Customer Reviews

Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

As a philosopher, psychotherapist, and writer, I think I know the "state of the art" in current research on emotions, and I know a fair amount about current thinking in ethics and about the research linking development, ethics, and emotions.

I heartily endorse this book as an extraordinary, careful, encyclopedic work. In the last twenty years, psychologists have finally learned something philosphers proved fifty years ago (at least): that one cannot understand human action without taking into account subjective experience--including emotion. Nussbaum--contra some previous reviewer who for-who-knows-what-reason says her psychology is "misguided"--knows well the cognitive research on emotions, current psychoanalytic thinking and developmental research, and cutting edge, research-guiding theories. She is quite clear on exactly what kind of evidence each can boast or not. She puts them all together and shows us some things about emotion and ethics that, perhaps, psychologists will get around to knowing in a decade or so.

(So why only four stars? The book really needed a ruthless editor. I frequently found myself saying, "Enough already--you've made your point, so get on with it.)

Caution, though: This is a book for intellectuals--in the best sense of the word, namely, those who care to know the best that has been thought or said. If you're looking for feel-good self-help or goofy metaphysics, go elsewhere.

The 760 pages of Nussbaum's book make for many hours of absorbing reading. Her aim is to bring back into philosophy what it has lacked so often: emotions. The book gives splendid summaries of the best in (Western) philosophy, literature and music. Having read the chapters on Seneca, Dante, Spinoza, Proust, Mahler, Joyce and others, many readers will feel tempted to go back to the originals and read or re-read them.
It is not too difficult, either, to disagree with much that Nussbaum proffers. Take music. She has much to say about the "contents" and "meaning" of Mahler's music, in detailed descriptions of such works as the Second Symphony. She cannot, however, really convince us that it is the music itself which conveys the message. Mahler thought and wrote a lot about what prompted him to write music. But apart from the words of songs included in his symphonies, can the music itself "mean" anything? What we hear is chords, tempi, structure - which through mysterious ways move and touch us. But there may be nothing, really, which would prompt the listener to hear any part of that symphony as particularly "heroic" of "tragic" or "fateful" if that listener does not know of Mahler's commentary - he or she may well feel those parts are spirited, or hurt, or just plain "beautiful" - or maybe tedious and longwinded. The same could be said for other arts: paintings, sculpture, dance (which Nussbaum, remarkably, does not refer to at all).
Language can express emotions a lot more explicitly, but again: can fiction be "about" something? Is Joyce's Ulysses really "about love", as Nussbaum stipulates, or is it a lot more that that? Is not Ulysses rather about, well, everything in the book called Ulysses?
In this book, compassion and love are the core themes. Nussbaum adduces a wealth of literature, fiction and non-fiction, to explain how these two emotions dominate both personal and public life. Each of her arguments makes a point, but also jeopardizes to weaken another. Love is such a complicated concept (and Nussbaum deals with all possible ramifications of it) that at the end one wonders whether anything succinct can be said about it. Compassion is a value of enormous significance in public life, but is so rife with contradictions that no political philosopher (let alone politician) would base her theory on it.
This book, indeed, is very hard to summarize. It may be significant that it does not have a conclusion. In philosophy, Great Thinkers have tried to get to the heart of things. They have come up with simple catchwords - such as alienation, abandonment, human flourishing, righteousness, existential angst, and much more - to offer us something of a grip on the bewildering experience of life. In their methodology, as Nussbaum points out, they have often overlooked or sidelined the vicissitudes of emotional life. But "mining the full wealth of personal experience" (Nussbaum's words) may produce so much debris, valuable as it is, that it becomes impossible to find that one small nugget of gold.
The many hours I spent on reading this book certainly have felt rewarding. It merits a four star appraisal for its combination of forceful intellectual stimulus, fascinating erudition and engaging moral debate. To deserve five stars it might have needed more than just the solid editing that another customer reviewer suggested. It should have had some definite clue, something that would have guided the reader from the outset. The map of experience displayed in this book threatens to become as large as the landscape.
This book is a real treat for everyone who is an avid reader, even if not by far as well-read as Nussbaum. In signaling that emotions are paramount she responds to the frustrations which many of us will have felt about what is sadly lacking in so much formal philosophy. But the book is not a philosophical breakthrough, since Nussbaum has not come up with a (refutable, falsifiable, debatable) answer to the philosophical question of "what it is really all about".

