At the end of The Monarchy of Fear, Martha Nussbaum writes about the emotions that society needs to encourage and that we as citizens need to nurture if we're to move away from the destructive forces that seem so much in evidence today. Fear, anger, blame and envy in her reckoning. Shame, narcissism, lack of empathy, anxiety and depression according to Richard Wilkinson (who I am to interview soon!) and Kate Pickett in The Inner Level.
So, what does Nussbaum prescribe? Hope (which she defines much as I did here and analogously to Kant's 'practical hope'), faith (which she defines much as Martin Hagglund does here) and love.
It is an empirical question whether changing emotions can change society. As they are cognitive evaluative responses, they reflect society's values for what matters to them - which may or may not be prosocial ends and which may or may not be inspired by the current state of society. That suggests that either society's values need to change or the institutions. Or both. Together. Chicken and egg. Catch-22. But let's leave that.
I wanted to start with a look at love.
The image is the Eros statue in Piccadilly Square - I walked past on my trip to the National Gallery. We had cause to consider Eros when looking at Iris Murdoch's work. In her view, Eros is the passion for the good and the true. It sounds rather abstract, theoretical, intellectual, perhaps leading to a sense of personal rather than prosocial transcendence. Robert Solomon states a similar view in his analysis on the role passion plays in ethics, where again the personal appears to take a pre-eminent role. I think - and am persuaded by Nussbaum's in-depth analysis of the Platonic and Spinozan ascent of love (in Upheavals of Thought) - that this kind of love might lead one away from valuing the very concrete, often flawed, certainly fallible others around us.
Nonetheless, I do think it plays a strong part in the good life, but the separation of inner and outer virtue might err rather too much on the inner. Murdoch does insist that a good person can be totally without this aesthetic and intellectual quest, yet I am not sure that she spent a great deal of time looking at good actions rather than good intentions.
Midgley is more concerned with the external applications of virtue - in animal rights and social living. She has more of the practical about her. I'll duplicate here what I wrote about her in Wonder - and nature:
In Midgley's view, the lines of life lead not inward (in terms of what one can gain from a situation or person), but outward - in curiosity about others and in social affection for them. The world is not there for us to internalise and thus gratify ourselves, but as something objective, wonderful, fascinating and other in and of itself. Midgley insists that we are beings in a society and a world and cannot extricate ourselves from it to consider ourselves as separate pure intellects. Our animal nature makes us finite and dependent and bound in with others.
It's worth emphasising here that she specifically states how moments of wonder (like Murdoch's experience with the kestrel) can release us from the boundaries of the ego - but she has a prosocial take on this, saying that such experiences remind us that we are embedded in nature and society. That begs the question, though I would like to believe it to be true. Indeed, in my analysis of wonder I saw it as filling that narcissistic absence in the self, that focal point of desire. When considering art and nature (as I argued in the post on Epiphanies - which contains links to other relevant posts), I do see wonder as opening us to the otherness of others, as increasing empathy as we see into the lives and minds of others, of broadening our outlook. Even moments that are not necessarily epiphanic but arise out of an attentive attitude to that which is outside - such as in the posts Glimpses and Exploration and engagement - confer the same benefits, if perhaps less potently. (Though this assumes that one is motivated to attend to the world outside oneself, which already suggests some ability to quell the ego.)
Nonetheless, the inner transformation, while it may encourage prosocial emotions does not guarantee prosocial actions.
That said, the views on emotions argued by Robert Solomon and Martha Nussbaum, as well as in the doctoral thesis I was looking at) tend to suggest that they will play a role in determining behaviour - both in restricting some actions and encouraging others.
But all that was considering one view of love - the love for the good in art and nature - rather than love as a human, all too human, feeling for specific or general others (human or non-human).
The Greeks had separate words for different kinds of love. Eros is sexual passion; philia is deep friendship; ludus is playful love; philautia is love for oneself; pragma is longstanding love; agape is love for everyone. The Romans had one, amor, but managed to express with it the different kinds of love - though caritas came to embrace the idea of agape and transitioned into the Christian ideal of charity, which has narrowed in sense somewhat over the last few hundred years. That Christian charity is closely connected with faith and hope as well as the more one-to-one conception of love - as we can learn, not just from texts but from paintings. Check out this video produced by the National Gallery. That suggests that an embracing attitude of charity (a compassionate generosity for all) sustains the three emotions that Nussbaum focuses upon.
Hope is like the flick of a switch from fear: we do not have complete control, the probability of success is not known, but we do have a belief that improvement is possible and we will work toward it. We recognise contingency and finitude - which makes seeking to do our best in this life all the more urgent. It can be fed by seeing beauty in the everyday, rather than envisioning an impossible transcendent ideal.
