Serious Emotions: Philosophy, Rhetoric and Sophistic Play

 

 

 

An emotion refers to what it signifies:

the totality of the relations of the human-reality to the world. 

 

                                                            - Jean-Paul Sartre -

 

 

A few years ago, while living in Paris, I had a chance to go for Sunday Mass at the famed Notre Dame de Paris.  At one point during the ceremony, something occurred that has remained with me since.  The Cathedral was crowded with worshipers and even a few, curious onlookers standing and sitting side by side.  As I looked over to my right, where a woman was praying, I could see tears streaking down her cheeks.  Before looking down, as I tend to do at such times, I looked to my left and noticed that an older man was smiling almost at the verge of breaking into open laughter.  He noticed that I was observing him, so he turned to me and in a wispy French accent whispered: “Did you know that Christ loves to laugh as much as he loves the Father; I don’t imagine either of them to be too serious, love is never weighed down, it always floats.”  Though at first I smiled at him, superficially, out of a desire to be polite, accepting and reassuring, slowly I began to feel a profound tranquility within my heart as I recalled Nietzsche’s god, the echoes of his laughter, his rhythmic dance.

 

Most would consider a smile, let alone open laughter, as lacking a necessary and natural seriousness – Mass is after all a solemn occasion, an occasion for tears and serious reflection, for performances of the Missa solemnis.  Thus, it is not surprising that in ‘The Philosophical Foundations of Sacred Rhetoric’ Debora Shuger argues for a taxonomy wherein emotions are “serious” as opposed to “playful” (116-117).  Her aim is to defend rhetoric from the charge of sophistry, which, she claims, is playful and so irresponsible.  She writes: “Rhetoric is not sophistry precisely because the former is passionate, and hence serious rather than playful” (118).  Here she is not just claiming that rhetoric is serious, but that so too are emotions or “passions”, and that they are not playful.  Emotions are not playful, but serious. 

 

In attempting to rescue rhetoric from what she sees as the agon between philosophy and rhetoric, which, according to her, has been established by a postmodern reading of the traditions, she attempts to assimilate rhetoric to philosophy, as the title of her piece indicates.  In so doing, it becomes paramount that she establish veracity as the telos and fundamental structuring criterion of rhetoric.  Despite her attempt to move away from Plato’s influential tripartite psychological doctrine, which she rightly observes as being at the core of the divide between philosophy and rhetoric, reason and emotion, a divide wherein rhetoric is assimilated to sophistry in order to be more readily dismissed, she actually ends up adopting the Platonic philosophical structure itself.  Her claim is that rhetoric has just simply found itself on the wrong side and that the sacred rhetorics of the Renaissance Humanists proves this.  Interestingly, in the ancient world, sophists were quite often rhetoricians or orators – the words were used interchangeably – something Shuger fails to mention. 

 

Shuger argues that rhetoric, like reason, is also serious, for it too is concerned with truth, in fact it is concerned with faith, which is the path to the Truth Himself.  As she concludes, “Rhetoric in this sense, then, is not below but beyond reason” (128).  Rhetoric can be more serious and more veridical than reason, than philosophy itself.  Thus, she is not in the least concerned with philosophy and its history being characterized by reason/truth/seriousness, but rather with the exclusion of rhetoric and emotion from this elite council.  It is never a question for her whether philosophy thus characterized is actually all or even a part of what philosophy is, what the history of philosophy has been.  She never questions whether the history of philosophy has in fact been characterized by reason, truth and seriousness.  I do not wish to get into the genealogy of this delusion and the immense irony of Shuger’s attempt to locate a space of belonging for rhetoric and emotion within the space supposedly demarcated by ‘philosophy’, within a rational, veridical, serious space, the very space which was the locus for rhetoric’s and emotion’s originary exclusion.  Suffice it to say that even today there is a lively debate among Anglo-American ‘philosophers’ about how the period between Greek philosophy and Descartes, the first ‘modern’ philosopher, was not really philosophy, but rather theology.  Such a reading of the history of philosophy excludes such canonical giants of philosophy as Augustine, Peter Abelard and Thomas Aquinas, let alone the sacred rhetorics, about which Shruger speaks and which she goes to great lengths to include within the ‘analytic’ category of philosophy that she uncritically appropriates.        

