Moving forward in the study of emotions: Some conclusions

Abstract

None of the contributors to this book subscribe to the idea that the emotions are inconsequential or stand opposed to reason and rationality. In different ways the previous chapters have demonstrated that the emotions make a substantive contribution to political and social life, that they are not simply the consequence of thought or action but are also a crucial determinant. The contributors go further: whilst they demonstrate how the emotions can contribute to unreason (Alford shows, for example, how hatred can attack the very foundation of thinking itself) they also show how the emotions contribute to struggles against injustice and thoughtful ethical action. Moreover they demonstrate how an understanding of the emotions can provide a richer and fuller understanding of rationality. But there are still some unresolved issues here. In particular there is the vexed question of the precise relationship between thinking and feeling. Can feelings exist which lack a thinker to think them? Are feelings necessarily attached to an individual thinker or can they be the possession of a group? In other words, if the possibility of the existence of collective feelings is acknowledged, in what way are they collective? Do experiences such as social suffering, ressentiment or a shared sense of outrage or shame exist in a kind of social ether or is this to fall into a kind of reification of emotion, one in which emotion becomes some kind of phantasmic force operating above and beyond individual actors? Just how do shared emotions make themselves present, what form do they take?.