Abstract
In the face of longstanding philosophical debates on the nature of hatred and an ever-growing interest in the underlying social-psychological function of group-directed or genocidal hatred, the peculiar affective intentionality of hatred is still very little understood. By drawing on resources from classical phenomenology, recent social-scientific research and analytic philosophy of emotions, I shall argue that the affective intentionality of hatred is distinctive in three interrelated ways: (1) it has an overgeneralizing, indeterminate affective focus, which typically leads to a form of collectivization of the target; (2) short of a determinate affective focus, haters derive the indeed extreme affective powers of the attitude not in reaction to any specific features or actions of the targets or from some phenomenological properties of the attitude but, rather, from the commitment to the attitude itself; (3) finally, in sharing this commitment to hate with others, hatred involves a certain negative social dialectics, robustly reinforces itself and becomes entrenched as a shared habitus.
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Notes
Cited from Elster 2004, 225.
I have suggested such requirements in Szanto 2015, 2018, and León et al. forthcoming.
Hatred shares some of these features with Scheler’s (1919) conception of Ressentiment. Scheler views hatred, in fact, as one affective component among others (such as envy or malicious joy) of the complex sentiment of Ressentiment. I think this is essentially right. Notice, however, that Scheler does not hold that hatred is identical with Ressentiment; thus, the point that it is a sui generis attitude still holds.
For the few phenomenological attempts to describe the embodied dimensions or bodily comportment in hatred, see Demmerling and Landweer 2008; Meyer-Drawe 2007; Ahmed 2014; see in this connection also Steinbock (forthcoming) who suggests a phenomenological difference between ‘hate’/‘hating’ and ‘hatred’, according to whether one considers them as ‘feelings’ (hate) or ‘feeling-states’ (hatred); notice, however, that for Steinbock both lack bodily sensations.
With regard to the feeling component of hatred, Aristotle (1991) is notoriously ambivalent. Compare the partly contradicting passages for example in the Politics (1312b19-1312b34), the Nikomachean Ethics (1105b19-1105b28), the Rhetorics (1354a32-1354b22) and elsewhere (e.g., 1445a30-1445b24). For a useful discussion, see Sokolon 2003, esp. 76–78.
For an informative essay on early phenomenological accounts of hatred, and in particular those provided by Kolnai and his predecessors, Scheler and Pfänder, see Vendrell Ferran 2018.
And this is so, even if, as we shall see below, it is typically not clear what the proper intentional object, let alone affective focus, of hatred is.
Surely, more argument would be needed here to support this claim; for a systematic discussion of the sense and ambiguities in which certain forms of hatred can be conceived as reactive attitudes and, in particular, for a discussion of what he calls ‘retributive reactive hatred’, see Brudholm (2010). Brudholm (2010) is the only author I am aware of who thinks that “retributive reactive hatred” is not necessarily a globalist attitude and can (just like its usual contrast-case, resentment) properly target particular actions of others (and not necessarily persons as a whole). But see also Murphy and Hampton (1988), and Elster (2004, 229–230), who discuss hatred as a “retributive emotion”. As indicated in the introduction, I contend that a proper analysis of the appropriateness of hatred in affectively responding to certain evaluative features of its object would have to proceed from a detailed analysis of hatred’s peculiar affective intentionality. If the analysis in this paper is compelling, it ought to establish that, for systematic reasons, hatred can never be an appropriate affective attitude. However, again, I cannot provide independent support for this claim here; see for the two most intriguing, diverging, views on this, Murphy (2016 and, in Murphy and Hampton 1988, esp. 88–110) and Schmid (forthcoming).
It is in this sense that Ben-Ze’ev (2000, 381) describes hatred as involving depersonalization.
This is just one of the several places in Sartre’s oeuvre where he discusses hatred. Indeed, hatred figures prominently in Sartre’s early phenomenology, from his Transcendence of the Ego, where he uses hatred as an example to illustrate the general structure of the intentionality of consciousness (Sartre 1936/37, esp. 61–68), to his famous essay, Anti-Semite and the Jew (1944b); see more below.
As Schmid (forthcoming) interestingly points out, though Aristotle does not explicitly distinguish between hateworthy agents as “kinds of wrongdoers” and particular morally reprehensible or hateworthy ‘acts’ of those wrongdoers (e.g., thievery), he still doesn’t construe class-directed hatred simply as stereotyping hatred, since it is due to being a kind of wrongdoer that membership in a certain (hateworthy) class is assigned, and it is not conversely the case that mere membership in a hateworthy class makes the individuals hateworthy. The same goes, according to Schmid’s insightful analysis, for Aquinas; cf. also Green 2007.
See for a powerful counter-narrative Mishra 2017.
Salmela and von Scheve (2017, 2018) offer a convincing account to this effect. They suggest that socioeconomic insecurity, high competition and fear of losing one’s job, e.g., to immigrants or refugees, coupled with the repression of anticipated shame in the face of déclassement, is transformed by the mechanism of Ressentiment into hatred of generic Others, which includes very diverse social groups (immigrants, refugees, the unemployed, and the political and cultural elite), whose only common denominator is that they are perceived as enemies of oneself or one’s social identity.
I understand ‘sharing’ here in a sense that only requires and entails the above-described negative dialectics; I cannot dwell here upon what it would (additionally) take to robustly ‘share’ affective states, or what a theory of properly speaking ‘collective hatred’ would require; see again: Szanto 2015, forthcoming, and León et al. forthcoming.
This again resonates with Sartre’s view of (anti-Semitic) hatred as a form of “passion”, whose characteristic is that “it precedes the facts that are supposed to call it forth” and, instead, “seeks them out to nourish itself upon them” (Sartre 1944b, 11).
To avoid misunderstandings, my notion of ‘shared commitment’ should not be confused with Gilbert’s technical conception of joint commitments (e.g., Gilbert 2014), which is normatively and social-ontologically more demanding; I discuss that elsewhere (Szanto 2015, forthcoming).
Historical evidence also corroborates this observation; take, for instance the persistence of stereotypical stigmatization of—factually already inexistent—ethnic- and class-minorities in the wake of homogenization processes enforced by Communist regimes in the Central Eastern European Danube-region; see Ther 2014, 171.
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Acknowledgments
Earlier versions of this paper were presented at conferences in Montreal, Lund, Athens, Salt Lake City, Den Haag and Hagen. I have received numerous helpful suggestions on these occasions from various audiences, for which I am very grateful. I am especially indebted to Thomas Brudholm, Mikko Salmela and Carina Staal, who have read and commented the penultimate manuscript, and to two anonymous reviewers for their thorough and constructive criticism. Work on this paper was generously supported by Sara Heinämaa's (PI) Academy of Finland research project Marginalization and Experience: Phenomenological Analyses of Normality and Abnormality (MEPA).
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Szanto, T. In hate we trust: The collectivization and habitualization of hatred. Phenom Cogn Sci 19, 453–480 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-018-9604-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-018-9604-9