Martha nussbaum on the emotions

Ethics

Volumn 116, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 552-577

  Hunt, Lester ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33745475884     PISSN: 00141704     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/498465     Document Type: Review

References (9)

1. See Martha Nussbaum, Poetic Justice (Boston: Beacon, 1995).
2. On this earlier work, see my "Sentiment and Sympathy," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 62 (2004): 339-54.
3. Richard Wagner, Judaism in Music,
4. trans. Ashton Ellis, in Richard Wagner's Prose Works (London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, 1894), 80-81.
5. That this is so is in fact suggested by work done during the fifties by the psychologist and (unjustly neglected) theorist of the emotions, Magda Arnold. On Arnold's account, what I am calling "emotional inference" (she calls it "emotional conditioning") necessarily wildly overgeneralizes. Childhood experiences convinced me that everyone who resembles my older brother will bully me: thus I have nearly phobic reactions to authority figures. This is just the sort of mechanism that can explain racial prejudices and rationally groundless fears. See Magda B. Arnold, Emotion and Personality (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), 1:182-86.
6. See Aristotle, The Poetics, ed. and trans. Stephen Halliwell (Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library), 59-60.
7. Perhaps I should mention that, during the antishame decade of the sixties, a new phrase began to come into use, 'guilt-tripping' someone. Of course, guilt, like fear, jealousy, and every other emotion, can be manipulatively induced in others. My point is that, as Nussbaum would probably agree, this strategy is more readily available in the case of shame. Psychologically, shame seems to be closely related to the experience of being beheld by others. Perhaps shame is seeing oneself as an unworthy or repellent object of beholding by (actual or hypothetical) other people.
8. Here I am revisiting ideas I treated long ago in "Generosity," American Philosophical Quarterly 12 (1975): 235-44.
9. Nietzsche would claim that it is no coincidence that Wagner and Dickens, who were preeminent among the artistic representatives of the compassion tradition, were also open and vitriolic anti-Semites. In the nineteenth century, the figure of the cold-hearted, exploiting Jew was one of the principal outlets for vengeful rancor.