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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Human civilization is founded on ethical principles, norms of behaviour that have accumulated over time. Perhaps the oldest of ethical principles is the rejection of violence, which includes the respect for life and for the physical and psychological integrity of others. But, in some circumstances, violence itself can be regarded as ethical – for example, when it is used by states claiming to act in self-defence. In these circumstances, the need to defend oneself against an enemy can transform war from an unacceptable act into a necessary, socially shared and morally sanctioned choice. And it is when violence becomes ethical that we must begin to fear for our future.
In the wake of the pandemic, we are witnessing the growing prevalence of aggression and emotionality in social and political life. We find ourselves living in an increasingly impatient and insecure society, which is sceptical of scientific thought and which takes refuge in the irrational. The decline of rationality and the growing prevalence of violence are increasingly common features of a society that has lost touch with the great Enlightenment narrative. We need, argues Bordoni, to rediscover the rationality we have lost and recuperate the positive side of technology.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Praise for
Ethical Violence
Title Page
Copyright Page
Detailed Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Living in Disturbing Times
1 Do We Live in the Most Rational of All Possible Worlds?
1.1 The best of all possible worlds
1.2 The revival of emotions
1.3 The dominance of impulse
1.4 Irrational choices and the task of ideology
1.5 Pseudoscience and beliefs
2 The Violence of Reason
2.1 The non-reasons of violence
2.2 Power and reason
2.3 The destruction of reason
2.4 The angry ego of technological society
2.5 The principle of opposition
3 Avoidable Conflicts
3.1 Interventionism: looking back
3.2 Justification of conflict
3.3 The power to declare war
3.4 The pacifist’s dilemma
3.5 Beyond symbolic violence
4 The Ethics of Violence
4.1 Ethification as legitimation
4.2 The oppressive nature of moral anachronism
4.3 Building the enemy
4.4 ‘Make’ live, let die
4.5 The dignity of mourning
5 The Fault of Modernity
5.1 The crisis of modernity
5.2 European modernity
5.3 Reaction and revolution
5.4 The ambivalence of modernity
5.5 Nationalism resurrected
6 Only Technology Can Save Us
6.1 Individualism and freedom from debt
6.2 Technology and rationality
6.3 Without reason or intellect
6.4 Technology and science, an ambiguous harmony
6.5 Digital enchantments. The magical allure of new technologies
6.6 Knowledge as a remedy
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Praise for Ethical Violence
‘Carlo Bordoni has written a remarkable book. It should serve as a wakeup call to what is happening in terms of our increasing abandonment of science in favour of technology, which, by the very click-of-the-button nature has disastrously changed the perception of knowledge to mere personal opinions. Because of this imbalance, and its pocketbook nature, we are seeing an irrational drift in the nature of our societies’ democratic responses, and a revival of the predominance of the emotional, which is gaining ground and dangerously altering the very nature of social and political life. Bordoni also warns of the difficulties of putting scattergun beliefs and notional opinions back into any agreed and rational collective order in the years ahead. An informed and challenging book.’
Mari Fitzduff, Brandeis University
‘Bordoni’s search for an understanding of the paradox of ethical violence – and of many other puzzles of human rationality and irrationality – takes him through many times and places of human history, a wealth of philosophers and others from the ancient Greeks to today’s writers, and a myriad of ideas. This is a book that makes you stop and think after nearly every sentence.’
Colin Crouch, University of Warwick
‘Ethical Violence is a timely book, a theoretical vade mecum for dark times, simultaneously ambitious and cautious, taking the reader on unusual paths from ancient philosophers to contemporary social scientists, and questioning what is taken for granted about the distinction between rationality and irrationality. A needed reflection on the crisis of late modernity.’
Didier Fassin, Collège de France and Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton
Ethical Violence
Carlo Bordoni
Translated by Wendy Doherty
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © Carlo Bordoni 2024
The right of Carlo Bordoni to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Originally published in Italian as Furor
Copyright © Luiss University Press 2023
This English edition published in 2024 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
111 River Street
Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6101-8 (hardback)
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6102-5 (paperback)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023936711
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Detailed Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Living in Disturbing Times
