on it. Hence, instead of engaging directly with the nuts and bolts of the case, he stands towards it as if “the relations between things and their potentialities were not governed by deterministic processes but by magic” (STE 40). That account is carefully articulated over the first twenty pages of Section III, which outlines a “phenomenological theory of emotion”. In the last five pages of that section, though, Sartre talks of magic as something found in reality as such, since in horror, terror and wonder “it is the world that … reveals itself suddenly as a magical environments” (STE 57).

According to the interpretation we are discussing, this “new” view of magic, is “more satisfactory” than the previous account, since it fits better with ordinary experience, because it acknowledges that affective experience does not create, but “discloses” the world to us (see Richmond 2010: 153–5).

To assess those claims, it is worth noting, first, that the “new” view of emotion favoured by that interpretation is not really that new: the view that emotion is a way of apprehending qualities of the world is put forward at the very beginning of Section III. Indeed, the view that things may suddenly reveal themselves to us as “hateful, horrible, likeable, etc.”, as well as the claim that emotions

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