Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions | Martha C. Nussbaum

Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions | Martha C. Nussbaum | Why feelings are as important as reasonings

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Upheavals of Thoug...

	Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions Martha C. Nussbaum Cambridge University Press, 2003 - 766 pages average customer review:based on 17 reviews view larger image
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What is it to grieve for the death of a parent? More literary and experiential than other philosopical works on emotion, Upheavals of Thought will engage the reader who has ever stopped to ask that question. Emotions such as grief, fear, anger and love seem to be alien forces that disturb our thoughts and plans. Yet they also embody some of our deepest thoughts--about the importance of the people we love, about the vulnerability of our bodies and our plans to events beyond our control. In this wide-ranging book, based on her Gifford Lectures, philosopher Martha Nussbaum draws on philosophy, psychology, anthropology, music and literature to illuminate the role emotions play in our thoughts about important goals. Starting with an account of her own mother's death, she argues that emotions are intelligent appraisals of a world that we do not control, in the light of our own most significant goals and plans. She then investigates the implications of this idea for normative issues, analyzing the role of compassion in private and public reasoning and the attempts of authors both philosophical and literary to purify or reform the emotion of erotic love. Ultimately, she illuminates the structure of emotions and argues that once we understand the complex intelligence of emotions we will also have new reasons to value works of literature as sources of ethical education. Martha C. Nussbaum is Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics, University of Chicago, appointed in Law School, Philosophy department, and Divinity School, and an Associate in Classics. A leading scholar in ancient Greek ethics, aesthetics and literature, her previous books include The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge, 1986), Loves's Knowledge (Oxford, 1992), Poetic Justice (Beacon Press, 1997), The Therapy of Desire (Princeton, 1996), Cultivating Humanity (Harvard, 1997), and Sex and Social Justice (Oxford, 1999). Her reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Boston Globe, New York Review of Books, and New Republic.

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Excellent defence of the emotions in Philosophy

In the past few centuries or so of Philosophy, except for Hume's dictum 'Reason ought to be the slave of the passions', Philosophers have generally tried to expunge the emotions and the subjective as much as possible from their explorations of questions such as the nature of the world, what is good and true, and what makes for a good life.

Unfortunately the response to this has often been a descent into irrationality and unthinking sentimentalism, which philosophers such as Nietzsche and later Freud warned were to our peril. To ignore the animal, instinctual and emotional aspects of our being seemed to come at the cost of rendering unimportant many things which are actually incredibly important to the life of every human being, such as love, our attachments to others, and the emotions and the fact of our embodiment, and our sexuality.

Nussbaum in this volume offers a very carefully argued and detailed exploration of the emotions and their relation to other important philosophical questions, especially morality, the good life, and rationality. In continuing with her previous work Nussbaum argues it is vital to recover the emotional in our lives, and to better recognise their importance to philosophical debates.

Nussbaum does not cut corners or offer the confused and garbled garbage and half-baked nonsense one often sees in popular psychological treatments of our emotions, nor does she try to reduce the emotions to just the dance of molecules in our brain cells and neurone pathways. She also engages in a careful dialogue with the traditions of the past, from Aristotle and Plato to G.E. Moore, as well as engaging the experience of emotions in literature and art.

This book is an excellent and outstanding exploration of the emotions and a must read for anyone interested in the philosophy of mind, philosophical psychology, phenomenology, and philosophy of emotions.

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Why feelings are as important as reasonings

We all have feelings. (Turgenev said that 'everything depends on them'.) They can grab our attention in surprising and commanding ways. We can see them as imposing themselves on us, as being alien to us, as being something we have to rationalise away. We don't design to have feelings - although some feelings are immensely pleasurable. So why do we have these extensions of simple sensory awareness?

In this book we learn that the feelings - or emotional responses - are things that we should honour in ourselves. These are immediate responses to our environment and they way it affects our view of how we sustain ourselves in the face of challenges. When we face a problem we can be rational about it - look at options, look at strengths and weaknesses, look at possible outcomes to different courses of action. But at the outset we will have an emotional response that tells us what our immediate assessment is. This emotional response is as important as any other form of evaluation.

Nussbaum uses emotionally evocative materials to demonstrate her points of view - music, literature and poetry. This is very effective and avoids losing the drive of her thesis in philosophy, psychology, psychoanalysis and the like. I was not convinced in this when she talked of Mahler's music, but her discussion of Mahler's use of words was very revealing to me.

There is philosophy in this book - lots of it. And, for me, that was far more to my liking that large anmounts of psychology might have been. I was fascinated by the discussion on compassion - is it real or an invention? For me it is real, but following the arguments philosophers and schools of philosophy have made was very instructive. I was perhaps less convinced about the ascent of love. Maybe this was psychology interfering. For me sex and love have to be separated. This is difficult because sexual activity is generally associated with the trust that genuine love creates. But, of course, this is not a necessary outcome. Most of the people we love we do not have sexual activity with. Don't even want to have sexual activity with. So to embed the ascent of love with sex does seem to me to be making two distinct matters unnecessarily entwined and probably to the detriment of the understanding of both.

