Product Description

One of Sartre's most important pieces of writing, Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions not only anticipates but argues many of the ideas to be found in his famous Being and Nothingness.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #300943 in Books
• Published on: 2001-10-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 80 pages

From the Back Cover

With an introduction by Mary Warnock

‘The best introduction available to the world of Being and Nothingness, and also a useful guide to M. Sartre’s more difficult views on the imagination.’ – Times Literary Supplement

Although written fairly early in his career, in 1939, this is considered to be one of Sartre’s most important pieces of writing. It not only anticipates but argues many of the ideas to be found in Being and Nothingness. For its witty approach alone, Sartre’s Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions can be enjoyed at length. It is a dazzling journey to one of the more intriguing theories of our time. First published in English: 1962.

About the Author
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80). The foremost French thinker and writer of the early post-war years. His books have exerted enormous influence in philosophy, literature, art and politics.

Customer Reviews

Illustrations of consciousness
"We have to speak of a world of emotions as one speaks of a world of dreams or a world of madness."

This tiny book, a thought-experiment really, is a highly useful and simplified illustration of the phenomenological method we find deep at work in Sartre's much longer and more difficult pieces, The Imaginary and Being and Nothingness. Here, Sartre defines his method, with nods to Husserl and Heidegger, as against the Positivist schools of contemporary psychology which he saw accumulating a great "sum of heteroclite facts" which in themselves signified nothing, and against the Freudian conception of the `unconscious', which he thought contradictory.

For Sartre, the world should be "put in brackets" before any attempt is made at defining the essence of emotion; one must consider it as "an organised type of consciousness" rather than a collection of physiologically-related behaviour types or symbolic realisations of repressed desires. Specifically, it is a consciousness much like that of someone asleep. It is a consciousness fascinated with the problem of changing the world en masse, of changing the world to make it compatible with our frustrated intentions, of changing it "magically". "Consciousness is always consciousness of something", it will not let off; emotion is ultimately an ineffectual way of making some of its truths let off, if only temporarily, and to indulge in it is `bad faith'.

I found this book massively useful for my understanding of Sartre's perspective regarding consciousness, which he requires all human-reality be derivative of. Thinking of tackling Being and Nothingness? Buy this first, it's a must.

Unconvinving and difficult to read
Sartre spends the first half of the book bashing psychology with apparently no aim but to discredit it to make way for the second half of the book -- his ideas and arguments, which, in my opinion, were not very convincing. Remarkably, the conclusion does actually seem plausible, just not the way he got there.

I think many of my problems with this book come from the style of writing, and I suspect the translation has something to do with it too. It seems closer to a stream of consciousness than a well organised and reasoned argument.

While I'm not the most well-read person in the world, I have a fair vocabulary, and yet I found myself looking up a word every other paragraph because I had never so much as heard of them before. I don't know if the words chosen were as close to the French original as possible or if the translator had swallowed a thesaurus, but either way it made reading the book a tediously difficult and long process.

If you read this book, I suggest you do it with a dictionary and a lot of patience.