Look, the fact of the matter is that good philosophy is not always synonymous with formal proofs and technical language. Nussbaum's Upheavals of Thought is a discussion of how emotions and moral psychology connect. Some recent work has been done in this area by others in the field, such as Wollheim, Neu, and Goldie. OK, so her recent work is not hard-core analytic philosophy. But it is informed by a breadth of research on various theories of emotion, and it does engage various philosophical treatments of the emotions.

The most interesting material in this book is in Part Three. Nussbaum explicates various texts to illustrate how they contain specific moral concepts central to human experience and action, such that the emotions are treated in an overlapping literary and philosophical manner. This section is not particularly philosophical, however that is taken to be, but is rather careful music and literary criticism. This is a bold move on Nussbaum's part. Her readings on Mahler, Bronte, Joyce, Dante, Augustine, etc. are valuable because she offers sensitive readings of literary texts that do not fall into the usual discourse one finds in or from literature depts. And why would we expect literary criticism in an Anglo-American philosophy dept.?? But Nussbaum's criticism and careful readings demonstrate how literary texts can be morally relevant and philosophical--in ways that are appealing to philosophers and literary folks at the same time. In a way, Upheavals of Thought is a continuation of her work in Love's Knowledge, Therapy of Desire, and the Fragility of Goodness.

So one could nearly always claim that a text which is similar to this one is "hot air" or "misguided psychology," but that sort of view undermines further critical thinking. It is simply too easy to take such a position.

Nussbaum's Upheaval is a subtle text. It is deeply evocative and insightful. Yes, problematic claims are made. Logical rigor is often absent. However, it is nice once and a while to hear from a genuine philosophical scholar on current issues in eloquent and sophisticated prose. Is it philosophy? I'm sure that question misses the point--at least Nussbaum's point in this text, which are actually several points. Her point seems more to take into account how literature, music, and diverse human contexts can be treated philosophically, which, it seems to me, valuable to those readers both in literature and philosophy.

"Upheaval of Thought" is a wonderful, interdisciplinary tome on the human emotions. Approaching them primarily from a philosophical perspective, particularly a neo-Stoic view, of what the emotions are, how they function cognitively, and what problems they cause and purposes they serve, Nussbaum incorporates animal behavioralism, evolutionary psychology, philosophical paradoxes, and the humanities' expression of the emotions to (1) evaluate how they both serve and disserve the individual, and (2) how which emotions are appropriate for the person to function well in society.

She begins with the Stoic's account of the emotions, how emotions are cognitive judgment of value and neither appetitive nor a separate function of the passions (sui generis), and challenges the Stoic raison d'etre to extirpate all of them from life. She believes the Stoic view is too severe, which she became cognizant of during the death of, and the grief over, her mother. The Stoic extirpation (i.e., apathy) of the emotions may satisfy one's personal life in some limited sense, but at the expense of perverting one's personal commitments and one's social and civic life. She then proceeds to show how one's individual development, starting from infancy and advancing through adulthood, serve and disserve the individual personally and socially, arguing that emotions are appropriate to given situations in life. Her principal concern is to not extirpate the emotions, but how one ought to develop them as intrinsically given, especially the emotions of love and compassion, so that they contribute to human flourishing (i.e., eudaimonia) in a very dynamic way. Love, properly ordered, is one such emotion (cognitive judgment of value) that involves our most intimate and personal commitments and projects, while compassion (also a cognitive judgment of value) is another essential emotion to the order of our political, economic, and social commitments and projects.

