Michael Ure

Post-Traumatic Societies: On Reconciliation, Justice and the Emotions

The articles collected here all share a concern with investigating the emotional foundations required to establish stable liberal democracies in the face of past conflicts and social divisions that systematically denied or destroyed liberal values of political equality and individual liberty. This broad concern with the emotional foundations of political order has a long history in Western philosophy, stretching back to Plato’s claim that the just city is based on an education that carefully calibrates its citizens’ anger (thymos) and extinguishes their sense of tragic grief or compassion (eleos). Plato’s political philosophy understood the regulation of the emotions as central to the bios politikos (not the bios theoretikos), and conceived political questions of justice and order as inseparable from the normative evaluation of specific emotions. However, classical political philosophy not only shows why the emotions are central to political theories of order and community; its account of the emotions as a type of cognition, most forcefully developed by the Greek and Roman Stoics, directly informs contemporary debates about the public role of the emotions. The Stoic theory of the emotions challenges the Kantian assumption that emotions or passions are merely thoughtless or irrational impulses (Nussbaum, 2001b: vii). The recent resurgence of scholarly interest in Stoic ethics and psychology has shown why the Enlightenment modern reason/passion dichotomy is deeply misleading. On the Stoic account, pity grief, fear and anger are, in fact, particular types of belief. As Martha Nussbaum shows, the Stoics powerfully and persuasively argue that the emotions are not antithetical to reason, but are themselves forms of evaluative judgement and insight. According to the Stoics, far from being blind impulses empty of any thought-content, mere ‘pushes’ or ‘pulls’, all emotions entail high evaluations of aspects of the world that we do not fully control (Nussbaum, 2001a: 4–25). Anger and grief, for example, are responses to damages that we have suffered, and these responses express the value we invest in what the Stoics call ‘external goods’. Emotions register the vulnerability we experience when we tie our ‘happiness’ (or more precisely, eudaimonia) to the possession of uncontrollable ‘external goods’, which include material goods and social attachments. Though the Stoics themselves counselled us to free ourselves from all vulnerabilities, and that doing so required extirpating the emotions, we do not have to share this anti-tragic normative perspective to make use of their theory of the emotions (Nussbaum, European Journal of Social Theory 11(3): 283–297

The Politics of Mercy, Forgiveness and Love: A Nietzschean Appraisal

Abstract This paper critically examines Hannah Arendt’s claim that we should conceive forgiveness as a specifically political or worldly virtue. According to Arendt, the virtue of forgiveness is necessary if we are to halt the reactive rancour that always threatens to destroy the space of politics. This paper suggests that in building her case for the politics of forgiveness Arendt confusingly intermingles three conceptual threads - mercy, Christian forgiveness and forgiveness driven by eros. Drawing on Nietzsche’s scattered analyses of these threads, it argues that all three of these modalities of forgiveness jeopardize rather than restore the circuits of mutual recognition that are integral to democratic communities. Nietzsche shows that these shadings of unconditional or unilateral forgiveness do not necessarily arise from a will to live together, as Arendt assumes, but are anchored in and oriented by our need to console ourselves for the narcissistic wounding we inevitably suffer in the struggle for recognition.

Review of: Refractions of violence, Martin Jay, Routledge, 2003

pay your money and take your choice. As a politico-moral project, Thompson will bring you plainly spoken liberal comfort and perhaps prompt you to join the next walk for Aboriginal reconciliation. As a descriptive, ethnographic project, Povinelli will remind you, through your effort to interpret her difficult and jargon-ridden prose, that you should not expect to take that walk without getting at least a little shit on your shoes. However, even if Povinelli profoundly complicates it, the choice remains. Let’s hope nobody takes The Cunning of Recognition seriously enough to abandon the march entirely and cease ‘taking responsibility for the past’.