It took quite a while for me to read this book. But, despite its closely argued structure, it was not a labour.

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Thought provoking

There is not much to add here other than to say that the book provides a thought provoking look into the cognitive basis of emotions. The only criticisms that I can level against the book is the dispoportional relationship between the book's depth of analysis and its length. That is to say that while the anlysis is in-depth and the argumentation is thorough, the book is often unneccesarily wordy in some places (something that should not surprise seasoned Nussbaum-readers, as she seems to have that tendency in everything she writes. Thus instead 714 pages I think the book would not loose any of its lustre if it were paired down to about 500 pages.) My second criticism is that the book contains some sexist remarks in which Nussbaum just can't help taking stabs at men which, to my mind, are below the belt and unworthy of a scholar of Nussbaum's calibre. This is a recurrent theme in Nussbaum's work and my reviews of her works would be more favourable if she stopped it.
But all in all the book is educational and therefore recommended.

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Not enough upheaval

Martha Nussbaum presents a reasoned and passionate defense of the role of emotions in thought which unfortunately devolves to too much "reading" and not enough analysis, in my view.

A fascinating quirk of language, which I discovered while teaching English in Hong Kong and grammar of the form found in "I feel sad that my mother has passed away", is that this proposition, which plays a rule in Upheavals of Thought, can be translated with only some change in meaning to "I feel sad because my mother has passed away".

To see the small but significant change in meaning, make another change to the sentence to read "I feel pain because I have a toothache". Note that this sentence now cannot be translated back to "I feel pain that I have a toothache". It's understandable in the manner of Malapropisms that are the bane of the English as a second language speaker, but cries out for correction, because the copula "that" links not a physical feeling with a state of affairs but an emotion, which may include but is not restricted to a physical feeling in ways explored, as Nussbaum shows, by Proust.

The Logical Positivist equivocated physical feeling with emotions but as Nussbaum shows, emotions are linked with states of affairs in a different way than physical feelings.

"Because", which refers to physical cause and effect, is the adequate copula to link an internally verifiable state of affairs such as toothache pain to an externally verifiable state of affairs such as an actual abcess. It inadequately encompasses, as we have shown, the range of meaning in "that".

In Nussbaum, feeling emotion "that" is the propositional contemplation of a state of affairs which necessarily changes when our knowledge of that state of affairs changes, and this is dissimilar to feeling either emotion "that" or "because".

The psychiatric patient feels sadness because of a happy event, or one that we think is unrelated to his "flourishing", to use Martha Nussbaum's word. For example, she might be inordinately sad "over the death of an actress named Eva Peron". She also feels sadness that Evita has died as she contemplates the media reports, and her sadness-that perhaps need to be alloyed by Che Guevera's reflection on the manipulation of emotions in a Fascist society.

Whereas the fully healthy woman like Nussbaum herself feels both sadness-that and sadness-because of her Mother's death, and we accept this as normal. Both types of sadness follow the facts in ways we accept as normal.

If Ms. Nussbaum were to have an experience recently reported by the computer executive Steve Jobs, who learned in the morning that he had an inoperable cancer, only to learn in the afternoon that the cancer was curable as it was cured, her normality means that the emotion changes with the facts without being identifiable with the facts in some sillyassed Behaviorism.

Indeed, were she to find on arrival at the hospital that her mother was alive, the sadness-that would change while the physical manifestations of sadness-because might remain in the manner of a hangover. The emotion would change to relief that her mother was alive and that she could speak important words to her, coupled perhaps with anger that the report was false.

The physical feelings (of exhaustion or adrenalin-induced anxiety) might remain and this would be roughly described as a physical feeling of sadness still linked to the false report of death. But its name would change from "sadness" to something like "post-traumatic stress". And note that one reason why the word "stress" names the situation of people in economic and job circumstances which cannot be questioned is that "stress" can be spoken of without the "that" nonsense. "I feel angry that my boss is a Yuppie pig" changes to "I feel stress".

Now, the problem is that I miss this level of analysis in Nussbaum, to find it replaced by a sequence of readings that culminate with a singular lack of suspense to the American way of feeling, and are based on slaveowner philosophies of the ancient world, whose material basis Nussbaum fails to interrogate.

In earlier works, she made space in Hellenistic philosophy in philosophical circles for Hypatia and other female participants without historicising Greek philosophy or demonstrating as did Derrida its aporias, and how those fissures are "real things" that infect the way we think now.

Nussbaum fails to critically analyze false consciousness and one of its major supports, false feeling such as was used to justify the Iraq war, because such analysis, necessarily political, is a no-fly zone in the American academy.

Since our emotions, while being different from physical states of affairs, are reportable as states of affairs, emotions and facts form as PR men know a closed system in which it can be easier to manipulate emotions than to govern.

Americans hypostatize a set of emotions accepted as valid and narrated in a single way. Nussbaum encountered, in Finland, a different way of emotional expression but doesn't consider that emotional syntax may not be the only thing to change.

