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Reason, Love and Laughter*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 April 2010
Extract
Yes, this is the book that those who know Ronald de Sousa have been waiting for. Since long before his 1979 Dialogue article, there has been much interest in what de Sousa thinks about the rationality of emotions. Many promises are here fulfilled.
In our traditional patriarchal philosophy, the standard view is that reason ought to be the controlling element in human nature. Commonly in this tradition, emotion is considered an opposing force—a female power allied with the irrational, and devoted to dragging men from attending to the clarity and truth which are the proper objects of their devotion. In contemporary anglophone philosophy, the distinction between reason and emotion reached a certain pitch in emotivist accounts of ethics. Recently, beginning with the critique of emotivism, there have been gestures of revision to these views of how emotions are related to reason. Bernard Williams hinted at rethinking the traditional relationship when he remarked that, “the capacity for creative emotional response has the advantage of being, if not equally, at least broadly, distributed”.
- Type
- Critical Notices/Etudes critiques
- Information
- Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 28 , Issue 3 , Summer 1989 , pp. 499 - 508
- Copyright
- Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1989
References
1 It might seem that Hume's “reason is and ought to be nothing but the slave of the passions” sounds a contrary note, but it can be argued that he simply recasts the traditional formula when he puts the socially-destructive passions under the influence of calm and reflective passion. It is so argued by Lloyd, Genevieve, The Man of Reason (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 50–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
2 Williams, Bernard, “Morality and the Emotions”, Inaugural Lecture, 1965, reprinted in Problems of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 229Google Scholar. See, too, David Braybrooke's early discussion of mismatches between emotivism and emotion, “How are Moral Judgments Connected with Displays of Emotion?”, Dialogue 4 (1965), 206–223.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
3 He pays careful attention, for instance, to the part played by bodily feelings in the texture of emotions. Compare Philip Koch's interesting discussion, “Bodily Feeling in Emotion”, Dialogue 26 (1987), 59–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
4 This point is crucial to many branches of philosophy. In aesthetics, for instance, it is the cornerstone of Hanslick's argument that the representation of specific emotions is not among the characteristic powers of music. See Hanslick, Eduard, On the Musically Beautiful, trans. Payzant, G. (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1986)Google Scholar, especially 9ff.
5 See de Sousa, R., “The Good and the True”, Mind 8 (1974), 534–551.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
6 Weil, Simone, Lectures on Philosophy, trans. Price, H. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
7 Ibid.
8 Plato is commonly accused of licensing promiscuity. If it is only the qualities that are our proper love objects, then we should embrace everyone who suitably exemplifies them. But this is not how it really is with Plato. In the abstract metaphysical sense, Platonic people are not particulars but complexes. When we attend only to a lamb's odour, or when Alcmene attends only to the sight and sound and touch of her partner, deceit is possible. But when she attends to the whole person, to all of his qualities, she makes of him something unique; and should, per impossible, another with all the same qualities present himself, she should not feel the guilt of adultery, but should carry on loving him. ASIDE: The real metaphysicians of promiscuity may be those who suggest that when you fall in love you embrace a set of counterparts, all but one of which, though you do not know which, is not actual, but including the one which dies of leukaemia at forty, the one which buries you when you are both eighty, and so on and so on.
9 Part 3 is condensed from my contribution to the panel discussion of The Rationality of Emotion held at the Canadian Philosophical Association annual meetings at Windsor, Ontario, in May, 1988. I am grateful for the extensive discussion which that occasion provoked.
10 It even makes room for bad puns: Discussing the impossibility of developing language on the presumption of total relativism, de Sousa suggests: “‘Chair’, says the child. ‘Chair-to-you’, says the parent, ‘but grapefruit-to-me’. Such lessons will remain amicable, but forever fruitless” (145).
11 Cf. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 4.002.Google Scholar