1 Do We Live in the Most Rational of All Possible Worlds?
1.1 The best of all possible worlds
1.2 The revival of emotions
1.3 The dominance of impulse
1.4 Irrational choices and the task of ideology
1.5 Pseudoscience and beliefs
2 The Violence of Reason
2.1 The non-reasons of violence
2.2 Power and reason
2.3 The destruction of reason
2.4 The angry ego of technological society
2.5 The principle of opposition
3 Avoidable Conflicts
3.1 Interventionism: looking back
3.2 Justification of conflict
3.3 The power to declare war
3.4 The pacifist’s dilemma
3.5 Beyond symbolic violence
4 The Ethics of Violence
4.1 Ethification as legitimation
4.2 The oppressive nature of moral anachronism
4.3 Building the enemy
4.4 ‘Make’ live, let die
4.5 The dignity of mourning
5 The Fault of Modernity
5.1 The crisis of modernity
5.2 European modernity
5.3 Reaction and revolution
5.4 The ambivalence of modernity
5.5 Nationalism resurrected
6 Only Technology Can Save Us
6.1 Individualism and freedom from debt
6.2 Technology and rationality
6.3 Without reason or intellect
6.4 Technology and science, an ambiguous harmony
6.5 Digital enchantments. The magical allure of new technologies
6.6 Knowledge as a remedy
References
Index
Acknowledgements
My gratitude to all who made this book possible. Especially to Colin Crouch who read the text in Italian and to the Polity team who believed in it, starting with the publisher, John Thompson, along with Sarah Dobson, the indefatigable foreign publishers hunter, Maddie Tyler, production editor at Polity, and Susan Beer, punctual editor who followed me in fine-tuning this English edition. And, obviously, I thank my devoted translator, Wendy Doherty; but Ethical Violence would not have taken shape without the advice, prompting and patient revision of my wife Daniela.
IntroductionLiving in Disturbing Times
We live in times of crisis. However, some will say that every time is a time of crisis, and that no sooner do the critical issues of a given moment fade away, than the clouds that forewarn of new storms immediately begin to form on the horizon. The fact is that crises – in the original meaning of the word, i.e., times when judgements are needed, which require courageous choices, sometimes even grievous decisions – follow one another more and more rapidly, converging on each other, affecting politics, economics and international relations, and also personal behaviour and social relationships.
This sort of congestion produces severe existential distress on the one hand and, on the other, evidence of not being able to deal with, let alone overcome, each and every problem, thus heightening the feeling of continuous uncertainty and helplessness. What the crisis should have produced – a different decision – instead results in immobility, the inability to act, and we know that uncertainty is the enemy of the faculty to plan ahead, since it precludes any positive vision of the future.
In a book written in 2014 with Zygmunt Bauman, State of Crisis, we examined the crisis brought about by the ‘great recession’ of 2008, along with the difficulty of the nation-states to withstand the weight of globalization. But, above all, it was the crisis of modernity, already denounced by Jean-François Lyotard in the late 1970s and aggravated by the ‘liquefaction’ of social relations, on which Bauman himself had founded his successful sociological interpretation.
Despite the complex and exhaustive analysis of liquid modernity, it soon became clear in the years immediately following that the rapidity of the social change taking place required new instruments to understand it, so much so that Bauman introduced, as a partial remedy, the concept of ‘interregnum’, along the lines of Gramsci’s thought.
It is true, however, that understanding the reasons for a crisis is the way to overcome it, and those who lived through those years thought that they would be able to come through it definitively, albeit with some difficulty. Instead, we know that new waves of crises, all being different, followed after one another, up to the ‘perfect storm’ of the pandemic, which forced us to re-think social relations and living conditions. We are still not fully aware of the implications that this global upheaval may have but there is every likelihood that it will permanently erase the idea of modernity as we knew it.
Similarly, Bauman’s idea of liquidity appears to have been shelved, despite being extremely useful to explain society between the end of the twentieth and the first decade of the twenty-first century. What has emerged, then, is an awareness of an end to the social or at any rate to its dramatic transformation. Alain Touraine anticipated this in 2013, while Bernard Stiegler (2014, 2015) confirmed how new technologies could play a major role in an increasingly individualized world.
After the pandemic, the possible effects of new crises were highlighted but other critical issues that relate to the post-social trend still needed to be addressed, such as the decline of rationality and the prevalence of violence, both in the private and in the public sphere. The two aspects – irrationality and violence – may appear far removed, but on closer inspection they present deep connections that, together, add to the vision of a world in which the shift towards a post-social condition is spreading extensively. Without underestimating the decline of rationality and distrust in science, of which we see ample evidence every day, it is, however, the issue of violence that is the most pressing and of great concern for those who note it.
