emotion, reflection and action in sartre's ontology

C. CHRISTOPHER RODIE New Haven, Connecticut

E ~ M O T I O N , R E F L E C T I O N A N D A C T I O N

I N S A R T R E ' S O N T O L O G Y

There is an antinomy between freedom and interpersonal relations which haunts theoretical reason. This antinomy remains hidden so long as thought is able to maintain an illusion of its oven substantiality, but insofar as this illusion depends upon an underlying system of beliefs which is being continually modified, there is always the possibility that an attitude of doubt with respect to the substantiality of thought can emerge, and with it the

problematic relationship between freedom, conceived as the autonomy of thought, and interpersonal relations, conceived as interaction between free beings.

Within a climate of belief which was essentially theological, such

doubt could not radicalize itself, for it was interpreted as a lack of harmony between the faculties of faith and reason, rather than as a tension within reason itself. But, by the time of Descartes, the notion of faith as a separate faculty of the understanding had been totally absorbed within the ever- growing domain of reason, so that doubt was able to grasp itself as the freedom of thought to say "no" to the being of its objects in order to affirm

its own existence as an autonomous will. With this conception of freedom, Descartes was in a position to discover the antinomy between freedom and interpersonal relations. However, he could not believe in thought conceived as a pure negativity, so he rescued the illusion of substantiality by identi-

fying this freedom of thought with that mode of reflection in which its

objects appear to it as though emanating from a purely transparent medium. When the essential attribute of though was conceived as transparency, reflection itself became substantial, so that an attitude of doubt could be maintained with respect to the being of external objects of thought, but not with respect to the existence of the self as object. If freedom was, for Descartes, an ontological negativity, it was a negativity of two phases, an autonomy of the will and a clarity of the understanding; and the understanding assumed the power to dominate and determine the will.* The priority of thought over action which was thereby established obscured the negative and active character of thought, which subsequently developed a belief in the givenness of all its objects based on its certainty of its self.

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Descartes' rationalistic consciousness could not confront the problem of the existence of other free beings directly; it was content to conceive of others as the members of a coherent system of ideas. The initial term of this system was an idea cif its own existence derived from the exercise, of the second phase of its freedom upon the first. Such thought was inevitably solipsistic since, it referred only to. its own ideas and never to any being outside itself.

Kant was probably the first thinker to attempt a resolution of the antinomy between thought's solipsistic conception of itself and its conception of interaction. Through his critical enterprise it became, apparent that the laws of the understanding, which had furnished the rationalist metaphysi- cians with the self-evident a priori grounds of their systems, could not be

the laws governing a system of beings distinct from one another in their being, and that beings-in-themselves resided in a transcendental realm of willing and feeling governed by the laws of practical and aesthetic reason. If it were possible to preserve the meanings of the elements of the antinomy in a continuous passage from the realm of thought to that of action,

there the antinomy would be dissolved. In other words, only if the concepts of freedom and interpersonal relations could be directly reflected together in certain forms of action could the resolution of the antimony proposed by Kant succeed. However, the critical apparatus, insofar as it had to reIy upon the rationalistic notion of substantial reflection, which could grasp only a priori relations among concepts and not relations among acts themselves., could not by itself insure the passage. Ultimately, the bridge from thought to action could be conceived only when theoretical reason exceeded the boundaries it had set for itself in the critical enterprise and fell back upon a theistic metaphysics.

Sartre's attack upon the antinomy between solipsistic thought and interaction is similar to that of Kant insofar as a resolution is conceived as a preservation of forms of thinking in a passage to the realm of action. How- ever, believing that Kant's failure was the result of his dependence upon an object-oriented substantial reflection, Sartre begins by overturning that rationalistic bias which gives the understanding priority over the will. By emphasizing the radical autonomy of the will, which may be grasped prior to any theoretical reflection in the unity of feeling which is the ground of the factual existence of conscious life, Sartre can show that thought itself has an active character and that the passive ground from which it emerges