We assume that other people feel a describable set of emotions isomorphic to ours while expressing them in different ways. The almost-modal case is that of the woman who acts as conduit to the dominant, but emotionally inarticulate, male and who like Evita adopts the intercessory role. She is apt to describe the leader as actually feeling feelings which she and not Peron feels, but to claim that el Maximo is inarticulate about his compassion for the descamisados, with a pitying and superior smile.

For example, I was very disturbed at the was Posner's "Law and Economics" so neatly deprives poor people of access to the courts where the former convenience of saving the time of court officers has replaced Aristotle's "equity" and the quality of mercy itself, by imposing completely inappropriate metrics on the one venue in which "your day in court" was formerly a suspense of metrics. I made my concerns known to Nussbaum in email who graciously responded, however with the unsatisfactory explanation that Posner was some sort of bad boy who liked to shock people out of a complacency which in my case doesn't exist.

The alternative possibility is that an entire generation now coming to power is emotionally stunted in an unprecedented way, and this is on display in the conduct of the current Administration: but I don't see any critical reflection on this dangerous topic in Nussbaum.

My theme, missing in Upheavals, is that feminism and American culture, have narrowed "feelings" in celebrating them and made us remarkably provincial about feelings, with one result being the disasters of our foreign policy.

For example, feelings about birth happen to be radically different, in my experience, in mainland China and these feelings track the ready availability of abortion.

In America, even the pro-choice have been schooled by the political activity of the pro-life to take birthing and childcare with a great deal of seriousness, that form of external seriousness characteristic of moral panics, where the pro-choice are alarmed by the vehemence of the emotions expressed by the pro-life, feelings which in terms have a generally unreported class-linked subtext, having to do with the injustice of the way in which a woman's entire prospects change in the lower middle class when she becomes pregnant, and also having to do with the injustice done to her mate, whose career and life prospects are also stunted by pro-life moral panics.

More generally, Americans take the feelings of others, and their own, for granted in an environment where the layering of traditional psychoanalysis is in disrepute. To reflect that in China, government family campaigns and the widespread availability of abortion might make a Chinese woman feel quite differently about reproduction may trouble an American woman like Mrs. Clinton who while she wants women to have equal rights has also been schooled to accept and celebrate the necessary conservatism of people on lower rungs about reproductive choice and personal responsibility, a conservativism made necessary by the end of "welfare as we know it" and the end of any real reproductive choice in many rural areas of the USA while Roe v Wade remains on the books.

This isn't quite the same thing as "moral relativism", because ethics has long recognized that if a bad act is unaccompanied by the guilty mind, its badness is lessened or in the case of the "M'Naghten rule" in law, eliminated despite our dismay at the suffering of the victim (which in the case of first-term pregnancy may not exist, as Peter Singer points out).

The problem with reading unaccompanied even by my crude examples of "ordinary language" analysis is that the vivid images of reading reduce purity of heart, that purity of moral seriousness (as opposed to moral panic) where like Kant we retain the conviction that there are good and bad acts while not enumerating their empirical content.

Moral panic can be induced by feminist reading. This happened in the case of Catherine MacKinnon's needed and valid redefinition of pornography as violence against women which became a censor's tool in an America where our sexy porn can and does include and encode political dialogue about our pursuit of a happiness which for most Americans is an intimate joke. To ascend to James Joyce by way of Whitman, the Bronte sisters, Dante and St. Augustine is to arrive (as does Orwell in Keep the Apsidistra Flying) at a lower middle class "adjustment" to intolerable lives by repeating Molly Bloom's "yes" in times of stress in the manner of the business self-help book.

Whitman asked, courageously, for much more than was coming to him in a nineteenth century context where his homosexuality was unmentionable, and is answered in Nussbaum's sequence of readings by a crabwise retrograde movement with which many Americans have become all too acquainted in recent years: that of a content-free affirmation that is also found in the music of the later Stravinsky and in that of composers under continual pressure like Dmitri Shostakovich.

My fat and it must be admitted prolix pal Adorno merits only a few footnotes in Upheavals of Thought which is a shame, for Minima Moralia in particular is a critical analysis of emotions in lives where the state of affairs is not atomic or restricted to the death of a loved one but global in that we globally can say our lives have been irretrievably damaged by exogenous events.

Part of emotional work in today's America needs to be empathy for the emotions of the Other. For example, reading 20th century history and Adorno might help us understand that great mystery of Baby Boom Americans, which is the reconstruction of the emotional life of their parents.

And, of course, we need to access Islamic emotional life, which starts with acknowledging how as in Shenzen emotions don't necessary precede the law. For example, we've never realized how Islamic women feel empowered by choosing traditional garb while knowing that their freedom of the will is unharmed, or, historically, knowing that Islamic people in general feel that their religion, by incorporating Christian prophets, is more "civilized".

A great deal of work needs to be done on the emotions, long equivocated by the indirect influence of Logical Positivism with toothaches and alcoholic hangovers. However, Nussbaums' account is a one-dimensional track which sends the message that Americans are the best emoters on the planet despite their inexperience with the damaged life.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4

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