Violence becomes extremely dangerous when we return to legitimizing it, justifying it on the most disparate grounds, starting with the right to defence. It is not only the state that legitimizes it, with its self-attributed power to exercise violence since the origins of modernity, but any inner conviction that, based on any socially shared emotional reaction, leads to justifying it because it is necessary. In this way, the violence becomes ‘ethical’ when it is legitimized by convention and even tolerated by the law. In a certain sense it becomes part of everyday life, something purely instinctive and therefore irrational. From an anthropological point of view, it could be called an archaic legacy of our mind, thanks to the role of the amygdala that drives man – as is the case for all higher animals – to defend his territory and offspring, and to behave aggressively towards anyone who presents a threat or danger. However, it does not always work this way: more often, in fact, violence is a form of culture, socially induced, where behaviours are stratified and modifiable over time, depending on the moods of society.
However, it is still irrational violence, controlled and inhibited by centuries of civilization, which are unable to control it completely when reason is challenged and emotionality prevails. Times of great passions and emotional turmoil are always accompanied by irrational outbursts of violence.
Ethical violence encompasses all types of violence, including the non-physical kind, and verbal or written aggression; the deliberate failure to help others and even denial of our responsibility towards them (Emmanuel Lévinas); as well as any form of culturally exerted pressure towards certain social behaviours. Pierre Bourdieu’s symbolic violence fits neatly into the status of ‘ethics’ precisely because it takes the form of a ‘habitus’, a need to conform to the standards that society demands and that allow people to feel normal and integrated.
In recent times we have begun to feel a new and worrisome atmosphere of readiness to judge violence, a perception that is gaining ground in the common consciousness. In the wake of international events, this perceptible change in attitude is due to the contribution made by more or less everyone, starting with the media, which – as Étienne Balibar reminds us – has a great responsibility in this regard.
We are quite rightly outraged by feminicide, gratuitous acts of violence, and outbursts of irrational aggression, but we remain indifferent to rational violence, carried out using the most advanced weapons, if it is justified by the right to self-defence. It is felt as something necessary, indisputable, urgent, and shared at an emotional level, because it is a collective need that has to be met. It comes under – and this is easy to understand – the perverse appeal of war as an epochal change: a formidable, nullifying tool to put an end to the state of uncertainty, making it possible to reset reality and prepare for rebirth. This will create new opportunities, new rules, but the price to pay for this is very high indeed. When this shared emotion becomes ‘ethical’, meaning morally permissible, is the moment when we must begin to be afraid.
It is important to clarify the difference between private and public violence: private violence, which is stigmatized and reprehensible, is never legitimate (as defined by Hannah Arendt), but public violence – controlled by a power, which may be the state, an absolute sovereign or dictator – possesses an underlying ambiguity that enables it to become legitimate in particular cases.
The conditions required for this to happen are the defence of the nation, but also the exceptional nature of an event that, supported by public opinion, expresses the need for action for the benefit of the community or justice. This right is authorized by the principle guaranteed in modernity of attributing the use of force to the state, taking it away from the citizen, thus granting an ethical value to violence, making it customary and even lawful, since it is established by the legislation in force.
Rational violence, insofar as it is laid down by institutions (repression, criminal convictions, capital punishment, wars), does not need emotional justifications. If anything, it is the very cause of such reactions, which may or may not be shared by the public. It is up to the institutions themselves to make these forms of rational violence acceptable through appropriate information and propaganda campaigns so that they become ethical.
What are the consequences? Without succumbing to the dark allure of any dystopia, or being beguiled by false prophets who threaten impending tragedies, finis mundi or other irrational conveniences from which to take comfort in despair, it is now more necessary than ever to understand what the current change may entail and to prepare to make the right choices, because the future will depend on those very choices made. One way or the other.
Has the changing society really left behind the grand Enlightenment narrative, as the postmodernists announced in the late 1970s? By observing the present, sociology made it possible to prepare the future, without directing it – although some have tried to do so, using sociology as a blunt instrument – but at least offering probable scenarios, around which to reason and make conscious choices. By the time sociology gives its response, it will be too late and of little use. We will file away the analyses of this time with the inevitable sense of detachment, under the heading of lost opportunities. It is more necessary than ever to try to understand what is happening in an increasingly impatient and insecure society, which seeks solutions in emotional responses, aggression and denial of the other.
This book can be read as a continuation of previously undertaken sociological analyses (Bordoni 2016, 2019, 2022), with the aim of addressing the new emergencies that have been added to those of social distancing, the primacy of the emotions and voluntary submission to surveillance that have characterized the period immediately following the peak of the pandemic.
