JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

64Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic WritingsIt is a good while since the notion of the world has succumbed under the criticisms ofthe methodologists, just because we cannot apply the methods of the positive sciencesand at the same time expect them to lead us one day to a discovery of the meaning ofthe synthetic totality that we call the world. But man is a being of the same type as theworld; it is even possible that, as Heidegger believes, the notions of the world and of“human-reality” (Dasein) are inseparable. Precisely for that reason, psychology oughtto resign itself to doing without the human-reality, if indeed that human-reality exists.Applied to a particular example, to the study of the emotions for instance, what isto be gained from the principles and methods of the psychologist? First of all, ourknowledge of emotion will be something additional to and outside all our otherknowledge about psychic being. Emotion will present itself as an irreducible noveltyin relation to the phenomena of attention, of memory, etc. You can indeed inspectthese phenomena, and the empirical notions that the psychologists lead us to formabout them, you can turn and turn them about as you will, but you will not find theyhave the slightest essential relation to emotion. However, the psychologist admitsthat man has emotions, he knows that from experience. In this view, emotion isprimarily and in principle an accident. In treatises on psychology it is the subject ofone chapter after the other chapters, much as in chemical treatises calcium might comeafter hydrogen and sulphur. As for studying the conditions under which an emotion ispossible—enquiring, that is, whether the very structure of the human-reality rendersthe emotions possible and how it does so—to the psychologist this would seemneedless and absurd. What is the use of enquiring whether emotion is possible, seeingthat manifestly it is? It is also to experience that the psychologist appeals in order toestablish the limits of emotive phenomena and to define them. And, truth to tell, thismay well awaken him to the fact that he already has an idea of emotion, for afterexamining the facts, he will draw a line of demarcation between the facts of emotionand those of a quite different order. How could experience supply him with a principleof demarcation if he did not already have one? But the psychologist prefers to holdfast to the belief that the facts fall into groups of themselves under his gaze.The question now is how to study the emotions one has isolated. To this end, let usagree to depict some emotional situations or turn our attention to the particularlyemotional subjects offered to us by pathology. We will then try to determine thefactors in such complex states: we will isolate the bodily reactions (which moreoverwe can establish with the greatest precision), the behaviour and the state ofconsciousness properly so called. After that, we shall be in a position to formulate ourlaws and put forward our explanations; that is, we shall try to relate these three types