Do
philosophers, as philosophers have a
responsibility to relate to suffering and injustice? Are the methods of
philosophy suited to address social and political topics? Martha
Nussbaum is a
thinker who answers these questions in the affirmative. She finds
support for
her view with the Stoics, Epicureans and Skeptics that philosophy is a
way of
understanding and attempting to heal human suffering. Thus, in the
first
chapter of The Therapy of Desire she
quotes Epicure:
Empty
is that philosopher’s argument by which no
human suffering is therapeutically treated. For just as there is no use
in a
medical art that does not cast out the sickness of bodies, so too there
is no
use in philosophy, unless it casts out the suffering of the soul.
While
Nussbaum’s intent to perform philosophy in a way that aims
at the
reduction of suffering is truly admirable, her project is somewhat
flawed by
her overt intellectualism and excessive belief in cognitive control.
The virtue
of her cognitivistic analysis of emotions is that she often succeeds in
describing emotions in rich and nuanced ways, thus emphasizing
important
aspects of emotions frequently ignored by moral philosophy. Emotions,
she
states in Upheavals of Thought, do
not only figure as motivations either supporting or subverting our
choice to
act according to principle. They are themselves parts of our system of
ethical
reasoning. Rather than merely being supportive of the moral judgments
we make,
emotions should be seen as being themselves moral judgments. Martha
Nussbaum
has been one of the most central philosophers when it comes to
rehabilitating
emotions within the sphere of ethics.
Her statement is an attack on
emotivism on the one hand,
having held a
dominating position within meta-ethical debate for a long time, and
claiming
that since morality is based on emotions, and emotions are
non-cognitive, moral
questions cannot be subject to rational discussion, and on the other
hand
rationalistic theories in which a contrast is drawn between moral
judgments
that are good, valid or objective because emotions are excluded from
them and
judgments which are emotion-based, hence being subjective, egoistic and
potentially dangerous. As against these views, Nussbaum wants to
establish the
fact that praising or blaming an actor for his or her emotions, as well
as
rational discussion of emotions, are meaningful activities. What she
needs to
show is thus that emotions contain a degree of cognition which renders
these
claims plausible.
THE POSITION SHE DEFENDS is
that emotions are judgments
of value that
ascribe to external objects, things and persons outside of one’s
control, a
central importance to one’s well-being and flourishing.
Furthermore, she
disagrees with Aristotle’s view that a belief is a necessary, but
not a
sufficient condition for a given emotion. She shares the view of the
Stoic
Chrysippus that an emotion is identical with a full assent to a belief
in
something being the case. Hence she claims that there are no
constituent parts
of an emotion that are not part of a judgment of value. In other words
she
denies that we should see an emotion as partly constituted by
non-cognitive or
bodily elements. The fact that having an emotion is experienced in a
certain
way should not be included in the definition of what an emotion is.
Neither
should specific feelings such as trembling or boiling be included in
the
definition. Neither phenomenological nor physiological descriptions,
she
claims, should be given any weight when it comes to understanding what
emotions
are.
WHY IS IT IMPORTANT to
Nussbaum that emotions be defined
as being merely
cognitive? What is gained and what is lost by her approach? I think it
is
apparent from some of her phenomenological illustrations that when
looking for
a very rich cognitive content in emotional reactions, and for implicit
views of
what is valuable, Nussbaum finds things which might otherwise have
passed
unnoticed. Thus the advantage of her method over reductionist
approaches of
which emotivism is an example is obvious. But while she gains richness
in terms
of cognitive content, she looses the aspect of urgency which is
connected to
why these evaluations matter to the individual in question.
