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Admiration, Affectivity, and Value: Critical Remarks on Exemplarity

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Notes

  1. Compaijen 2017; Tachibana 2019.

  2. Zagzebski 2017.

  3. Zagzebski 2015: 205–221.

  4. Irwin 2015: 223–248.

  5. Despite an increased interest in research on admiration in modern thinkers such as Spinoza (Dahlbeck 2021) and Kierkegaard (Compaijen 2017; Aho 2019) in the context of exemplarity, not much research has been dedicated to the analysis of the consequences of the affectivity of admiration to this discussion.

  6. Berrios 2019; Lindquist and Barrett 2010; Gottman, Katz, and Hooven 1996.

  7. See: Smith and Ellsworth 1987.

  8. Hatfield, Cacioppo, and Rapson 1993.

  9. Lines 2010: 285-303; Dunning 1986.

  10. Zagzebski 2013: 194.

  11. Zagzebski 2017: 130.

  12. Zagzebski 2017: 140.

  13. Zagzebski, 2013: 200–201.

  14. Zagzebski 2013: 201.

  15. Zagzebski, 2013: 201. “We identify the admirable by the emotion of admiration. I do not assume that we always trust our emotion of admiration, and the emotion is shaped by the emotional responses of others, but when our emotion survives reflection and we trust it, we take the object of admiration to be admirable. A person who is admirable in some respect is imitable in that respect.”

  16. Irwin 2015: 225.

  17. Kristjánsson 2017: 22.

  18. For a more comprehensive account of admiration in Descartes, see: Kaposi 2010: 107–118.

  19. Descartes describes admiration in Part II, Article 70 (“About Wonder: Its definition and its cause”) of The Passions of the Soul, writing as follows: “Wonder [admiratio] is a sudden surprise of the soul which makes it tend to consider attentively those objects which seem to it rare and extraordinary;” Descartes 1989: 57.

  20. Descartes 1989: 57.

  21. Descartes 1989: 58.

  22. Descartes 1989: 59.

  23. Descartes concludes that while it is not in itself bad to have an inclination to admiration, the engagement of this emotion is characteristic of people who, though they “have a good deal of common sense, still do not have a high opinion of their competence,” 1989, 61). Thus, he suggests, “we should emancipate ourselves from it as much as possible.” See: Descartes, 1989, 60.

  24. Spinoza 2018: 95.

  25. Lord 2010: 79.

  26. Lord 2010: 79.

  27. Spinoza 2018: 164.

  28. Spinoza 2018: 134.

  29. Spinoza 2018: 134–135.

  30. Berrios 2019.

  31. Berrios 2019 “Experiencing a meta-emotion requires that one emotion (e.g., sadness) triggers a secondary emotion (e.g., anger). Fundamental in the understanding of meta-emotions as a complex emotional experience is that emotions can be hierarchically organized, forming finite layers of emotions.”

  32. Spinoza 2018: 114.

  33. Smith 1996: 233.

  34. Smith 1996: 237.

  35. Smith 1996: 238-239.

  36. Smith 2002: 24, “For approbation heightened by wonder and surprise, constitutes the sentiment which is properly called admiration, and of which applause is the natural expression.” See also 2002: 37–38, “Approbation, mixed and animated by wonder and surprise, constitutes the sentiment which is properly called admiration, of which, applause is the natural expression, as has already been observed.”

  37. Smith 1996: 233-234.

  38. See an overview of the subject of “mixed feelings” in contemporary cognitive and clinical psychology in Schimmack 2010

  39. Smith 2002: 46

  40. See Hatfield, Rapson, and Le 2009: 20. “Scientists and writers have long observed that people tend to mimic the emotional expressions of others. As early as 1759, Adam Smith (1759/1966) acknowledged that as people imagine themselves in another’s situation, they display motor mimicry: ‘When we see a stroke aimed, and just ready to fall upon the leg or arm of another person, we naturally shrink and draw back our leg or our own arm’ (p. 4). Smith felt that such imitation was ‘almost a reflex.’”

  41. Kaftanski 2021.

  42. Kierkegaard 1975b: 295. “With respect to a merely human prototype … there is no time for admiration—get busy right away with the task of imitating him. The ethical truth of the matter is just this—that admiration is suspiciously like an evasion.”

  43. Kierkegaard 1975b: 184.

  44. Kierkegaard 1997: 304.

  45. Kierkegaard, 1975a: 597.

  46. Kierkegaard 1975a: 538.

  47. Kierkegaard 1975a: 181.

  48. Kierkegaard 1970: 513-514.

  49. Nietzsche 1997: 305

  50. Kaftanski 2017: 605.

  51. Nietzsche 1997: 87.

  52. Nietzsche 1997: 87.

  53. Nietzsche 1997: 88. An alternative translation of this fragment indicates the visual dimension of the imitation of suffering between the imitator and their model: “[B]ut, above all, if he would like to see us suffering from the sight of his suffering, we pretend to suffer, for all this secures for us the enjoyment of active gratitude…” Nietzsche 1911: 148, my italics).

  54. Nietzsche 1997, 88.

  55. Bamford 2019: 77–78.

  56. Nietzsche 1911: 150.

  57. Nietzsche 1911: 150.

  58. Nietzsche 1911: 151.

  59. See also Nietzsche 1996: 99. “The imitated gesture leads him who imitates it back to the sensation which it expressed in the face or body of the person imitated. That is how people learned to understand one another: this is how a child still learns to understand its mother. In general, painful sensations may well also be expressed by gestures which in turn occasion pain….”

  60. Nietzsche 2005: 115.

  61. Zagzebski 2015: 218.

  62. See more on the problem of cognitive and non-cognitive values in Todt and Luján 2014.

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    Wojciech Kaftanski

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Kaftanski, W. Admiration, Affectivity, and Value: Critical Remarks on Exemplarity. J Value Inquiry (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-021-09875-1

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