Cont Philos Rev (2016) 49:533–544 DOI 10.1007/s11007-016-9400-6
A journey through the emotions into a new existentialism: a review of Anthony J. Steinbock: Moral emotions: reclaiming the evidence of the heart Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 2014, 339 + ix pp, $24.95 (pbk), ISBN: 978-0-8101-2956-6 Michael R. Kelly1 Published online: 25 November 2016 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016
Keywords Phenomenology Person Emotion(s) Temporality Social/ political thought This remarkable book draws the reader into philosophizing. In showing us old (familiar) things about philosophical and human matters in new and important ways, it offers, as I see it, a new theistically-oriented and phenomenologically explicated existentialism.1 Though not a book for the philosophically or spiritually faint of heart (well, maybe the latter should have a look) perhaps singular among the many achievements of Moral Emotions is Steinbock’s ability to do philosophy in a way that does justice to both spheres of philosophical interest, the scholarly and the human. Steinbock pitches a challenging, erudite project concerning the nature of the emotions and persons, phenomenology and its method, and social-political philosophy. He pursues a novel approach to emotions intended to reawaken the manner in which they reveal the interpersonal nature of persons that, in turn, may contribute to a new social imaginary. Steinbock’s introduction presents this bill of goods; the seven ensuing chapters provide rich descriptions of nine moral emotions—in an intricate, nested, tripartite schema of emotions of self-givenness (pride, shame, guilt), of possibility (repentance, hope and despair) and of otherness (trust, and loving and humility)—that do the labor that enables him to cash in the following: If we find ourselves at an impasse today with the postmodern, facing the same problems concerning the articulations of power and civil society, … the impasse is … due in part to the way in which modernity established itself by dismissing the spiritual and evidentiary role of … what we call the moral emotions as 1
Sokolowski (1998), p. 520, 528.
& Michael R. Kelly
[email protected] 1
University of San Diego, San Diego, CA, USA
123
534
M. Kelly
interpersonal, that is, by … including them in a discourse only by excluding them from social and political coexistence … Through the moral emotions, it is possible to retrieve what was excluded in modernity without trying to go back abstractly to an earlier, precritical social imaginary … Experiences like loving, humility, trust, repentance, even shame, guilt, and pride reveal the person as interpersonal; we discover in our self-relations that we are inherently relational and not self-grounding, the ‘‘self’’ given most deeply relationally as Myself. As opposed to secularity, holiness is revealed … not as dominating or controlling over another, but ‘‘vertically’’ as serving another in love, trust, humility, mutual respect … in this sense from what Taylor calls ‘‘higher times’’. (273-74) A work of this ambition unsurprisingly engages traditions and figures spanning ancient Judeo-Christian wisdom literature, modern and contemporary Continental philosophy (especially phenomenology), and some contemporary social and natural science research and analytical moral psychology.2 More than all this, and very importantly, Steinbock draws the reader into that seemingly increasingly obsolete way of doing philosophy, that way related to what it means to be, what it means to call things into question and to (ourselves) be called into question—‘reduced’—and ‘lead back to’ what it means to be a person and to live such a fully realized life. Steinbock advances a distinctive and I think highly valuable spiritual-existential dimension rooted in a phenomenological development of a view of persons (28, 99, 159) derived from ‘‘the Abrahamic tradition … which is a personal as interpersonal tradition’’ (267). And it is important to bring this spiritual-existential dimension to the fore of Steinbock’s descriptions of the ‘moral emotions,’ for this densely woven tapestry of emotion analysis isn’t a theory of emotion per se (in case that’s what you were seeking based on the title). As he moves through each particular emotion, touching on their inter-relations as he understands them and thus providing a unity to his account, Steinbock regularly distinguishes his position from the relevant literature in analytical moral psychology but does not establish the cogency of his unique view through direct engagement with analytical philosophy’s cognitivist or neuro-affective theories. In a work that proposes as emotions repentance and trust, which, however affective, aren’t traditionally viewed as emotions, such an account seems needed. Steinbock’s introduction presents an argument against the traditional cognitivist view of emotions in phenomenology found in Husserl’s Logical Investigations and Ideas I (6–11). But he establishes his view of the distinctive structure of emotions on a disputable charge that Husserl reduces emotions to cognitions, which itself doesn’t tell us how Steinbock understands the emotion’s distinctive structure.3 Such concerns, nevertheless, don’t touch the core of Steinbock’s book, for Moral Emotions orbits around its spiritual-existential reflections, its reflections on those 2
As I said, this is a challenging read. In one sense, Steinbock makes the text less challenging for its primary audience in continental philosophy by treating the literature from the sciences and analytical philosophy in the footnotes rather than direct discussion in the body of the text. I found these footnotes quite engaging and often found myself wishing such mentions were more fully integrated into the body of the work.