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is that same field of prejudgmental experience upon which all forms of action arise. While for Descartes this passive ground was only an infinite nothingness by which thoughts were bounded (It later became God), it has, for Sartre, its own determinate structures. Certain of these structures, which always have the character of autonomy in their being, hold also the promise of immediate relations with other beings; they overflow with being. 2 These structures are the emotions. Sartre will have succeeded in dissolving the antinomy if he can show that structures of pure interaction among persons can be built upon the emotions. By exposing the active

character of thought, Sartre makes possible the conception of a reflection which grasps not merely objects, taken as given, but objects together with the acts which constituted them. It is this reflectiveness which Sartre hopes to make the basis of pure interaction by showing that its structure is both that o.f pure thought, i.e., the attitude of doubt, and that of the emotion shame, in which others are perceived directly. If these structures of interaction can organize the overflow of being experienced in emotion in such a way that the totality of this being is grasped in the reflection of its consti- tuent acts, then the choice of the emotions as a bridge from thought to action will have been justified.

A brief review of the history of the problem to which Sartre addresses himself in his ontology and in his study of the emotions has revealed that all his hope for a theory of pure interaction hang upon a new form of reflection. This form of reflection was the rediscovery by Husserl of the radical attitude of doubt first discovered by Descartes and then abruptly abandoned by him. In practice, this reflection grasps its objects as incomplete in themselves insofar as they signify conscious acts of which they are the expressions. With respect to itself, pure reflection recovers the fundamental negativity which it is; it grasps itself as non-substantial, as an act, and gives up any pretense of identifying itself with its objects. Pure reflection, insofar as it is a conscious act, is scattered through time and cannot arrest itself in an instant; since its being is time, its being is not the being of its objects. This reflection, then, is opposed to the substantial reflection of the rationalist mode of consciousness, which denies its being as tempo.rali- ty and gives itself the illusion of being identical with itself and of grasping

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its objects in toto. While substantial reflection, or in Sartre's terminology, accessory reflection, is free only insofar as it is transparent and can grasp its objects as completed, referring to nothing beyond themselves, pure reflection is free insofar as it is other than its objects and can maintain this otherness by continually going beyond them through time. In giving pre- cedence to the act of thinking, rather than to its content, pure reflection reveals the illusoriness of the transparency of thought with respect to its objects and destroys thought's naive belief in the givenness of these objects. This calling-into-question of the existence of the objects of thought makes explicit the problematic relation between thought and other thinking beings since the conception of such beings as a special class of objects is no longer adequate to insure interaction with them. It is only the adoption of the phenomenological attitude, pure reflection, over the natural attitude, substantial reflection, which manifests the antinomy between freedom and interpersonal relations as the antinomy between temporal thought and inter-

action. Before exploring Sartre's attempt at the resolution of this antinomy, I

would like to clarify the consequences of the exclusive exercise of substantial reflection and thereby suggest the difficulty which this antinomy poses to theoretical reason. Thought which maintains a naive belief in its objects is said to. be in the natural attitude. The antinomy between freedom and interpersonal relations is hidden to theoretical reason so long as it remains in this attitude. I have shown that this attitude is characterized by a reflectiveness which grasps objects of thought only in the relations which they adopt with respect to each other according to the a priori laws which define their natures. The natural attitude cannot ascribe to itself any active nature, but grasps itself as the mere receptor of ideas or impressions which exist already constituted for it; neither can it grasp any of its objects as active, since they are, like it, substantial. There are two limiting cases of the natural attitude, the realistic consciousness and the idealistic consciousness; both types of thought identify their freedom with the clarity of their understanding, i.e., with the extent of the connections which they can estabiish within the objective field as opposed to their being as time.

Consciousness in the realistic mode, seeing in the complexity of discursive reason only a source of confusion, identifies reflection with perception. It is then in a position to affirm the existence of others insofar as they are given directly as facts of experience; but if such a judgment is to avoid

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having the character of mere inference, the realist must identify others with the facts themselves, thereby reducing others to bodies which exhibit certain behaviors. Such a judgment robs others of their freedom, i.e., their very otherness, since they are knowable only insofar as they exhibit recognizable patterns of behavior, i.e., insofar as they behave in the same way as does their observer. In comparing itself with others in this way, the realistic consciousness makes use of what Husserl calls primary memory. Whenever a realistic consciousness exercises secondary memory to make judgments about its past or employs that special type of perception which it calls introspection to discover its feelings, its grasps itself in a way which has no immediate correlates among its perceptions of others. However, by attributing these memories and feelings to the exclusive influence of external causes, such a consciousness effectively neutralizes the private and unique nature of these phenomena; it gives them the status of objects which have essential connections with the field of objects in its external perception, which are accessible to all. The objects of introspection become accessible to anyone who knows the laws of psychophysics. A realistic mode of consciousness thus destroys its own freedom as well as that of others.

