Interest in the political relevance of the emotions is growing rapidly. In light of this, Hannah Arendt’s claim that the emotions are apolitical has come under renewed fire. But many critics have misunderstood her views on the relationship between individuals, emotions and the political. This paper addresses this issue by reconstructing the conceptual framework through which Arendt understands the emotions. Arendt often describes the heart – where the emotions reside – as a place of darkness. I begin by tracing this (...) metaphor through her work to demonstrate that it is meant to convey the inherently uncertain nature of emotions rather than a devaluation of them. I proceed to challenge the notion that Arendt adopts the Enlightenment dichotomy between reason and emotion. In fact, she rejects both as a basis for politics. However, she does identify some constructive roles for the emotions. I argue that fear is intrinsically connected to courage – the principal political virtue – in Arendt’s philosophy. In light of my discussion, I then reinterpret the role of compassion and pity in On Revolution, concluding that Arendt’s insights can help us avoid the potential pitfalls of the contemporary project to recuperate the emotions in politics. (shrink)

Interest in the political relevance of the emotions is growing rapidly. In light of this, Hannah Arendt’s claim that the emotions are apolitical has come under renewed fire. But many critics have misunderstood her views on the relationship between individuals, emotions and the political. This paper addresses this issue by reconstructing the conceptual framework through which Arendt understands the emotions. Arendt often describes the heart – where the emotions reside – as a place of darkness. I begin by tracing this (...) metaphor through her work to demonstrate that it is meant to convey the inherently uncertain nature of emotions rather than a devaluation of them. I proceed to challenge the notion that Arendt adopts the Enlightenment dichotomy between reason and emotion. In fact, she rejects both as a basis for politics. However, she does identify some constructive roles for the emotions. I argue that fear is intrinsically connected to courage – the principal political virtue – in Arendt’s philosophy. In ligh... (shrink)

This article challenges the consensus that silences about mental disorders are there to be broken. While silence in mental disorders can be painful, even deadly, the consensus rests on an oversimplified understanding of silence. Drawing upon accounts from depression and bipolar memoirs, this article names and analyses some salient experiences of silence in mood disorders. It does so with two goals in mind. The first is to show that mood disorders may involve several different kinds of lived experiences of silence. (...) This is important because even though silence is considered a promising objective symptom of depression, little has been written about lived experiences of silence in disorders that involve depression. The second is to argue against the fetishisation of breaking silence and the concomitant understandings of silence as an externally imposed and inherently negative phenomenon. This is important because some silences are not experienced as external and are even felt to be valuable, meaning that efforts to break them may be counterproductive. (shrink)

The COVID-19 crisis has served not just to instil fear in the populace but to highlight the importance of fear as a motivating dynamic in politics. The gradual emergence of political-philosophical approaches calling for concern for ‘positive’ emotions may have made sense under non-pandemic conditions. Now, however, describing fear in the face of a deadly pandemic as ‘irrational’ or born of ‘ignorance’ seems ‘irrational’ and ‘ignorant’. In this article, we draw upon the work of John Gray and behavioural science to (...) present a defence of fear. We show how the pandemic has highlighted deficits in the work of four thinkers highly critical of fear: Martha Nussbaum, Zygmunt Bauman, Hannah Arendt and Sara Ahmed. We argue that, if such approaches are to be of value in anything other than optimal conditions, then they have to acknowledge the fundamental role of fear in helping human beings to pursue fundamental interests. (shrink)

This paper illustrates how concepts of mental disorder have been deployed to medicalize negative emotions and, thereby, weaken the political agency of some individuals. First, I theorise the link between political agency and emotions, arguing that effective political action entails the transformation of emotions into public issues. Using the British referendum on membership in the EU as a case study, I then examine how medically loaded terms and rhetoric were used to describe suffering after the vote. Finally, I argue that (...) this generated conditions that interrupted or even reversed the transformation of subjective experiences into politically meaningful issues. (shrink)

This article draws upon clinical experience of GPs working in a deprived area of the North East of England to examine the potential contribution of Universal Basic Income to health by mitigating ‘patient-side barriers’ among three cohorts experiencing distinct forms of ‘precariousness’: 1) long-term unemployed welfare recipients with low levels of education (lumpenprecariat); 2) workers on short-term/zero-hours contracts with low levels of education (‘lower’ precariat); 3) workers on short-term/zero-hours contracts with relatively high levels of education (‘upper’ precariat). We argue that (...) any benefits must be accompanied by robust institutions capable of promoting health. (shrink)

While much ink has been spilt over the political importance of speech, much less has been dedicated to the political importance of silence. This article seeks to fill that gap. We propose the need for a robust, democratic right to silence in public life and argue that there are politically salient epistemic reasons for recognising that right. We begin by defining what silence is and what a robust right to silence entails. We then argue that the right to silence offers (...) two politically salient epistemic benefits. The first is that, if the right to silence is maintained, we can avoid the epistemic harm that may be caused when an individual is compelled to lie in public. The second is that the right to silence can protect marginalised individuals against the epistemic injustices that may arise when others are likely to misconstrue their speech. (shrink)

Naturalistic understandings that frame human experiences and differences as biological dysfunctions have been identified as a key source of epistemic injustice. Critics argue that those understandings are epistemically harmful because they obscure social factors that might be involved in people’s suffering; therefore, naturalistic understandings should be undermined. But those critics have overlooked the epistemic benefits such understandings can offer marginalised individuals. In this paper, I argue that the capacity of naturalistic understandings to obscure social factors does not necessarily cause epistemic (...) injustice and can even help people to avoid some epistemic injustice. I do this by considering how some individuals with bipolar disorder deploy the neurobiological understanding of their disorder, highlighting three functions it fills for them: explanation, disclamation, and decontestation. In performing these functions, the neurobiological understanding does marginalise alternative, social perspectives on bipolar disorder. However, this can be understood as a feature rather than a bug. By marginalising alternative explanations, the neurobiological understanding can help individuals with bipolar disorder resist epistemic injustice, including, for example, the trivialisation of their experiences. Given this, critics seeking to undermine naturalistic understandings of mental disorder and other experiences in the pursuit of epistemic justice themselves risk exacerbating epistemic injustice. (shrink)

Despite the relevance of silence in several psychopathologies, first-person perspectives on silence have been largely neglected in the phenomenological scholarship on those conditions. This paper proposes a phenomenological framework for addressing this neglect and demonstrates its usefulness through a case study of empty silence, an experience which can be found in many first-person accounts of depression. The paper begins by surveying research on silence in depression in mental health research and phenomenological psychopathology. Drawing on the thought of Merleau-Ponty, it then (...) outlines a phenomenological framework for explicating the structure of silence experiences in psychopathology. Finally, it applies this framework to articulate the experiential structure and implications of empty silence, with a particular emphasis on the bodily doubt that can flow from repeated experiences of empty silence. (shrink)