Who is Charlie Chaplin?

Charlie Chaplin is said to have entered once a Charlie Chaplin lookalike contest and he lost: He became third. When I searched for it on the Internet in order to find out whether it was true, I found that it had happened in 1915 according to some websites, while other websites say that it was in 1975. Again other websites say that it’s not true. It looks like an “alternative fact”, as the American president Trump has called it. That’s interesting, for some governments (like the French government) want to forbid by law to publish alternative facts on the Internet, which would mean that such amusing websites have to be removed from the web, if the contents is not definite. Be it as it may, for this blog the factuality of this fact is not important, for Dolly Parton says that she, too, once lost a lookalike contest, so such things happen. Philosophically and psychologically it is interesting, for how can it happen?

If you ask a cartoonist to draw a certain well-known person such as a politician or a pop star, it’s likely that he’ll exaggerate the characteristics of that person, especially the facial traits. It’s not only because it may be amusing, but by doing so the person drawn is easier recognized: You see immediately who it is. And so it is also in a lookalike contest. If you want to recognize the participant as Charlie Chaplin’s double, he must exaggerate Chaplin’s traits and behaviour just a little so that he is a bit more Chaplin than Chaplin himself is. That’s the best way to look alike Charlie Chaplin. And in the end a person is who he is, so that’s why Chaplin himself failed. Note, however, that Chaplin finished third and not last or almost. So to look alike another you must exaggerate but not too much.

Such a contest raises the question “Who am I?” For in the eyes of others who look at me and who judge me, I am not myself if I am myself but only if I am just a little bit more than myself. Sometimes we say about a person that she or he has excelled her or himself, when s/he did something extraordinary. In view of the foregoing it is to be wondered whether it is true. Anyway, such a yourself lookalike contest in which you participated but didn’t win or such a deed by which you allegedly excelled yourself say a lot about the idea of personal identity. For is it true that you are simply the traits that constitute you plus your past, so the way you got your traits, as identity philosophers tell us? Judging by how a cartoonist or a lookalike contest jury would see you, it’s not the case. Then your identity does not exist of your actual version of yourself, whatever this may be – for how to establish who you actually are? – but it is a kind of biased version of it; or rather I would prefer to say that your identity is a saturated version of the actual version of yourself, to say it in a clumsy way. In photography many photographers tend to process photos that way that the colours are just a little bit (or sometimes a lot) more saturated than they are in reality. Red is made somewhat redder, blue somewhat bluer, yellow somewhat yellower, etc. They think that the colours in the photo are really so or they think that it’s more beautiful. And so it’s also with your personal identity: It’s the saturated version of yourself – at least in the view of others! One step more and one could call it a prejudiced version of yourself. In the end you are only a caricature of yourself, aren’t you?

The passion of anger

The Angry Boy  in the Vigiland Park in Oslo, Norway

When Martha Nussbaum writes about anger, it’s striking that she refers to classical authors like Aristotle and Seneca and not to early modern philosophers like Montaigne and Hume, who wrote on anger as well. Montaigne devoted an essay to this subject, while Hume wrote on anger in two sections of his A Treatise on Human Nature. Since I am not very acquainted with most of Hume’s philosophy, I’ll ignore him in this blog, but if Nussbaum had given some attention to Montaigne, her view on anger might have been different. It is so that both for Montaigne and for Nussbaum people become angry because they have reasons for it. Moreover, for both of them the reasons why one gets angry are usually good reasons in the sense that someone did something to you that this person shouldn’t have done. But then their approaches separate.

When Nussbaum starts to discuss anger she says “that the idea of payback or retribution ... is a conceptual part of anger. ... Either anger focuses on some significant injury, such as murder or a rape or it focuses only on the significance of the wrongful act for the victim’s relative status” (p. 15). Montaigne’s view on anger is very different. For him other aspects are important. As he says in his essay Of Anger: “There is no passion that so much transports men from their right judgment as anger. ... We ourselves, to do well, should never lay a hand upon our servants whilst our anger lasts. When the pulse beats, and we feel emotion in ourselves, let us defer the business; things will indeed appear otherwise to us when we are calm and cool. ‘Tis passion that then commands, ‘tis passion that speaks, and not we. Faults seen through passion appear much greater to us than they really are ...”

When we put these quotations next to each other, the differences between the two authors become clear. For Nussbaum anger is an emotion that leads to a wish for revenge. Moreover, anger happens always because you are seriously hurt, not because of an act that is actually not very significant. She talks explicitly about murder and rape – in the quotation and elsewhere in her book –. Nussbaum argues then that revenge makes no sense for reasons she explains, even though – which is implicit in her argumentation – the eye you wish for an eye or the tooth you wish for the tooth taken from you might have equal values. For Montaigne, on the other hand, it’s no problem to punish a person who has done something to you but for him punishment is not a kind of revenge but it is what it is, namely punishment in the actual sense. It’s a way to correct the perpetrator, or a penalty for what has been done, and not a kind of compensation; or it is a warning for other possible perpetrators. The problem is, however, that your judgment is disturbed just because you are angry: Anger leads to a false judgment. Therefore Montaigne’s advice is: Don’t judge before you have cooled down. Only then your judgment can be reasonable and right. Moreover, as the cases discussed in his essay make clear, usually anger is aroused by minor things, for instance because a servant didn’t do what you had ordered him to do or because someone was rude or disrespectful.

