Circumscribing the space for disruptive emotions within an African communitarian framework

ABSTRACT

Bernard Matolino has recently argued that African communitarianism is an ethics grounded in emotion aligned with reason. If he is correct, questions arise about what emotions have value within African communitarianism, especially as emotions like anger or resentment could stand in tension with important communitarian values, such as social harmony. While little critical attention has so far been paid to such emotions within an African communitarian framework, a wider philosophical literature examining the moral value of disruptive emotions could be drawn on to develop analyses of emotion within African communitarianism. In this paper, I explore how such an analysis could proceed. I argue that drawing on the wider emotion literature, and especially the concept of reactive attitudes introduced by P. F. Strawson, provides an initial case for even disruptive emotions to have value. Even so, we must question whether an analysis of emotion plausibly based on individualistic commitments is compatible with relational communitarian commitments. I nevertheless defend the compatibility and argue that, not only can disruptive emotions have instrumental value through their epistemic and motivational roles in the promotion of community but, importantly, they are partially constitutive of the interpersonal relationships within which we are embedded and that form community.

KEYWORDS:

• African communitarianism
• communitarian emotion
• Bernard Matolino
• reactive attitudes
• anger and resentment

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the participants of the 26th conference of the International Society for African Philosophy and Studies (ISAPS) and of a workshop on political emotions hosted by the University of the Witwatersrand, as well as the editors and two anonymous referees of this journal, for their helpful comments and suggestions on an earlier version of the paper. I made substantial headway on the paper during an online writing retreat at the end of 2020 and would also like to thank my colleagues attending the retreat for creating a conducive and supportive writing environment (even while fully online).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 From here on, whenever I use ‘communitiarianism’ or ‘communitarian’ in this paper, I am referring to African communitarianism.

2 In recent work, Metz argues that survivor’s guilt can be interpreted as a manifestation of good character, where having a good character is living communally or in harmony with one another (Metz 2019a). Something like survivor’s guilt or negative emotions like feeling bad for others could be manifestations of our standing in interpersonal relationships but they do not necessarily pose the same challenge to social harmony as disruptive emotions like anger or resentment because they can be more inward facing. As such, these different emotions need to be treated separately, where my approach differs from Metz’ by looking more closely at the role of reactive attitudes within interpersonal relationships.

Additional information

Funding

This work is based on the research supported wholly by the National Research Foundation of South Africa (Grant Number: 121895).

Notes on contributors

Mary Carman

Mary Carman is a Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. She has published on topics relating both to philosophy of emotion and to African philosophy and is currently pursuing a research project titled ‘Working with anger: A step towards a philosophy of emotion for Africa’, funded by a grant from South Africa’s National Research Foundation.