A new approach to Sartre’s theory of emotions

The emotions continue to be casualties of ontological presumptions that legislate against appreciating their cognitive and expressive significance. When possibilities of emotional disclosure are covered over by misunderstanding, the emotions cannot be appropriated with their full potentiality. The misunderstanding of emotion is not only true of everyday preconceptions of self and world, but also of philosophical investigations and of particular interest here, even of existential phenomenological interpretations of emotions. This failure is particularly striking, since one of this tradition's founders, Jean-Paul Sartre, wrote a seminal work on the emotions which his successors have still failed to appreciate adequately.