Quotation
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“Emotions are not just the fuel that powers the psychological mechanism of a reasoning creature. They are parts, highly complex and messy parts, of this creature's reasoning itself.”
Martha Nussbaum · Capabilities approach · Modern · 2001
What does it mean?
The mainstream reading refuses a division of labour in which reason thinks and emotion merely pushes. Emotions are parts of reasoning, messy ones, because they embody judgements about value and about what has been lost or threatened. A competing reading hears a claim that feelings are infallible, or that argument should be replaced by intensity. She thinks emotions can be wrong, because the judgements in them can be wrong. The sentence is in the introduction to Upheavals of Thought (2001). The Fragility of Goodness had asked how luck reaches into a good life. This book asks how the upheavals, grief and fear and love, are themselves forms of thought about that exposure. Creating Capabilities is a political theory and is already a separate card. Fuel is the picture she rejects. Parts of reasoning is the picture she defends.
Did Martha Nussbaum really say this?
The library’s label is Well attested. Nussbaum's formulation in the introduction to Upheavals of Thought. The wording is hers. Emotions, on the view the book defends, involve judgements about what matters. This is not the capabilities paraphrase and not the sentence from The Fragility of Goodness.
Where it comes from
Upheavals of Thought (2001), the introduction's statement of the view
Approximate date: 2001.
How to use it
A disciplinary hearing that treats anger as noise to be set aside, and the timeline as the only thinking in the room, has accepted the fuel picture. The anger may contain a judgement that a slight was contempt, and that judgement can be true or false. Her sentence says to examine it as thought. It does not say the angry person is right. A process that cannot ask what the emotion is judging has left the introduction.
A mindset reading
Messy is her word, and it blocks two tidy mistakes: emotions as pure force, and emotions as clean arguments in disguise. The habit is to look for the judgement inside the upheaval, and to allow that the judgement may be confused. That is still reasoning, on her account.
Understand the philosophy
The introduction to Upheavals of Thought states this view of emotion. The key contrast is fuel and parts of reasoning. The Fragility of Goodness is the earlier book on luck. The capabilities card is the later theory of justice. Grief, compassion, and love are the cases the book works through. They are not summarised by a second motto here.
- mind
- ethics
FAQ
What does it mean?
The mainstream reading refuses a division of labour in which reason thinks and emotion merely pushes. Emotions are parts of reasoning, messy ones, because they embody judgements about value and about what has been lost or threatened. A competing reading hears a claim that feelings are infallible, or that argument should be replaced by intensity. She thinks emotions can be wrong, because the judgements in them can be wrong. The sentence is in the introduction to Upheavals of Thought (2001). The Fragility of Goodness had asked how luck reaches into a good life. This book asks how the upheavals, grief and fear and love, are themselves forms of thought about that exposure. Creating Capabilities is a political theory and is already a separate card. Fuel is the picture she rejects. Parts of reasoning is the picture she defends.
Did Martha Nussbaum really say this?
Well attested. Nussbaum's formulation in the introduction to Upheavals of Thought. The wording is hers. Emotions, on the view the book defends, involve judgements about what matters. This is not the capabilities paraphrase and not the sentence from The Fragility of Goodness.
Which work is it in?
Upheavals of Thought (2001), the introduction's statement of the view Approximate date: 2001.