A Short Essay That Reframed Emotional Experience

The chapter's central question

Sartre criticized the psychology of his time for explaining emotions by gathering them into isolated facts. Rather than asking whether anger is ‘an object in the mind,’ phenomenology describes what the other person, the room, and the future mean to an angry person. Emotions are not internal events separate from the world, but are an organized way of consciousness experiencing the world.

Read the complete essay

In 1939, Jean-Paul Sartre, a young 34-year-old philosophy teacher, published a slim book of just over 100 pages in a Paris cafe. The title was 『Esquisse d'une théorie des émotions』.

At the time, the psychological community treated emotions only as ‘mere physiological nervous excitement’ or ‘remnants of evolution.’ However, Sartre completely redefined emotions based on Husserl's phenomenology.

'Emotions are subjective decisions of human consciousness that have meaning! Emotions always have a clear purpose and strategy behind them!'

Context and nuance

Sartre's Outline of the Theory of Emotions is an early work that heralds phenomenological psychology rather than a completed emotional psychology. Rather than seeing emotions as passive internal states, we see them as a way in which consciousness changes the meaning of the world and the possibilities for action in blocked situations.

This early work need not be viewed as a complete version of Sartre's theory of emotions. In the later 『Being and Nothingness』, the body, the gaze of others, freedom and self-deception develop more complexly. The value of an outline is not so much to solve every case as to move emotions from ‘what happens inside me’ to ‘how the world appears to me’.

Do not oversimplify it this way

Saying that emotions ‘magically’ change the world does not mean that all emotions are intentionally selected or postponed. Emotions engage the entire body and actually capture our consciousness. Using this perspective to accuse ‘you chose to be depressed’ distorts existentialism, which speaks of the complex relationship between freedom and circumstances.

Philosophy in life

When you fail at something, have you ever suddenly become cynical or extremely irritated, saying, "It was no use trying anyway?"

Banish the language of self-deception: Rephrasing ‘I was angry without realizing it’ to ‘I chose to express my anger in that situation.’

Primary-source guide

Primary guide: Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions, especially the critique of classical theories and the phenomenological account.

Pathos Editorial · Reviewed 2026-09-12