(Et udkast)
We may consider asking whether 'Anger' is ever justified. Certainly, philosopher Amia Srinivasan has done so. Arguing against instrumental (alternatively utilitarian) critiques which claim that Anger is an undesirable affective state because of the consequences it produces, Srinivasan claims that Anger, regardless of its consequences, may nevertheless be 'Apt'. Further, Srinivasan also argues that those who oppose the aptness of some instances of anger are at risk of committing a certain kind of injustice, namely affective injustice. Yet, I believe, Srinivasan's argument leaves much to be desired. Especially in way of understanding the way that affective language itself works. Affective language, I claim, merits more consideration than Srinivasan gives it. And such consideration of the meaning and use of affective language may work to undermine at the very least parts of the claim made by Srinivasan.
In an almost Aristotelian way, Srinivasan approaches an understanding of "Anger" by denoting its differences from a (supposedly) near relative, namely Disappointment. She claims that
"What makes anger intelligible as anger, and distinct from mere disappointment, is that anger presents its object as involving a moral violation: not just a violation of how one wishes things were, but a violation of how things ought to be" (128)
Importantly, Srinivasan categorises both of these emotions as "negative emotions", whatever that means.
At the same time, Srinivasan opts not to assume a cognitivist understanding of the normative content of an emotion such as anger. In other words, Anger is at first glance a negative emotion which expresses a breach of genuine normativity or morality (as opposed to personal, instrumental preference), yet does not itself entail a normative 'judgment'.
How exactly we can make sense of a normative expression of which one is not aware is not clear. The consequence, however, seems to be that it is possible for one to communicate a breach of normativity without necessarily being aware that a normative breach has taken place. In other words, being angry with someone is itself an expression of a breach of normativity; in this sense, my affective state goes before me in recognizing a normative breach, with my conscious judgment only following afterwards.
I make here a note that this last point appears at a glance to place anger not, as Srinivasan claims, in the space of reason, but in the space of causes. Insofar as the expression of anger is identical to the reaction one has to a genuine breach of normativity, it also doesn't demand that one reasonably come to that conclusion. How exactly, then, anger becomes something reasonable rather than "merely" caused is unclear, and, I believe, hardly plausible. And it also appears to place us within some sort of space of moral intuitionism, although the extent to which this is the case is also unclear.
Aptness, in turn, becomes a question of whether anger corresponds, well, with itself. Anger is apt in those cases that anger is a response (once again seeming caused rather than reasoned) to a genuine violation of normativity. Meaning that anger is an apt response when something happens ought not happen, and inapt simply in all other cases.
Yet this is not a sufficient criteria for anger to be apt, Srinivasan believes. Aptness also requires that there is a reason for anger - which is then the claim that places anger within the space of reason rather than causes. The key claim is that for anger to be apt, there must be a reason to be angry and I must be aware of said reason. The fact that someone has spoken ill of me thus only constitutes a reason to be angry insofar as I am aware of it.
The key to understanding Anger and its Aptness is essentially given with all thus said. Anger, then, is constituted by and made intelligible as the attitude which one has in response to a violation of normativity. Anger, in turn, is apt when both the attitude is present in response to an actual violation of normativity and the angry person knows that such a violation of normativity has taken place, although we maintain that anger itself does not express that knowledge.
From this understanding of Anger, Srinivasan draws conclusions about an intrinsic value of anger. Briefly summarised, he who does not express anger in spite of having faced countless genuine justices and being aware of these appears to be missing something, she claims. Which of course makes sense if we recall that Anger denotes simply, for the time being, the single affective response to genuine injustice. Which is also to say that any emotional response, for the time being, to genuine injustice is essentially what anger is. For which reason, of course, this idea of an intrinsic value attached to anger holds.
