Nussbaum

Emotions are internal by nature but are experienced because of our relationship with external contingencies. The emotions we feel come from the ability to relate; to impose situations onto ourselves. Aristotle describes love as the acknowledgement of one’s own faults and finding compliments to these in other people. He describes fear and pity as “acknowledging our vulnerability…only if we really do think that life can do something us, and that this something matters (pg. 312).” Before one can take action, whether it is to start a fight or to fall in love, one must be able to acknowledge his/her own vulnerabilities. A somewhat cliché, yet easily graspable, example would be the concept of donation. In order for a passerby to feel compelled to give a homeless man on the street a dollar, the giver must acknowledge that the homeless man’s plight is something that could in fact happen to his/her own life. If the passerby does not recognize this as a possibility, he/she will not feel inclined to assist.

However, there are many negative consequences to this interconnectedness that drives emotion. We impose others’ circumstances onto ourselves, driving our sense of fear, hate, love, ect. In doing this we inevitably, and often, take action based on completely external possibilities. Certainly this can be seen as a potentially dangerous scenario. This leads into Plato’s idea that “a good person is completely sufficient to himself for good living (pg. 313).” In Plato’s Republic he describes a world where people do not sacrifice virtue for any reason. If people enforced this belief, emotions would virtually disappear. He makes the point that in order to be a truly virtuous human being, one must not be manipulated by emotions; of course to not be manipulated by them would mean they must somehow not exist. In order for emotions to not exist, since we have identified them as being products of outside forces, the virtuous man must recognize that “nothing among human things is worth much seriousness (pg. 313).” Only then would people be able to act solely for themselves, free from the affect of others. It is worth noting that if this were the case, our beliefs about love would, too, be shattered as love is an incredible attachment to another being, leaving people vulnerable to all sorts of actions and emotions.

Fusing both Socrates’ and Plato’s examples, emotions can be deemed as rational in the context that we are inevitably connected to other people, though they seem almost irrational for this same reason. We will be driven by the affect of outside forces but is this really necessary? Would individuals and society both be better off by a lack of emotional response or would it suffer from the consequential lack of interconnectedness?

Though I sense the allure of shrugging off circumstances I cannot control with little affect on my emotional state, I personally fall more on the side of Socrates. I find an importance to recognizing the greatness that can come from being affected by other, especially in the vein of pity and love. Though many horrific acts (war, murder, genocide, revenge) can come from this affect, so too can many acts of greatness (meaningful relationships, charity, relief, civil rights). In my personal life I’d like to find a balance between the two philosophies. Ideally, I would like to acknowledge the power of other’s on my emotions so that I can logically sift through them, deciding when it is acceptable to act on this affect and when to simply walk away from negativity. Being aware of Socrates’ observation, and keeping Plato’s solution in mind, I feel it is possible to, not control my emotions but, have the ability to understand their origins and in turn act only as I would logically want to act under my own definition of personal “virtue”.