Justice Speaks: Nemesis, Nature, and Common Law in Aristotle's Rhetoric

This essay explores Aristotle's treatment of the passion of nemesis or “righteous indignation” in his Rhetoric and its relevance to contemporary displays of passion in democratic political orders. It does so by considering Aristotle's perplexing definition of nemesis in relation to two other passions, pity and envy, as well as its significance to his discussion of common law (a transpolitical standard of justice according to nature), which he presents through allusions to Sophocles's Antigone. Aristotle's discussion sheds light on the way in which nemesis, which is aroused in relation to the concern for justice, necessarily takes into consideration questions of moral worth that liberal democratic regimes attempt to relegate to the private sphere.

“The Stone Which the Builders Rejected”

This chapter narrates the role of the Bible in the secession crisis that erupted after Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860. While Benjamin Morgan Palmer and other southerners saw slavery as “a divine trust,” many northerners agreed with Lincoln’s quotation of scripture—“A House Divided Against Itself Cannot Stand,” meaning the nation could not endure if it remained divided over slavery. In response, southerners scoured the scriptures for arguments to support white supremacy, fearing that many non-slaveholding whites in the South would refuse to support secession. In all, the Bible contributed to the righteous indignation on both sides, helping to pave the way for war.

Aristotle on Shame and Learning to Be Good

This book presents a novel interpretation of Aristotle’s account of how shame instils virtue, and defends its philosophical import. Despite shame’s bad reputation as a potential obstacle to the development of moral autonomy, shame is for Aristotle the proto-virtue of those learning to be good, since it is the emotion that equips them with the seeds of virtue. Other emotions such as friendliness, righteous indignation, emulation, hope, and even spiritedness may play important roles on the road to virtue. However, shame is the only one that Aristotle repeatedly associates with moral progress. The reason is that shame can move young agents to perform good actions and avoid bad ones in ways that appropriately resemble not only the external behavior but also the orientation and receptivity to moral value characteristic of virtuous people. By turning their attention to considerations about the perceived nobility and praiseworthiness of their own actions and character, shame places young people in the path to becoming good. Although they are not yet virtuous, learners with a sense of shame can appreciate the value of the noble and guide their actions by a true interest in doing the right thing. Shame, thus, enables learners to perform virtuous actions in the right way before they have practical wisdom or stable dispositions of character. This proposal solves a long-debated problem concerning Aristotle’s notion of habituation by showing that shame provides motivational continuity between the actions of the learners and the virtuous dispositions that they will eventually acquire.

A Study of the Neurolinguistic Features of Programming Unhealthy Personality Mindset: A Case Study of the Language of Affection in the Qur’an

For a start, the present study tackles the language of affection in the Qur’an and its role in managing unhealthy personality. Primarily, it provides a full-scale model for programming unhealthy mindsets. The model uses linguistic and neurological tools in the process of analysis. Affectional language is a case in point that shows how language, emotions, and cognition interact to reflect each other. The study highlights the effective role of affectional language in shaping minds. In the same vein, a typical example for the neurological programming process is the Qur’anic representation of the attitudes of some believers at the time of the Prophet Muħammad (PBUH) after a specific battle. This representation reports the initial reaction of the believers which is emotionally shaped. Also, it helps in making proper reactions which are shaped according to the normal pathways of thinking. The process of shaping cognition is carried out according to specific neurological strategies that include the proper process of sensation, retrieval of the previous experience, neuroplasticity, and acceptance. Also, these strategies include self-compassion and compassion for others. Adding to its motivational role in the promotion of forgiveness, it plays the same motivational role for doing justice. Accordingly, the study concludes that the discourse of affection plays an effective role in shutting the door on any potential sign of the hurt-perceived and the righteous indignation reactions. Furthermore, it combats radicalism and extremism in a way that ends all forms of violence.

Begriffsspaltung II

This chapter explores two further ‘split’ abstract concepts presented in the Works and Days, Aidos (‘Shame/Awe’) and Nemesis (‘Righteous Indignation’). It is shown that not only are there contradictory meanings inherent in these terms, but these contradictions become apparent only once we consider the context. For Hesiod, the good and the bad Aidos are not clearly opposed and distinct from one another, but can have positive or negative effects depending on the existing conditions. Reality and its linguistic expression are not static, but fluid and dynamic, and must be subjected to interpretation.

Hot Potato Criminology: Ethnographers and the Shame of Poor People's Crimes

When ethnographers study street crime, they anticipate that readers might shame them for shaming the poor. One common response is to compromise the quality of ethnographic data. Another is to pass righteous indignation away from the poor by arguing the causal significance of deindustrialization, class inequalities, racial prejudice, policing, colonialism, or hostility toward immigrants. Almost always, such arguments are gratuitous: The evidence for the structural and historical causes offered by ethnographers does not vary with the situational and biographical variations in behavior that make for high-quality ethnographic data. Nevertheless, if we read around the rhetorical practices that contemporary ethnographers of crime use to shift shame away from their subjects and themselves, we learn how street crime is produced through small criminogenic social circles. Considered as a set, recent ethnographies have significantly advanced knowledge about the social psychology of criminality, and they provide promising leads for improving the understanding of variations in crime patterns over time and across metropolitan spaces.

Rationality through the Eyes of Shame: Oppression and Liberation via Emotion*

Standard accounts of shame characterize it as an emotion of global negative self‐assessment, in which an individual necessarily accepts or assents to a global negative self‐evaluation. According to nonstandard accounts of shame, experiences of shame need not involve a global negative self‐assessment. I argue here in favor of nonstandard accounts of shame over standard accounts. First, I begin with a detailed discussion of standard accounts of shame, focusing primarily on Gabriele Taylor's standard account (Taylor 1985). Second, I illustrate how Adrian Piper's experience of groundless shame can be portrayed as 1) both a rational and an irrational experience of shame, in accordance with Taylor's account as a paradigm model of standard accounts of shame, and 2) as a rational experience of shame when taken in its own right as a legitimate, rational account of shame (Piper 1992/1996). Third, without denying that some experiences of shame either are or can be irrational experiences of shame, I elucidate how standard accounts of shame can act as mechanisms of epistemic injustice, and in doing so can transmute the righteous indignation of the marginalized by recasting them as shameful experiences (that is, by recasting them as experiences of the righteous shame of the marginalized).

Cynic Philosophical Humor as Exposure of Incongruity

I examine several recent interpretations of Cynic philosophy. Next, I offer my own reading, which draws on Schopenhauer’s Incongruity Theory of Humor, Aristotle’s account of the emotions in the Rhetoric, and the work of Theodor Adorno. I argue that Cynic humor is the deliberate exposure of incongruities between what a thing or state of affairs is supposed to be (either by nature or according to tradition) and what it in fact is, as evidenced by its present manifestation to our sense-perception and thought. Finally, I interpret the significance of this new reading: the exposure of incongruity aims to elicit a response of righteous indignation at the failure of phenomena to live up to our reasonable expectations. Cynic humor redeems the value of ‘wrong life’ by rendering its wrongness palpable and thus intolerable, by availing itself of reason’s inability to withstand flagrant contradictions.