Aestheticized Tragedy (Karuṇarasa) as an Intellectual Virtue

Global Dialogues in the Philosophy of Religion, 2024

As Jeremy Bentham noted, philosophies that do not anchor goodness in God often take the emotions of pleasure and pain as the basis of ethics. What else do people ultimately want or fear, for themselves or others? The binary idea of positive and negative emotion underpins utilitarianism and many notions of virtue and sin. Yet India, with its longstanding history of yogic introspection, has developed a more complex theory of emotions. The theory of ‘rasas’, or sustained complex moods, says that the simple passions are of many types, and are malleable - and able to be developed into higher-order forms. In particular, they may be scaled out according to wider or narrower concerns, or altered in qualitative character according to greater and lesser degrees of egoism. This, according to rasa theory, can be done through techniques of i. combining affects, ii. generalising their focus, and iii. intensifying emotional self-reflexivity, all open up the phenomenological possibilities of emotion beyond simple positive and negative passions. A broad palette of emotion can be curated through practices of self-cultivation; this in turn alters the ethical itself. Impersonal arc-emotions for instance – what Chakrabarti calls ‘Ownerless Emotions’ – may focus on the overall coherence of a situation, rather than one’s personal appetites. Or a ‘bliss’ is possible that escapes all acquisitive character. Thus in Hinduism one may seek ‘higher’ emotions that transcend egoistic impulses, and achieve other states of subjectively intrinsic value.

Australasian Political Studies Association Conference, 2004

The Journal of Value Inquiry, 2004

Mind, 2004

Emotions have often been considered a threat to morality and rationality; in the Romantic tradition, passions were placed at the center of both human individuality and moral life. This ambivalence has led to an ambiguity between the terms of emotions for vices and virtues. Epicureans and Stoics have argued that emotions are irrational. The Stoics believed that virtue is nothing but knowledge, and emotions are essentially irrational beliefs. Skeptics believed that beliefs were responsible for pain, recommending rejection of opinions of any kind. These schools emphasized the general value of "ataraxia", the absence of mental disturbance, the philosophy being regarded as therapy for the cleansing of the emotions in the soul. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.27533.77282

Skill in Ancient Ethics: The Legacy of China, Greece and Rome (Bloomsbury Academic), 2021

In Nicomachean Ethics 2.1, Aristotle draws a now familiar analogy between aretai ('virtues') and technai ('skills'). The apparent basis of this comparison is that both virtue and skill are developed through practice and repetition, specifically by the learner performing the same kinds of actions as the expert: in other words, we become virtuous by performing virtuous actions. Aristotle’s claim that “like states arise from like activities” has led some philosophers to challenge the virtue-skill analogy. In particular, Aristotle’s skill analogy is sometimes dismissed because of the role that practical wisdom or phronesis purportedly plays in character virtue. In this paper, I argue that a proper understanding of character virtue, phantasia-based emotions, and Aristotle’s implicit distinction between habituated and strict or full virtue (aretè kuria) grounds his virtue-skill analogy. Character virtue stems from the non-rational orektikon and is developed through the habituation of passionate elements, primarily phantasia and pathé. Pathé are pleasurable or affective perceptions, not judgments or beliefs. Thus, pathé are subject to non-rational habituation. Practical wisdom, on the other hand, is an intellectual virtue stemming from the rational part of the soul. Though practical wisdom is necessary for full virtue (aretè kuria), it is not necessary for the habituated character virtue that Aristotle refers in Book II. Once we understand the phantastic basis of emotions and the distinction between habituated and full virtue, the virtue-skill analogy is apt. I conclude by briefly mentioning two contemporary forms of emotion regulation—cognitive reappraisal and cognitive behavioral therapy—that lend support from empirical psychology to Aristotle’s claim that emotions (pathé) can be habituated. Character virtue is indeed a skill; it is—at least in part—the skill of emotion regulation.

2013

This dissertation contends that emotions are subject to ethical assessment, not simply as motives or overt expressions, but in their own right. Emotions, I argue, are subject to assessment because they are aspects of a person's character. Specifically, emotions involve voluntary acts of attention, which are due to habituation. These acts show character by manifesting certain stable, deeply-held desires called 'concerns.' This view, dubbed 'Attentional Voluntarism,' is opposed to the prevalent view, dubbed 'Rationalism,' that emotions are subject to assessment because of their propositional content. Rationalism is unable to account for certain kinds of irrational emotion, where one forms an unwarranted emotion to avoid anxiety and secure pleasure. It exaggerates how mature and adaptive these emotions are. Attentional Voluntarism, by contrast, accounts for the childish and even infantile character behind such emotions, because the relevant habits of attention may simply be the residue from previous developmental stages.

Roeser & Todd (eds), Emotion and Value (Oxford University Press), pp. 199-211, 2014

The thought that emotions play a central role in moral epistemology goes back at least to Aristotle. It is, of course, the centrepiece of various non-cognitivist theories, but has more recently been defended by cognitivists on the basis of cognitivist theories of emotion. I begin from the assumption that the passions are an important source of intuitions about reasons to act, feel, and desire in certain ways. But they can be misleading, and in ways that operate outside unawareness; they are lack transparency. One cause of this is the occurrence of defence mechanisms creating unconscious distortions in the agent’s understanding of what he feels and why. Such distortions in turn result in distortions in one's understanding of the situations to which one respond and the reasons which they furnish. Thus, moral enquiry may be aided by the deconstruction of defence mechanisms. I argue for the importance of close relationship and dialogue with others, together with specific forms of courage, self-acceptance, and compassion, as productive in this regard.

chapter in the book: PATHE: THE LANGUAGE AND PHILOSOPHY OF EMOTIONS, ed. by Ljiljana Radenović, Dragana Dimitrijević and Il Akkad

In this paper, I will endeavor to point out that according to Aristotle tragedies are beneficial for a soul to a great degree. In the first section of the paper, I will elucidate his central thoughts on emotion in general, and pity and fear in particular. Subsequently, I will critically discuss, compare and contrast both ordinary and tragic fear and pity, as well as their interrelations as the defining features of the tragic genre. Additionally, I will argue that the fundamental cognitive components of pity and fear have an important impact on both Aristotle's understanding of tragic experience in general, and on one of his most controversial concepts, that of katharsis in particular. By discussing the various interpretative models in understanding katharsis, I will attempt to demonstrate why a kind of ethical perspective, which includes both emotions and cognition, is the best standpoint in accounting for tragic experience.