The last thing to be understood is the way in which anger is expressed. Srinivasan endorses a model she calls "Moderate Functionalism". It is a model designed to contrast "Strong Functionalism", which claims that Anger is at least partially composed of its stereotypical expression (meaning thus that "being angry" and "acting angrily" cannot be separated at all), Moderate Functionalism, in turn, maintains that Anger must be somehow expressed, but does not pass judgment on its mode of expression. Instead, Moderate Functionalism claims that while emotions must be expressed, they can be expressed in multiple different ways which can be culturally trained or retrained. To support this argument, Srinivasan draws of the example of Gandhi: What ought we here believe, that Gandhi was never angry, or that he had spiritually retrained himself as to never act in a stereotypically angry manor? Srinivasan, with her Moderate Functionalism, opts for the latter.
There are a variety of issues with Srinivasan's account. I've briefly commented on a few, but the two main ones rest on her very understanding of Anger itself.
First and foremost, we have to ask about the extent to which Moderate Functionalism is at all plausible. Or rather, we might desire to ask why we ever would have to accept that Gandhi was angry but simply didn't express it.
Moderate Functionalism claims that anger must be expressed, but at the same time allows anyone to express it in any possible way. Whether someone is angry cannot regularly be concluded merely by a stereotypical expression of anger, one would think. Insofar as modes of expression and affective attitude are actually separate from one another, Moderate Functionalism is, if not implausible, then at the very least unacceptable. We might grant that one can train oneself to express anger in a different way. For example, it may be possible to stop shouting or to stop being violent in ones expression of anger. Yet, it seems to be, a stereotypical expression of some sort is necessary at the very least for Anger to be intelligible as anger to the rest of the world. That we, suddenly, have to claim that Gandhi was angry, even if he never expressed it in a way identifiable to us, seems odd. Why, then, might Srinivasan believe it to be so desirable?
Indeed, I believe this rests on her very understanding of Anger itself. For we opted to understand Anger as that affective state which is intelligible as the response to a violation of normativity. As such, insofar as we believe that Gandhi was aware of a breach of normativity and had an affective response to it, that response would, by Srinivasans account, be anger, regardless of its expression. Recalling once again the point about the intrinsic value of apt anger - that is, the realization of an affective response to a violation of normativity, it seems plausible enough that we might draw this conclusion. What doesn't seem plausible is that we are talking about Anger any more.
Anger has here become a mental attitude available seemingly only to the Angry Person. No one else can reasonably, by Srinivasans account, make a truth-apt judgment about the anger of another person, except to the extent that they know the Angry Person well enough that they can reasonable recognise their patterns of affective expressions - at which point, even then, we can only make an educated guess. The Angry Person will always retain the last word as to what their anger is concerned.
The idea that some Emotion X which expresses "a violation of normativity" is apt in those cases where indeed a violation of normativity is present appears to be a truism. It hardly seems different to other evaluations of the situations, such as simply speaking about said breach. Insofar as someone has done something wrong, my saying that it is wrong is of course always apt (leaving aside odd and extreme cases). And it is the role of this Emotion X that Srinivasan has had Anger take, indeed believing that Anger is intelligible as Anger exactly because it is identical with Emotion X. Returning once again to the same Gandhi example, it should thus appear clear: Insofar as Gandhi has any emotional response to a violation of normativity, we are opting to call this "Anger". But in doing so, we have not identified some emotion intelligible as anger. Rather, we have redefined Anger and have ignored the way affective language itself works.
Before turning to Affective Language, consider further the affective state which Anger is supposed to be distinguished from, namely Disappointment. In claiming that Disappointment expresses an idea that the Disappointed Person "wishes Y hadn't happened" whereas Anger expresses that "Y ought not have happened", the criterion of distinctness, I believe, falls apart. The reality of emotional life is that one can very well both "wish that Y hadn't happened" and believe that "Y ought not have happened"; indeed, I should claim that the majority of the time, these two coincide.
Using Srinivasan's own example:
When I say that I am disappointed that you betrayed me, I imply that I wish you hadn’t; when I say, by contrast, that I’m angry that you betrayed me, I imply that you shouldn’t have. (128)
The question thus becomes how this claim can ever make sense. Insofar as Anger was the expression of a violation of normativity and that its expression could take any form whatsoever, Anger essentially became a mental attitude and something private. Only that way could we possibly maintain that Gandhi was meaningfully angry. Now, at the same time, the notion of distinctness, used to make anger intelligible as anger, is mentioned not in the private mental state of some person, but in the actual and realised use of language. Thus it becomes that when I say that I am angry, I mean something else than when I say that I am disappointed.