Consciousness in the idealistic mode, on the other hand, seeks to preserve the autonomy of thought by mediating its relations to its objects. Thought is first of all a res cogitans which exists only for itself in the relation of identity to itself; this is the meaning of the cogito for Descartes. The relations of thought to its objects, whether they be understood as concepts or as the mere data of sensuous intuition, have their own determinate contents; they are the laws of theoretical reason. But despite the fact that they are themselves conceptual relations, idealistic consciousness finds justification for giving them a special ontological status as the limiting ideas

of the understanding. This justification is generated by the identification of reflection with discursive reason. Such identification allows the relations of thought to its objects to be conceived as subject-predicate relations. The coherence of any system of objects built up by idealist thought is guaranteed by the a priori character of the syntactical forms used to express relations among objects as conceptual relations, while the objects themselves remain distinct from thought. This mediation of thought and its objects by ideas presents special problems when discursive reason approaches the problem of the existence of other thinking substances. It may not conceive an idea of another directly since it cannot have another as an object of its perception.

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The other does not appear in the objective field because it is itself mediated by the idea of its body; it is only the other's body as distinct from the other itself which appears to thought. Insofar as the other must be autonomous, any judgment of its existence can only proceed by analogy from the relation which thought conceives itself to have to its own body and from the givenness of another similar body. Thus, such a judgment, when based on the laws of theoretical reason alone without the addition of any metaphysical postulates, can never be more than a probable inference.

As Sartre showsfl a realistic consciousness which wishes to reinstate thought with freedom must ultimately become idealistic; yet consciousness in the idealistic mode, in order to solve the problem of the existence of others, must adopt a belief in its objects which differs from that of realistic thought only in that here the metaphysical character of this belief is made explicit, whereas in realistic thought per se it remains implicit. Thus, each of these attitudes refers to the other in a vicious circularity. Even the critical idealism of Kant could not avoid this problem, since, according to Sartre, the root of the problem lay in the character of the reflectiveness of the natural attitude, which remains object-oriented whether it be iden- tified with perception or with discursive thought. Sartre speaks of this reflectiveness as impure or "accessory. ''~

To understand the natural attitude as such is a preliminary condition for the resolution of the antinomy which hides within it. Husserlian phenomenology provides the key to this understanding in the notion of bracketing. Bracketing is an operation of theoretical reason which suspends belief in the reality of objects of thought in order to discover, in the layers of signification which adhere to them, structures which are not dictated by natural laws but refer to meanings beyond the objects. These meanings, moreover, can only be the conscious acts which have conferred the objects' structures upon them. It is the phenomenological attitude, having a reflectiveness oriented toward act-object complexes, which refers Sartre to the Cartesian doctrine of freedom as the autonomy of the will. This notion of freedom, which was the source of the attitude of doubt, was abandoned by Descartes upon his discovery of the cogito, at which time h e fell into the natural attitude. But this methodical doubting, the "purifying reflection ''~ of the phenomenological attitude, having been rediscovered by Husserl, manifests the antinomy between freedom and interpersonal relations by pointing to the circularity between realistic and idealistic consciousness which was

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noted above. It was necessary that the freedom of the will first reassert itself as the level of theoretical reason as the freedom to. doubt before the

priority over action which rational thought had claimed for itself could be understood to be not merely arbitrary but self-defeating. Having freed himself from the natural attitude, and, at the same time, having regained a concept of freedom more fundamental than that of the clarity of the understanding, Sartre has at his disposal a notion of reflection with which he can attack the problem of others anew.

