3
examines these emotions carefully then they can help us shed light on a number of
questions that have been central to the debates about the place of the emotions in moral
and political life. More specifically, I believe that these emotions can help us to see
precisely why posing the question of emotions in terms of binary distinctions such as
passive/active, disinterested/interested, egoism/altruism, voluntary/involuntary,
affective/cognitive, body/mind, inside/outside, self/other, heteronomous/autonomous,
irrational/rational, etc. misrecognizes essential aspects of our emotional life. Secondly, I
believe that if one considers the place of these emotions in human life then one begins to
understand why the category of the aesthetic so often seems to shed important light on
the kinds of judgments, choices and decisions that do play a role in the emotions.
Finally, I believe that these emotions can help us to understand the complex ways in
which power comes to be inscribed in the body such that our emotional life often seems
like something that seizes and disrupts our life and undermines our agency, even though
it is, as I shall argue, essential to our very motivation as agents. It is my hope that once
emotions are reconsidered in this light then the very debate between Hume and Kant
about whether reason or the passions are or ought to be the real engines of human
motivation comes to light as a result of an oversimplistic duality between reason and the
emotions, the rational and the irrational in human life.
Robert Solomon has recently argued that the study of the emotions has been
plagued by an oversimplistic Cartesian duality between the mind and the body.
1
Emotions are seen either as passive, irrational and bodily phenonemena that disrupt our
1
Solomon, Robert, Not Passion’s Slave: Emotions and Choice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003),
p. 144.
Convention