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| 24016 | Consciousness always transcends itself |
| Full Idea: It is of the essence of consciousness to transcend itself | |||
| From: Jean-Paul Sartre (Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions [1939], §III) | |||
| A reaction: As usual, I am a bit baffled by these sorts of pronouncement. Sounds like an oxymoron to me. Maybe it is a development of Schopenhauer's thought. |
| 24013 | An emotion and its object form a unity, so emotion is a mode of apprehension |
| Full Idea: Emotion returns to its object every moment, and feeds upon it. …The emotional subject and the object of the emotion are united in an indissoluble synthesis. Emotion is a specific manner of apprehending the world. …[39] It is a transformation of the world. | |||
| From: Jean-Paul Sartre (Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions [1939], §III) | |||
| A reaction: The last sentence is the essence (or existence?) of Sartre's core theory of the emotions. They are, it seems, a mode of perception, like a colour filter added to a camera. I don't think I agree. I see them as a response to perceptions, not part of them. |
| 24017 | Emotion is one of our modes of understanding our Being-in-the-World |
| Full Idea: Emotion is not an accident, it is a mode of our conscious existence, one of the ways in which consciousness understands (in Heidegger's sense of verstehen) its Being-in-the-World. …It has a meaning. | |||
| From: Jean-Paul Sartre (Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions [1939], §III) | |||
| A reaction: Calling emotions a 'mode' suggests that this way of understanding is intermittent, which seems wrong. Even performing arithmetical calculations is coloured by emotions, so they go deeper than a 'mode'. |
| 24014 | Emotions are a sort of bodily incantation which brings a magic to the world |
| Full Idea: Joy is the magical behaviour which tries, by incantation, to realise the possession of the desired object as an instantaneous totality. [47] Emotions are all reducible to the constitution of a magic world by using our bodies as instruments of incantation. | |||
| From: Jean-Paul Sartre (Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions [1939], §III) | |||
| A reaction: I can't pretend to understand this, but I am reminded of the fact that the so-called primary qualities of perception are innately boring, and it is only the secondary qualities (like colour and smell) which make the world interesting. |
| 24015 | Emotions makes us believe in and live in a new world |
| Full Idea: Emotion is a phenomenon of belief. Consciousness does not limit itself to the projection of affective meanings upon the world around it; it lives the new world it has thereby constituted. | |||
| From: Jean-Paul Sartre (Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions [1939], §III) | |||
| A reaction: There seems to be an implied anti-realism in this, since the emotions prevent us from relating more objectively to the world. The 'magic' seems to be compulsory. |
| 20491 | States have a monopoly of legitimate violence |
| Full Idea: Max Weber observed that states possess a monopoly of legitimate violence. | |||
| From: report of Jean-Paul Sartre (Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions [1939]) by Jonathan Wolff - An Introduction to Political Philosophy (Rev) 2 'State' | |||
| A reaction: This sounds rather hair-raising, and often is, but it sounds quite good if we describe it as a denial of legitimate violence to individual citizens. Hobbes would like it, since individual violence breaches some sort of natural contract. Guns in USA. |