II

The adoption of the phenomenological attitude does not automatically resolve the antinomy between solipsistic thought and interaction; but by shifting the level of inquiry into the problem from that of metaphysics, which describes relations among objects of thought, to that of ontology, which describes relations among beings, theoretical reason is able to discover the conditions under which the antinomy might be resolved. It must be recalled that the very adoption of the phenomenological attitude is the

adoption of the notion of freedom as autonomy, thus an adequate con-

ception freedom, which ought to be first condition, is presupposed. The

conditions which must be stated, then, are those necessary for a conception of the existence of others; they may be stated as follows :,6 (1) There must be a cogito which is for-others correlative with the cogito discovered by Descartes, which is for-itself. The cogito is to be understood in each case as a certainty of belief which can come only from a direct intuition. Thus, there can be no question of a formal proof of the existence of others, which could not proceed without certain assumptions; rather, a hermeneutic must be discovered which will elucidate the meaning of each of the cogitos in relation to the other. (2) These two cogitos must have an essential connection, which cannot be a mere conceptual relation but must exist at the

level of factual necessity. The for-itself must contain a for-others as a part of its necessary structure. (3) The Other can be conceived neither as an object of knowledge nor as a necessary condition for knowledge of the self or of the world. The other must be the who "interests our being" concretely and ontically. (4) There is a final condition, which is explicitly stated by Sartre though it is presupposed by the inquiry. This condition

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states that the cogito which is to found relations with others must be conceived as an internal negation, i.e., the negation of itself in its being-as- object and the assumption of its being as time. Moreover, this negation must have two reciprocal components (acts). The full significance of this apparent redundancy should become apparent later on.

Having set out the conditions necessary for the conception of immediate relations with others, Satire seeks phenomena which meet these conditions. The emotions are such phenomena. (1) The emotions are beliefs v given in the immediacy of intuition. In addition,

...there are two forms of emotion, according to whether it is we who constitute the magic of the world to replace a deterministic activity which cannot be realized, or whether it is the world itself which abruptly reveals itself as being magical. 8

(2) These beliefs are structures of the passive ground of consciousness, i.e., they are unreflective, prior to any judgments about their objects? These beliefs are neither mine nor the other's but simply lived experiences which refer to a fullness of being beyond their objects. ~1~ Emotional objects always exhibit a fullness of being, a magical character, and, in certain cir- cumstances, they may be understood as transcendent objects having themselves undergone the modification of passivity, la Thus, the emotions may comprise the category of conscious life which "governs the interpsychic relations of men in society, and more precisely, our perceptions of others. ''12 (3) Emotion is a fall from the natural attitude motivated by a recalcitrance of its objects. In certain situations it becomes difficult for the natural attitude to maintain its naive belief in its objects, or to maintain a course of action based upon its belief, la In these situations the world of objects, which is first perceived as a complex of instruments in which the distances between objects are organized according to certain possibilities for action, is degraded in a way that destroys its character as a world of instruments24 Emotion is a way of being-in-the-world in which the distances separating consciousness from its objects are destroyed. .5 When consciousness no longer perceives a distance between itself and it objects it is no longer faced with the difficulty of acting upon or knowing its object. It can thus grasp its object which, under certain conditions, may be the other, immediately, without any knowledge. (4) As noted in response to the first condition for conceiving of the existence of others, there are two types of emotion. This fact makes possible a reciprocal relation *~ between consciousness and

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the world which can be understood as a connection between two degraded

consciousnesses; it need not be reflective, lr Sartre shows that negation is

merely the replacement of one belief by another at the level of passive

synthesis; a pure negation, then, is not yet reflective. I would like to com- pare texts of Sartre and of Husserl to clarify this point. First, Sartre speaks of negation as a "passage to infinity" :

It is not necessary to speak of a world of emotion as... a world of indivi- dual syntheses maintaining connections among themselves and possessing qualities. But every quality is conferred upon an object only by a passage to infinity. *s

Husserl is more explicit:

It thus appears that negation is not first the business of the act of predicative judgment but that in its original form it already appears in the prepredicative sphere of perceptive experience. Whatever kinds of objectivities are in question, the superposition of a new sense on the one already constituted is always essential for negation, along with the displacement of the first by the second; likewise essential, from a noetic point of view, is the formation of a second apprehension, which is not merely adjacent to the first, which has been displaced, but is super-imposed on it and in conflict with it. Belief struggles with belief.. ,9

