Collectivity and emotion: Attempts to resist certain tendencies in Western philosophy

Abstract

The collective constitutes a pair together with the individual, whereas emotion makes one pair with reason and another with action. In Western philosophy, the individual tends to be considered before the collective. Reason and action are each considered superior to emotion. The arguments presented herein resist these tendencies by emphasizing the importance of the collective and of emotion. For the collective, joint action is irreducible to mere aggregation of the participants’ separate actions. One can speak non-metaphorically about (‘symmetrical’ and ‘asymmetrical’) shared emotion by conceiving of emotion as consisting of its propositional content rather than of its privately experienced aspect. For emotion, how an agent feels about action pertains to moral assessment of the action. The moral perfection of the agent’s emotive disposition contributes to attainment of rationality in the agent’s moral choice of action. Finally, the author argues that emotion admits of rational assessment in terms of its content.