[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
Schadenfreude or identifying Schadenfreude with femininity.
In addition to a sustaining interest in the problem of human suffering,
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche share credit for drawing philosophical atten-
tion to psychological disavowal. Both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche appre-
ciate, for different reasons, the social importance of disavowing
176 When Bad Things Happen to Other People
Schadenfreude. The revulsion with which various commentators have
condemned the emotion makes it easy to understand why people who feel
it might disavow it. Schadenfreude belongs to the category Alison Jaggar
calls outlaw emotions : those responses which are distinguished by their
incompatibility with dominant perceptions and values in a community.
Jaggar, like Annette Baier, Cheshire Calhoun, and others working within
the field of feminist ethics, alerts us to the privileges our moral theories
may extend to certain kinds of people (for example, male, Christian,
white heterosexuals). In the late twentieth century, predominantly female
thinkers have refined moral philosophy, or rather those who think about
it. These philosophers have prompted us to attend out of habit to the mo-
tives of people who come up with theories about morality. Consequently,
the way in which I have framed Schadenfreude requires some mention of
Schopenhauer s and Nietzsche s mutual contempt for women.
Frailty, Thy Name Is Woman
Contempt for women grows out of the Western philosophical tradition.
Kant, like others before him, equated emotions with passivity and women
with both. Emotions, we learn from (male) philosophers, are feminine, ac-
tions are masculine. Even orthodox emotions (such as love and compas-
sion) raise suspicions, because emotions allegedly threaten to undermine
reason. Kant saw little or no moral significance in the emotions: for him,
morality centered on actions what he took to be the realm of men.
It is not surprising that so-called feminist philosophers have to a large
extent fastened upon the emotions, for the association of emotions has
been not just symbolic, but also normative. This means that disdain for
emotions amounts to disdain for women. Work in feminist ethics has tried
to expose a moral double-bind: men have confined women to a certain
realm of experience or behavior and then blamed women for their im-
puted behavior. Emotions rule women, our moral tradition told us, and so
women are unsuitable for public life. Women belong at home because we
have been conditioned to see women as suited for domesticity.
This synopsis simplifies what feminist philosophers have shown us,
but nonetheless captures a bona fide fear of emotions that has pervaded
Western philosophy. The misguided idea that emotions signify personal
Outlaw Emotions 177
weakness and, further, subvert reason gave men an additional reason to
hide their Schadenfreude.
We learn to disguise our Schadenfreude for the same reason that our
forebears came to ban public executions. Anger toward criminals had to
disappear from ready view in order to sustain a belief in a non-vengeful
justice. We have learned a dubious lesson, namely that emotions and jus-
tice have little if anything to do with one another. This lesson harbors un-
easiness over the idea that the legal institution of punishment might rest to
some important extent on emotional responses to transgressions. Men-
tally separating the emotions from justice recalls a tradition of segregating
women from reason.
What Remains Unsaid
What does it mean to stifle emotions? It means we don t allow ourselves
to reflect on a thought that presents itself. Sometimes we have good rea-
son to do this, namely to make our lives easier in society. Emotional con-
formity often confers identity in a particular group. Cheering over the
electrocution of a hardened criminal, for example, may well land us out-
side of a group to which we want to belong. Silence may earn us the ad-
miration of desired peers.
Emotions, like actions, follow social cues. In Thomas Hardy s Return
of the Native, an ambitious mother happens upon her worldly and well-
educated son working in the fields as a common laborer. Mrs Yeobright
observes her child Clym wearing the regulation dress of the craft, and
apparently thinking the regulation thoughts, to judge by his motions. 1 To
succeed as a field laborer, Clym has programed himself to think and feel
as a field laborer. By watching him closely, his mother can sadly tell that
her son has adapted to a socially inferior position.
Can our communities really dictate our mental responses to the world
around us? Listen to what Simone de Beauvoir tells us in her autobiogra-
phy Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter about the thrill of suddenly under-
standing her fondness for a girl: All at once conventions, routines, and
the careful categorizing of emotions were swept away and I was over-
whelmed by a flood of feeling that had no place in any code. I allowed
myself to be uplifted by that wave of joy which went on mounting inside
178 When Bad Things Happen to Other People
me, as violent and fresh as a waterfalling cataract, as naked, beautiful and
bare as a granite cliff. 2 This first-person account describes the experience
of an outlaw emotion. (It is just one description, however, as the experi-
ence may not always be pleasant.) As a young girl, the renowned French
philosopher already knew something about non-conformist emotions.