Having established the possibility of a reciprocal internal negation in

emotional experience, Sartre has satisfied all the conditions which the phenomenological attitude establishes for an adequate conception of others. But before he can describe concrete relations with others in the field of action, Sartre must discover the specific emotion or emotions which satisfy all four conditions; only from such a concrete experience can he enter the field of action, if he can enter it at all. A study of specific emotional struc-

tures is necessary because these structures cannot be built up from a pure phenomenology due to their dependence on the pure facticiousness of human existence, which is beyond the grasp of theoretical reason. 2~

In particular, it is necessary to discover within some form of the emotional

experience the specific character of doubt, for only an emotion having such a structure, a structure which could meet the fourth condition for a for- others, could be the foudation of a form of action which would correspond to the reflectiveness of the phenomenological attitude itself. It has already been noted that the emotions in general, including fear, pride, sadness, and joy, have the character of negations insofar as they are phenomena of belief. All these emotions meet the first three conditions established by Sartre's

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inquiry, and are for-others in that sense. However, each of these negations has only one active component; each is a conflict of belief, to be sure, but such a conflict is never more than a partial cancellation of a belief in the object as a thematic unity of sense, which persists underneath the conflict. 2.

Such a consciousness need not modalize itself into a scissiparity of partially- filled protentions, thereby constituting itself as doubt and destroying the

thematic unity of its experience; it need only shift its regard from the object's external horizon to its internal horizon. This shifting of regard, which retains an interest in the object, is the prepredicative structure upon which accessory reflection is grounded, but it cannot be the origin of pure reflection because a mere shifting of regard still maintains an interest in

the object taken as a totality, while the ground of pure reflection must be a passive structure which introduces a new theme for perception, a theme which takes the object to be an incomplete signification.

At this point it might well be asked whether an emotion having the

character of doubt is possible in principle since emotion is first of all a

belief in its object. Husserl gives a clue to the answer when he describes doubt as the vacillation between inclinations of belief. 22 Doubt, then, has what Sartre calls a "metastable" character with respect to belief. 2a Insofar

as it has this metastable character, doubt constitutes itself as a series of negations which cannot have the same essential nature as any one negation; on the contrary, this string of negations is grasped in its persistence as a positivity. Thus, consciousness doubt affirms a belief in itself as such over any belief in an object. Since doubt does have the quality of belief, it may in theory be an emotion. But, here again, the limits of pure phenomenology have been reached, and unless there is a real emotion which corresponds

to the structure of doubt, as described by I-Iusserl, the Sartrean enterprise fails. But the emotion exists; it is shame24 With the discovery of this real

emotion, Sartre was able to write Being and Nothingness, for this is the emotion upon which the possibility of a pure reflection can be grounded; for Sartre, shame alone, of all the emotions holds the promise of immediate relations with others.

According to Sartre, '2~ this promise can be realized only if the reciprocity of beliefs which constitute, a doubting consciousness, and shame in particular, has two active components which are simultaneous. Now, there is no question that doubt has two active components, insofar as it is the vacillation of two beliefs; however, Husserl's text (note 22) clearly indicates that

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these beliefs alternate with one another in a single temporal series. At any given instant, doubt is merely a single act which is the partial apprehension of a single object; there is no simultaneity. The question which arises here is: Why must Sartre conceive reciprocity as simultaneity, when such an identification puts the goal of relations with others out of reach of the very reflection which established it ? The answer must lie in the character of pure reflection itself. It may take for its object only a single cogilo. A reciprocal relation between two cogitos, distinct from one another in their being, could therefore not be grasped by pure reflection in a single experience. This fact leads pure reflection to establish the necessary condition (the second condition listed above for the conception of a for-others) that these cogitos be fused at the level of factual experience. This fusion canno( be conceived except as a relation of identity, i.e., a pure simultaneity; thus, even with the replacement of accessory reflection by pure reflection the conceptions of interaction depends upon the laws whidl cognition has established for its objects.

