Pondering Hatred

TY - CHAP

T1 - Pondering Hatred

AU - Brudholm, Thomas

AU - Johansen, Birgitte Schepelern

PY - 2018/1/1

Y1 - 2018/1/1

N2 - Hatred is a complex and difficult thing, in life as well as in theory. Its history in Western philosophy is as long as the history of love. It begins, perhaps quite appropriately, with a warning. There is, said Socrates, nothing worse than misology, the hatred of rational argumentation. In this form (at least), hatred is a matter of pathology, an evil to be prevented at all costs. At almost the same time and in exactly the same place, Aristotle told aspiring orators how to incite hatred (misos) in an audience. What he had in mind was definitely not misology. In his Rhetoric, hatred is presented as a normal and moral emotion, a socially acknowledged antagonism toward people with a vicious character or a harmful disposition. Much later, David Hume asserted that hatred is “altogether impossible to define.” Apparently, Immanuel Kant disagreed. He clearly defined hatred as a passion. Still, he admitted that there is something particularly “deceitful and hidden” about it. In an exceptional poetic moment, he wrote that if the affect (Affekt) of anger is like water that breaks through a dam, the passion (Leidenschaft) of hatred is “like a river that digs itself deeper and deeper into its bed.” In fact, hatred has never been neatly defined or consistently categorized. Some philosophers have tried to delimit hatred by distinguishing it from anger, love, or revenge. Others have insisted on various sorts of entanglement between these same emotional phenomena. Some are preoccupied with the legitimacy of the modern criminalization of enactments of various kinds of group hatred. Others - dissatisfied with lazy notions that all hatred is a bad thing - are keen to provide “a word on behalf of good haters.” Taken as a whole, the history of views on hatred may serve to remind us that we can - and probably sometimes should - ponder what we mean when we talk about hatred. In the field of Holocaust and genocide studies, there is no shortage of reasons for such reflection. There is a sickening amount of evidence of hateful incitement in the archives on atrocity crimes, and hatred is a recurring theme in interviews and trials of perpetrators as well as in testimonies of victims and bystanders. Consider, for example, the case of Adolf Eichmann.

AB - Hatred is a complex and difficult thing, in life as well as in theory. Its history in Western philosophy is as long as the history of love. It begins, perhaps quite appropriately, with a warning. There is, said Socrates, nothing worse than misology, the hatred of rational argumentation. In this form (at least), hatred is a matter of pathology, an evil to be prevented at all costs. At almost the same time and in exactly the same place, Aristotle told aspiring orators how to incite hatred (misos) in an audience. What he had in mind was definitely not misology. In his Rhetoric, hatred is presented as a normal and moral emotion, a socially acknowledged antagonism toward people with a vicious character or a harmful disposition. Much later, David Hume asserted that hatred is “altogether impossible to define.” Apparently, Immanuel Kant disagreed. He clearly defined hatred as a passion. Still, he admitted that there is something particularly “deceitful and hidden” about it. In an exceptional poetic moment, he wrote that if the affect (Affekt) of anger is like water that breaks through a dam, the passion (Leidenschaft) of hatred is “like a river that digs itself deeper and deeper into its bed.” In fact, hatred has never been neatly defined or consistently categorized. Some philosophers have tried to delimit hatred by distinguishing it from anger, love, or revenge. Others have insisted on various sorts of entanglement between these same emotional phenomena. Some are preoccupied with the legitimacy of the modern criminalization of enactments of various kinds of group hatred. Others - dissatisfied with lazy notions that all hatred is a bad thing - are keen to provide “a word on behalf of good haters.” Taken as a whole, the history of views on hatred may serve to remind us that we can - and probably sometimes should - ponder what we mean when we talk about hatred. In the field of Holocaust and genocide studies, there is no shortage of reasons for such reflection. There is a sickening amount of evidence of hateful incitement in the archives on atrocity crimes, and hatred is a recurring theme in interviews and trials of perpetrators as well as in testimonies of victims and bystanders. Consider, for example, the case of Adolf Eichmann.

KW - Faculty of Humanities

KW - Hatred

KW - Genocide

U2 - 10.1017/9781316563281.005

DO - 10.1017/9781316563281.005

M3 - Book chapter

SP - 81

EP - 103

BT - Emotions and Mass Atrocity

PB - Cambridge University Press

ER -