The violation of an unspoken code thrilled her.
In my earlier discussion of emotion management, I praised Arlie Rus-
sell Hochschild, who has argued that we instinctively mold our emotions
to conform to reigning standards of appropriateness. Alison Jaggar s
account of outlaw emotions advances Hochschild s contribution to moral
thinking. Jaggar illustrates what it means to disavow or repress emotion,
and what she writes can illuminate Schadenfreude. She offers both a use-
ful description of disavowal and a compassionate justification of it.
Against Scheler, who warns that the disavowal of Schadenfreude leads to
the generation of ressentiment, Jaggar points to the redundancy of avow-
ing outlaw emotions in a culture that expects them of you.
Strategies for disavowing Schadenfreude disguise a rationalization of
self-interest while they reveal cultural ideas. These strategies attest to the
force of emotions generally, as well as to the susceptibility of the socially
privileged to turn away from the suffering of others.
According to Jaggar, the apparently individual and involuntary char-
acter of our emotional experience is often used as evidence that emotions
are gut reactions. Such an inference is, however, quite mistaken. One of
the most obvious illustrations of the processes by which emotions are so-
cially constructed is the education of children, who are carefully taught
appropriate responses to any number of situations: to fear strangers, to
relish spicy food, or to enjoy swimming in cold water, for example.3 Chil-
dren also learn what their culture defines as appropriate ways to express
the emotions that it recognizes. Although any individual s guilt or anger,
joy or triumph, presupposes the existence of a social group capable of
feeling guilt, anger, joy, or triumph, this does not mean that group emo-
tions precede or are logically prior to the emotions of individuals. Rather,
it indicates that individual experience is simultaneously social experience.
Values both derive from social experience and presuppose emotions to
the extent that emotions provide the experiential basis for values. If we
Outlaw Emotions 179
had no emotional responses to the world, it is inconceivable that we
should ever come to value one particular state of affairs over another. Fur-
ther, it would be in many instances virtually impossible to claim knowl-
edge without some significant familiarity with the emotions. If, for [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
zanotowane.pl doc.pisz.pl pdf.pisz.pl chiara76.opx.pl
Schadenfreude or identifying Schadenfreude with femininity.
In addition to a sustaining interest in the problem of human suffering,
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche share credit for drawing philosophical atten-
tion to psychological disavowal. Both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche appre-
ciate, for different reasons, the social importance of disavowing
176 When Bad Things Happen to Other People
Schadenfreude. The revulsion with which various commentators have
condemned the emotion makes it easy to understand why people who feel
it might disavow it. Schadenfreude belongs to the category Alison Jaggar
calls outlaw emotions : those responses which are distinguished by their
incompatibility with dominant perceptions and values in a community.
Jaggar, like Annette Baier, Cheshire Calhoun, and others working within
the field of feminist ethics, alerts us to the privileges our moral theories
may extend to certain kinds of people (for example, male, Christian,
white heterosexuals). In the late twentieth century, predominantly female
thinkers have refined moral philosophy, or rather those who think about
it. These philosophers have prompted us to attend out of habit to the mo-
tives of people who come up with theories about morality. Consequently,
the way in which I have framed Schadenfreude requires some mention of
Schopenhauer s and Nietzsche s mutual contempt for women.
Frailty, Thy Name Is Woman
Contempt for women grows out of the Western philosophical tradition.
Kant, like others before him, equated emotions with passivity and women
with both. Emotions, we learn from (male) philosophers, are feminine, ac-
tions are masculine. Even orthodox emotions (such as love and compas-
sion) raise suspicions, because emotions allegedly threaten to undermine
reason. Kant saw little or no moral significance in the emotions: for him,
morality centered on actions what he took to be the realm of men.
It is not surprising that so-called feminist philosophers have to a large
extent fastened upon the emotions, for the association of emotions has
been not just symbolic, but also normative. This means that disdain for
emotions amounts to disdain for women. Work in feminist ethics has tried
to expose a moral double-bind: men have confined women to a certain
realm of experience or behavior and then blamed women for their im-
puted behavior. Emotions rule women, our moral tradition told us, and so
women are unsuitable for public life. Women belong at home because we
have been conditioned to see women as suited for domesticity.