Then, in a most interdisciplinary fashion, she takes the historical development of the emotions through their hermeneutic history. Using the arts, philosophy, theology, music, economics, and literature, she explores the historical development and refinement of emotions, particularly of love and compassion, as expressed and developed in such figures as Plato, Spinoza, Augustine, Dante, Adam Smith, Mahler, Bronte, Proust, and Joyce among others. Each figure contributes either positively or negatively to our ultimate understanding of how the emotions figure into our cognitive judgment of values for human flourishing in both our personal and civic lives.

This book is a rich, invigorating, multifaceted, and very satisfying exploration into a very critical aspect of the human behavior, particularly the emotions of love and compassion, in order to harness these judgments of value for our ultimate happiness (again, eduaimonia). The book's 700 pages are by no means exhaustive, which she frequently restates, nor tightly as argued as it could be. The problem, and there is one, is that the book flows much more like a lecture (which it originally was), and less like highly-disciplined argument. The argument is unquestionably made, it is simply not as concise, precise, nor as rigorous as I would have liked. There are too many extraneous diversions that distract us from her central arguments. A good editor and clearer and more ostensive articulation of her arguments would certainly be welcome in a revised edition.

We all have feelings. (Turgenev said that 'everything depends on them'.) They can grab our attention in surprising and commanding ways. We can see them as imposing themselves on us, as being alien to us, as being something we have to rationalise away. We don't design to have feelings - although some feelings are immensely pleasurable. So why do we have these extensions of simple sensory awareness?

In this book we learn that the feelings - or emotional responses - are things that we should honour in ourselves. These are immediate responses to our environment and they way it affects our view of how we sustain ourselves in the face of challenges. When we face a problem we can be rational about it - look at options, look at strengths and weaknesses, look at possible outcomes to different courses of action. But at the outset we will have an emotional response that tells us what our immediate assessment is. This emotional response is as important as any other form of evaluation.

Nussbaum uses emotionally evocative materials to demonstrate her points of view - music, literature and poetry. This is very effective and avoids losing the drive of her thesis in philosophy, psychology, psychoanalysis and the like. I was not convinced in this when she talked of Mahler's music, but her discussion of Mahler's use of words was very revealing to me.

There is philosophy in this book - lots of it. And, for me, that was far more to my liking that large anmounts of psychology might have been. I was fascinated by the discussion on compassion - is it real or an invention? For me it is real, but following the arguments philosophers and schools of philosophy have made was very instructive. I was perhaps less convinced about the ascent of love. Maybe this was psychology interfering. For me sex and love have to be separated. This is difficult because sexual activity is generally associated with the trust that genuine love creates. But, of course, this is not a necessary outcome. Most of the people we love we do not have sexual activity with. Don't even want to have sexual activity with. So to embed the ascent of love with sex does seem to me to be making two distinct matters unnecessarily entwined and probably to the detriment of the understanding of both.

It took quite a while for me to read this book. But, despite its closely argued structure, it was not a labour.

Philosopher Nussbaum argues in this book, the product of her Gifford Lectures, that emotions shape who we are, and they must form part of a system of ethical reasoning as intelligent responses to the perception of value. Emotions include in their content judgments that can be true or false and good or bad, and they act as guides for ethical choice. "A central part of developing an adequate ethical theory," claims Nussbaum, "will be to develop an adequate theory of the emotions, including their cultural sources, their history in infancy and childhood, and their sometimes unpredictable and disorderly operation in the daily life of human beings who are attached to things outside themselves" (2). Emotions have a complicated cognitive structure in relation to objects that we cherish and this relationship extends over time. And this means that without emotional development, a part of our reasoning capacity's political creatures will be missing.

Nussbaum's Neo-Stoic inspired project is to construct an analytic framework for thinking about emotions in general. Emotions "involve judgment about important things, judgments in which, appraising external objects are salient for our own well being, we acknowledge our own neediness and incompleteness before parts of the world that we do not fully control" (19).

In her first chapter, "Emotions as Judgments of Value," Nussbaum sets out the basis for her argument about the intelligence of emotions. Emotions view the world from the perspective of one's own scheme of goals, the things to which one attaches value for what it means to live well. In short, emotions are valuative appraisals of the world.

