Feeling our way to democracy: review of philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s ‘cognitive’ theory of emotions as embodied in her Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions.

In Nussbaum’s view, our emotions are not mere inner forces that buffet us about, constantly threatening to unseat reason. They are themselves modes of responsive intelligence that express our conscious and unconscious judgments of what we value and what we believe will promote the flourishing of our lives.

All the evaluative judgments implicit in emotions, she is careful to say, connect to specific historical, social and individual life circumstances. San Francisco Chronicle

Without being Freudian, Nussbaum has an essentially psychoanalytic notion of emotion, viz. that it is essentially narrative in structure — “The understanding of any single emotion is incomplete until its narrative history is grasped and studied for the light it sheds on present response.” She also apparently makes a great case for compassion, discussed at length, dismantling conservative critiques which regard it as politically irrelevant.