Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions

Sartre's central claim is that emotion is a mode of consciousness that intentionally structures the world rather than a passive physiological event or an unconscious drive. He rejects the classic physiological theories that treat emotion as a bodily disturbance with no meaning, and the psychoanalytic theory that explains emotion through unconscious symbolism. Against these, Sartre argues that emotion is a 'magical' transformation of reality: when a situation proves too difficult to handle through practical action, consciousness spontaneously alters its relationship to that situation by conferring on it a new quality—the frightening, the sad, the joyful—that makes it bearable or meaningful in a different register . Emotion is therefore strategic and intentional, not something that happens to us but something consciousness does.

Sartre uses 'magic' to describe the way emotion transforms the world without physically changing it. In the Sketch, he characterizes emotional experience as a magical strategy aimed at transforming a difficult situation . If a path is blocked by a threatening animal, fear does not remove the animal; it transforms the world so that the animal appears as a magical, overwhelming presence that demands flight rather than practical engagement. Martin Hartmann has defended this idea against critics who dismiss it as applying only to irrational emotions, arguing that the world-shaping capacity of emotion is general: emotions do not merely represent an independently given evaluative world but actively shape that world for the subject . On this reading, magic is not a malformation but the structure of emotional intentionality itself.

The Sketch is not merely a preliminary; it is the first sustained application of Sartre's phenomenological method to a specific region of experience, and many of the ideas developed in Being and Nothingness are anticipated in its pages. Routledge's description notes that the Sketch 'not only anticipates but argues many of the ideas to be found in his famous Being and Nothingness' . The theory of consciousness as intentional and self-transparent, the critique of the unconscious, and the emphasis on freedom and project all appear here in embryonic form. Reading the Sketch alongside Being and Nothingness reveals that Sartre's theory of emotion is not an appendix to his philosophy but a laboratory in which its central concepts were first tested.

The most common criticism is that Sartre's account applies only to 'malformed' or 'irrational' emotions and cannot accommodate ordinary, appropriate emotional responses. Sarah Richmond has argued that the Sketch contains two inconsistent lines of reasoning about magic: one in which consciousness constitutes the magic of the world to replace unachievable action, and another in which the world reveals itself as magical, which she regards as a better view . Anthony Hatzimoysis has responded that the two views are consistent because Sartre is analyzing two different kinds of emotion, not two theories of the same kind . Martin Hartmann has offered a broader defense, arguing that critics impose a rationalistic framework on Sartre and miss the way all emotions, not just distorted ones, shape the world for the subject .

The standard English translation is Philip Mairet's, first published by Methuen in 1962 and reprinted by Routledge with a preface by Mary Warnock . This version has been the primary route by which Anglophone readers have encountered the Sketch for over sixty years. A separate translation by Bernard Frechtman was published in the United States under the title The Emotions: Outline of a Theory, and the two titles reflect different emphases: 'Sketch' suggests a provisional essay, while 'Outline' suggests a systematic framework . Readers should be aware that the French original, Esquisse d'une théorie des émotions, was first published in 1939 by Hermann and has been reissued with substantial scholarly apparatus, including a lengthy preface by Arnaud Tomès in the 2010 edition . Mairet's translation remains the standard for English-language scholarship.

The most persistent misreading takes Sartre's claim that emotion is a 'magical transformation' of the world as a form of voluntarism—as if we consciously choose to be afraid or sad. But Sartre does not say that emotion is a deliberate decision. The transformation is spontaneous and prereflective: consciousness adopts an emotional attitude in response to a situation without first deliberating about whether to do so. The freedom involved is the freedom of consciousness to constitute meaning, not the freedom to select emotions at will. A related error treats the Sketch as a rejection of the body's role in emotion. Sartre acknowledges that emotions involve bodily changes, but he insists that these changes are meaningful expressions of consciousness's project rather than the causes of the emotion. The bodily manifestations are the emotion's realization, not its explanation.