Abstracts

Why does it seem to be the case that the same piece of criticism can engender a deep sense of shame in some but not others?

In this article, I explore but ultimately reject two prevailing explanations for this phenomenon that center the nature of the object of criticism: the Insecurities Explanation and the Moral Responsibilities Explanation. According to the Insecurities Explanation, shame arises when criticism targets traits or behaviors about which the individual already feels insecure. The Moral Responsibilities Explanation takes shame to be a reactive attitude—a fitting response to moral failings that are criticized by others. I argue that neither explanation helps us understand cases in which criticism evokes shame in individuals who are neither insecure about the object of criticism nor have failed morally.

I then propose an explanation grounded in a novel account of the relationship between criticism and shame that links both to personal identity and centers gendered and racialized narratives around personal identity formation. On my account, shame is the generic response to being told one has erred (in any way) when one believes that the testimony of others is, in large part, constitutive of one’s personal identity. Hence, one’s propensity to experience shame in response to criticism (of any kind) is a function of how much one perceives one’s personal identity (and, as such, one’s moral worth) to depend on the testimony of others. How much one perceives one’s identity to depend on the testimony of others is, in turn, shaped by one's gender, race, and gender and racial identities.

In this way, I argue, shame ought to be understood as an oppressive emotion that upholds patriarchal and white supremacist ideologies, disproportionately affecting individuals from historically marginalized groups. And inequalities in shame ought to be seen as yet another injustice tied to gender- and race-based oppression.

This paper explores the power of nostalgia to inform political imagination via collective cultural memory. Nostalgia has a reputation as a tool for reactionary, exclusionary political movements, yet I argue that nostalgia can be employed to benevolent ends and that its rhetorical power must not be overlooked by any political project. My purpose is to outline a framework for recovering a political culture that promotes strong community bonds and living in harmony with nature. I understand collective memory and the complex emotion of nostalgia to be supportive of such a framework.

First, I examine the process of invoking collective memory, which is housed in cultural stories and ancestral practices passed down through generations. In the contemporary age, such invocations often provoke nostalgia, longing for the past, due to the consciousness of having lost continuity with ancestral traditions. This consciousness of loss stimulates the imagination of the subject as one is drawn to reflect on one’s own place in historical time and the flow of past, present and future. I argue that the rhetorical force of nostalgia is enacted by this provocation of memory, imagination and emotion, and provides a motive and a means by which a subject can begin to imagine a future grounded in both honoring the past and acknowledging the present.

I next look to examples from Daoist political theory to show how the invocation of cultural memory can be employed to inspire political imagination when advocating for a social framework that prioritizes living in harmony with nature. I contrast the Daoist use of cultural memory with that of Confucians in order to show how two traditions draw from the same cultural storehouse in different ways, resulting in different imagined futures.

Finally, I engage with Indigenous Epistemology to address contemporary concerns about cultural memory and knowledge transmission. Using this framework, I explore how the boundaries of time, place and culture can inform our political moment, and what kinds of possible futures might be imagined.

For many philosophers, blaming emotions are central to the moral life. Such emotions, however, are subject to a regulatory problem—they are all too often out of control. Mindfulness has been presented as a way to regulate blaming emotions. Mindfulness advocates, however, have historically disavowed blaming emotions. As such, for mindfulness to appeal to the blame-embracer a convincing case must be made regarding how mindfulness can solve the regulatory problem in a way that is normatively compatible with blame-embracing. This paper aims to make such a case by arguing that mindfulness enables the blame-embracer to properly sculpt their blaming emotions without sacrificing such emotions’ moral value. Insofar as the blame-embracer experiences an emotion mindfully, they affectively appreciate their emotion without being fully gripped by it, equipping the blame-embracer with the skills and dispositions needed to blame well. As such, blame-embracers, by their own lights, ought to become mindful moral emoters.