3
Drummond (2014).
123
A journey through the emotions into a new existentialism…
535
gripping human experiences like ‘what am I [to] do?’ ‘Who am I to become?’ ‘What is my path in life?’ ‘I cannot do otherwise than this,’ ‘this is who I am’, and so on [that] could have no meaning if I were completely self-determining or self-grounding because if I were … these questions would be so transparent that they would be answered in the very instant they were posed. (53-4) These kinds of affective experiences, entailing relation to others, reveal not only the view of persons as ‘‘inter-Personal,’’ related to the Holy, and thus interpersonal—thereby developing Steinbock’s earlier work, Phenomenology and Mysticism (2007) (54, 282n33)—but also—since Steinbock ‘‘called the inter-Personal elsewhere religious experience’’—the moral emotions as ‘‘having a fundamentally … spiritual significance’’ (13, 28). The bulk of Steinbock’s book unpacks his view of emotions such that they ‘‘show themselves to be self-subsistent, as another kind of experience that has its own style of givenness, cognition, and evidence and that is irreducible to both epistemic acts … and to instinct or private feelings,’’ i.e., neither reason’s handmaiden nor reason passions’ slave (11). But an account of the person is the end and ‘moral emotions’ the means, so to speak: My intention in this work is … [first] … to give a fuller and richer account of the human person than is customarily available in interpretations that restrict evidence in human experience to the perceptual and judicative dimensions … I do this by describing certain key moral emotions … and … how they can yield a broader sphere of evidence where persons are concerned. … The description of moral emotions … enables me to suggest … what they can tell us about our experience … of freedom, normativity, power, and critique … (3, 5). The core of the project follows from this view of the person rooted in the ‘‘Abrahamic tradition’’—as ‘‘clarified phenomenlogically in the traditions following Max Scheler,’’ whose value theory drew upon a Pascalian view of the heart’s reason of which (the mind’s) reason knows nothing (54, 282n33)—and to which Steinbock adds a (technically) ‘‘general and non-specific sense of self’’ taken as ‘‘living-through acts,’’ ‘‘the spiritualization of the concrete lived-whole of the human being’’ (11–12). Considered as such a whole, persons are absolute, unique, irreplaceable, ‘‘inherently interpersonal,’’ and ‘‘intrinsically relational and not self-grounding’’ (12). Steinbock’s notion of ‘moral emotions’ thus functions as a term of art denoting ‘‘the experience implicitly of not being self-grounding,’’ being revelatory of ‘‘… the ‘person’ as interpersonal (as from and with finite persons) and as inter-Personal (as from and with the infinite)’’ (13, 14). Hence, the modifier in ‘moral emotions’ doesn’t denote whether an emotion is good (love) or bad (envy) or fits or violates some accepted norm. Steinbock’s view of moral emotions involves no virtue theory or deontology and doesn’t concern itself with traditional issues in philosophy of emotion such as fit, justification or warrant.4 Indeed, ‘moral emotions’ expressly resists offering prescriptions and imposing norms regarding how one should feel 4
For an example of a contemporary account of emotions that considers them normatively (as related to fit, warrant, and justification), see (Roberts 2013), especially ‘‘Emotional Truth.’’