Pure reflection, as I have shown, is act-object oriented, and despite the fact that its objects are taken as the significations of acts, these objects are still subject to the laws of cognition, and most fundamentally to: the laws which establish the criteria of adequacy for objects. It becomes apparent that pure reflection, insofar as it is an act of knowledge scattered in time, can only approach the limit of adequacy which is identity. Thought in the phenomenological attitude cannot be completely reflective because it cannot be simultaneous with itself taken as object. The act of grasping the Other as a transcendent object is possible to a consciousness which has undergone the modification of passivity due to an external affecting pre- sence; but this very act distances itself from itself, so that whenever consciousness exercises pure reflection to try to grasp itself in connection with the Other, it must treat the Other as an incomplete object which signi- fies not the Other's act, whereby he degrades himself into a passivity- capable-of-affecting-another, but its own act of being-affected. While consciousness is for-others insofar as it allows itself to be affected with emotion by an Other, it is only for-itself when it tries, in the mode of pure reflection, to grasp an essential connection between the being-for-others of the Other and its own being-for-others. Thus pure reflection is thrown back upon itself in solipsism in its futile effort to complete itself by knowing itself as being-fulfilled in its emotions. Because this reflective effort remains ina-

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dequate, it always refers itself to its past, in an effort to fill itself out by projecting itself as a pattern of acts to be repeated. In this effort of fulfill- ment pure reflection does not differ from the similar effort which is motivated by the inadequacy of accessory reflection to establish interaction; both attitudes transform themselves into passions.

I have traced S artre's passage from naive thought to the emotions, only

to encounter a blockage to any further passage toward action and others themselves. Nevertheless, if the emotions do not really promise relations

with others in their essential being, they do open into certain partially fulfilled forms of concrete social relations. If one follows the passage taken by Sartre into the field of action, the conclusion that pure reflection remains essentially solipsistic is reconfirmed.

III

I intend to sketch only briefly here those concrete relations with others which may be built upon the emotions; a more thorough treatment of these

relations will be the subject of a subsequent paper. The forms of interaction

which will be discussed here are known as the passions, and they may be placed in two groups according to whether they arise in the mode of accessory reflection, or in the mode of pure reflection.

Practical interaction, which is built upon accessory reflection, has a form correlative with that of the natural attitude of thought which was earlier designated as realistic. Accessory reflection, which is object-oriented, operates within a world of action in which the other appears for-himself-as-an- object-for-me; in other words, it believes that the other appears directly

as a real freedom upon whom it may act directly. In freely thrusting itself

toward the other, accessory reflection entraps itself in a circle of causes.

It acts because the other is given as to be desired, to be destroyed, or to be used as an instrument. These significations of the other correspond to the passions of desire, hate, and sadism, which refer to each other in an order of increasing reflectiveness in terms of accessory reflection's capacity for practical interaction. To be sure, accessory reflection gives itself the illusion of having been coerced into acting in these ways by the other himself; this illusion is established in the deliberation which precedes action. But deliberation is only this same accessory reflection exercising itself as thought,

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which, despite a fundamentally realistic attitude, is never entirely free of idealist tendencies. The finality of this deliberation is nothing other than

an idea of the Other, which corresponds to a "because motive" in the terminology of Alfred Schutz. ~'6 The limiting case of this mode of action avoids interaction with the Other because he is indifferent to it, he neither offers anything nor poses a threat. This case may be the occasion for the emergence of doubt in the reality of the Other's being-as-he-appears and

may motivate the passage to the attitude of pure reflection.

Pure interaction, which is built upon pure reflection, which is act-object- oriented, can only affect the Other in his being indirectly. It takes the form of a manipulation of his instrumental world, of which it becomes the absolute limit for him. Pure reflection determines itself to. be for-itself-as- an-object4or-the-Other, in the forms of love, language (or seduction), and masochism. Its forms are correlative with what might be designated as a quasi-realism in the realm of thought; such forms approach the attitude of the phenomenological reduction, but they lack the character of methodical

doubt, insofar as they contain some elements of beliefs in the Other or in

the world. Pure reflection acts in-order-to construct a world in which the

Other can love me, desire me, or use me as an instrument. Each of these significations refers to the next in an order of decreasing reflectiveness, in

terms of pure reflection's capacity for pure interaction, the highest form of which (and the highest form of action in general for Sartre) is love. The limiting case of this mode of action is anguish, which may arise when pure reflection has exhausted all its forms. Though anguish is a form of the mode of pure reflection, 27 it has no determinate object, and it might be

correct to identify it with the phenomenological reduction itself; it tries to engage a stream of empty protentions, a completely free, i.e., disengaged

and undifferentiated consciousness. But without discovering any object for- itself, anguish loses its reflective character; it is referred immediately back to shame.