Nussbaum’s mastery of
literary descriptions combined with
very developed
analytical skills are impressive to the reader. Her presentation of her
main
example of her own feelings of grief at the death of her mother, and
her
succeeding use of the description to make theoretical points about
emotions is
a case in point. Hers is a very good description of the cognitive
aspects of a
process of grieving, in which beliefs about what the world is like and
about
her own evaluations of the state of affairs, the import they carry for
her,
have to be reworked and adjusted. However, the urgency connected with
this
process is partly left out, partly unaccounted for in her analysis. I
think
this becomes particularly apparent in her treatment of the theme of
emotional
conflict and defense. To Nussbaum, the dynamic process of emotional shift is
to be conceived as a debate between judgments concerning the loss that
has
occurred – a conflict between recognizing and denying its
importance;
At one
moment I assent to
the thought that an irreplaceable wonderful person has departed from my
life.
At another moment I deny this, saying, “No human being is worth
so much
concern,” <…> Then the thought of my mother, lying
in the hospital bed as
I so often saw her lying at home, returns – and I know that she
is not like
anyone else, and that I love her; and I assent once again to the
thought that
something has gone from my life that I cannot replace.
What
Nussbaum argues against in this passage is the view that a conflict of
the kind
must be seen either as a battle between two non-cognitive entities, or
as a
strife between a non-cognitive entity on the one hand and reason on the
other.
But she only succeeds in showing that sudden emotional shifts of this
kind are
also shifts of cognition. They involve a change of perspective with
regard to
one’s evaluation of the situation, about what is the case in the
world as well
as the importance of this state of affairs to me. The fact that the
passage
quoted above fails to convey the urgency connected with these
judgmental shifts
is linked with the fact that Nussbaum’s account leaves the
readers bewildered
as to the question of why such disruptions of outlook should take place
at all.
Why should reason, as she puts it, carry on urgent struggles with
itself? A
radical and recurring change of judgments and emotions like the one
described
here only makes sense when regarded as a defence, and the concept of
defence is
comprehensible only the experience of necessity which is involved. A
central
psychoanalytic insight is that some interpretations of the states of
affairs
are simply too painful to be upheld. It follows that any subjective
interpretation or experience of a situation or phenomenon will have to
be one
that is bearable for the individual in question, where the notion of
something
being bearable depends on a non-dualist conception of the mind and on
emotions.Wilfred
Bion’s conception of the mind on the basis of
the metaphor of digestion serves as an interesting explication of this
point.The fact
that adjustments of perception are made to
render a picture of external reality that is tolerable to the
perceiver, and
accordingly, that an ability to endure emotional experiences is
essential to
realistic perception of the outer world. In a purely cognitive theory
of the
emotions this central point about human emotion and judgment is
necessarily
left out.
Nussbaum’s definitions of emotions, furthermore, are
sometimes too cognitively
heavy, and she often seems to require too much in terms of
propositional
content to ascribe to an emotion moral significance. Anger, to
Nussbaum,
requires the thought that one, or someone dear to one, has been
slighted,
wronged or insulted, that the damage that has occurred is a serious one
and
lastly, that it happened through someone else’s voluntary action.But I think it is fair to say that anger
sometimes may precede the issue of justification. At least it is clear
that the
question of whether a damage has been voluntarily imposed upon one need
not be
posed before becoming angry. As to the question of the seriousness of
the harm,
a felt acuteness in the moment, as opposed to a more reflective
evaluation, is
all that is required. Hence the emotion of anger, while it also plays a
necessary and constructive role in a person’s inner life, has a
side to it that
makes it potentially even more troublesome than the account of Nussbaum
and the
Stoics suggests. The fact that anger can be modified by cognitively
complex
evaluations of various kinds does not suffice to show that it depends
on these
complex evaluations in order to arise. As Nussbaum argues, anger can be
expected to go away if one discovers that an alleged slight never
actually took
place, was not really serious or was not deliberately performed. But,
although
susceptible to influence by them, anger need not contain, and may
temporally
proceed, these relatively more sophisticated evaluations. A similar
point can
be made with regard to compassion. According to Nussbaum’s
definition,
compassion requires believing oneself to be vulnerable in a way which
is
similar to the object of the emotion, it requires the belief that his
or her
sufferings are significant and thirdly, it takes the belief that the
