Will and Emotion

Sartre's theory of Emotion diverges from Spinoza's in one significant fundamental respect--whereas in the latter, an emotion is an undergone modification, in the former, it is a type of nascent action. In other words, for Sartre, an emotion is 'magical thinking', i. e. is a vicarious action in response to a situation, e. g. 'love' and 'hate' are vicarious attempts to preserve, or to eliminate, respectively, some influence. Here, even such vicarious exertion is a manifestation of Will. Accordingly, the effectiveness of Spinoza's program, which is based on the thesis that understanding an event as 'necessary' suffices to quell any emotion attached to it, is, on Sartre's analysis, due to the neutralization of vicarious action by depriving it of a specific target. Sartre's theory thus has the further advantage of being better equipped than Spinoza's to propose concrete alternative action as an effective corrective to an emotion, i. e. for Spinoza, the acquiescence arising from a moment of self-control does not suffice to generate a potentially reinforcing redirection of one's active powers. But, despite those differences, each doctrine implicitly rejects the kind of glorification of Emotion promoted by e. g. popular culture.