Faith, when dealing with others, recognises that they have depth, inner lives, a view of the world replete with emotions and beliefs, a capacity for reasoning. It is a generous attitude that carries within it the conviction that no one, not our political adversaries nor our rivals nor anyone else, is irredeemable. It allows us to engage with them as rational, social animals, with needs and desires. It enables listening and communication. It sustains hope and is sustained by it.
Love ensures that we can accept the doer - whatever the ills of the deed. We see others as fully human and fallible, frail, mortal. The whole person is always larger, always more complex, than the deed. The doer is capable of growth and change; while the deeds are in the past and cannot be changed - focus on them is not practical. Focus on the future is - and in the future the former enemy can indeed be our ally. Remember how Kant advises against the perpetuating of prejudices.
Love, says Nussbaum, is anti-narcissistic. I mentioned this in a previous post, but I'll repeat it here as I think it is beautiful: love is determined to allow the other their mystery and infinite complexity, it does not seek to label and define; love allows the other to think, feel and act as they are; love values the individuality and the particuliarity of the other. In this way, it is more generous even than agape for it grants to the other not just that their needs should be met, not just a generalised compassion, but a very specific appreciation and acceptance of their own quiddity. Consider how Gerard Manley Hopkins sees the uniqueness of things. Not bird qua bird, but that bird, right there, right now, just like that. Consider how Rembrandt paints Margarathe. How Hilary Mantel careful sculpts and generates Thomas Cromwell. In art, we touch infinity through the individual. This is the upside of valuing individualism! The reverse trajectory, from transcendent to personal - as in loving this person because you see the light of God or good in them - does not seem, to me, to have the same life enhancing force.
Nussbaum adds that if we read economic treatises we fail to see, we risk losing, precisely what is most precious perhaps about others. She is right: Matthew Lieberman in Social: Why our Brains are Made to Connect says that while solving abstract problems, the default mode network of the brain is quietened. This is what he describes as the social network, which is related to mind reading, connection and harmonising. Abstract thinking isolates us from others and focuses us on the pure concepts, the generalities, the maths.
Love demands more than that - and offers the potential for something better than that. Not that it's easy. It is a process of maintaining - alongside the work - faith and hope as well as love.
I think this homes in on my problem with utilitarianism, that it strips others of their individuality. The very thing about persons - and here I am including non-human animals - is that each one is not replaceable. When I lose my mother, I have lost the one person who was or could be my mother. Of course, another person could fill the role, as caretaker; of course, I could love another person as much or more. But in neither case would that mean that I had not lost Hazel Mary Clarke, with her occasional snobbery, frequent deep generosity and intense vulnerability; her volatility, her compassion, her story-telling and apple-pie-making; her fondness for matching handbags and shoes; her passion for coffee puffs; her difficulty in dealing with the emotions of others; her need for love and her need to love; her desire to be of use; her particular pose for a camera; her willingness to sing me to sleep; her ritual of rubbing her wedding ring around my face, smooth side to smooth skin, saying 'Bless these eyes, that do so much reading. Bless this mouth, that smiles so beautifully. Bless these pink cheeks with their rosy glow. Bless these lips and all the kind words that come from them.'
It is this intense and irreplaceable individuality, which great artists show in their work, that is to me the greatest (the real? the only?) value of life. We can see it in this night's sunset - never exactly the same as on another night, never to be repeated; in the character of a cat, who chirrups as he caresses my face with a paw, occasionally catching the skin with a not-entirely-retracted claw; in the view of a landscape shimmering with heat as today or dampened down by the drizzling rain and even in the gravel and broken glass littering a pavement. A gift of finitude; a gift of particuliarity and a gift of perspective granted by the willingness to look out on the world with love.
This is the fuel that keeps me going. Forcing myself to wear the love-lenses and then seeing something - a smile, a hare, the one tiny cloud in the blue-glare of sky - and that is enough to feed the faith, stoke the hope and keep, for today, the cynicism and despair at bay.
But the big question, the ethical question, is if we can expand some of the qualities of this love - not the completely generalised almost abstract caritas, but this love - for the individual, the particular, for, in Gerard Manley Hopkins' terms 'All things counter, original, spare, strange;' - outwards, so that we can experience the same acceptance for and generosity towards our fellow earthlings at large, the strangers and others, of other nations and other species who share this blue planet with us? Can we value them, as creatures with their own thoughts, beliefs, dreams, desires and preferences, not just as utiles in a utilitarian calculus or as 'others' who pose a threat?
I want to see a world rich in individuality and well-being (which demands political, economic and legal freedoms as well as habitats and homes and food), not just as a total of generalised and interchangeable lives.
Beautifully written. Inspiring. Challenging.