Is this to say that Affective Statements become only realised and distinct from one another in our expression of them through language? If so, and if indeed the truth-condition of affective language lies entirely in the mental state of the one making use of affective, then I once more must maintain that we have redefined what Anger is.
Ignoring for a brief moment the notion of anger coming to be with my saying "I am angry", consider the possibility that Anger and Disappointment might overlap. In the case of Betrayal, it surely must be possible to imagine that one both Wish that the betrayal didn't happen while also believing the betrayal Ought not have happened. Further, I believe we might even go as far as to say that in the case of a truly Virtuous Person, these two categories ought entirely overlap: I ought to prefer exactly those things which are normatively correct, such that I am only Disappointed when I am Angry and vice versa. In which case I am not sure the criterion of Distinctness holds. For what affective state would we then confer upon the Virtuous Person? Even if we reserve the ability to identify affective states for the person affected by such states, what would the Virtuous Person say? We might imagine, following Srinivasan's criteria, that they could say nothing - for the mere reason that to the Virtuous Person, neither Anger nor Disappointment, identified as they are by standing in contrast to one another, would be identifiable, as neither would be distinct and thus intelligible from the other. And indeed I think this is the case much more often than simply this theoretical Virtuous Person for whom the two overlap entirely. Matter of fact is that indeed, most of the time, wishes tend to coincide with beliefs about normativity. To use another of Srinivasan's examples, your not showing up to my party which you had promised to come to is obviously a case in which both anger and disappointment are merited, and in which personal preferences and beliefs about normativity coincide entirely. In these many cases which take the structure of a "I wish you had done what you ought to have done but didn't", the language of distinct moments of disappointment and anger can only be made sense of insofar as we attach these to modes of expression. And perhaps, I should like to first claim, this is indeed a better model of making particular emotions intelligible as emotions.
In denying the possibility of private language, understanding oneself as angry essentially amounts to understanding oneself as someone angry. That is: In identifying myself as being presently angry, I am identifying some part of me (leaving aside questions of identity) with how anger is socially conceived. The same way that you may know someone well enough to tell that their acting in a particular happy-looking mood is truly an expression of anger, understanding oneself as being in one or another affective state is an event of historical understanding. I know that I am now angry because I know how it is to be angry, and I know that I have felt this feeling before. This, I claim, is first and foremost how we understand our own affective lives in everyday life. Much the same can be said, of course, of how we identify the affective states of others. Your anger becomes intelligible to be as anger exactly because I have seen anger, and potentially even yours, before. Without committing to a hard functionalism, we may at the very least be able to grant that anger becomes at first intelligible as such due to its being understood historically. After that, we may always reevaluate our claims.
The matter of fact is also that our emotional lives are complex, and that much of the time, it can difficult to distinguish what we are truly feeling. Rather than "clear and distinct" ideas which can be penciled out by some strict definition, our internal affective lives have a dialectical structure. It is exactly in this way that we can at all claim that our affective lives belong to the space of reasons rather than causes. In becoming aware of my own anger, I am essentially confronted with the aptness of my own anger. Much the same goes for feelings like shame, guilt, or any other affective state with an import (in the terminology of Charles Taylor).
If indeed our affective lives are muddled rather than consisting of clear and distinct structural moments, we may consider what Srinivasan might positively be pointing towards when she divides Anger and Disappointment by the way in which we self-ascribe them.
In picking out Anger as the affective state with which I identify myself, I am thus not picking it simply because I am angry and thus have no choice, but rather am making an evaluative judgment myself: In stating that I am Angry, I have chosen Anger above other present possibilities (which might range from disappointment to frustration to sadness and beyond). The question thus becomes what it is that I mean to say when I state that I am angry.