The first four chapters analyse the climate of irrationality that questions science, the attempts to justify war and all forms of violence, up to the debate between Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida and Carl Schmitt on war as a creator of law. It explains the concept of ‘ethical violence’, starting with Theodor W. Adorno up to Judith Butler, through Michel Foucault and Achille Mbembe. The last two chapters find the possible causes of the social drift in the crisis of modernity and mistrust of science, preferring a passive and automatic use of technology. The concluding remarks, following Bernard Stiegler’s lead, urge us to find the rationality we have lost and recuperate the positive side of technology, its good pharmakon, that humanity dearly needs.
It intends above all to demonstrate how non-reason is forcefully entering our lives. It seems to be prevailing, together with examples of personal self-assertion based on emotionality and spontaneity. It seems to be taking hold through the ever-present social media, accompanied by the rampant right of speech. In contrast, there is a growing distrust of science, with a preference for ‘disintermediation’, which has an undercurrent of populism and false democracy – all accompanied by a covert restoration of the legitimization of aggressiveness and violence.
An ethical violence.
1Do We Live in the Most Rational of All Possible Worlds?
1.1 The best of all possible worlds
Do we really live in the most rational of possible worlds? The Leibniz-like question is insidious and contains within itself a doubtful answer, simply because rationality, just as the Enlightenment thinkers observed, necessarily involved the element of doubt. Doubt is the litmus test of reason, its incontrovertible proof.
But how far are we now from the Enlightenment? It seems that the reason that regulated the development of modernity has been overshadowed by the primacy of the emotions, given that they are more immediate, more human and therefore more suited to the needs of a life lived in the present day.
One symptom of the move away from Enlightenment ideas is precisely the disappearance or attenuation of doubt. This would appear to be absurd in the age of uncertainty, but doubt – the first quality of reason, the foundation of logic and the guarantee of knowledge – has been lost in pursuit of the presumption of knowledge and the need for reference points. Individuals, alone with themselves, try to find inner certainties, and are convinced that they possess auctoritas by the mere fact of existing here and now. Even the act of sharing with others is done with a certain ‘selective deafness’, where any contrasting opinion is rejected on principle and any confirmation of similar beliefs is accepted.
Dispensing with the benefit of doubt is the easiest mode of reassurance, but it leaves the individual unprepared for the unexpected. The unexpected is not contemplated but simply removed from the consciousness, since it leaves room for anxiety and fear. Reversed single thought takes hold, where self-referential truth must be strongly defended; we follow our nose with no destination in sight, following the emotional trail of instinct. But a culture that does not envisage the benefit of doubt is doomed to impoverishment.
Moreover, the disparagement of doubt carries with it, as if it were an effect of the first question, a request: is it really preferable to live in a rational world? Even in the most rational of possible worlds? In this case too, the answer is doubtful and needs some reflection.
A world based solely on reason would be an unpleasant one and, from a human perspective, probably unlivable. Yet modernity tried to impose the choice of reason, the only one that would enable continuous progress and guarantee social order. But when it came to realizing a totally rational world, the outcomes were not positive.
What does a rational world actually mean? First and foremost, an orderly, standardized world, where the citizens obey the laws, pay taxes and lead an existence dictated by precise rules according to their role and age. And, above all, enjoy a status of equality: equality is the key word here, since the first principle on which the modern state was founded is the equality of citizens.
This does not mean, contrary to what one might think, economic and social equality, which there never was, nor has ever been envisaged, but only the equality of rights/duties in the eyes of the state. If we go back and search through the initial propositions that led to the establishment of the modern state, between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we find that they include the erasure of all diversity and privilege. All equal in the eyes of the law.
Basically, for the first time in human history, modernity subjected the citizens to a kind of ‘Procrustean bed’, cutting and stretching where necessary in order to achieve a homogeneous population that behaves in the same way, that receives the same education and upbringing, with the result that they are easily controlled, in everything they do, from birth to death: a strictly political equality.
The Procrustean cleaver comes into play where the rules are not respected, using moral persuasion in the first instance and resorting to violent repression in the case of resistance. Both instruments are available exclusively to the state, which decides when to ease or intensify one or the other, depending on social conditions or the expediency of the time, in order to maintain a stable balance.
Nearly four hundred years of modernity unfolded around this continuous search for a balance between ethical conditioning, repression and concessions, which culminated in a tragic outcome, as recorded in the period of totalitarianisms. Totalitarianism is a creature of modernity: it has been discussed extensively by many observers, including Theodor W. Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Jean-François Lyotard and Zygmunt Bauman. Now we know that it is a process of instrumental rationality carried out with the aim of achieving the perfect modern state. But what is not known is whether this outcome is the result of a deviation, i.e., whether totalitarianisms represent a perversion of the ideal of social order envisioned by modernity.
