Nineteenth century

The Nineteenth century appears in Jean-Paul Sartre’s discussion of affectivity as a critical intellectual and literary backdrop: French psychology and literature, in his account, often treated feeling as private, self-contained, and only contingently linked to the world. Against this separation, Sartre argues that feelings are directed toward objects and help constitute their meaning. The period matters here less as a comprehensive historical survey than as the setting for positions his phenomenology seeks to correct.

Psychological Background

Sartre contrasts French psychology, which he describes as remaining contemporary with Ribot, with work by Brentano, Husserl, and Scheler in Germany. He finds the French discussions, including those in Dumas’s treatise, still occupied by older disputes between peripheral and intellectualist explanations. Physiological study had advanced since William James and Nahlowsky, he observes, without making feeling itself better understood.

The prevailing description of affect as something merely lived, in Sartre’s assessment, severs it from its object. Feeling becomes an ineffable subjective shiver, ultimately reduced to awareness of organic modifications. At the limit, affectivity is treated as coenaesthesia: a flux of private qualities preceding a world of things and persons. Representations may be associated with feelings, but the connection is then explained mechanically—as contiguity, transference, condensation, derivation, or sublimation—rather than as a living synthesis.

Literary Accounts of Feeling

Sartre presents nineteenth-century literature as reacting against the older Pascalian theory of love-esteem. In this literary reaction, feelings become capricious appearances that may happen to accompany representations but have no essential relation to their objects. The stronger version of the claim is that feelings have no objects at all. The account associated with Proust and his followers makes the bond between love and the loved person a matter of contiguity, leaving affectivity enclosed within itself.

Sartre calls the result a kind of solipsism of affectivity. His objection is not simply that a feeling has been described inaccurately, but that its significance has been removed: love is no longer understood as love of someone, nor hate as hate of someone. By treating feeling as an isolated inner occurrence, this model cannot explain what the feeling is about or how it makes its object matter.

Sartre’s Alternative

Sartre’s corrective begins with the claim that there are affective consciousnesses, not inert affective states carried along by consciousness and accidentally attached to representations. Like every consciousness, feeling is consciousness of something. Hate intends a person; indignation is directed toward an unjust action. Bodily signs such as trembling, clenched fists, or blushing do not by themselves amount to hate or indignation if they are not oriented toward an object.

This intentionality is not intellectual judgment in disguise. Hate does not first contemplate a person neutrally and then add a subjective tone; in unreflective feeling, the person appears as hateful. Love similarly attends to the loved person’s charms rather than primarily taking love itself as its object. Such feeling gives the object a new affective sense: it can disclose a person as attractive, disturbing, sympathetic, or repulsive. Sartre distinguishes that unreflective engagement from reflective consciousness, which can make the feeling itself an object of awareness.

The Period’s Place in the Argument

For Sartre, affective qualities are neither simple properties attached from outside nor detachable sensations. They permeate the perceived object and help make it meaningful. His example of loving a person’s long, white, fine hands shows how love is directed toward their finesse, whiteness, and lively movement, while remaining different from intellectual knowledge of those representative qualities. The feeling is a way those qualities appear, giving them an affective sense.

This account also clarifies the stakes of the historical contrast. If feeling is reduced to interiority or accidental association, the world can seem unaffected by it; Sartre instead argues that affectivity helps constitute the sense of the world encountered. He notes that in depersonalization perception may remain intact while the world becomes impoverished. The Nineteenth century thus functions in his argument as a foil for a theory in which feeling is not sealed inside the subject but is an intentional manner of reaching and disclosing its object.