LEVINAS'S LANGUAGE (original) (raw)
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WIlliam James on Emotion and Morals
The Emotions chapter (XXV) in James' Principles of Psychology traverses the entire range of experienced emotions from the “coarser” and more instinctual to the “subtler” emotions intimately involved in cognitive, moral, and aesthetic aspects of life. But Principles limits himself to an account of emotional consciousness and so there are few direct discussions in the text of Principles about what later came to be called moral psychology, and fewer about anything resembling philosophical ethics. Still, James’ short section on the subtler emotions, when read in connection with his later philosophical writings, still provides insight on James’ views about how human emotion colors our moral psychology and agency. The paper tries to articulate how James' somatic account of emotion adds significantly to contemporary discussions at the borders of moral psychology and philosophy: discussions over the foreground/background distinction, emotional temperament, emotional learning, moral imagination, and selfhood and narrativity. The final section focuses on the neo-Jamesian character of "new sentimentalist" moral psychologists. Among the substantial connections I discuss between James and 1) between Jonathan Haidt’s “social intuitionism” and 2) Jesse Prinz’s "emotionism" are the critiques that they each share of the pretensions of hard universalist ethical theories.
2016
This chapter reviews the two primary ways in which moral issues pertaining to literature are discussed in Anglophone philosophy of art. The first half of this essay looks at the morally relevant influences that literature is thought to have on its audiences, while the second half considers various positions on the question of whether a literary work's moral character affects its artistic value. Since several extensive and incisive surveys of this terrain are already available (Carroll 2000; Gaut 2009, chapter 7), this chapter focuses on points of contention and subsequent developments. Part One: Literature's Morally Relevant Influences Moral judgment is a common feature of interpreting, appreciating, and evaluating literary works. For example, we often attribute virtues or vices to characters and praise or condemn their actions on explicitly moral grounds. Moral judgment is even written into many of the concepts we use to understand literary works: just think, for instance, of the very notion of villain. A skeptic about the moral criticism of literature might point out that the moral judgments just mentioned pertain to diegetic elements of literary works-that is, to things within the world that a literary work describes-and that these judgments may diverge starkly from moral judgments we might make about the work itself. While a literary work might, for instance, tell the story of a mean and nasty person who deliberately hurts others, this does not make the work itself mean and nasty; the moral valence of diegetic elements, our skeptic is quick to point out, is conceptually distinct from the moral valence of the work itself. Further, our skeptic persists, while it is not difficult to acknowledge the moral valence of diegetic elements-after all, persons and their conduct are paradigmatic objects of moral assessment-it is far from obvious how a literary work itself-which is inanimate-can be the proper object of moral judgment.1 By what right, if any, do we make moral judgments about literary works themselves? Although few Anglophone philosophers of art directly attend to this question, the tradition does implicitly offer a compelling answer: namely that a literary work's moral valence lies in its influence on its audience. To be more specific, most philosophers working in this tradition appear to implicitly hold that a literary work is mmally meritorious or mmally flawed insofar as it has, or aims to have, a morally salutary or mmally deleterious influence,
Thinking about feeling: Sensibility and self-consciousness in the eighteenth-century novel
2015
v Acknowledgments My greatest debt is to Michael McKeon, my dissertation advisor, whose consistent and painstaking engagement with my work helped shape it at every stage. His ability to intellectually challenge me to better my work and to nurture me gave me a constant sense of a supporting figure behind my efforts. Michael's unwavering commitment to my work held me through the long process of thinking, writing, and revising. Despite the many problems he would point out in my drafts, I never felt slighted, put down, or paralyzed by diffidence on reading his comments. They were simply helpful and insightful and gave me the courage to soldier on to doing better work. His staggering devotion to his students' work is evident in his detailed and prodigious feedback, both conceptual and editorial, on each and every part of each draft. His commitment to my work has set high standards for me in many ways. I was fortunate to have a rigorous and engaged set of readers on my committee. I am very thankful to Lynn Festa, reader on my committee, who gave me her thorough engagement with my work, going over every line and pushing me to think harder and write better. Her rigorous and perceptive responsiveness stayed with me as an imagined audience while I wrote, and her scholarship with its vitality invigorated my own. I also wish to thank Ann Coiro, a reader who came in late on my committee, yet whose quick support and commitment gave me the space to reach the end. I have been very fortunate in my outside reader, Ann Jessie Van Sant from UC, Irvine whose perceptive comments vi and encouraging feedback, borne out of her dedication and commitment, will help improve this dissertation in its afterlife. I would also like to thank Jonathan Kramnick for reading and commenting on earlier drafts of my chapters. Jonathan's excellent graduate course on eighteenth-century philosophy and literature shaped my interest in moral philosophy. I also wish to thank Colin Jager for his support and rigorous training during my qualifying exams.
Sympathy, Sensibility and the Literature of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century
Sympathy, Sensibility and the Literature of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century asks what makes it possible for self-interest, cruelty and violence to become part of sensibility – a cultural trend of compassion, benevolence and humanitarianism in the eighteenth century. Csengei undertakes to investigate the darker side of sensibility by exploring forms of emotional response, including sympathy, tears, swooning and melancholia through a range of eighteenth-century contexts. The book offers fresh interpretations of core literary texts of sensibility (by Sarah Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Oliver Goldsmith, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Henry Mackenzie), works by its most central philosophers (Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson, David Hume and Adam Smith), medical writings about sympathy, sensibility and irritability (Albrecht von Haller, Robert Whytt and La Mettrie), late eighteenth-century critiques of sensibility by Mary Wollstonecraft and Elizabeth Inchbald, along with William Godwin’s papers, letters and diary. It also explores connections between eighteenth-century forms of feeling and more recent sciences of the psyche from psychoanalysis to the neurosciences. Chapters, previews and purchase information: https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9781349339044
Sentimentality in Life & Literature
In his paper "In Defense of Sentimentality" in the book of the same name, Robert Solomon aims to rehabilitate the concept of sentimentality both in life and in literature, and to defend it against its many critics. He argues that the root sense of "sentimentality" is simply "an expression of and appeal to the tender emotions" and that the most common criticisms of sentimentality as a kind of emotional affectation, falsity, or self-indulgence fail. In this paper I argue that the critics are right to say that sentimentality in real life can be ethically problematic, but that Solomon is right to say that sentimental responses to sentimental literature are (usually) ethically harmless. It's true that sentimental literature is not usually "great literature." Its goal is usually pleasure rather than increasing our moral understanding, and partly for this reason it may not be as aesthetically valuable as the great realist novels of George Eliot, Henry James and company. On the other hand, Solomon is quite right to argue that sentimental novels serve an important ethical function in promoting what literary scholar Robyn Warhol calls the "effeminate" virtues of tenderness and compassion.
Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 2010
In this article it is argued that feelings are all important to the function of literature. In contradiction to music that is concerned with the inwardness of humankind, literature has, because of language, the capacity to create fictional worlds that in many respects are similar to and related to the life world within which we live. One of the most important reasons for our emotional engagement in literature is our empathy with others and our constant imagining and hypothesizing on possible developments in our interactions with them. Hence, we understand and engage ourselves in fictional worlds. It is further claimed and exemplified, how poetic texts are very good at rhetorically engage and manipulate our feelings. Finally, with reference to the important work of Ellen Dissanayake, it is pointed out that the first kind of communication in which we engage, that between mother and infant, is a kind of speech that positively engages the infant in a dialogue with the mother by means of poetic devices.