We have no other examples to compare it with, although there have been several modernities and, starting with the Western one, they developed at different times and in different ways in other parts of the world. It is a fact that the moment technological development made it possible and the conditions were created in the political field for exercising a more stringent control of humanity, totalitarianisms were able to achieve that form of absolute state which involves illiberty, subjugation, the annihilation of differences, and the mechanization and bureaucratization of lives. This process is only possible (and still is) through the use of technology. The more sophisticated it is, the more achievable is the subjugation, homogenization and absolute control of minds and bodies.
Fascism and Nazism demonstrated how the use of technology, through every available means and the implementation of impressive displays of force, could influence, persuade and coerce the masses into accepting an inhumane political regime. When this mode of consensus management did not achieve the desired results, totalitarianisms resorted to violence.
With the Holocaust, Nazism reached levels of dehumanization unprecedented in history, using the instruments that technology provided to alter the world according to a fanatical ideal of perfection and social order. Genocide and genetic experimentation, a combination that used the technology available to eliminate the weakest and the undesirable, have truly represented a process of ‘social gardening’, whose gardener is the faceless power of the totalitarian state. Technology, hierarchy, bureaucracy, absolute obedience and a regime of terror, all used to achieve a universe of modern perfection, but also of blatant artificiality.
Is this the world that modernity aspired to?
The end of modernity is considered to have occurred at this phase of totalitarianism. It is here that the long season of modernity comes to an end, at the very moment of the extreme expression of the modern idea of social order and the mechanization of existence. Everything that has followed since then, from postmodernism to Bauman’s liquid society, is just an attempt to keep alive a form of civilization that has now run out of steam. In the long goodbye that has been stalling for the past seventy years, from the post-Second World War period to the present day, what remains of modernity and its last breaths has petered out in the face of the tragic intrusion of the pandemic.
Given this complex evolution, we can find a succession of different socio-cultural connotations that allow us to trace multiple types of modernity. If modernities are multiple, as Shmuel Eisenstadt suggested, then there is no single modernity. There are several, each of which, over the centuries, has shown a different face, aggregating components and breaking them up, contradicting itself and evolving according to new patterns of development that have changed its direction, while still firmly maintaining its fundamental principles to adapt to social and economic conditions.
Early modernity goes back to the sixteenth century; its most important thinker is Jean Bodin, who introduced the concept of sovereignty and the need to separate religious and temporal power.
The second modernity in the seventeenth century is foundational: its greatest representative is Thomas Hobbes. In Leviathan and De Cive, Hobbes configured the modern state governed by an absolute sovereign, thanks to the principle of ‘cuius regio, eius religio’, which creates a cultural and political unity within the borders of the modern state.
The third modernity is characterized by reason. In the eighteenth century it links the modern idea to the primacy of reason with the Enlightenment of Voltaire and Diderot.
Instead, industrialization is the basis of the fourth modernity of the nineteenth century with Karl Marx denouncing its contradictions and theorizing the redemption of the working class.
The twentieth century sees the fifth modernity using instrumental rationality to dominate nature and humans through technological innovations that had already been underway in the previous century. Here the leading thinkers are Max Weber and Martin Heidegger.
After the events of the twentieth century and the experience of totalitarianisms in which modern thought reached the peak of its hubris, the new century, the twenty-first, began with the most acute crisis of modernity, represented by Zygmunt Bauman’s liquidity: modernity on the wane becomes inconsistent and elusive, and starts to lose its reference values.
After this phase of liquefaction, considering the development that has been ongoing for centuries and the state of severe deterioration it has reached, the recovery of modernity as an appreciable, solid and convincing form of society does not appear feasible. Rather, its condition of extreme crisis is a prelude to an epochal change that we all, men and women of today, are about to experience.
1.2 The revival of emotions
Let’s face it: we are animals, not so different from the domestic cat or the monkey in the forest. We are differentiated by evolution, that immense and continuous process that was triggered who knows when and who knows why, from the famous opposable thumb to speech, up to the greatest gift of all, individual consciousness.
We have defined ourselves as superior beings but in some way we are still animals and, deep down, we still harbour instincts and impulses; something innate that drives our survival instinct, makes us flee from danger, find food, rest, procreate and play. And because we are pack animals, it also makes us want to group together.
