Upheavals of Thought by Martha Nussbaum

Overview

Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (2001) is Martha Nussbaum's defense of the claim that emotions are not irrational disturbances but intelligent forms of thought. The book's title names its thesis: emotions are upheavals — they move us, disturb us, turn our lives upside down — but they are upheavals of thought, judgments about the world and about what matters to us. When we grieve, we are not suffering a blind reflex; we are making a judgment that someone irreplaceable has been lost. When we love, we are judging that another person's flourishing is bound up with our own.

The book is organized in three parts. The first builds the theory: emotions are evaluations of the world from the point of view of a person who cares about things that are not fully under their control. The second part turns to the paradigm emotions — grief, compassion, love — and reads them through literature, from the Iliad and the tragedies to Proust and Joyce, arguing that narrative art is where the intelligence of emotion is most fully displayed. The third part asks what follows for the good life: whether emotions can be justified, whether they can be educated, and what role they should play in ethics and politics.

The book stands at the center of the contemporary philosophy of emotion and of Nussbaum's own career. It brings together the threads of her earlier work — her Aristotelianism, her reading of the Stoics, her interest in tragedy and in the fragility of goodness — into a single comprehensive statement. And it enters the long debate about what an emotion is with a distinctive answer: emotions are judgments, and because they are judgments, they can be reasonable or unreasonable, just or unjust, and they can be educated. The book is thus both a work in the philosophy of mind and a work of ethics.

Key Ideas

Emotions as Judgments

Nussbaum's central thesis is that emotions are judgments of value — specifically, judgments that attribute importance to objects or persons that we do not fully control. Fear judges that something threatening is at hand; grief judges that an irreplaceable good has been lost; love judges that another person's life is a central part of our own flourishing. On this "cognitive" view, emotions are not blind forces that erupt from the body and drag reason along; they are ways of seeing the world, and they can be assessed for truth and falsity, appropriateness and inappropriateness, in just the way other judgments can.

The thesis has ancient roots, and Nussbaum is careful to acknowledge them. It is the theory of the Stoics, who analyzed emotions as judgments (and who therefore thought the wise person could, by correcting judgments, become free of disturbance); it is continuous with Aristotle's account of the emotions in the Rhetoric; and it is the position of Spinoza, whose Ethics treats emotions as ideas that can be rendered adequate by understanding. Nussbaum's version differs from the Stoics' in one decisive respect: she denies that the wise person should aim to be without emotion. The judgments emotions contain are mostly true, and a life without them would be a life without care.

The Eudaimonistic Structure of Emotion

Nussbaum's distinctive refinement of the cognitive theory is her account of the "eudaimonistic" structure of emotion. An emotion is not just any judgment about the world; it is a judgment about what is important for my flourishing (eudaimonia). Grief involves the thought "this person was central to my life"; anger involves the thought "this offense against what matters to me is intolerable"; compassion involves the thought "this suffering matters because this person matters." This structure explains both the intelligence and the partiality of emotion: emotions are ways of registering what we care about, and they are therefore inevitably self-referential in the sense that they measure the world against our own commitments.

The eudaimonistic structure also explains why emotions are so hard to control and so easy to distort. If emotions are judgments about what matters to us, then changing our emotions requires changing our judgments about what matters — which is to say, changing our lives. And because our judgments about importance are shaped by the culture we grow up in, emotions are deeply social: a society that teaches its members to care only about certain things will produce certain characteristic emotions, and a society that wants different emotions must educate different cares. This is why Nussbaum's account of emotion slides into her account of education, law, and politics.

Grief, Compassion, and Love as Paradigms

The book's middle section works through the paradigm emotions in detail, using literature as its evidence. Grief, Nussbaum argues, is the emotion of attachment: it is the recognition that the world is not fully under our control and that what we love can be taken away. Compassion is the emotion that extends our care to others' suffering, and it involves three judgments — that the suffering is serious, that it is not the sufferer's fault, and that the sufferer matters to us. Love, the most complex, is the judgment that a particular person is irreplaceable in our lives, and it is the emotion that most fully reveals the eudaimonistic structure of all emotion.

Literature matters to this argument because narrative is where emotions are made visible as thoughts. Nussbaum reads the Iliad as a meditation on grief, the Greek tragedies as an education in compassion, and Proust's In Search of Lost Time as the most searching modern account of love's judgments. The literary readings are not decoration; they are evidence for the claim that emotions have a cognitive content that only narrative can display. The beauty of art and the intelligence of emotion are, on her account, aspects of the same phenomenon: both are ways of making the world's importance felt.

Are Emotions Rational?

The book's most contested claim is that emotions can be assessed for rationality — and that they are often more rational than the philosophical tradition has allowed. Against the view that emotions are animal responses that must be governed by reason, Nussbaum argues that emotions are themselves forms of reasoning about value, and that the question is never whether to have emotions but whether the judgments they contain are correct. The relevant standards are those of ethics: an emotion is rational when its judgments are true — when what it takes to be important really is important, when its account of the situation is accurate.

This normative claim has practical consequences that Nussbaum spells out. Because emotions are judgments, they can be educated: not by suppressing them, but by improving the judgments they contain, through reflection, through habituation, and through exposure to the right narratives. Because emotions are judgments, they are also accountable: a society can ask whether its characteristic emotions are just — whether, for example, a politics of fear rests on true judgments about the world. The book's answer to the question are emotions rational is thus a qualified yes: emotions are intelligent, and their intelligence can be cultivated or corrupted.

Structure and Style

The book is long, written with Nussbaum's characteristic combination of rigorous argument and literary sensitivity. It moves from abstract theory to close reading and back, and it is organized as a journey from the "upheavals" that seem most like blind disturbances (grief, rage) to the emotions that most clearly display intelligence (compassion, love). The first part establishes the theory; the second part tests it against literature; the third part draws the consequences for the good life and for society. The whole is framed by her claim that a philosophy that ignores the emotions is a philosophy that cannot understand human beings.

The book is also deliberately personal. Nussbaum writes in the first person about her mother's death and about her own experience of grief, and she treats the reader as someone who has loved and lost — someone who already knows, from the inside, that the upheavals of emotion are upheavals of thought. The personal voice is not an indulgence; it is an argument, because the book's thesis is that emotion contains knowledge that only the one who loves can fully possess.

Legacy and Influence

Upheavals of Thought is one of the most important works in the contemporary philosophy of emotion, and it has shaped the revival of the cognitive theory of emotions across philosophy and psychology. Its account of compassion has influenced the study of moral emotions and the ethics of care; its literary readings have made it a model for the philosophical use of narrative; and its defense of the emotions' rationality has given philosophers and psychologists a common vocabulary. It is the book to which discussions of what emotions are and whether emotions can be trusted routinely return.

The book's deepest legacy is its insistence that the emotions belong at the center of the good life. Against the long tradition — Stoic, Kantian, utilitarian — that treated emotion as a threat to reason, Nussbaum argues that emotion is where our commitments live, and that a life without emotion would be a life without love, without grief, and without the capacity to care about what is not under our control. For the reader who wants to understand why the mind is not the enemy of feeling, Upheavals of Thought is the essential text.