JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

Phenomenology65of factors in an irreversible order. If I am partial to the intellectualist theory, forexample, I shall set up a constant and irreversible succession between the intimatestate of consciousness considered as antecedent and the physiological disturbancesconsidered as consequences. If, on the contrary, I agree with the advocates of theperipheric theory (that “a mother is sad because she weeps”), I shall limit myself;fundamentally, to the reverse order of the factors. What is certain in any case is that Ishall not look for the explanation or the laws of emotion in the general structure of thehuman-reality, but, on the contrary, in the development of the emotion itself, so that,even when duly described and explained, the emotion will never be more than one factamong others, a fact enclosed in itself, which will never enable anyone to understandanything else, nor to look through it into the essential reality of man.It was in reaction against the insufficiencies of psychology and of psychologismthat there grew up, some thirty years ago, a new discipline, that of phenomenology.Its founder, Husserl, was first of all struck by this truth: that there is anincommensurability between essences and facts, and that whoever begins his researcheswith the facts will never attain to the essences. If I am looking for the psychic factsthat underlie the arithmetical attitude of a man who is counting and calculating I shallnever succeed in reconstituting the arithmetical essences of unity, of number and ofnumerical operations. Without, however, renouncing the idea of experience (the principleof phenomenology is to “go to the things themselves”, and its method is founded uponthe eidetic intuition), it must at least be made more flexible; room must be made for theexperience of essences and values; we must even recognize that essences alone enableus to classify and examine facts. If we did not have implicit recourse to the essence ofemotion it would be impossible for us to distinguish, among the multitude of psychicfacts, this particular group of the facts of emotivity. Since, then, we have anyhowtaken implicit recourse to the essence of emotion, phenomenology prescribes that wemake our recourse explicit—that we should fix, once for all and by concepts, thecontent of this essence. It is easy to see that, for phenomenology, the notion of mancan no longer be taken as an empirical concept derived from historical generalization;but that on the contrary we are obliged to make use, without saying so, of the a prioriessence of the human being to give a little firm basis to the generalizations of thepsychologist. Psychology, moreover, envisaged as the science of certain human facts,cannot be our starting-point, since the psychic facts that we meet with are alwaysprior to it. And these, in their essential structure, are reactions of man against theworld: they therefore presuppose man and the world, and cannot take on their truemeaning unless those two notions have first been elucidated. If we want to found a