Again, the character of pure reflection is seen to frustrate a passage to Others; the shift f rom accessory to pure reflection in the realm of acts does not produce genuine interpersonal relations as Sartre expected. On the contrary, action continues to be intelligible only in terms of motives which arise prior to it, and these motivea, having the character of ideas, never refer to the Other, but only to the thought which thinks them in its delib- erations. Sartre fails to arrive at a conception of others which would

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resolve the antinomy between freedom and interpersonal relations, since, when thought attempts to translate itself into action by falling into an emotional attitude, it is always thrown back upon itself. However, like Kant, whose theory of practical reason has value despite the failure of his philosophy as a whole, Sartre has contributed to thought an important truth about the relations of the emotions to theoretical reflection and to action. Any attempt to found genuinely rational interaction on a psycholo- gistic ontology in which the faculty of feeling is the mediating link between the faculties of pure thought and will is bound to fail. A solution to the problem of free interaction must be sought elsewhere. This is why there is a significant reorientation of Sartre's thought following Being and Nothing- ness. It remains to examine Sartre's later work in the light of our discoveries here.

N O T E S

1 J . -p. 5ar t re , " C a r t e s i a n F reedom," Literary and Philosophical Essays, tr. by Annet te Michel- son. New York : Collier Books, 1962 , p. 19i. 2 J . -p. Sartre, The Emotions : Outline of a Theory (hereaf ter EM), tr . by Bernard Frechtman, New Y o r k : The Phi losophical Library , z948, p. 79. 3 J .-p. Sartre, Being and Nothingness (hereaf ter BN), special abr idged ed., tr. by Hazel Barnes. New York : The Citadel Press , I964, pp. zoz, 206. 4 Em, p. 9x. 5 Era, pp. 79, 9 ~. ,6 The condit ions g iven here are extracted f r o m BN, pp. 226-228.

7 Era, pp. 6I, 73, 75. 8 Em, p. 85. 9 Em, pp. 5x, 56. lo Em, p. 79. l l E m , p. 84. 12 Era, p. 85.

la Era, p. 58. 14 Em, p. 77. 15 Emj pp. 89, 9x. 16 Era, p. 85. 17 Era, pp. 56-57, 77-78. 18 Era, p. 8o. lO E. Husse r l , Experience and Judgment (hereaf ter E]), ed. by L. Landgrebe, tr. by J.S. Chur- chill and K. Amer iks . Evans ton : Nor thwes te rn Univers i ty Press , z975, P. 9o. 20 Era, p. 94. 21 EJ, p. 9 x. 22 El, p. 95. 22 J.-p. Sartre , Existential Psychoanalysis, tr. by Hazel Barnes. New York : The Philosophical

Library , x95~, P. 204.

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24 There is support for Sartre's characterization of shame as a phenomenon of doubt in Max ficheler's excellent study, Uber Scham und $chamgefiJhl, translated into French by Maurice Dupuy as La Pudeur, Paris : Aubier, 1952. See especially pp. 31-3z. However, Scheler's account also provides evidence for a critique of Sartre's theory of intersubjectivity founded upon this emotion: "De m~me le fair de 'se savoir regard6' ne suffit pas par lui-mSme & provoquer la pudeur" (La Pudeur,. p. Vo). A complete treatment of this problem lles outside the scope of the present essay, but it should come as no surprise to the reader that elsewhere I have established the solipsistic character of Sartre's ontology of consciousness. The work of A. Schutz, "'Sartre's Theory of the Alter Ego," Collected Papers, Vol. I, ed. by Maurice Natan- son, The Hague : Martinus Nijhoff, I97I, PP. 18o-zo3, recognizes this solipsism; but unfortuna- tely, Schutz does not see that the critique ought to be rooted in the character of the phenomenological reflection itself. 25 BN, p. 277. 26 A. Schutz, op. cit., pp. 69-7z. 27 Joseph Fell, Emotion in the Thought of Sartre. New York : Columbia University Pr., ~965, pp. 229-23o.

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