First Modulation

Summary

Emotions shape the landscape of our mental and social lives. Like the ‘geological upheavals’ a traveller might discover in a landscape where recently only a flat plane could be seen, they mark our lives as uneven, uncertain, and prone to reversal.

Martha Nussbaum's neo-Stoic account of the emotions has significant implications for social and political transformation in South Africa. Her theory, acclaiming emotions as evaluative judgements, emphasises and elucidates one of the most crucial prerequisites for the successful transformation of South African society. Essential to the successful or unsuccessful adjustment by individual South Africans to all the changes in society, are the ways in which these uncontrollable external objects are appraised and evaluated with reference to each person's perception of own wellbeing. Nussbaum sees emotions as evaluative-cognitive judgements. They are our ways of registering how things are with respect to uncontrollable external items. ‘The peculiar depth and the potentially terrifying character of the human emotion derives from the especially complicated thoughts that humans are likely to form about their own need for objects, and about their imperfect control over them’.

At the core of social and political transformation in South Africa is its impact on our emotional lives and the above précis provides an illuminating elucidation of my own rebirth as a ‘new South African’ -- a slow, sometimes painful and often confusing process, which started some years ago, and will continue for years to come. Painful and confusing, because at the nucleus of my inner, personal self are several deeply embedded appraisals, which were formed in my childhood and strongly cultivated by the particular society in which I grew up. These evaluative judgements, aimed at very specific perceptions of objects, which were often also culturally predetermined, have constituted my personal and cultural identity. They have made me who I am. Expecting me to alter my judgements, perceptions of objects and ideas of my own flourishing means tampering with who I am, with my identity. Transformation becomes a daunting and complex undertaking, because it urges me to depart from the security of the known and venture into the vastness of the unknown.

According to Dent, Rousseau's political philosophy is based on a conception of the ideal society as comprising two mutually reciprocal dimensions, namely, the political and the pre-political, or personal dimension.