This synopsis simplifies what feminist philosophers have shown us,
but nonetheless captures a bona fide fear of emotions that has pervaded
Western philosophy. The misguided idea that emotions signify personal
Outlaw Emotions 177
weakness and, further, subvert reason gave men an additional reason to
hide their Schadenfreude.
We learn to disguise our Schadenfreude for the same reason that our
forebears came to ban public executions. Anger toward criminals had to
disappear from ready view in order to sustain a belief in a non-vengeful
justice. We have learned a dubious lesson, namely that emotions and jus-
tice have little if anything to do with one another. This lesson harbors un-
easiness over the idea that the legal institution of punishment might rest to
some important extent on emotional responses to transgressions. Men-
tally separating the emotions from justice recalls a tradition of segregating
women from reason.
What Remains Unsaid
What does it mean to stifle emotions? It means we don t allow ourselves
to reflect on a thought that presents itself. Sometimes we have good rea-
son to do this, namely to make our lives easier in society. Emotional con-
formity often confers identity in a particular group. Cheering over the
electrocution of a hardened criminal, for example, may well land us out-
side of a group to which we want to belong. Silence may earn us the ad-
miration of desired peers.
Emotions, like actions, follow social cues. In Thomas Hardy s Return
of the Native, an ambitious mother happens upon her worldly and well-
educated son working in the fields as a common laborer. Mrs Yeobright
observes her child Clym wearing the regulation dress of the craft, and
apparently thinking the regulation thoughts, to judge by his motions. 1 To
succeed as a field laborer, Clym has programed himself to think and feel
as a field laborer. By watching him closely, his mother can sadly tell that
her son has adapted to a socially inferior position.
Can our communities really dictate our mental responses to the world
around us? Listen to what Simone de Beauvoir tells us in her autobiogra-
phy Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter about the thrill of suddenly under-
standing her fondness for a girl: All at once conventions, routines, and
the careful categorizing of emotions were swept away and I was over-
whelmed by a flood of feeling that had no place in any code. I allowed
myself to be uplifted by that wave of joy which went on mounting inside
178 When Bad Things Happen to Other People
me, as violent and fresh as a waterfalling cataract, as naked, beautiful and
bare as a granite cliff. 2 This first-person account describes the experience
of an outlaw emotion. (It is just one description, however, as the experi-
ence may not always be pleasant.) As a young girl, the renowned French
philosopher already knew something about non-conformist emotions.
The violation of an unspoken code thrilled her.
In my earlier discussion of emotion management, I praised Arlie Rus-
sell Hochschild, who has argued that we instinctively mold our emotions
to conform to reigning standards of appropriateness. Alison Jaggar s
account of outlaw emotions advances Hochschild s contribution to moral
thinking. Jaggar illustrates what it means to disavow or repress emotion,
and what she writes can illuminate Schadenfreude. She offers both a use-
ful description of disavowal and a compassionate justification of it.
Against Scheler, who warns that the disavowal of Schadenfreude leads to
the generation of ressentiment, Jaggar points to the redundancy of avow-
ing outlaw emotions in a culture that expects them of you.
Strategies for disavowing Schadenfreude disguise a rationalization of
self-interest while they reveal cultural ideas. These strategies attest to the
force of emotions generally, as well as to the susceptibility of the socially
privileged to turn away from the suffering of others.
According to Jaggar, the apparently individual and involuntary char-
acter of our emotional experience is often used as evidence that emotions
are gut reactions. Such an inference is, however, quite mistaken. One of
the most obvious illustrations of the processes by which emotions are so-
cially constructed is the education of children, who are carefully taught
appropriate responses to any number of situations: to fear strangers, to
relish spicy food, or to enjoy swimming in cold water, for example.3 Chil-
dren also learn what their culture defines as appropriate ways to express
the emotions that it recognizes. Although any individual s guilt or anger,
joy or triumph, presupposes the existence of a social group capable of
feeling guilt, anger, joy, or triumph, this does not mean that group emo-
tions precede or are logically prior to the emotions of individuals. Rather,
it indicates that individual experience is simultaneously social experience.
Values both derive from social experience and presuppose emotions to
the extent that emotions provide the experiential basis for values. If we
Outlaw Emotions 179
had no emotional responses to the world, it is inconceivable that we
should ever come to value one particular state of affairs over another. Fur-
ther, it would be in many instances virtually impossible to claim knowl-
edge without some significant familiarity with the emotions. If, for [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]