Solomon (2006:93-94) – emoções: tradição e aporte de Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre   foi um dos primeiros escritores do século XX sobre o assunto [emoções] a romper com esta tradição. Fê-lo de forma incompleta, mas vou argumentar que lhe deve ser atribuída uma alternativa persuasiva ao modelo antigo de invasão por parte de "espíritos animais" e fisiológicos estranhos que atacam os nossos padrões normais de comportamento e pensamento.

What are emotions? Ancient poets described them in terms of insanity and brute forces. (“Love is a kind of madness,” wrote Sappho; “Anger is like riding a wild horse,” wrote Horace.) Medieval and modern poets alike have talked of the emotions in terms of physiological disruptions and outages—the breaking of hearts; the outpouring of bile, spleen, and gall; the paralysis of reason. Our present-day language of the emotions is riddled with metaphors of passivity: “falling” in love, “struck by” jealousy, “overwhelmed by” grief, “paralyzed by” fear, “haunted by” guilt, “plagued by” remorse. The classic modern psychophysiological theory of the emotions, the so-called James-Lange theory (simultaneously formulated by William James   in America and by C. G. Lange in Denmark), was a scientific canonization of these metaphors: the emotions are physiological disturbances with certain epiphenomenal “affects” (feelings or sensations) in consciousness. Simultaneously, Sigmund Freud   described the “affects” as we might speak of hydraulics, in terms of various pressures and their outlets: filling up (cathexis) and discharge (catharsis), channeling (sublimation), and bottling up (repression). Like James and Lange, Freud links this “hydraulic model” to scientific, but at that time merely hypothesized, operations of the central nervous system. [1] James, Lange, and Freud viewed the emotions as untoward and disruptive forces or pressures, erupting in “outbursts” or manifesting themselves in behavior that is aimless and “irrational,” degrading and often embarrassing, inimical to our best interests and beyond our control. They are not our responsibility (except in their expression, which we are told we ought to control).

Jean-Paul Sartre was among the first twentieth-century writers on the subject to break with this tradition. He did so incompletely, but I shall argue that he must nonetheless be credited with a persuasive alternative to the ancient model of invasion by alien physiological and “animal spirits” assailing our normal patterns of behavior and thought. In his Esquisse d’une theorie des emotions, [2] Sartre defends a view of the emotions as conscious acts, as purposive and “meaningful” ways of “constituting” our world, for which we must accept responsibility. The Esquisse is the only published portion of a projected four-hundred-page manuscript that was to be titled “The Psyche.” [3] It is worth noting that it was written in 1939, about the same time as Nausea, Sartre’s first “existentialist” novel, and only a short time after “La Transcendance de l’ego,” his best-known phenomenological essay. [4] The “sketch” on the emotions not only anticipates but also actually argues many of the familiar themes of Being and Nothingness, [5] mapping out its phenomenological presuppositions with a simplicity that is lacking in the larger work. (In fact, I suggest to my students that they read the “Sketch” and/or Transcendence as an introduction to Being and Nothingness in place of the opaque so-called introduction to that work, in which the paradoxes of phenomenological ontology obscure more than they clarify the existential themes that occupy Sartre for the rest of the book.)

After the “Sketch,” Sartre did not attempt to develop his theory of the emotions as such. Its basic structures, however, are prominent throughout Being and Nothingness and in his later “psychoanalytic” studies. In his brilliant analysis of the career of Jean Genet, [6] for example, the conception of an emotional “transformation of the world,” the key to the theory of his early piece, is also the key to Genet’s “word magic” and his “poetic use of language.” Sartre’s gargantuan study of Flaubert also demonstrates that no matter how his interests shifted over the years, he continued to hold and to employ something of the theory he sketched for us some seven decades ago. [7]