The paper studies the performance of mourning for the martyrs at Karbala in the month of Muharram as the commemorative and ritualized cultivation of grief as public emotion, and as perpetual reminder of the possibility of commitment against injustice. Such ritualized mourning is viewed using Martha Nussbaum’s notion of tragic spectatorship. The paper studies the importance of mourning both in the realm of devotional performance and fictional narrativization. I take up the contemporary Indian novelist Ismat Chughtai and her Urdu novel “Ek Katrā Khūn” or “One Drop of Blood” as exemplifying the narrative-commemorative possibilities Karbala opens. Chughtai’s novel is a literary commemoration of Karbala, and a deployment of tragedy for political ideals like democracy and freedom. Like the marsiya poets and nohā singers of her beloved Urdu, she makes use of the emotion of grief to sustain and develop an imagined political position (I would even argue, an imagined community) against imperialist injustice. I show how spectatorship of the tragedy of Karbala emphasises shared human vulnerability across space and time, making it possible for Chughtai to recast the story in the modern political vocabulary of the fight between democracy and fascist imperialism. Thus, through enactment and memorializing, narrative and fictive reimagining, the subversive potential of mourning is brought out. Read in terms of the commitment against injustice, the ritualized repetition of mourning (in both performance and fiction) makes conspicuous and helps energize and recreate a vulnerable relationality and community – formed out of an irredeemable loss – which is always poised against the ever-present and ubiquitous shadow of injustice.

Eunhong Lee -- Why Do ‘Pragmatic Reasons for Emotions’ Matter for Social Integration?

Some philosophers (Marušic, 2022; D’Arms and Jacobson 2000; 2023) argue that pragmatic reasons for an emotion—reasons concerned with the practical benefits of having that emotion—should be rejected, as such reasons are considered the ‘wrong kind of reasons’ for experiencing emotions. These reasons are considered the wrong kind because the genuine reasons for an emotion should be related to the fact that is the proper object of the emotion, while pragmatic reasons are not related to such a fact. They argue that only fitting reasons—reasons that make an emotion appropriate or suitable given the circumstances or facts—should be taken into account. However, I challenge the view, arguing that pragmatic reasons for emotions should be taken into account, especially when they serve public goods, promote political stability, or foster social integration. Emotions like moral indignation or anger can be justified not only by their fittingness but also by the pragmatic benefits and social advantages they bring. If emotions play a critical role in fostering social integration, then pragmatic reasons for emotions are vital in achieving and maintaining that integration. Recognizing the importance of pragmatic reasons in emotional experiences allows us to better understand how emotions contribute to both individual well-being and the cohesion of society as a whole.

A common diagnosis of contemporary right-wing populism is that it relies on misdirected anger: it galvanizes the justifiable anger people feel due to economic exploitation and marginalization but directs it towards scapegoat targets, like immigrants or minorities. Such explanations are not new: W. E. B. Du Bois already used the idea of misdirected rage to explain race relations in Civil War-era USA, and for authors like Adorno it figured as a key part of the explanation for 20th century European fascism. Despite the ubiquity of this analysis, though, the phenomenon of misdirected anger has received very little philosophical attention, and it is rarely made explicit what it means for an emotion to be ‘misdirected’. In this paper, I argue against existing epistemological and psychoanalytic accounts of misdirected anger and provide an alternative account that relies on a phenomenological understanding of anger. Anger arises from embodied frustrations that subjectively reveal problems in the subject’s lifeworld and aims to overcome them. Thus, it is a way of making sense of practical problems and is misdirected when interpreted in ways that do not help overcome the source of the initial frustration. The question of correctly directing one’s anger, then, is a forward-looking, rather than a backward-looking, one, which distinguishes the diagnosis of misdirection from other ways in which emotions can go wrong, like being inappropriate or unfitting. This account explains how misdirected anger serves to stabilize exploitative social orders and suggests that political organizing around shared material interests, rather than simply better information, is most likely to help people redirect their anger in more emancipatory ways.