Customer Reviews:
 Illustrations of consciousness April 18, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
"We have to speak of a world of emotions as one speaks of a world of dreams or a world of madness."
This tiny book, a thought-experiment really, is a highly useful and simplified illustration of the phenomenological method we find deep at work in Sartre's much longer and more difficult pieces, The Imaginary and Being and Nothingness. Here, Sartre defines his method, with nods to Husserl and Heidegger, as against the Positivist schools of contemporary psychology which he saw accumulating a great "sum of heteroclite facts" which in themselves signified nothing, and against the Freudian conception of the `unconscious', which he thought contradictory.
For Sartre, the world should be "put in brackets" before any attempt is made at defining the essence of emotion; one must consider it as "an organised type of consciousness" rather than a collection of physiologically-related behaviour types or symbolic realisations of repressed desires. Specifically, it is a consciousness much like that of someone asleep. It is a consciousness fascinated with the problem of changing the world en masse, of changing the world to make it compatible with our frustrated intentions, of changing it "magically". "Consciousness is always consciousness of something", it will not let off; emotion is ultimately an ineffectual way of making some of its truths let off, if only temporarily, and to indulge in it is `bad faith'.
I found this book massively useful for my understanding of Sartre's perspective regarding consciousness, which he requires all human-reality be derivative of. Thinking of tackling Being and Nothingness? Buy this first, it's a must.
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