ABSTRACT
To understand Sartre’s Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions it is crucial to clarify the sort of inquiry that Sartre takes himself to undertake. In the Introduction to the Sketch, Sartre contrasts the method employed by prominent psychologists at the turn of the twentieth century, commonly referred to as introspectionism, with the method of inquiry employed by Phenomenology, understood as the discipline inaugurated by Edmund Husserl. Introspectionist psychologists were interested in studying the factual contents of mental phenomena. Introspectionists would typically collect their data by asking subjects to introspect and report the content of their experiences, for instance by detecting threshold stimuli. Introspectionist psychologists would then compile detailed descriptions of psychological states by relying on their patients’ factual reports. By contrast, Husserl’s phenomenological method was interested in eidetically grasping the universal structures of consciousness. Husserl believed that it is in virtue of its structure that consciousness grasps objects in the world as meaningful. It was precisely the generation of meaning characteristic of the relation between consciousness and the objects in our environment that Husserl wanted to study by means of uncovering universal structures of consciousness. Sartre was inspired by Husserl to pursue an explanation of the role of consciousness, and in particular of its structure, in generating the experience of a meaningful world. It is no surprise then that Sartre takes issue with the tendency of introspectionists to treat psychological states as empirical facts that can be accurately accessed and studied by means of an introspective, observational effort. In so doing, according to Sartre, psychological states are decontextualized, that is, they are extracted from the context within which they arise. Sartre argues that this sort of decontextualization leads to a conception of our psychological states as entities that have a merely contingent relationship to human experience of the world as a meaningful whole. We therefore lose sight of the fundamental character of psychological states as responses to particular situations and simply describe a psychological state as an enclosed nucleus “within our mind.” Ultimately, then, Sartre charges introspectionist psychologists with divesting psychological states of their significance. The “significance” of psychological states refers to their role as constituents of ‘human reality’, that is, of the experience of the world as a meaningful whole (12). In applying the introspectionist method on emotions, introspectionist psychologists fundamentally distort the nature of psychological states. 118