123
536
M. Kelly
emotion X in instance Y for duration D with intensity I (13–4, 267). To prescribe norms for the moral emotions would presuppose what we as phenomenologists should describe (232). While it seems phenomenologically sensitive to say that grief, for example, will have essential features even if the agent feeling grief grieves over something supposedly not ‘worth’ grieving, e.g., the death of a pet goldfish, one may debate whether this actually discloses the ‘emotions themselves’ or whether some emotions by their names entail badness (267–68). But such a presupposition, I think Steinbock would say, backslides into the view of emotions as founded on or warring with cognitive acts insofar as those colorful affects accented or got the better of us—our reason.5 Steinbock’s view is that ‘‘the moral tenor of the emotions can be weighed according to how it opens up or closes down the interpersonal nexus …’’ in a way that, harkening back to (by mention but not discussion) Bergson’s notion of creative or static emotions, produce an open or closed society (14).6 That our nature can be expanded or contracted suggests that it cannot be shed; our inter-Personal essence remains even if our manner of existence obscures or forecloses on our relation to others and our ‘nature.’ If his subtle existentialism tied to how my existence ‘determines my essence’ (carried out in the ontic sphere) is not Sartre’s secular existentialism but (I suggest) a theistic variant of Christian existentialism,7 then Steinbock’s account of moral emotions—despite the refusal to impose norms— seemingly implies a qualitative difference between the open and the closed, between considering oneself a self-made or self-grounding (pride) and considering myself as fundamentally interpersonal, being revealed as Myself to myself in the accusative (humility) as Steinbock likes to note throughout his work (12, 237–40). Moreover, Steinbock conducts his search phenomenologically, which means his is an ‘‘attempt to clarify the essential structures of these experiences…’’ such that ‘‘… an emotion will have such and such a structure no matter when, where, or who experiences it’’ 5
Here, I allude to Aristotle’s view of what is properly one’s own or human. Aristotle makes this point that reason is us, is our own life, in the discussion of being a friend to or lover of oneself (Nicomachean Ethics 9.4, 9.8). He puts the point more forcefully in book X; ‘‘If reason is divine, then, in comparison with man, the life according to it is divine in comparison with human life … [We] must … strain every nerve to live in accordance with the best thing in us; for even if it be small in bulk, much more does it in power and worth surpass everything. And it would be strange, then, if he were to choose not the life of himself but that of something else’’ (1178a). Against this reading of the person, if Moral Emotions rests on a phenomenology of the person, it offers a rather different view of the person and different phenomenological analysis of the person than the one found in (Sokolowski 2008). I shall have more to say about this in a correlative point in the concluding footnote. 6
Bergson (1977). For a view of Bergson’s account of emotion and creative emotion as it relates to the open and closed society, see (Kelly 2013) esp., pp. 76–81.
7
We live (as Pascal said) in a realm where our ‘‘true nature having been lost, everything becomes natural … the true good having been lost, everything becomes their true good’’; and though it seems natural to place ourselves before others—pride will have its lures—we are never free from others as manifest by the reality that (as Augustine said) ‘‘our hearts are restless until we rest in Thee’’; such a corrective that returns us to our true nature and true good cannot come from oneself but only from a self that realizes through its affective experiences that it is not self-sufficient but rather ‘‘sustained by God,’’ a realization of holiness manifest or confirmed by, to use Steinbock’s expression, ‘‘‘… serving one another … in love, trust, humility, mutual respect …’’ with no expectation of praise, return, or recognition (as Martin Luther’s Christian liberty emphasized) (274) (Pascal 2008), aphorism 7; (Augustine 2003), first paragraph. Luther (1970), p. 303–04.
123
A journey through the emotions into a new existentialism…
537
(267). The essential structures of these emotions includes not only their revelation of the nature of person as interpersonal, but also the distinctive temporality of ‘moral emotions’ which sheds light on their distinctive evidentiary structure of opening or closing: If the moral emotions have their own modes of givenness peculiar to the kind of experiences they are as personal and interpersonal, they may not necessarily map onto familiar temporal life that we see in the presentation structure of time-consciousness … [The] process of self-temporalization does relate to these experiences as … mine. Yet, the temporality of some of these emotional experiences is not simply founded in these presentation structures of timeconsciousness … For … if there are experiences that exhibit different kinds of givenness and different kinds of evidence (e.g., epiphany …), then we can at least suspect that this will hold for their temporal modes of givenness as well. (15) Steinbock distinguishes between the temporal orientation and temporal meaning of these moral emotions in order to bring these different modes of temporal evidence (ways of givenness) into relief, i.e., to capture the distinctive evidentiary structure of the emotions, i.e., as revealing persons as opening or foreclosing their