If we compare then how Nussbaum analyses anger and its consequences and how Montaigne looks at it, we can conclude that Nussbaum has an interesting view, but that she actually considers only a part of the idea. For isn’t it so that at most times that we are angry it is not for very significant reasons but for the daily annoyances, rude acts, mistakes and stupidities done to us (or so we think)? Often we explode with fury because of only little affairs, even when we don’t want to, for, as Montaigne says, it’s not we that hold it, but anger holds us.

References

Martha Nussbaum, Anger and Forgiveness. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Michel de Montaigne, “Of Anger”, in Essays, Book II-31.

Anger and forgiveness (2)

Better filled half-full than not at all.

Johann Adolph Hasse’s opera “Siroe, Re di Persia” – mentioned in my last blog – is full of anger but it ends with forgiveness. Also Martha Nussbaum’s book that I discussed there is not only about anger but also about forgiveness, as the title of the book, Anger and Forgiveness, already shows. Nussbaum distinguishes three kinds of forgiveness. First she considers “transactional forgiveness”. It involves that the offender of the act to be forgiven “must approach the other person directly, confess the fault publicly, express regret and commitment not to do this sort of thing again – to change the course of one’s life in regard to that whole area of sin. And then the victim must accept the apology.” There is “a change of heart on the part of the victim, who gives up anger and resentment in response to the offender’s confession and contrition.” (p. 63) Transactional forgiveness seems to restore the cosmic balance, as some people think, but actually, so Nussbaum, it involves the errors of anger discussed in my blog last week, since it contains the idea of payback: “the victim’s pain somehow atones for pain inflicted.” (p. 74). In my words, it’s a sort of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Transactional forgiveness does not involve transition to the future in the sense of restoring what went wrong. It looks only back on what happened.

Although transactional forgiveness has been widely accepted, there is also another model, so Nussbaum, which she calls “unconditional forgiveness”: “forgiveness that rains down freely on the penitent, without requiring an antecedent confession and act of contrition.” (p. 75) According to this model “we should ... forgive those who wrong us even when they do not make any gesture of contrition.” (p. 76) Although unconditional forgiveness is to be preferred to transactional forgiveness, it “is rarely free from some type of pay back wish, at least at first. [Moreover,] it remains backward-looking and not Transitional. It says nothing about constructing a productive future. It may remove an impediment to the future, but it does not point there in and of itself. ... [S]ometimes the forgiveness process channels the wish for payback.” (ibid.) This can make that the person who forgives feels him or herself morally higher than the offender. Then unconditionally forgiving “is itself a punishment of the offender”. (p. 77) Moreover, it “is still about the past, and it gives us nothing concrete with which to go forward.” (ibid.)

Nussbaum prefers to call her third kind of forgiveness not forgiveness but “an ethic of unconditional love”. “[I]t departs altogether from judgment, confession, contrition, and consequent waiving of anger.” (p. 78) This love is unconditional and needs no apology by the offender. It “is a first response, not a substitute for a prior payback wish.” (ibid.) The model case for Nussbaum is Jesus’ parable of the Prodigal Son in Luke 15 in the Bible, where the father accepts his son in unconditional love despite what the son has done to him. In the case of unconditional love, so Nussbaum, “there is no allusion to a past of anger. Not only is there no structured ... penance process, with its multiple conditionalities, there is also no forgiveness in any recognizable form at all, even unconditional. There is just love, silencing anger.” (p. 85)

Nussbaum sees this unconditional love as an ideal of forgiving, but is it realistic? Could it be put into practice, not incidentally but in some institutionalized way? Just then where the discussion should have to start, Nussbaum says: “This theme cannot be fully developed at this stage.” (ibid.) How disappointing, for now she avoids the fundamental problem: how to deal with unconditional love in practical cases. Recently in the village where I live a young woman has been violated and murdered. The murderer has been caught and then he has cooperated with the police in solving the case. He has also shown regret. So far, so good. But then? Even if the family of the murdered woman would give the murderer unconditional love – which I seriously doubt, but Nussbaum mentions such a case – what practical consequences will this have for him? No sentence? Not in prison? Note also that this man was already in a psychiatric institute for another crime but that he was on leave when he committed his act.

Nussbaum’s ethic of unconditional love assumes that we behave like saints, but there are only a few people among us who can. Saints do as saints are but humans do as humans are. Look around and ask yourself: Can we ever succeed to build a society on an ethic of unconditional forgiveness? I am afraid that the answer is “No”, if it were only because there’ll always be free riders – people who consciously will commit crimes with the thought in mind that if caught unconditional love will be the punishment. I have ideals but not illusions. Let’s keep the ethic of unconditional love as an ideal to be strived for. Try to practice it where it may work, and the more often it will work so the better. But remain practical. Practice comes often not farther than halfway our ideals, but it’s already ideal when it comes that far.