Clearly, stating that "I am Angry" is not the same as saying that "You have done something which you ought not to have done". Indeed, we might imagine a response to the former statement "Why?", to which one would respond with the latter. Much the same, however, might happen if I said that I was Disappointed, Sad or Frustrated. To some extent, the difference between the various possibilities appears to be the desired consequence. When I put the emphasis on being Angry, I might desire for you to do something immediately to remedy the situation. Emphasising sadness might instead express a desire for you to feel guilt or repent for what you have done. These various, self-ascribed affective states appear to be to be simply a variety of possible responses to a confrontation with something Undesired, whether it is a matter of preference or general normativity.
An option seemingly unconsidered by Srinivasan also becomes clearer if we understand affective language (when self-ascribing emotions, anyway) to be a muddled affair, namely the possibility of being wrong. Where I might call myself angry, others may ask if I am not truly sad, and there may - and likely will - be cases where I am in the wrong, with me having indeed confused my sadness for anger. This, in turn, seems to imply that affective states are not private but collective affairs. It is in these cases we might say you know a friend better than they know themselves and vice versa. Here, we appear to have a disjunction between affective language and its functional expression which aligns more closely with what Srinivasan pictures, but it is instead based on an understanding of our affective lives as being muddled rather than clear.
But notice that these are examples which concern themselves largely with ourselves or those we know well. In being careful in not wanting to confuse "Acting Angrily" with "Being Angry", I think we'd perhaps have done better to instead speak of "Acting Angrily" and "Stating That One Is Angry". For the truth is that we use affect-ascribing language in both ways, although in different ways. Affective language is not a monolith.
Thus, when speaking of some raging drunk down the street, I do not seem to mean the same when I call him "angry" that I do when I tell you that I am Angry "because XYZ". Yet it'd also be quite the stretch to suddenly claim that the drunkard isn't angry simply because he himself doesn't identify as such. There appears to be a difference between affective language used about third parties and affective language when used of ourselves.
I do not think we have to settle for either of the two usages of language. Stating of some Third Unknown that they are angry does not require that they agree for it to be true. Indeed, the raging drunkard would hardly ever agree with the statement. And while, when being called angry, many might respond "I wasn't but now I am!", this doesn't mean that they weren't angry before. Anger, in its social form when spoken of others than ourselves, appears to align with what Srinivasan termed strong functionalism. We speak of third persons as being angry exactly because they act angrily, but tend to self-identify with anger because of patterns of thoughts rather than socially visible patterns of action. Much the same can be said of affective language in general.
The point perhaps becomes clearer yet when we consider what Srinivasana Anger (and Disappointment, too) to be intentional: The emotions have an Object. And while this may at times be the case, it also highlights that Srinivasan speaks here of a very specific form of Anger, namely Anger in the sense that "I am angry that". But Anger and other emotions which are subject to similar forms of affective language do not always take this form. We may self-ascribe Anger and then, in response to the "Why?"-question, respond with something indefinite. "The world is cruel", one might say, and one might mean it, although of course it carries little sense insofar as we cannot concretely term the world an object. The point is made more clearly when we understand that certain affective states can present themselves and present themselves reasonably too even without an object. I may at times simply be sad, angry or happy without being able to provide sufficient reason. The necessity for a legitimate reason behind an affective state only comes to be real when the self-ascription of an emotion is used to make normative demands of others.
These kinds of all-encompassing affective states take the shape of something more akin to what Heidegger termed "moods" (Stimmung), a way of being in and interfacing with the world. And in communicating these, we seem to confront an alltogether third way of using affective language, one which carries not a demand of a particular rectification of wrongs but one a wish of being understood. Indeed, when I say "I am angry", do I not say it, for the most part, that I might be understood by those with whom I speak? When I express that "I am disappointed", do I not most often do so in wishing to simply share my disappointment, to simply communicate, to be less alone? This seems to be to be the most fundamental function of affective language - a means of interfacing with others about those things which matter in our lives, a means of coming to understand ourselves as being one among others, as being just that little less lonely, to negate, once again, that looming threat of solipsism? And is this not a key function of language more in general, too?
(This redeems the evaluative usage of affective language, too, osv osv. Fortsæt med mere om hvordan affektivt sprog gennem Stemningsbegrebet derfor relaterer direkte til verden)