intrinsically inter-Personal nature (15, 93). This distinction isn’t merely a distinction between ‘‘objective time’’ and ‘‘subjective time’’ but one of temporal directedness in full. In some emotion experiences, though the temporal orientation and meaning may differ, this isn’t a subjective difference but one essential to the experience itself. Consider the difference between remembering and recollecting. Remembering is an act that is oriented toward the past and retrieves the past—refers the present to the past without any futural (open) meaning precisely because the act of remembering changes the temporal index of the experience and gives the past as past. Recollection is an act that is oriented toward the past and retrieves the past for the present (though also not (necessarily) with any futural (open) meaning). The act of recollection does not give a changed temporal index but refers the past to the present in its relevance for the now, thus giving the past as present or in a present meaning. Steinbock makes an original contribution here—to phenomenology and emotion studies in general. The distinction between the temporal orientation and the temporal meaning at least complements a traditional way of conceptually clarifying emotions by distinguishing between their object and cause,8 which doesn’t always neatly hold. Consider grief: Allie’s death causes Daniel’s grief, but she did not cause and she surely isn’t the object of Daniel’s grief. As analytical philosophy also has tended to note that grief ‘‘refers the present to the past,’’9 this view makes the past event vaguely the cause of the grief and the memories of the beloved the object. But the memories are not themselves painful and the object of one’s grief is not the beloved or memories of the beloved but the beloved as no longer here and now— 8
For example, when Daniel’s Allie gives Johnny too much attention, she ‘causes’ Daniel’s jealousy the ‘object’ of which is Johnny. Hence, we can differentiate envy from at least this case of jealousy.
9
Solomon (2004), p. 84.
123
538
M. Kelly
forever. Using Steinbock’s distinction, we could say Allie’s passing marks the temporal orientation of Daniel’s grieving, while the temporal meaning of Daniel’s grief is about Allie as absent henceforth. Steinbock’s distinction enables us to better capture the experience of grieving and to realize that grief (contrary to popular and philosophical belief) puts the past before us, refers the past to the present and future and not the present to the past.10 Steinbock’s innovative use of phenomenological resources is on display throughout his account of the moral emotions of self-givenness, from pride through humility. Though I have several questions about his account of pride—How would Steinbock’s account of pride differ from what Sartre calls arrogance insofar Sartre distinguishes arrogance from pride on the same ground that Steinbock distinguishes pride from vanity, namely, that the latter in each pair remain beholden to public opinion, others, while the former do not (34-5)?11—it’s more important to mention Steinbock’s significant contributions to phenomenology. Steinbock distinguishes self-givenness or self-awareness from self-revelation. The former can be opened or closed to others but the latter denotes that self-givenness in which one experiences oneself (pre-reflectively) as a Myself, as revealed to myself by another, as interpersonal. Pride is not self-revelatory but self-given precisely insofar as it ‘‘dissembles’’ or ‘‘dissimulates’’ in considering itself self-grounding or selfdetermining. Pride is an exclusion of others and thus a closing down—a concealing rather than revealing—of persons. Such closure is ‘‘evidenced’’ by—its way of appearing shows itself in light of—the temporal orientation and meaning of pride as the present. Indeed, in a creative move, Steinbock argues that our structure of absolute consciousness makes us susceptible to pride: within the scope of self-temporalization, I am the ultimate source of meaning … I do not constitute my birth or my death; therefore, in terms of selftemporalization, I experience myself as always was and always will be … I am the origin of time. Thus, we have the givenness of an eternal being … The self-givenness in self-temporalization can be understood as a basic experience and lure for pride insofar as I am given to myself as self-grounding, as the absolute source of time, as ‘eternal’ … (42-3) The temporal orientation of pride is thus the present in terms of my immediate selfawareness, that self-givenness that simulates the ‘eternal’ through the now’s retentional and protentional structure—an absolute consciousness, a standingstreaming. The temporal meaning of pride is thus the present, ‘enduring’ sense that I 10 I develop this point in light of Steinbock’s distinction in ‘‘Grief: Putting the Past Before Us,’’ Quaestiones Disputatae. Special Issue: Husserl’s Phenomenological Time and Time-consciousness, forthcoming fall 2016. 11
Sartre (1984),p. 386: ‘‘There are two authentic attitudes: that by which I recognize the other as subject through whom I get my objectness—this is shame; and that by which I apprehend myself as the free object by which the other gets his being-other—this is arrogance or the affirmation of my freedom confronting the other-as-object. But pride—or vanity—is a feeling without equilibrium and it is in bad faith. In vanity I attempt in my capacity as object to act upon the other. I take this beauty or strength or this intelligence which he confers on me … and I attempt to make use of it in a return shock so as to affect him passively with a feeling of love or admiration’’.
