It's written in a more or less academic style so the book itself might not appeal to everyone here. The content however as a whole is a quite rare and unique effort to find a new approach, a multi-faceted look at emotions, their origins, handling and insight in how they might relate to your self or the society that defines them in the first place. It ranges from Aristotle's discourse on emotions in his Rhetoric, the Stoics, Descartes and Spinoza to Hobbes, Hume and even neuro-scientists like Damasio. Quite a large playing field.
I'll give some quotes to give you an idea:
Anger is a deeply social passion provoked by perceived, unjustified slights, and it presupposes a public stage where social status is always insecure (...) rather than private feelings. (...) Anger assumes asymmetrical power.
The king is angry because his entitlement is concretely threatened, and without that extracongnitive entitlement manifest in the world around him, the king would have no angry thoughts at all. And that brings me to a final point linking Aristotle directly to early modern psychologists such as Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, and William Perfect, or even to someone like Judith Butler in our day: Aristotle's anger presumes a contoured world of emotional investments, where some people have significantly more liabilities than others. A man becomes angry both at those who belittle him and, interestingly, at those belittling others whom it would be shameful for him not to defend
My project is distinguished by its rhetorical approach, which puts the question of politics front and center ... a "political economy" wherein passions are (1) constituted as differences in power, and (2) conditioned not by their excess, but by their scarcity.
Damasio is criticized because of his ignorance of any social context or model in his various experimentsOne might imagine emotions that were once treated by everybody as externalized forms of currency and worldly investments sucked, as it were, into the brain.
I will concede that it is trivially true and therefore uninteresting that everything human, including the judgment of trustworthiness, has some localizable and theoretically measurable manifestation in the body or brain. (...)
Considering that his first book is called Descartes's Error, it is fair to ask whether Damasio can do any better explaining emotional variation. (...)
How does one determine scientifically what a sick culture is, after all ... what barriers to objectivity are faced by the brain scientist of emotion who works within a sick culture? This is called the paradox of the observer: how can one adequately characterize an abnormal emotional brain when one's study might be designed within a sick culture affected by maladaptive biases inherently unidentifiable and therefore uncontrollable from within the scientific study?
For now enough quotes. The general idea seems to be that emotions are better understood when seeing them linked to their social functioning (as coinage) which links them with deeply embedded power relations manifested in politics, various beliefs and the cultural as opposed to a purely personal functioning. This would lead also to the question how much of your self is defined by its social standing and maintained through the passions.Emotions, whether in the context of eighteenth-century psychology or even in ouw own popular psychology, must be read as markers of social distinction rather than just expressions of a human nature essentially shared by all. Instead of wondering perennially why it has taken so long to extend the range of human compassion to women, to slaves, to non-Europeans, to the poor, and so on, we would do better to track the history of terms such as pride, humility, pity, and compassion and see how they have been mobilized for strategic purposes; how, for instance, particular communities are composed by the notion that they have a monopoly on that compassion that would be extended to others. This would be a very different history of psychology indeed.
