176
Book
ReviewCherishing
ThemUpheavals
of thought: the intelligence of emotions. Martha C. Nussbaum, 2001. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press; ISBN 0-521-46202-9, 751 pp., £30.00
SAGE Publications, Inc.2004DOI: 10.1177/09675507040120020506
Katherine Weare
University of Southampton
At
one time it may have been accurate to say that Western society was frightened
of emotion, but that has changed in recent years, and emotion has recently
taken centre stage as the most fashionable issue in town. Work is developing
at an extraordinary pace, in psy- chology, neuroscience and education to name
but three disciplines, and is demonstrating from a variety of perspectives
that emotions, far from being merely primitive responses to be suppressed,
are at the heart of how we think, how we learn, and how we attribute mean-
ing and value. We are recognizing, too, that we have the ability to do far
more than respond blindly to feelings. We can think about them, organize them
modulate them, moderate them, and shape them through reflection and learning
(LeDoux, 1998). This perspective is often captured in shorthand by the term
`emotional intelligence',
177
which
was supposedly coined by Mayer and Salovey, who defined it as: `the ability
to perceive accurately, appraise and express emotion; the ability to access
and/or generate feelings which facilitate thought; the ability to understand
emotion and emotional knowledge; the abil- ity to regulate emotions to promote
emotional and intellectual growth' (Mayer and Salovey, 1997: 10). Goleman
(1996) popularized the term in his book of the same name, and argued that
emotional intelligence is more influential than conventional intelligence
for all kinds of personal, career and schol- astic success. Although there
have been significant criticisms that he overstated his case, his book certainly
caught the popular imagin- ation. Concern about the nature and proper response
to emotion is, of course, no twenty-first century fad. Aristotle clearly understood
the challenges of responding appropriately to anger: `Anyone can be angry — that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree,
at the right time, for the right purpose and in the right way — that
is not easy'. So it is fitting that perhaps the most con- sidered recent contribution
to the field has been made by Martha C. Nussbaum, a philosopher whose considerable
powers of thought have brought some much needed clarity and depth of thought
into this complex and controversial field. This may be a book that chimes
with the modern zeitgeist by its emphasis on the centrality of emotion to
personal and public life, but this is no airport best seller, and those who
pick it up hoping from the subtitle for the same kind of journal- istic romp
they experienced with Goleman's book are in for a tough time. Although Nussbaum
claims she writes for a general audience rather than for her academic peers,
and is keen to present her work as being of use and social value, this is
by no means an easy book. It is, however, a very rewarding one for those who
are prepared to stick with its 700 or so pages, and appreciate the breadth
of scholar- ship, the awesome ability to synthesize ideas from a range of
disci- plines without becoming facile, the elegance of the argument and the
clarity of the writing. It is a book to read slowly, with care, and with plenty
of pauses for reflection. Nussbaum divides her book into three parts. In the
first, `need and recognition', she concurs with the mainstream view, outlined
above, of psychologists and neuroscientists who are working in this area (for
example, DeMasio, 2000), that the emotions are not `irrational' distractions
from rigorous thought, but an essential part of rational and ethical judgement,
because they attach value to the objects of our experience (a point of view
that jars with her rather odd choice of title for the book, suggesting as
it does that emotions are distur-
178
bances
of thought rather than its essence). This thesis may no longer be novel, but
Nussbaum's particular take on it certainly is. Her justi- fication is partly
based on philosophical analysis, and in so doing she is correcting the tendency
of philosophy itself to ignore emotion in favour of the notion of dispassionate
analysis. She returns the disci- pline to its roots, and focuses particularly
on the merits and demerits of the point of view of the Stoics, which she praises
for its grasp of the central idea that emotions are judgements of value, while
taking issue with its conclusion that the emotions are disruptive influences
to be overcome and suppressed. She also roams widely away from her philosophical
base, moving into the world of psychology, and more particularly the psychoanalytical
theory of object relations developed by Melanie Klein and Donald Winnacott,
which suggests that our personal emotional landscape is not only the essence
of who we are, but is formed in the earliest years of our life, and that the
first relations a child forms with their primary carer, usually the mother,
shape all later relations. Most unusually in such an erudite book, although
satisfyingly for readers of Auto/Biography, she illustrates her argument from
personal experience, with a sustained account from her own life concerning
her grief reactions to her mother's death, an experience that she concludes
is the inevitable consequence of the high value her mother held for her — loss is the inevitable the price of love. Nussbaum is not content to restrict
her consideration of emotion to the personal — given her own long-term
interest in human rights and ethical development, she is keen to develop a
social theory of emotion, which is a major contribution to this debate. In
the second part of her book, she broadens out her argument to consider the
es- sential value of emotion in social and political life, using the key no-
tion of `compassion'. Compassion represents a generalizing of the idea of
personal attachment into a more general empathic judgement about the value
of other people, allowing us to recognize that they have equal value with
ourselves. Compassion is therefore not to be dismissed by those who are trying
to fight for such issues as equity, justice, human rights as `bleeding heart'
sentimentality, as it is the foundation for our concern with these matters.
The final section of the book is yet another ground-breaking foray, examining
ways in which emotion, and in particular love, has been explored in religion,
philosophy, literature and music, and selecting key examples that she believes
represent the essence of the Platonic, Christian and Romantic movements that
have shaped the Western tradition. She subjects the treatment of love in her
examples (whose extraordinary range includes Plato, St Augustine, Brontë,
Mahler
179
and
Joyce) to rigorous ethical scrutiny. She is no postmodernist, and is unequivocally
evaluative in her commentary, concluding that her figures represent, in some
ways, a `ladder' of development, which cul- minates in the work of Whitman
and Joyce, who manage to over- come the shame and disgust that mar our reactions
to our emotions by `restoring our love and attention to the phenomena of everyday
life'. This generous acceptance and celebration of the full range of emotion
is another welcome step forward. Much work that purports to be about emotional
intelligence turns out to be ultimately recommending the suppression of emotion
(impulse control, anger management, etc), in order to realize the dubious
goals of personal success in the corporate world. Nussbaum clearly thinks
emotion is far too important to be harnessed to the trivial goals of Microsoft,
and this book provides a welcome antidote to what could be seen as this closet
neo Stocism, focusing instead on the need fully to ex- perience and accept
our all our emotions, including difficult ones such as grief and guilt, cherishing
them as the foundation of ethical personal and social judgement and action.
References
DeMasio, A.
2000: The feeling of what happens. London : Vintage.
Goleman, D.
1996: Emotional intelligence. London : Bloomsbury.
LeDoux, J.
1998: The emotional brain. London : Phoenix.
Mayer, J.
and Salovey, P.
1997: `What is emotional intelligence?', in P. Salovey and S. Shulter , Emotional intelligence and emotional development.
New York: Basic Books.