Of course, culture, meaning behaviour induced by experience and reflection, has enabled us to modify, refine and control our instincts but, as far as the emotions are concerned, nothing has changed: they have always remained in their embryonic state. In fact, the step from natural impulses, which allow survival itself, to the emotions, is even shorter because there has never been an education of the emotions. Regarded as the irrational part of the self, but nonetheless authentic, they have not been touched by evolution, only suppressed at the appropriate time. Deemed to be inferior to cultural processes and notions, the emotions are indeed the result of an education that makes man worthy of his status of man.
If we look back, very far back, to the origins of human life on earth, we can imagine that there was an almost absolute prevalence of emotions, and behaviour induced by experience or imitation of others made up a very small part. Thus, it became necessary to acquire a great body of knowledge from tradition, from the passing down from generation to generation of fragments of practical knowledge, useful for survival. This was mainly mythical knowledge, based on symbolic narratives, transmitted orally, and which contained clusters of family or community memory: hypomnema, consisting of practical norms, moral and religious teachings.
It was the primacy of logos in Socrates’ fourth-century bce Greece, i.e., of logical and rational thought, that shaped the fate of emotions. We are left with irrefutable evidence in Plato’s dialogues and Aristotle’s writings about logos, the ability to discuss and reason about things. The end of mythos, and its replacement logos, determined the prevalence of rational thought, which guided Western culture from then on.
In Plato’s works, emotions are in fact seen as a human characteristic to be kept under control: in the Phaedrus he recounts the myth of the charioteer and the need to keep emotions (anger and passions) at bay as if they were horses that had to be guided along the right path. Umberto Galimberti recalls the Platonic myth of the charioteer (reason) driving a chariot towards the sky, where ideas are to be found. The chariot is drawn by a white horse (the irascible soul) and a black one (the concupiscent soul); when the black horse loses control and crashes the chariot, ruin ensues. ‘This happens, according to Plato, when we are guided by our senses instead of reason’ (Galimberti 2021: 17). From this terrible beginning, it is no wonder that modern thought, starting with the Enlightenment, founded a morality that excludes all emotions, since they are responsible for irrational behavior. Since then, emotions have been repressed because of their unreliability in productive, legal and commercial relationships.
Indeed, in this narrative there is an implicit positive judgement on the usefulness of emotions seen as necessary to move forward, but which must be properly controlled. However, they should certainly not be repressed outright, which is what was to happen in modernity. In fact, the Stoics (Zeno, Cleanthes, Chrysippus) believed that the emotions allow us to assess actions, to distinguish what is good from what is not, and what is desirable from what is dreaded. In effect, classicism does not exclude emotions, but considers them an essential component of the human soul, as long as they are not predominant and man is not guided by them alone.
Instead, it is modernity that judges emotions more harshly, advocating that they should be avoided at all costs. At the peak of the Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant believed them to be the cause of irrational behaviour, and even excluded them from moral principles in his Critique of Practical Reason. It was Romanticism that rediscovered the importance of emotions, especially when they are translated into their cultured form, such as feelings – which, Galimberti reminds us, ‘can be learned’. Because they favour feelings, a more polite and conventional form of sensibility, emotions still remain in a condition of inferiority, the stuff of inferior populations, ordinary people, people to be pitied rather than praised. So, there is a qualitative, almost class-based differentiation between emotions and feelings, where the latter are credited with superiority, precisely in relation to the noble minds who nurture and preserve them.
In the case of a failed examination, the student is reprimanded for letting their emotions get in the way, as if emotion is an obstacle, an adverse reaction that prevents the student from correctly answering a question. This is the historical prejudice that emotions have been tarred with from the very beginning, almost as if it were a weakness to be ashamed of because it comes from the most animalistic part of the self.
And yet the emotions are useful, in fact necessary if – as Daniel Goleman warns – ‘our emotions have been wise guides in the evolutionary long run’ (2020: 17) and Martha Nussbaum cleverly demonstrated in Political Emotions (2013) that they are an instrument of knowledge. For his part, Galimberti recognizes their social function because they are capable of connecting people. This is why emotional intelligence, one of the many intelligences we have, should be nurtured in schools.
Today we are witnessing a revival of the emotions: they are gaining ground in politics (populism has made them an instrument of transparency) and triumphing in the media. Exhibiting emotionality is an opportunity for self-realization, in the false belief that it is the only way to express one’s true nature. Thus, with a strong counterreaction worthy of times of crisis, it is reason that is considered unreliable. Perhaps because, despite Plato, there is no such world of ideas to reach out to.
