Category Archives: Volume 15, no. 2 (2020)

Paola in Bergen

A Short Introduction to the Proceedings of the Conference “The Reason of Passions: Emotion and Rationality in the Landscape of (Contemporary) Politics”

A short introduction to the proceedings of the conference “The Reason of Passions: Emotion and Rationality in the Landscape of (Contemporary) Politics”, held over two days at the University of Bergen in November 2019. The conference was organised as a joint effort by the Department of Philosophy of the University of Bergen (UiB), Norway, and the Department of Antiquity, Philosophy and History (DAFIST) of the University of Genoa, Italy.

Read More...

Post-Truth, Polarization and Other Emotional Threats to Democracy

Why do emotions shape the arena of contemporary politics? Are post-truth and polarization the most powerful tools of the populist approach to politics? Do they pose a challenge to liberal democracy? How can we bring back rationality in public deliberation and political discourse? In this short paper I will try to answer these questions focusing on the role of emotions in contemporary democracies and the connections between post-truth, polarization and populism, while assessing a provisional proposal hopefully useful in building a working paradigm to bind politics to a more rational and prospective approach.

Read More...

Is Populism an Ideology or a Tool? Of Reason or Passions?

Populism, now on the frontlines of real world politics and academic investigation, is the phenomenon put to question in this article. Two related questions are posed concerning populism: 1) Is populism an ideology or a tool (in service of any ideology)? 2) Does populism address the emotions (passion) or is it a turn to rational human endeavor (reason)? These queries are investigated by bringing to bear Simon Critchley, Nancy Fraser, and Chantal Mouffe on the intricate behavior of populist politics. It is concluded that one can distinguish between right-populism and left-populism and thereby address both questions above.

Read More...

Emotional Politics – Some notes on anger, resentment and compassion

This article presents some attempts to understand the recent political turn to authoritarian right-wing populism in terms of emotions – more specifically anger. This anger belongs, according to researchers, to a specific demographic; white, downward mobile, middle class men are the backbone of the populist far right in US and Europe. The move towards populist authoritarianism is, however, a worldwide phenomenon, and Pankaj Mishra links the authoritarian and illiberal turn to inherent problems in the global modernization process first envisioned by Rousseau and the failure of liberal political theory to take human emotions seriously. Martha Nussbaum’s Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice wants to amend this lack of attention to emotions in liberal theory. We do not only need abstract principles, she claims, governments should also actively encourage pro-social emotions such as patriotism, love and compassion in order to create a more just, redistributive and inclusive society. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s critique of compassion and pity in On Revolution I will discuss some potentially problematic aspects with Nussbaum’s suggestion that we ought to actively foster a political culture of compassion.

Read More...

Good Prejudice. A Passing Foray in Intellectual History

It is difficult, if not impossible, to pinpoint the exact time when the pejoration of “prejudice” occurred. Nor can “prejudice” be understood once and for all as being exclusively a poorly formed opinion, an unreasonable belief, a false judgement, a sentiment, an assumption dictated or corrupted by sentiment, a bad behaviour, or an admixture of them, at least as far as intellectual history is concerned. Though assuming only one particular meaning of the term ab initio may be very convenient, speakers, erudite ones included, have been using “prejudice” in many ways, the variety of which linguists and other researchers at large cannot but acknowledge and report to varying degrees. Unlike artificial technical terms—e.g. the classical legal interpretation of “praejudicium”—and like all important concepts of our natural languages—e.g. love, justice, beauty, education—“prejudice” too is polysemic, ambiguous, living, contestable and contested. Within the history of philosophy, moreover, it is even possible to find positive appraisals of the term itself and the present short text lists and comments on many of them.

Read More...

“Polite Conversation is now Undesirable”: Peace and Agonism in Georg Johannesen’s Rhetoric

The promotion of peace by conscious and forceful articulation of agonism is one of the central and recurring motifs across the oeuvre of Norwegian rhetorician, author and public intellectual Georg Johannesen (1931-2005). The article concentrates on one of his texts, a partisan appeal, making serious charges against those in power, in a conflict described (non-metaphorically) as a matter of life and death. Apart from introducing Georg Johannesen to a non-Norwegian public, the aim of this paper is to sketch out the concept of “counterhegemonic peace movements” in the nuclear age.

Read More...

Fictional Utopias, Dystopias, and the Problem of Evil

Fictional utopias of the early modern time, as an alternative and an opposite to classical social contract theories, and fictional dystopias of the 20th century, as the opposite of the democratic and liberal rule of law, remain a major reference or for our contemporary political debates when it comes to characterize warn against considerable dangers entailed in political options, regimes, opinions etc. Today, classical utopias are mostly overwhelmingly considered in a negative way, although there were initially designed to be a more comprehensive solution for the problem of political evil than the social contract theories. From the beginning, dystopias were designed as the greatest political evil ever. Yet, both are not only fictional, but also radically impossible to ever b realized, for reasons that have not been really analyzed yet. In the following, I enquire into these reasons.

Read More...

A Reasoned Feeling, beyond the Contrast between Reason and Emotion

The aims of this paper are 1) to quickly describe and analyze the criticims of rationalism in The Affective Sciences and above all, to formulate the hypothesis of an indirect but undeniable link with populist and neoconservative movements. 2) To clarify the status of republican rationalism. 3) To make a philosophical offer that goes beyond the emotion/reason dualism in the political field. Thus, attention will be paid to define a “reasoned feeling”. Passion towards certain political ideals can, in our opinion, be coupled with the coldness of rationalism, the informed consideration of legal needs or institutional complexities.

Read More...

Passions and Society: Do we need a new Galateo?

In this paper I will try to define a possible way to respond to the increase of violent passions and violent reactions in our societies. It might well work in everyday life, but perhaps mostly at a political level. In the first part, the focus will be devoted to the idea (and practice) of Galateo, that is kindness or politeness. We will later wonder if and how a new Galateo (etiquette) could be an effective tool for social action, in view of overcoming the current violence of language and political passions.

Read More...

Xenophobia, Political Society and the Mechanism of the Imitation of Affects

In recent times, in almost all European countries, we have witnessed the rapid spread of growing xenophobic and racist sentiments, antisemitism, discrimination and violence against migrants, black people and Muslims. These sentiments have profound implications for the stability of our liberal democratic societies. Spinoza’s theory of the imitation of affects can help us to understand the ease with which negative feelings spread in even the most civilized and democratic societies. Furthermore, this theory also sheds light on the dangers these negative feelings pose to the stability of the political body.

Read More...

Errors in Politics: An analysis of the concept of political error

Although political errors are likely to be as old as politics itself, it is only in modern times – and I will suggest that it is only with Machiavelli – that the notion of political error clearly emerged on the background of other kinds of errors with which it has long been mingled. In an article entitled Morality and the social sciences, Albert Hirschman analysed the connection between morality and politics. He shows that there is a durable tension between the two. He writes: “modern political science owes a great deal to Machiavelli’s shocking claim that ordinary notions of moral behaviour for individual may not be suitable as rules for conduct for states.” Such an analysis invites to go back to the distinction between the different kinds of errors that can be done by humans with the goal of identifying the nature of those that can be specifically called “political errors”.

Read More...