Assignment: Apply wonder, intellectual curiosity, and/or theoretical playfulness (see week 3) to these readings as you respond to an issue or idea that moves you.Last week we spent a healthy portion of our class period discussing what exactly "wonder" and "wondering" are. Sarah Ahmed talked about an affective relationship to the world (wonder as "feeling-ness"): a "first-ness" that sees the world "as if" for the first time. This leaving behind of the ordinary, she argued, is a practice, not a capacity. Wonder[ing] is a willingness to be surprised and a conscious act of not taking anything in this world for granted—an opening up.
Wonder, I think, is a necessary practice for reading through something like Aristotle's Book II chapters on emotion. Bringing one's own understanding of (or experience with) a particular emotion doesn't help one engage with the text, because Aristotle doesn't engage with emotions as "mindless surges of affect" but as cognitive process: Nussbaum says that "emotions have a rich cognitive structure" (309). He doesn't want to describe what emotions feel like, but (as Nussbaum says) "what they are." Aristotle's work on emotion is credited as the earliest work we know of on human psychology, and rightfully so: it details situations that might cause a person to feel a certain emotional response so that a student might understand the rhetorical choices he/she could make to affect an audience's anger/calmness/pity/etc.
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Emotions are relationality. "Correctness" and appropriateness of emtions.
Nussbaum: Aristotle's beliefs about emotion "involve the ascription of significant worth to items in the world outside of the agent, items that he or she does not fully control" (312). And further, "there are things in the world that it is right to care about...[that] can be damaged by events not under one's control.... The good person, rather than being a fearless person, is one who will have them doing what is required and noble" (315).
Nussbaum: "Emotions, in Aristotle's view, are not always correct, any more than beliefs or actions are always correct. They need to be educated, and brought into harmony with a correct view of the good human life. But, so educated, they are not just essential as forces motivating to virtuous action, they are also, as I have suggested, recognitions of truth and value" (316).
Aristotle's students think through the design of political institutions: "the aim of her education is to make her capable of bringing the good life and the conditions that produce a good emotional character to her fellow citizens by politics" (320).
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Are emotions instinctive, biological, universal responses?
Though often involuntary and individual responses, Jaggar posits that emotions are socially constructed "in that children are taught delibrately what their culture defines as appropriate responses to certain situations" (135). This seems to echo some of Aristotle's writing in Rhetoric, where he strives to teach students how to create (or abate) certain emotional responses in their audiences. Here emotions are conditional and situational.
Additionally, "even apparently universal emotions" vary considerably from culture to culture, historical period to historical period: "the emotions we experience reflect prevailing forms of social life" (135).
These social constructs might even be actively engaged and performed, "habitual responses we may have more or less difficulty in breaking" (136). They are active ways of constructing the world.
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Can emotions be separated from affect? That is, can emotions be discussed in terms of "rational" thought and knowledge making? Can emotions be cognitive processes?
Understanding emotions in terms of the construction of knowledge is a new way of considering emotions, for me. I've never before thought of them as a way of negotiating meaning with the world. (For instance, Jaggar points to the non-universality of emotions cross cultures as evidence "to believe that the concept of emotion itself is a historical invention"[131].)
Jaggar: "emotions differ from feelings, sensations, or phsyiological responses in that they are dispositional rather than episodic" (133). This view of emotion, as tied to character, smacks of Nussbaum's description of Aristotle's view, that "emotions are not blind anial forces, but intelligent and discriminating parts of the personality, closely related to beliefs of a certain sort, and therefore responsive to cognitive modification" (303).
Cognitive understandings of emotion define emotions "by their intentional aspect, the associated judgement.... When intntionality is viewed as intellectual cognition and moved to the center of our picture of emotion, the affective elements are pushed to the periphery and become shadowy conceptual dangers whose relevance to emotion is obscure or even negotiable" (133–4).
Can emotion have a role in scientific inquiry?
Jaggar: "positive epistemology recognizes that the role of emotion in the construction of knowledge is not invariably deleterious and that emotions may make a valuable contribution to knowledge. But the positivist tradition will allow emotion to play only the role of suggesting hypotheses for emotion" (139).
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Could you clarify the following snippet for me please? "Bringing one's own understanding of (or experience with) a particular emotion doesn't help one engage with the text." Specifically, I'm wondering why not: I remember having a particularly visceral encounter with Book II because it made me understand how I was interacting with some of my students at the time. (Indeed, it was that experience that made me think it would be good for me to re-read Aristotle every couple of years to help me master myself more fully.)
ReplyDeleteHave you read Foucault's History of Sexuality? In it, he argues that the Greek view of sexuality was as an internal impulse that needed to rigorously controlled; the metaphor he used was of a person as a city of impulses that needed to be governed. That, combined with your post, makes me consider the ways in which Aristotle/Greek thought is concerned with the human being as something that needs to be cognitively regimented and disciplined, which says a fair bit about what they think it means to be human. (An obvious statement, but cut me some slack at the end of the semester.)
Cringing now that I read that phrase back again ("Bringing one's own understanding of (or experience with) a particular emotion doesn't help one engage with the text." ). It was late. ;)
ReplyDeleteWhat I was trying to argue is that Aristotle doesn't just present emotions as "mindless surge of affect" (Nussbaum). Anger is more than just boiling blood: Aristotle describes it as a situation, conditional, cognitive process.
Knowing this, my argument is that thinking in terms of our knee-jerk reactions and feelings could (in some cases) impede an understanding of what Aristotle is trying to get at. He's making a case for emotion as something that responds to external stimuli, and as something that should be used "appropriately." (That is, a morality governs our use of emotion.)
I haven't read Fourcalt, but it sounds like it aligned with our discussion in class today about the morality surrounding affect for ancient Greeks. Aristotle and others sought to educate children as to when/how to use emotions appropriately for given situations.
Meant to say above in 3rd paragraph that "knee-jerk reactions and feelings could (in some cases) impede A READER'S understanding..."
ReplyDeleteAlso, though my brain is well aware that Michel's last name is "Foucalt," my fingers are apparently out of the loop.
I don't know, I kind of like the idea of Fourcalt, Foucault's mathematician cousin.
ReplyDelete