George Kelly's Personal Construct Theory on Hostility and Anger

2020

The way that George Kelly treats moving from an act of love to an act of hate, via his formulation of the construct of hostility, may indicate how far apart Kelly’s model and embodied intersubjective approaches stand concerning the issue of the fundamental integrity of experiencing. All feeling and emotion for Kelly expresses an awareness of the relative ongoing success or failure in relating new events to one’s outlook. But his definition of hostility stands out from his account of guilt, anxiety, fear and threat in that it consists of a two-stage process. Kelly defines hostility as “the continued effort to extort validational evidence in favor of a type of social prediction which has already proved itself a failure.” Notice that this definition combines awareness of a validational event(invalidation) with a response to that event(extortion of evidence). Furthermore, as we will see, the way in which the first step is understood determines the sense of the second step, and vice versa. The crucial importance of interpretation in fathoming what Kelly meant by hostility can be demonstrated in the following questions: How far-reaching did he mean his definition to be? Is hostility the same thing as anger, and if so, is there such a thing as healthy, adaptive, anger, or do all forms of anger extort evidence? And what about subtle forms of affective perturbation like irritation and annoyance? Are these also forms of hostility?

2013

Revista de Humanidades de Valparaíso, 2022

This work intends to study the status of some emotions in a practical environment. I shall focus speci cally on two: anger and hatred. My first objective will be to show that the distinction between the two is not as simple as might appear at first sight. it is because, as I will show, anger and hatred appear to be neighboring emotions. It is therefore necessary to analyze them conceptually to pull aside the veils of appearance and thus identify their relevant di erences. My second objective is to show that the conceptual distinction I seek is not in pursuit of a merely analytical interest. I shall claim that the conceptual differences here have a practical impact, especially in the political environment, because anger and hatred should be dealt with differently in the realm of democracies.

Australasian Political Studies Association. Hobart, Tasmania, 2003

We are so well-equipped with an emotional capacity to hate that this element of the emotional repertoire is entrenched in common parlance. We may hate persons we have known and loved, those we know only by reputation and entire groups whose members we do not know at all. We are even capable of hating abstractions and general ideas. Such a robust capacity for expression across the full range of human relationships suggests that hate is not obviously perverse or pathological. Nevertheless there is a reluctance to acknowledge hate as a normal, much less universal, element of human experience. In recent years the meaning of hate has been broadened by way of denial into an ambiguous adjective to characterise odious or illegal behaviour (e. g. hate speech and hate crimes). Hate is, of course, a strong emotion, potentially yielding a disposition to forceful action. But numerous other emotions are also powerful and may lead to aggressive and violent action. Love, for example, or patriotism, fear, envy and greed may in extreme instances incline us to danger, violence and self-destruction. This paper will explore the proposition that, like many of these emotions, hate has a range of expression that is 'developmental' in the sense of normal biological, psychological and perhaps even social formation. Although the human emotions are powerful and potentially dangerous forces, without them we would surely not be the sentient and social creatures we imagine ourselves to be. The discussion will focus on the sparse philosophical discussion of hate, beginning with Aristotle, and proceed to the cautious and decidedly reluctant examination of hate within the province of theoretical and clinical psychology.

JCPCP, 2015

George Kelly's construct of 'hostility' is proposed as an explanation for why psychiatrists and psychologists hold on to bankrupt theories despite evidence to the contrary.

Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 2024

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the relevance of emotions for public debate, ideological attitudes, and the relationships between politics, the media, and claims to truth. Under the catchword "post-truth," (Peters et al. 2018) a way of thinking and acting in which emotional dispositions more than verifiable facts are the focus of politics has been critically discussed. Collective temperaments and individual manifestations of discomfort, particularly through expressions of anger and rage, can be found in all kinds of media outlets. The social mechanisms underlying these phenomena call for an investigation of their emotional foundations and implications on the part of philosophers and psychologists. A main focus of such research concerns inter-group attitudes. Positive feelings such as love, compassion, and sympathy open the prospect of living together in solidarity. On the other hand, negative feelings of anger, hatred, disgust, fear, and aversion can lead to aggressive self-assertion and the violent exclusion of supposed "others." While research on "political emotions" has produced considerable literature in philosophy, sociology, political science, and history in recent years (Goodwin et al. 2001; Nussbaum 2013; Demertzis 2014; Plamper 2015; Szanto and Slaby 2020), the descriptive and conceptual clarification of the group of aversive other-directed emotions remains an important desideratum. What these emotions have in common is hostility and a characteristic of creating or reinforcing boundaries between in-groups and out-groups. But what exactly are "hostile emotions"? The label encompasses emotions such as antipathy, jealousy, ressentiment, disgust, hatred, and contempt, which, for themselves and in combination, form personal attitudes and influence our relationships with others. The aim of this Special Issue is to bring together approaches from phi

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 2020

In a recent paper, Thomas Szanto (Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 2019) develops an account of hatred, according to which the target of this attitude, paradigmatically, is a representative of a group or a class. On this account, hatred overgeneralises its target, has a blurred affective focus, is co-constituted by an outgroup/ingroup distinction, and is accompanied by a commitment for the subject to stick to the hostile attitude. While this description captures an important form of hatred, this paper claims that it doesn't do justice to the paradigmatic cases of this attitude. The paper puts forward a "singularist" view of hatred, the core idea of which is that, in its simpler form, hatred is to aversively target the other qua this individual person, where the adverb "aversively" expresses the subject's desire for the target to be annihilated. The conclusion develops some general considerations on the distinction between paradigmatic and marginal instances of an attitude by highlighting its importance for the study of affective phenomena.

Ethnologia Europaea, 2015

Many argue that skepticism about blameworthiness impugns the rationality of the reactive anger partly constitutive of blame, and therefore generates a strong reason for skeptics to either relinquish doubt or eschew anger. Appealing to the conclusion Gary Watson draws in his influential discussion about the sadistic murderer Robert Harris, these philosophers argue that it is nearly impossible for any sane adult to target an agent with the anger that is constitutive of blame without also believing that the targeted agent deserves it. I call this view retributivism about anger. In this paper, I debunk the Harris explanation, and argue for a view I call the practical view of anger. Roughly, this is the view that an agent can target an individual with anger if she believes she is sufficiently justified in doing so, and values acting on that justification more than she disvalues harming the individual. Blameworthiness is the justification most often assumed to obtain. And we tend to value acting on it. However, there are non-desert based justifications and values that can work just as well. I cite as paradigms two kinds of cases: cases of moral reform in which we value the betterment of the immoral agent and moral community more than we disvalue the temporary harm that anger causes, and cases of moral protest in which we react angrily to an immoral but nevertheless undeserving actor in order to overcome or take a stand against the immoral system of which they are a part. That we lack the belief that such an agent deserves to be targeted by anger is not a sufficient emotional hinderance. So although skepticism about blameworthiness undermines a common justification for the reactive anger constitutive of blame, it does not impugn the rationality of blaming agents in reaction to their immoral acts.

The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy 16, 2018

This chapter aims to reconstruct the phenomenological theories on hatred developed by Scheler, Pfänder and Kolnai and to refl ect upon its anthropological implications. Four essential aspects of this phenomenon are analyzed, taking as point of departure the works of these authors: (1) its place in the taxonomy of the affective life; (2) the world of its objects; (3) its expression in the form of bodily manifestations and motivating force; and (4) the inherent possibilities for overcoming it. The chapter concludes that hatred is a key phenomenon for understanding aspects of human nature that we generally try to ignore or overlook.