Reference

Martha Nussbaum, Anger and Forgiveness. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Anger and forgiveness

The cast receiving the applause after Hasse's opera "Siroe, Re di Persia"

Wilmink Theatre, Enschede, Netherlands, 26 January 2018

When in Johann Adolph Hasse’s opera “Siroe, Re di Persia”, the Persian King Cosroe appoints his younger son Medarse as his successor to the throne, and not his older son Siroe, a range of intrigues develop. One of the leading emotions in these intrigues is anger: Anger that the characters in the play don’t get what they want; that their victims don’t do what they should do. Siroe, the main victim, is driven to despair and cannot choose when he should have to. This makes his father Cosroe – who doesn’t understand Siroe’s doubts and feels himself betrayed by him – so angry that finally he orders to kill his son. This qua music and expression beautiful opera is more like a soap opera than a play in which characters develop. But here we see anger performed as one of the most important emotions of man. And we see its pernicious consequences: revenge and destruction, which in the end backfire on the protagonists. For which father wants to kill his son, the more so when it turns out to have been done on false grounds?

Anger has been analyzed by such outstanding philosophers as Aristotle, Seneca and Montaigne, and recently by Martha Nussbaum in her book Anger and Forgiveness. They all see a relationship between anger and revenge, or at least “payback and retribution”, as Nussbaum calls it. But as she says “the payback idea is normatively problematic, and anger, therefore, with it.” (p. 15) Before I’ll expound Nussbaum’s reasons why this is so, let’s look how she defines anger. Actually she doesn’t develop a definition of her own but she takes Aristotle’s description, which she then discusses and corrects. Here it is: Anger is “a desire accompanied by pain for an imagined retribution on account of an imagined slighting inflicted on by people who have no legitimate reason to slight oneself or one’s own” (p. 17). Essential is, I think, not only the slighting that hurts but the feeling that we are hurt. The slighting is subjective: We become angry only when we believe (rightly or wrongly) that the damage was inflicted illegitimately or wrongfully. (p. 18) And then and therefore we want to payback.

Now it can happen, so Nussbaum, that you become angry because your social status has been hurt by someone and then it may have sense to payback in order to uprank your perceived downranking. But apart from this special case, does revenge make sense? According to Nussbaum there are several objections to it. Often paying back is considered as assuaging the pain inflicted on the victim and the revenge should arouse a feeling of pleasure (cf. p. 21). However, this view is not correct, so Nussbaum, and she thinks here of cases like rape and murder in the first place, but I think that it applies to many kinds of “little” cases as well, from small crimes like theft to big crimes, from little damages in the private circle to big ones there. We don’t get our damage restored by tit-for-tat actions. By doing so we only bring damage to others, without getting compensation for the damage done to us. But let’s see what Nussbaum says. The problem is, she says, that simply hurting others doesn’t reverse what has been done to you, and from that point of view payback, revenge and retribution make no sense. “Doing something to the offender does not bring dead people back to life, heal a broken limb, or undo a sexual violation. So why do people somehow believe that it does? Or what, exactly, do they believe that makes even a little sense of their retaliatory project?” “[W]hy would someone who has been gravely wounded look forward with hope to doing something unwelcome to the offender?” (pp. 21-22) Pain done to yourself cannot be undone by doing pain to others.

However, anger is not pointless. It can have three functions. It may serve as a signal that something is amiss; it can be a motivation to do something about what is amiss; and it may be a deterrent. (pp. 37-40) But all this doesn’t imply that anger must lead to a kind of revenge. It means only that anger must be a reason to do something about what is amiss. And this is what Nussbaum sees as a very important function of anger. She has also a special name for it: Transition-Anger. Anger must not lead to revenge, but it must be a reason to restore what has gone wrong. “There are many cases in which one gets standardly angry first ... and then, in a cooler moment, [thinks] ... ‘How outrageous! Something must be done about this.’ ” (p. 35). Elsewhere in her book Nussbaum discusses the “extreme” cases of Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King, but  cannot we each of us be a little Mandela or King?

But, alas, “[t]here are many ways in which anger can go wrong”, so Nussbaum. (p. 35) In Hasse’s opera, out of anger the Persian King Cosroe orders Arasse, Siroe’s friend, to kill his son. Then, when Cosroe hears that Siroe is innocent, he is full of remorse. But as it goes in operas, Siroe comes back on the stage, alive and well. For it was a trick of Arasse to accept the order and he didn’t kill Siroe. And Siroe himself? He was happy that the intrigues had come to an end and that at last he got the throne of Persia. Instead of seeking revenge in anger and rage, he forgives all, despite the slighting and trouble inflicted on him.

Reference

Martha Nussbaum, Anger and Forgiveness. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.