Emotional consciousness, in Sartre’s seemingly deprecatory term, is a
“degradation” of consciousness in which consciousness believes. It is
unreflectively aware of this degradation into the magical relation to the
world and it is positionally aware of its noematic correlate, the “magical”
world. But, as such, it is capable of escaping this trap that it has laid for
itself either by a change in this situation to which it is reacting (for
example, the golfer finally escapes the sand trap) or by “the purifying
reflection of the phenomenological reduction” by which the emotion is
perceived insofar as it constitutes the world as magical: “I find it hateful
becauseI am angry.” But Sartre admits that “this relation is rare and
necessitates special motivations,” which, as we saw inTranscendence of the
Ego, he believes Husserl fails to provide (STE 61 ). This liberating move
resembles Spinoza’s famous counsel to reflect on our emotional state
rather than on its object and we shall overcome its power.
Sartre finishes this sketch by appealing to the regressive and progres-
sive methods that he will modify and elaborate in his essaySearch for a
Methodnearly twenty years later. Here he relates the methods to phe-
nomenological psychology and pure phenomenology respectively. His
growing sense of the distinction and likely mutual exclusion of the
existential with its contingency and facticity, and the pure phenomeno-
logical with its transcendental suspension of belief in the existential, is
articulated by way of conclusion: “The various disciplines of phenom-
enological psychology areregressive, and yet the term of their regression
isfor thema pure ideal. Those of pure phenomenology are, on the
contrary, progressive.” The two must complement each other because,
while pure phenomenology can show that emotion is essentially a real-
ization of human-reality insofar as it isaffection, it cannot show that
human reality must necessarily manifest itself insuchemotions. “That
there are such and such emotions, and only these, manifests without any
doubt thefacticityof human existence. It is this facticity which makes
necessary a regular recourse to the empirical; it is this which, in all
likelihood, will prevent psychological regression and phenomenological
progression from ever coming together” (STE 64 ).
Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions 103