object’s
suffering is undeserved. Again, it is true that compassion is can be
manipulated or removed through an expressed denial of any of the
aforementioned
conditions. If a harm incurred is believed to be either insignificant
or
deserved, or if the object is thought of as being too dissimilar to
oneself to
render identification possible, a felt compassion for the object may
dissolve
as a result of these evaluations. Even so, to include all of these
criteria as
necessary conditions for compassion results in a definition that is too
cognitively heavy. The fact that any thought of similarity between
oneself and
the object need at least not be explicit is one that Nussbaum may be
able
account for. With regard to the question of seriousness, one should
think that
a damage appearing as, or seeming, grave would suffice for the arousal
of
compassion, i.e. that a critical evaluation of the seriousness of a
particular
harm would not be an initial requirement, although it may of course
make a
difference afterwards. But the least likely candidate for inclusion as
a
requirement for compassion is the question of deservedness. While it is
true
and important that explanations of why the object deserves to suffer
often
serve the function of diminishing compassion, it is implausible to
think that
when faced with a situation in which someone has been harmed, one poses
to
oneself the question of whether this damage may have been deserved, and
answers
it in the negative, before experiencing compassion. If this may seem to
be an unfriendly
interpretation of Nussbaum’s view on the matter, it must be
remembered that she
in fact describes all these judgments as necessary components of
compassion
proper, and that the emotion cannot precede these judgments, since it
is equal
to one’s acceptance of them.
An implication of what I
have argued above is that
there are more or less cognitively sophisticated instances of the same
kind of
emotion, e.g. anger may, and may not, contain more or less complex
evaluations
concerning justification. Another significant consequence of the view
that
non-cognitive elements are constituent parts of an emotion is that
emotions of
the same general kind differ not only with regard to the inherent
richness or
complexity of the judgments they contain, but also with regard to
degree. While
Nussbaum’s account must reduce all differences of degree to differences
of
judgments concerning the importance of the object of the emotion in
question, a
theory which is not uniquely cognitivistic would allow for a statement
to the
effect that two different persons, or the same person at two different
times,
may experience emotions which are the same with regard to cognitive
content,
yet which differ in degree, intensity or temperature. Thus it allows
one to
distinguish between different degrees of an emotion as a dimension
which is
separate from the dimension of complexity of cognition.It is my view that this would give a better
rendering of how emotions appear to us in ordinary experience. We
do commonly make judgments about the appropriateness of degree with
regard to
emotion. These phenomena, to Nussbaum, must be explained entirely by
different
background beliefs about importance. While I believe this to be an
important
part of the truth, I think it would be an error to reduce all such
differences
of degree to differences of kind.
Nussbaum argues that the
view of the Greek Stoic
Chrysippus is correct; an emotion is identical with the full acceptance
or
recognition of a belief. His further normative thesis, however, that
the passions
are forms of false judgments, and that therefore they should be done
away with,
is one that Nussbaum repudiates. To Nussbaum, as to Chrysippus, the
fact that
an emotion is a judgment means that it is an assent to an appearance
– it is an
acceptance ofthe belief that something
which appears to be in a certain way is actually so. For instance,
grief is the
assent to the idea that someone deeply loved is forever lost. The
evaluative
beliefs on which emotions rest have one thing in common; they involve
the
ascription of a high value to worldly objects that are not fully
controllable
by the agent. Hence they presuppose the non-self-sufficiency of some of
the
most valuable things, but since this view is in fact false, since
virtue is
sufficient for eudaimonia and the
only thing that has intrinsic value, the emotions should be extirpated.
As
against this position, Nussbaum’s main agenda is to state that we
should
abandon a zeal for absolute perfection, that human finitude,
imperfection and
vulnerability to external events should be embraced, as these
conditions are
connected to the things we value and cherish about human life. Thus,
while she
agrees with the descriptive thesis, taken over from Chrysippus, that
emotions
are judgments that ascribe to things external to the agent a central
importance
to his or her happiness and flourishing, she rejects his normative
claim that
they should be extinguished. Since an emotion results from an
assessment of an
evaluative belief, we can treat these aspects independently of one
another and
decide whether or not to embrace the belief that an object is essential
to my
well-being.