123
A journey through the emotions into a new existentialism…
539
needed no one in the past and need no one in the future—the myth of the self-made man (64–5). Pride is thus a subjective attitude in the technical phenomenological sense of attitude. As one moment in the natural attitude among others, pride, like the natural attitude, ‘‘obfuscates the source of sense-givenness by taking meaning for granted,’’ i.e., assuming that others make no or no significant contribution to who I am and who I can become. As phenomenological reflection makes speak its mute assumption, pride says, ‘‘I live myself as the major, predominate, or sole constitutive source in the presence of others as excluded’’ (47). Hence, pride, precisely in its very concealing dissembling, reveals itself as ‘‘interpersonal because it presupposes an implicit movement toward others and includes others only by resisting them’’ (32). To highlight another of Steinbock’s developments of traditional phenomenological resources and methods, he notes that the emotions themselves generate a ‘moral reduction’ to challenge pride and reveal what pride conceals, namely, my nature as interpersonal. The moral reduction is not something I can execute like the phenomenologist does the phenomenological reduction; to think thusly would keep us in pride’s snares. The moral reduction ‘‘brackets me; ‘I am reduced’—to Myself (as not self-grounding, as relational)—I am humbled’’ (51). This moral reduction is initiated by the diremptive experiences of shame or guilt against my will (insofar as I may have willed X but not the negative feeling that comes from having carried out X willing) and interrupts (suspends) my ordinary flow of life. The moral reduction, like the phenomenological reduction, is a re-ducere—a leading away from back to12—but this time a leading away from pride back to myself as Myself, a ‘‘transformation of existence’’ that happens when I ‘‘become poor in spirit,’’ when I realize that I am ‘‘sustained only by God’’ (51).13 On Steinbock’s account—one familiar to the Gospels, Augustine, the great mystic, etc.—the affects announce the call (are the first messenger of value, as Scheler puts it) to recall our true nature (51). Faith alone does not justify on Steinbock’s account and this ‘‘transformation’’ or ‘‘revolution of the heart’’ requires a move out of the negative feelings of shame and guilt into repentance—a choice to rectify by ratifying the realization of my nature as person brought about through these ‘negative’ emotions (21, 28, 51, 136, 263-64). Shame and guilt both reveal the prideful person to be interpersonal. Steinbock treats shame before guilt and differentiates them by claiming that while ‘‘guilt concerns what I have done or omitted, shame bears on how I am. Thus, I am ashamed before you (shame) for what I did to you (guilt)’’ (94). Shame on Steinbock’s account is ‘less open,’ as it were, than guilt insofar as ‘‘shame seems … to issue in a possible reparation of Myself, guilt seems to open the way more immediately for reparation of relations with 12
Sokolowski (2000), p. 54.
13
The moral reduction, then, seems to parallel the feeling that Luther identified as the moment one begins to have faith—that salvific moment when I feel that all things in me are ‘‘blameworthy and damnable’’, when I find myself, as Augustine did, finally aware that he cannot save himself from himself and thus come to know that I need Him who sustains so that, instead of despairing over my wretchedness, I recall through hope my interrelatedness to Christ and my dependence on him to regain my greatness, to be renewed, transformed.
