Political Emotions: Aristotle and the Symphony of Reason and Emotion

Extract

Political Emotions: Aristotle and the Symphony of Reason and Emotion, Marlene K. Sokolon, DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006, pp. 217.

Marlene K. Sokolon has provided an intellectually stimulating and highly original work on Aristotle's understanding of the emotions, mainly as presented in his treatise the Art of Rhetoric. The central thesis of Sokolon's book manifests itself in her analysis of the emotion of anger. According to Sokolon, for Aristotle anger is the paradigmatic human emotion, defined as the desire for revenge for a dishonourable and undeserving public insult against oneself or those one loves. Of this desire for revenge, Sokolon argues that “for Aristotle, unique human anger is not ‘at’ something, but more properly ‘with’ what some other person did or intends to do. Anger and the other political emotions are certain kinds of judgments or perceptions about sociopolitical circumstances. Anger judges specific kinds of events with an acknowledged political, or what we now call ‘cultural,’ meaning” (p. 55). Thus, Sokolon argues that for Aristotle the emotional experience of anger occurs in social and political contexts where there are evaluations of worth in situations involving relations of power. But if anger is the paradigmatic human emotion, this means that anger is not simply representative of various political emotions, but illustrates that human emotion as such is an essentially political phenomenon. Sokolon's thesis, therefore, is that for Aristotle, “man is by nature a political animal” not simply because he possesses reason, the apparent claim of the Politics, but also because he experiences emotions.