with that of indignation
Abstract
What are the motivational bases that help explain the various normative judgments made by social subjects and the reasoning they employ when norms and values are concerned? Answering these questions leads us to consider the relationships between thoughts and emotions. Indeed, emotions are motive states that are intimately related to values and norms, and they tend to motivate social subjects to articulate their reasoning with respect to their values and norms. But each type of emotion does this according to its own logic by generating distinctive value and deontic judgements, speech acts, and arguments. In that sense, emotion types involve distinct modes of thinking, and explain why and how social subjects reason and argue in social situations in which they have to elaborate arguments in front of a public. To substantiate these claims, I will contrast the cognitive logic of envy with that of indignation by using two empirical examples.
Introduction
This paper is concerned with normative judgments and argumentation in social explanation; that is, the role that emotions play in explaining these judgements and argumentation in social situations. The central question is this: What are the motivational bases that help explain the various normative judgments made by social subjects and the reasoning they employ when norms and values are concerned? How do they connect their value judgments (X is dangerous, unjust and bad or Y is excellent, right and good) to their deontic judgments (X and Y are obligatory, forbidden, permitted)? Answering these questions leads us to consider the relationships between thoughts and emotions. Emotions will be described as thought-dependent and thought-directing, and thus as assessable in terms of rationality. They will, however, also be described as being intimately related to
values and norms: emotions are the psychological grounds that motivate social subjects to articulate their reasoning with respect to the values and norms they face and/or share in their social collective. In summary, it will be shown that each type of emotion (envy, indignation, etc.), by virtue of being modes of thinking, generates its own constitutive judgements and structures normative thinking according to its own logic. Emotions allow us to explain how social subjects reason and argue through norms and values.
This paper has two sections. The first one is devoted to the presentation of two illustrative cases taken from an empirical study of the political collective Occupy Geneva, and are focused on two different types of emotions, envy and indignation.
The second section develops a theoretical analysis that relies on the empirical illustrations. I will argue that emotions generate cognitive activities related to the making of evaluative and deontic judgements, the mastering of normative concepts, and the building of normative arguments. My main thesis is that emotions cannot be eliminated from sociological explanations of social subjects’
thinking, for they are precisely what motivate and, especially, structure thinking.
If one wants to explain normative judgments and argumentation, one has to look at emotions.
Contrasting the logic of an envious mind with that of an indignant mind
In this section, I present two empirical cases that are taken from my observations of the political collective Occupy Geneva (OGVA), which existed between October 2011 and May-June 2012 and belonged to the Occupy Movement. The first case concerns the envy that an Indigné88, Victor, felt toward one of the main leaders of the collective, Edis. I will analyze the public manifestations of this emotion during a violent conflict about leadership that broke out during one of the general assemblies of OGVA. The second case is taken from a semi-structured interview during which an Indigné, Ricardo, who used to be one of the leaders of the workgroup on economic injustices, spoke in depth about his indignation over tax havens and a petition he designed in order to take action against them. The
88 Indignéis the French name given to the members of Occupy Geneva and in general to the members of the Occupy Movement.
interview was conducted after the observations I made of this workgroup. The questions were therefore related to the observed collective action against tax havens that Ricardo had developed and led.
Why use two empirical cases to analyze and illustrate how emotions, normative judgments and argumentation work? The purpose is to avoid constructing examples that are in a way artificial or simply convenient for the argumentation, and to avoid too “thin” empirical descriptions. The problem of these kinds of descriptions is that they often miss the complexity of social phenomena by providing only meagre descriptions of social interactions, institutions and individuals’ psychology. Therefore, a requisite would be to use “thick”
descriptions in order to avoid the artificiality of “armchair” examples, and to extract the saliencies of the situation observed from “rich raw empirical data” in order to provide an explanation of the situation through analytic processes (Geertz 1973). Therefore, “à la Geertz”, I present “raw material” that I analyze with a focus on emotions and their connections to values and norms and argumentation in order to demonstrate some of their most important and most interesting relationships for sociological explanation. The data were chosen because of their exemplariness and because of their usefulness for giving life to the theory I elaborate. The aim is to use these cases for theorizing about the relationships between emotions, normative judgments and argumentation. Another methodological remark must be made. I am studying two distinct emotions—envy and indignation—in order to make a comparison that will show that each emotion type shapes and structures normative judgments and argumentation according to its own logic. This paper is then also an examination of some of the main specificities of envy and indignation.