123
540
M. Kelly
others’’ (131). Put in terms of their distinctive temporal evidence, the temporal orientation and meaning of shame are both the present (with the orientation tied in a trivially true sense to some past deed for which I am ashamed); guilt’s temporal orientation is the past, the past deed, but it’s temporal meaning is futural as open to reconciliation with others and thus reparation of myself and Myself (130). Should Steinbock have reversed the ordering of these emotions? I can say that I did X action, admit guilt for X and apologize, but not be ashamed; I expect familycourt is full of people such as this. In such an instance, the futural opening in guilt closes down in an instant if it ever truly opened at all. For Steinbock, I think we can have shame without guilt but not guilt without shame, for guilt without shame amounts to an ‘‘insidious form of pride’’ (106). Together, they function as ‘‘prompts to realign ourselves … Insofar as they … reestablish these relations, they have a moral sense; insofar as they … reestablish our connections with the ‘source’ of Ourselves, they have a religious significance’’ (159). Hence, shame comes before guilt; shame corrects pride and clears the way for guilt, ‘‘the point of [which] is repentance’’ and thus the futural temporal meaning of guilt as a ‘‘transformation,’’ a ‘‘reorientation’’ of myself and ‘‘reparation of my relations with others’’ and ‘‘revolution of the heart’’ (105, 108, 118, 136). Steinbock thus presents a view of guilt quite different from Heidegger’s more passive, modal or schematic, and selforiented account (126–129). Recognizing my dependence on others, my freedom in my relation (135), in repentance I seek to liberate myself from the fixed meanings of who I am or what I did. When I am oriented toward the past in repentance, it is already ‘‘from’’ and revelatory of a futural change of heart and new meaning of who I am. This is worth quoting in full: … repentance is an acceptance of the past or present whose full gesture is a being ‘‘dis-posited’’ and a ‘‘disclaiming’’: The past and present release their hold on me, and I am unburdened from their ‘‘determinacy’’ …. The past and present no longer have the same existential claim on me as they would have otherwise. The past’s and present’s meaning is undone—not in terms of what actually occurred but in terms of its bearing on what I can do and who I am. In this respect, repentance reconstitutes the significance according to the change of heart … As repented, the shameful or guilty person is existentially ‘‘disclaimed’’ in light of who I can become such that it is no longer expressive of who I am. (145-46) In repentance, I am what I am not and I am not what I am. I don’t change the past, but in accepting it, I release its meaning to join with others (or Myself) in a new becoming in becoming renewed. The spiritual significance of the moral emotions makes a full appearance in this chapter on repentance, which Steinbock discusses in conventional spiritual terms as a ‘‘turning around,’’ ‘‘a conversion expressed by the Hebrew t’shuvha or the Greek metanoia … a spiritual conversion on the part of the individual … a turning taking place on the level of the human being as person’’ (146). In a way that surely will spark the interests of Kierkegaardians, we thus might consider the ‘moral emotions’ Steinbock’s next chapters discusses (hope, trust,
123
A journey through the emotions into a new existentialism…
541
loving, humility) a picture of the spiritual-existential renewal of the person becoming more open, becoming (more fully) a person (with the exception of despair, which is the opposite of hope). In hoping, there is a belief that an object absent will one day be present or an event that has not yet come to pass one day will come to pass; hope openly relates to the future both in its temporal orientation and meaning (though its orientation has a trivially true present quality). Despair, on the other hand, ‘‘is lived as the impossibility of a ground that is present as absent’’ (264). Hope, grown out of repentance, is more interpersonal (more open) both as it entails dependence on Another and in its temporal orientation and meaning. Hope experiences the other in giving itself over to the other by desiring that which the one hoping cannot himself bring about. Steinbock’s original and phenomenlogically rich account of hope details the radical openness characteristic of hope’s futural temporal meaning that differentiates it from the temporal meaning of expectation despite their shared futural orientation. In expectation, belief is an ‘‘unbroken, straightforward relation to the future …. When I expect something I expect it as actual, not possible … Expectation is not a modalization of belief …’’ (163). Such an expectation with a sense of likelihood or probability arises from the past and is motivated in the present to pre-dict about the future; it is closed in this sense. Hope has no such foreclosing ‘evidence’; hope relates to the future with greater openness, ‘‘liberated from actuality and probability’’ (164). But, if hope entails the attitude toward a sustaining presence that is always an absence, then its temporal meaning seems present and future—as Steinbock’s description of hope as an ‘‘awaiting-enduring’’ implies (175-77). One thus may wonder how hope differs from faith, and perhaps Steinbock would agree that faith blends the openness of hope with strongest mode of expectation, namely, certainty. Moreover, if, in hoping, I am revealed to myself as Myself in being ‘‘given in relation to something other than myself in a relation of dependence where what is hoped for is not in my control’’ (166. 177), this feature may create an unwanted overlap with expectation (since the postman may have a package but not the one I expected or not one for me). Nevertheless, hope differs from expectation insofar as in all instances of hoping—but not in all instances of expectation—I cannot live neutrally or indifferently in relation to this desired possibility only now present as absent; hope is always ‘‘engaged with the outcome’’ (166). In hope, as in trust, I give myself over, freely, to another. We might say that if hope occurs in the inter-Personal or ontological domain of persons, trust occurs in the interpersonal or existential-social domain of persons—and thus we move from emotions of possibility to emotions of otherness. While hope is quite separated from expectation according to its temporal meaning, one can expect without trust but not trust without expectation, which means that trust (paradoxically) expects but without any motivation from the past or past experience to justify the expectation (such as I expect my phone to ring at noon when my wife takes her lunch break because such are some of her habits) (205). Indeed, for Steinbock, trust only can be trust in the absence of any past or present experience that would produce a conflation with reliability, probability, or expectancy. In trusting, we reveal the freedom of the other as always able to possibly betray our trust. The temporal orientation and meaning of trust just is this open future in ‘‘opening’’ myself to