Continuity exists between humans and non-humans in that both display emotions. Studies of animal emotions underscore Nussbaum's claim that cognitive appraisals need not all be objects of reflexive self-consciousness. Although all individuals feel emotions, both human and non-human, this does not mean that individual histories and social norms do not shape emotions. In fact, they do. A path should be steered between those at one extreme who argue that emotions are totally constructed by society and those at the other extreme who argue that society plays no role in the shaping of emotions.

Emotions "bear the traces of a history that is at once commonly human, socially constructed, and idiosyncratic" (177). This means that adult human emotions cannot be understood without understanding their history in infancy and childhood. Nussbaum rejects theories calling individuals to bring every emotion into line with the dictates of reason, or the dictates of one's ideals, whatever they may be.

In the second part of this 700 page book, Nussbaum focuses upon the emotion of compassion. She defines compassion as "a painful emotion occasioned by the awareness of another person's undeserved misfortune" (301). Compassion includes cognitive aspects, including (1) the belief or appraisal that the suffering one encounters is serious rather than trivial, (2) the belief that the person does not deserve the suffering, and (3) the belief that the possibilities of the person who experiences the emotion are similar to those of the sufferer.

Compassion involves a significant quasi-ethical achievement in that it values another person as part of one's own circle of concern. One should not depend upon the vicissitudes of personal emotion, but should build emotion's insights into the structures of ethical rules and institutions. Furthermore, the relationships between compassion and social institutions is that compassionate individuals construct institutions that embody what they imagine and institutions influence the development of compassion in individuals.

In the third part of the book, Nussbaum addresses various traditions of erotic love. She does so hoping to show that erotic love can be part of morally acceptable life. Erotic love "involves an opening of the self toward an object, a conception of the self that pictures the self as incomplete and reaching out for something valued" (460). This means that erotic love is based on unequal concern not explained by reason alone. It is love that is partial.

The literature that Nussbaum explores in section three is part of the ascent tradition of love in that the authors who write of this love offer ways to reform or educate erotic love "so as to keep its creative force while purifying it of ambivalence and excess, and making it more friendly to general social aims" (469). The authors that Nussbaum addresses in the final part of the book include Plato, Spinoza, Proust, Augustine, Dante, Emily Bronte, Mahler, Walt Whitman, and James Joyce. This literature presents (1) a tradition that sees eros love as fundamentally the contemplation of the good and beautiful, (2) Christian account of the ascent that investigates the role of humility, longing and grace, (3) a romantic account that strives for love's transcendence, and (4) the reverse ascent or the descent of love in which human desire sets out its task of embracing the imperfect human world with love.

The Neo-Stoic theory of emotions that Nussbaum develops entails that while love is an emotion, it is also a relationship. Given this, Nussbaum critiques the authors' writings in the third section of her book using three normative criteria. The first criteria is compassion by which she asks, "Does this view of love y the constituent features of compassion, including the seriousness of various human predicaments, one's responsibility for these predicaments, and the proper extent of concern." The second criteria is reciprocity. By reciprocity Nussbaum means the idea that relationships of concern are established in which people treat one another as agents and ends, not as things. The third criteria, individuality, means that love recognizes that human beings are separate and qualitatively distinct individuals.

Thomas Jay Oord

Drawing on her vast knowledge of philosophy, psychology and literature, Martha Nussbaum takes us on a tour of the emotional landscape that ranges from the agora in Athens to the world of lab rats and electrodes. Her goal is to convince us that our emotions are cognitive appraisals of the world around us. If we master this idea, we improve our chances of building a life that's ethical, passionate and compassionate.

The argument unfolds in three sections. In Need and Recognition, Nussbaum defines emotions as evaluative judgements about the world based on our ideas of what we deem important for our own flourishing. After elaborating on this definition, she refines it by sparring with the -ologists who argue for the physiological origins of emotion. She addresses in a convincing way the question of how pre-verbal beings such as infants and non-verbal beings such as animals can make sophisticated evaluative judgements. The section on infant emotions plunges the reader back into those wild storms of bliss and rage that come from having all that you need to survive exist beyond your direct control.

