The Role of the Moral Emotions in Our Social and Political Practices

Abstract

In this article, I address problems associated with ‘Modernity’ and those encountered at the impasse of post-modernity and the newly named phenomenon of ‘post-secularism’. I consider more specifically what I call ‘moral emotions’ or essentially interpersonal emotions can tell us about who we are as persons, and what they tell us about our experience and concepts of freedom, normativity, power, and critique. The moral emotions, and retrieving the evidence of the ‘heart’, point to the possibility of contributing to the social imaginary of the Modern and its post-modern variants, playing a significant role in shaping civic life and relations of power.

Keywords:

• Moral emotions
• post-secularism
• phenomenology
• modernity
• social imaginary

Notes

1. From the standpoint of rational evidence, the emotions tend to be regarded as unfounded matters of instinct, and as devoid of internal evidence and meaning, dependent upon our psycho-physical organization, leaving out human spirit, because it has been equated with the rational. If they are to be made meaningful, they must become the province of judgment; if they are not rational, they are to find a home in the soul or become the object of psychoanalysis; if they are to be real, they are to be naturalized or even able to be quantified. If rationality is coupled with profit and capital, then emotions that might call the later into question (like shame or guilt) would have to be deemed highly ‘irrational’: see Scheler 1966, esp. 259–264.

2. Similarly, Charles Taylor understands the social imaginary as the way in which we collective imagine, pre-theoretically and reflectively, too, our social life in the contemporary Western world: see Taylor 2007, esp. 23, 50.

3. As Maritza Blanco Organista has done in her recent presentation at the conference, ‘Filosofía de la Misericordia y Periferias Existenciales’, Mexico City, 24 February 2016.