123
542
M. Kelly
another—‘‘pro-offering’’ or ‘‘bearing forth’’ or ‘‘gifting’’ (205). We make ourselves beholden to the will of the one we trust; thus we freely choose our dependence and reveal and realize our personhood. Such a choice to trust—against the misanthropy or distrust that might emerge in the face of the other’s radical freedom and my vulnerability—must emerge the other emotions of otherness: ‘‘I proffer myself in the presence of this transcendent, free other in the presence of whom I am bound to their destiny … In this regard, trusting is tied to loving and humility’’ (222). While it remains difficult to tell if trust motivates or is motivated by love and humility, in loving we open ourselves to the other without expectations for what she can be and thus in a way that lets the other ‘‘realize … herself’’; in love, I respect her personhood, apprehending her through my affects—the heart’s reasons—as I move toward her as a ‘‘bearer of value’’ and allow her absolute ‘‘value to ‘flash forth’ in and of itself’’ (227). This view of love differs from what the love literature calls the ‘bestowal model of love’ as opposed to the erotic model. On the bestowal model, I love you not because you possess qualities X or Y to which my desire responds (the erotic model) but my love makes you valuable even where meritorious qualities might be lacking (as God’s love does for us). For Steinbock, love originates ‘‘from the beloved as invitational’’ (231). Love’s temporal meaning is thus presencing in the sense that orients that love across the history of the lover and beloved (oriented across past, present, and future). Such presencing seems the redeemed version of the lure of pride, for Steinbock talks of ‘‘loving [as] given without temporal limitations. As … in relation to trust, it makes no sense … to assert, ‘I will love you for five year’… because loving in its very directedness is moving toward infinity (toward eternity, omni-temporality … unconditionally)’’ (230). My sense of eternity, here, is one revealed to me rather than generated from me as was the case with the aforementioned lure of pride. If loving denotes the way of givenness of the beloved, humility denotes the subjective correlate (258), so to speak, ‘‘the way I receive myself in loving’’ (232) or ‘‘how I am self-given through being given over to another’’ (235) or ‘‘how I am in … loving and trusting’’ (256). Humility is not the remainder from the moral reduction—just as consciousness devoid of the world isn’t the remainder of the phenomenological reduction (239). Rather, humility arises ‘‘from the outside … In loving, the humble person is completely absorbed in the attentiveness to others…’’ and in contrast to pride ‘‘… the humble person accepts the contribution of others to the meaning constitution of the world and Myself’’ (240). The temporal meaning and orientation of humility is difficult to find, but as something like the feeling of gratitude as the subjective correlate to loving or trusting we can infer that it would have a share in both of their temporal meanings (256-57). In any event, the temporal mode of expectation will have no place in humility, for humility emerges with ‘‘… no expectation of return …’’ (236). Humility manifests how I feel in freely choosing to be Myself, in finding my freedom ‘‘… not as dominating or controlling another but ‘vertically’ in serving another in love [and trust …’’ (274).14 14
Regarding this humility correlative to love we see another striking parallel with Luther’s notion of true Christian liberty: ‘‘He should be guided in all his works by this thought alone, that he may serve and benefit others in all that he does, considering nothing except the need and benefit of his neighbor. … This is a truly Christian life. Here faith is truly active through love, that is, finds expression in works of the
123
A journey through the emotions into a new existentialism…
543
Given the existential-spiritual tenor of the work, I wish Steinbock would have engaged Sartre’s secular existentialist view of emotions as magical transformations. Sartre renders the emotions purely cognitive and purely voluntaristic, purely a matter of choice for which the subject is responsible without excuses. Steinbock’s account would reject Sartre’s cognitivism (and Robert Solomon’s analytical adaptation). He also would reject Sartre’s purely subjectivistic and voluntaristic account of the emotions based on his view (correct, I think) that the moral emotions he discusses bear essential structures. But without such an encounter, we are left with no clear sense of how Steinbock could reject Sartre’s subjectivist view of emotions while maintaining his position against prescribing norms on the moral emotions. If Steinbock had to reintegrate such norms, how could he do so without once again making the moral emotions related to those cognitive acts he so sharply divorced from his account of the distinctive evidentiary structure of the moral emotions? What is clear, in any event, is that Steinbock’s phenomenological analyses of ‘moral emotions’ is an inspired elaboration of phenomenological method that exhorts us to think again about what we are, what we want to and can be, what we and our communities are called to be, and how ‘moral emotions’ can ‘‘retrieve what was excluded in modernity without trying to go back … to an earlier, precritical social imaginary’’ (273).15
References Augustine, St. 2003. Confession. Bloomington: Hackett Publishing Inc.
