JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

Phenomenology69it is, as we have seen, subordinate to phenomenology, since a truly positive study ofman in situation would have first to have elucidated the notions of man, of the world,of being-in-the-world, and of situation. But, after all, phenomenology is hardly bornas yet, and all these notions are very far from a definitive elucidation. Ought psychologyto wait until phenomenology comes to maturity? We do not think so. But even if itdoes not wait for the definitive constitution of an anthropology, it should not forgetthat this anthropology is realisable, and that if one day it is realised, all the psychologicaldisciplines will have to draw upon its resources. For the time being, psychologyshould endeavour not so much to collect the facts as to interrogate the phenomena—that is, the actual psychic events in so far as these are significations, not in so far asthey are pure facts. For instance, it should recognize that emotion does not exist,considered as a physical phenomenon, for a body cannot be emotional, not being ableto attribute a meaning to its own manifestations. Psychology will immediately lookfor something beyond the vascular or respiratory disturbances, this something beyondbeing the meaning of the joy or sadness. But since this meaning is precisely not aquality superposed from without upon the joy or the sadness, since it exists only tothe degree that it appears—namely, to which it is assumed by the human-reality—itis the consciousness itself that is to be interrogated, for joy is joy only in so far as itappears as such. And, precisely because psychology is not looking for facts, but fortheir significations, it will abandon the method of inductive introspection or empiricalexternal observation and seek only to grasp and to fix the essence of the phenomena.Psychology too will then offer itself as an eidetic science. Only, it will not be aiming,through study of the psychic phenomenon, at what is ultimately signified, which isindeed the totality of man. It does not dispose of sufficient means to attempt thatstudy. What will interest it, however, and this alone, is the phenomenon inasmuch asit signifies. Just so might I seek to grasp the essence of the proletariat through the word“proletariat”. In that case I should be doing sociology. But the linguist studies theword “proletariat” in so far as it means proletariat and will be worrying himself aboutthe vicissitudes of the word as a transmitter of meaning.Such a science is perfectly possible. What is lacking for it to become real? To haveproved itself. We have seen that if the human-reality appears to the psychologist as acollection of heteroclite data, this is because the psychologist has voluntarily placedhimself upon the terrain where the human-reality must look to him like that. But thisdoes not necessarily imply that the human reality is anything else but a collection.What we have proved is only that it cannot appear otherwise to the psychologist. Wehave yet to see whether it will bear, to the depths, a phenomenological investigation—