 

In the history of Western philosophy and thought emotion has been for the most part negatively characterized and rejected as not objective, irresponsible and so immoral.  The emotions are irrational and lacking in objective truth value, which has lead to their mystification, or at least to the argument that they are “inexplicable”, as John Corrigan points out in the ‘Introduction’ to Religion and Emotion (6).  There is certainly merit to the argument that how we feel is at least to some extent, if not entirely, irreducible to explicit, rational formulations, especially given our finite and so limited epistemic abilities, but the genealogy of the mystification of emotion reveals that this ‘argument of mystification’ arose as a negative attempt to marginalize and exclude the emotions from the field of knowledge and hence of truth and morality.  Emotion was made to be irrelevant.    

 

As outlined above, the root of this characterization of emotion can be located in the Platonic taxonomy where superior reason (or ‘philosophy’) governs inferior emotions.  Shuger’s attempt to rescue emotion from this fate rather than challenge the taxonomy itself, attempts to relocate emotion to the space wherein philosophy dwells.  Thus, she must necessarily characterize emotion as what is concerned with truth, as what is ‘serious’ and grave – there is no room for levity here, no room wherein one can even begin to interrogate or challenge the weighty superiority of the category of the ‘serious’.  Her discourse simply serves to further entrench the dichotomous categories of the ‘serious’ and the ‘playful’, with the sole objective of a trivialization and rejection of the latter.  Why is there such immense value placed on what is ‘serious’?  Whence arises this gravitas?         

 

Reading Shuger’s paper is like reading a Christian Plato engaged in self-apologetics, attempting to rescue a now Christianized or ‘sacred’ rhetoric from suffering the horrible but well deserved fate of sophistic, which is nothing more than a playful game, a dancing around.  The sophist “does not come to fight, he comes to show off….he plans to dance,” as the 17^th century rhetorician, Nicholas Caussin, whom Shuger quotes, puts it (119).  Playfulness, as Shuger sees it, is simply a “delight in language for its own sake” and so it is “at odds with the commitment and unselfconscious absorption of strong emotion” (118).  Shuger might as well be quoting or summarizing Plato’s famous and highly influential condemnation of the sophists of his time, who, according to him, did not deserve the title ‘philosopher’.  She says nothing new here.  Plato long ago condemned and dismissed those whom he identified as ‘sophists’, whom he characterized as only concerned with the human emotions and linguistic play, with financial profit and moral degradation of ‘noble’ characters.  The sophists were interested in nothing more than an irresponsible and unserious horseplay.  It is obvious that there is truth, objectivity and morality, all of which are grave matters and non of which were concerns of the sophists who were ‘relativists’ and charlatans.  As we should have learned by now, this is the well-known charge hurled against those who have dared to challenge or play with such notions as ‘truth’, ‘objectivity’ and ‘morality’ and our ability to discern them with any real certitude. 

 

Shuger’s taxonomy of the emotions necessitates the existence of two types of emotions: ‘serious’ (or ‘strong’) and ‘playful’; the former, examples of which are love and faith, are characterized by a concern for truth, knowledge and ultimately for God, whereas the latter are concerned with trivial and inconsequential matters.  The intense emotions of the old man by my side, the very emotions that he believed he shared with his God, were inconsequential, trivial, because they were not serious, not concerned with truth and knowledge – they were all negative.  I wonder what he would have thought, how we would have felt, if I had said this to him, if I had trivialized his emotions, challenged their intense profundity, if I had trivialized his God and his world.                           

 

In an infamous passage in the Laws (908d ff.) Plato, no longer content with dismissing the playful sophist, the unserious linguist, who concerns himself with human emotion, condemns him to execution.  As Camus reveals in L’étranger, little has changed in our time; “in our society” too, as he tells us in the ‘Afterword’ to the novel, “any man who doesn’t cry at his mother’s funeral is liable to be condemned to death.”  The hero of L’étranger, Meursault, does not cry at his mother’s funeral, he does not feel as others do, as he should, he does not feel seriously about ‘serious matters’, does not feel their gravity.  In L’étranger we see that to feel otherwise is to risk condemnation, to risk execution.  Jesus too was crucified.           

 

 

 

Meursault is not a reject, but a poor and naked man, in love with a sun that leaves no shadows.  Far from lacking all sensibility, he is driven by a tenacious and therefore profound

passion, the passion for an absolute truth, a truth born of

living and feeling.

 

                                                            - Albert Camus, L’étranger –

 

~ by Babak on November 9, 2008.