«How simple life would be», writes
Nussbaum,
«if grief were only a pain in the leg, or jealousy but a very bad
backache. Jealousy and grief torment us mentally; it is the thoughts we
have
about objects that are the source of agony – and, in other cases,
delight.» Nussbaum relies on a sharp distinction between the mental and
the physical, the internal and the external, the controllable and the
uncontrollable,
which she maintains in spite of her references to Freud, and to
object-relations theory. According to the Stoic view of the person, the
“real
self” is the part which the individual controls and the parts of
the person
which are exposed to the blows of fate on closer examination turn out
to be
external. Human beings, however, are always and necessarily attached to
a great
number of objects. Since existing in relation to an object-world is a
basic
feature of the human condition, the general normative question posed by
Nussbaum looses its significance. We do not choose whether or not to
regard
external objects as significant, and the reason why we do not is that
they are
not at all external in the sense Nussbaum and the Stoics intend.
Still,
there remains of course a long range of particular and empirical
questions with
regard to the persons, projects and issues that matter most to us.
Questions of
what and whom we should allow ourselves to see as being of the utmost
importance to us remain central to human beings, which is why the issue
Nussbaum is concerned with is seen as existentially relevant.
Furthermore, the
more general question of how we should evaluate the degree of fragility
and
insecurity implied by the fact of our attachment to external objects is
one
that remains important to us. Nussbaum’s claim that we should
value the fragile
aspects of our existence as human beings and her emphasis on the
limitations of
the ideal of self-sufficiency are weighty contributions to contemporary
ethical
debate. However, her argument to the effect that we should choose a
life of
being attached to objects because we are able to realize it’s
beneficence to
social life is one comes out as being either circular or ineffective.
From a
point of view outside of any attachments to significant persons and
issues no
purely rational argument can be made to convince one to move from one
kind of
motivation to another. Hence her presentation of her case is somewhat
deceptive
in that she affirms human attachments and emotions as evaluative
judgments on
the ground that we could, and should, rationally choose to have them.
However,
subjectivity proper already contains relations to significant others.
There is
no state of pre-relatedness from which questions of responsibility and
attachment can be posed.
Daniel in Sartre’s novelLes
Chemins de la liberté puts his
three cats into
a basket and carries them across the city in order to drown them in the
Seine.
Because he loves these animals more dearly than anything else, and
because he
cannot bear his own weakness for the cats, he has decided to get rid of
them.
By drowning the beloved creatures, he hopes to eliminate the aspects of
his own
character which he despises. In the end, when having gotten as far as
to the
bridge, he finds himself unable to go through with his plan and returns
to his
flat with his basket, filled with worry for the state of the animals
and with
great self-contempt for not having managed to drown them.Far from being an admirable character,
Daniel gains the sympathy of the reader precisely because, and possibly
only
because, of what he is unable to do. Conflict-ridden as he is, his
reflective
evaluations of himself and of situations stand opposed to his action,
or rather
failure at such. But his case, in which the only element of positive
moral
significance is his displayed inability to act, exemplifies the fact
that a
feeling of concern for objects can be as deeply rooted as to persist
not only
in the absence of, but even in opposition to, more cognitively complex
evaluations.
For
all its brilliance, the fact remains that Nussbaum’s theory of
emotions fails
to account for a more spontaneous other-directedness which is
fundamental to
human beings.
Martha
C. Nussbaum, The Therapy of
Desire, Princeton
University Press, 1996, s. 13.
Martha
C. Nussbaum, Upheavals
of Thought, Cambridge
University Press, 2001, s. 86.
Jean-Paul
Sartre, Les Chemins de la
liberté. L’Âge de raison, Gallimard, 1972.