Footnote 14 continued freest service, cheerfully and lovingly done, with which a man serves another without hope of reward … He ought in his liberty to empty himself, take upon himself the form of a servant … Behold from faith thus flow forth love and joy in the Lord and from love a joyful, willing and free mind that serves one’s neighbor willingly and takes no account of gratitude or ingratitude of praise or blame or gain or loss …’’ (302, 304). 15 Steinbock’s view of persons and the emotion’s distinctive structure as revelatory of persons demonstrates the relevance of phenomenological resources for addressing the very philosophical and political challenges of modernity and postmodernity in a way that would create a fascinating dialogue with Robert Sokolowski’s vision for phenomenology’s contribution to political philosophy. As Sokolwoski explains in Introduction to Phenomenology, ‘‘phenomenology restores the possibility of ancient philosophy …. Provides one of the best examples of how a tradition can be reappropriated and brought to life again in a new context’’ (62). Indeed, with an eye toward developing phenomenology’s contribution to social-political challenges that arise precisely from modernity and postmodernity just as they concern Steinbock, Sokolowski writes: ‘‘During the first centuries of its influence, modernity has expressed itself as rationalism. The name given to this period of its history … was the Enlightenment. Modernity promised a purely rational political society and a secure, scientific development of human knowledge. But … after the initial proclamations made by Nietzsche, it has become more and more clear that the heart of the modern project is not the exercise of reason in the service of knowledge, but the exercise of a will, the will to rule, the will to power … Postmodernity is not a rejection of modernity, but the flowering of the deepest impulse in it … How does phenomenology fit into this development of modern philosophy? Is it a continuation of the rationalist strain in modernity? Some of the hopes and arguments found in Husserl would seem so. Or is it a contribution to postmodernity as some passages in Heidegger, and everything in Derrida, would seem to indicate? I would claim that phenomenology breaks out of modernity and permits a restoration of the convictions that animated ancient and medieval philosophy’’ (202).
123
544
M. Kelly
Bergson, H. 1977. The two sources of morality and religion. Trans. R. Ashley Audra and C. Brereton. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Drummond, J. ‘‘Rev. of moral emotions: Reclaiming the evidence of the heart, by Anthony Steinbock,’’ Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. Kelly, M. 2013. A reading of two sources of morality and religion, or bergsonian wisdom, emotion, and integrity. In Understanding bergson understanding modernism, ed. P. Ardoin, S.E. Gontarski, and L. Mattison, 70–88. London: Bloomsbury. Kelly, M. ‘‘Grief: Putting the Past Before Us’’, Quaestiones disputatae. Special issue: Husserl’s phenomenological time and time-consciousness. forthcoming. Luther, M. 1970. On christian liberty. Philadelphia: Fortress Press. Pascal, B. 2008. Pensees and other writings. New York: OUP. Roberts, R. 2013. Emotions in the moral life. New York: Cambridge University Press. Sartre, J.P. 1984. Being and nothingness. Trans. H. Barnes New York: Washington Square Press. Solomon, R. 2004. In defense of sentimentality. New York: Oxford University Press. Sokolowski, R. 1998. The method of philosophy: Making distinctions. Review of Metaphysics 3(203): 515–532. Sokolowski, R. 2000. Introduction to phenomenology. New York: Cambridge University Press. Sokolowski, R. 2008. Phenomenology of the human person. New York: Cambridge University Press.
123