The logic of an envious mind
The first empirical case that I present consists of 5 extracts of a debate of the general assembly (GA) that took place on the 16th of December 2011. During this GA, a violent verbal conflict on the topic of leadership occurred between various members. Two members, Victor and Armand, attacked the three members of the negotiation group, Edis, Renaud and Lukas, for the fact that they were major leaders of the collective. However, through their behavior and statements (before, during and after this GA), Victor and Armand manifested their desire to occupy leadership positions in the OGVA’s social structure. Envy is one of the emotions
that acts as fuel in conflicts that are organized around power and prestige. In this case, envy seemed to be one of the most important emotions motivating Victor and Armand. Because of its exemplarity, I will only treat Victor’s envy. But before proceeding, I need to say a few words about the context in which this conflict emerged.
At that particular moment of its history, OGVA was under strong pressure from the city council of the city of Geneva. The council required OGVA to submit a form to the authorities to officially ask for permission to use a public space; that is, the public park where they had already settled their tents. Without this authorization, OGVA was “occupying” the public space illegally. This illegality meant that the camp could be shut down by the police; so the existence of the camp and of the movement was threatened. But the city administration’s bureaucratic ways also caused trouble internally. Thus on the official form that the mayor of the city of Geneva had sent to OGVA, the names of the three members of the negotiation group, Edis, Renaud and Lukas, were put down as organizers of the “event”. The three members were extremely worried to see their names on the form, as they had not given their assent. Indeed, if they were really recognized as the organizers of the event, that legal status would have several legal consequences. It was also partly this form that lead to the heated debate about the issue of leadership during the GA of 16th December. Indeed, apart from instilling fear in the members of the negotiation group, this “nomination” went against the egalitarian ideology of OGVA. According to this ideology, no one should prevail over and dominate others or stand out without the consensual agreement of the members of the collective. Thus during the GA, questions about the correct understanding of leadership arose: should people who are in a position of leadership (and are making decisions, gathering information, coordinating, etc.) be called leaders or coordinators? A majority agreed that those who were in such a position of power were in fact coordinators and not leaders89.
Having given the background, I will now turn to the transcript excerpts in which Victor appears as the main protagonist. His envy makes him publicly attack Edis during the GA and suggest ideas aimed at preventing the rise of leaders in the collective.
89 This is of course a kind of collective self-deception by which leaders were given a euphemistic name: coordinators. But not all Indignés were subject to this self-deception, since there were members who clearly recognized the leaders and did not think it was always bad to have leaders.
Extract 1
Victor continues right after Armand: “So…The problem with the chiefs…I think this is a problem we need to solve. Because there are power struggles between us.
We have to bring them out in the open. It has to come out. So, me, I’d like to be a leader, I have it in me. There! So I’d like to put myself forth as an example. All of you who aspire to be leaders: say it. Because we’re all in this situation. The problem is it’s become a hidden issue! There are tacit leaders! That’s not ok!”
Victor publicly denounces the fact that there are leaders in the collective, a fact that he calls the “problem of the chiefs”. This denunciation is relevant in OGVA because of the egalitarian ideology of the members of the collective; members want to work as much as possible in a flat social structure where hierarchy is, because of ideological sensibilities, inexistent or kept to a minimum. By making this claim, Victor problematizes the issues of power and the struggles for power that he thinks he has identified among the members of the collective. According to him, the fact that these struggles are tacit and thus not publicly declared is bad, and they should be settled by the group. His speech is, then, an attempt to make the members of the assembly aware of these struggles. Moreover, he believes that each Indignéwants power, and he claims that he himself “aspire[s] to be a leader”, that it is in his nature (“I have it in me”). In fact, he used to believe in the anthropological theory that posits that all human beings are by nature motivated by the wish to dominate. In his opinion, his claim is a sincere declaration that discloses a power struggle in which he is an actor. But is it for the common good?
No, it does not seem like it is. His claim is that he wishes to be recognized as a leader by the other members of the collective, and that for the moment he is not recognized as such. In that sense, his wish testifies to the value he places on power and on the social recognition that the status of leader (usually) provides. In this situation at least, he is not concerned with the common good but rather with his self-aggrandizement. The utterance of this wish is also quite impressive because it is a rare record of someone publicly expressing that he yearns for a positional good (being a leader) that would give him superiority over others. This wish also includes the idea of rivalry, since there are already individuals in OGVA who enjoy this valued position of leadership. Thus Victor seems to say that he wants a good, but that this good is already possessed by rivals who, as a result, are better