Part II, Compassion, describes the process of extending one's definition of self-interest beyond the boundaries of one's own skin. She is particulary good on how shame and disgust, if not mastered, distance you from other people and prevent you from being imaginatively connected to a larger world.

Ascents of Love, the third part, traces evolving views of erotic love and it's here that Nussbaum's arguments start to soar. She demonstrates how the Platonic and Christian ascents of love solve the "problem" of loving specific individuals: you render the human irrelevant by ascending to the abstractions of ideal form or love of god. Nussbaum argues brilliantly for a view of erotic love that encompasses the ideal and real people as well. Her writing peaks in the chapters on Mahler and Joyce. She depicts Mahler's second symphony as a paean to human striving as a reward in itself, and Joyce's Ulysses as a heroic reclamation of the body in all its waywardness and fecundity from the life-denying clutch of the Catholic Church.

This book is important because it convincingly places control of our emotions within our own cognitive grasp. As masters of our emotions, we just might live a better life. One wishes the prose was less plodding in places, and the text less bristly with footnotes, but persevere. The views from the peaks are magnificent.

This is not a full review but merely a note of warning against taking seriously the earliest kneejerk reviews below, including the listing of this book as a "disappointment" before it was even published, by some idiot who admits to not having read it. Take a look instead at the editorial reviews which recognize this as a major work in an important area of contemporary inquiry, by a leading moral philosopher who is the object of much envy for her ability to write in lively and engaging prose. It merits serious attention for the philosopher/psychologist and the lay reader.

This book presumes that you have a deep, broad acquaintance with philosophy, literature, music and psychology, setting the bar high enough to deter all but committed and highly educated readers. Those undaunted by this barrier will find themselves amid an awesome tour de force of philosophical inquiry. Author Martha Nussbaum uses the ancient foundations of stoicism as a platform for a theory about emotions that, curiously enough, elevates and honors emotions - the same unruly forces that the Stoics eradicated. Yet, unfortunately, Nussbaum wrote her 700-plus pages so dryly that she makes even the story of a lonely man rescuing a little stray dog as bloodless and dusty as a mummy. Recounting her mother's death, she betrays the flicker of a tear, but quickly dries it with the towel of analysis. It seems strange that a study of the emotions should be so barren of emotional content. However, we assure persevering readers who keep digging through the dry sands of this book that they will discover some marvelous intellectual architecture buried deep beneath.

There is a major strand of Western philosophical thought that views emotions as opposed to reason, as if the passions were external, irrational forces pushing one around like a leaf in a storm. Then there is the strand that Nussbaum represents, that sees emotions (grief, fear, compassion, love, etc.) as fundamentally cognitive, adaptive expressions of an organism's assessment of its environment, vital to all our pragmatically rational endeavors. Nussbaum develops her thesis in three stages: first defending it philosophically, discussing the grounds of emotional response in biology, culture, and individual development; second, by exploring the rammifications of her cognitivism for ethical and social thought, and finally, by using her thesis as a critical lens through which to reread literary discussions of love ranging from Plato's Symposium to Whitman's Leaves of Grass.
Reading this work, one gets the impression that Nussbaum writes like she thinks; as philosophical writing goes, her style is quite lucid, but she has a tendancy to tell the reader she will "shortly" address topics that then do not appear for another hundred pages or so. She is nothing if not thorough, but it wouldn't have hurt if the whole book had been divided into two volumes, the second concentrating on the literary discussion. Moreover, in the first, philosophical half of the book she is too humble: if her treatment of emotions is correct, then two hunderd years of Anglo-American metaethical thought is overthrown, in so far as much of it stems from Hume's assesment of values as emotive and thus non-cognitive. This book should be read in conjunction with Hilary Putnam's The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy.