Ambivalence

A Philosophical Exploration

Hili Razinsky

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781786601520
• eBook ISBN: 9781786601544
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Critical Theory

Ambivalence (as in practical conflicts, moral dilemmas, conflicting beliefs, and mixed feelings) is a central phenomenon of human life. Yet ambivalence is incompatible with entrenched philosophical conceptions of personhood, judgement, and action, and is denied or marginalised by thinkers of diverse concerns. This book takes a radical new stance, bringing the study of core philosophical issues together with that of ambivalence. The book proposes new accounts in several areas – including subjectivity, consciousness, rationality, and value – while elucidating a wide range of phenomena expressive of ambivalence, from emotional ambivalence to self-deception. The book rejects the view that ambivalence makes a person divided, showing that our tension-fraught attitudes are profoundly unitary. Ambivalence is not tantamount to confusion or to paralysis: it is always basically rational, and often creative, active, and perceptive as well. The book develops themes from Wittgenstein, Davidson, Sartre, and Freud. It engages with contemporary debates in Analytic Philosophy in addition to work ranging from Aristotle to Cultural Studies and Empirical Psychology, and considers a rich set of examples from daily life and literature.

Part I

Beginnings

What is ambivalence, what character can it take, and how is to be understood? How is ambivalence related to such matters as mental attitudes, subjectivity, and rationality? The introduction (chapter 1) begins our investigation into these issues, presents a variety of examples, and explains the approach taken in this book. It opens with an overview of the topic and the book.

The existence of ambivalence challenges most of our conceptions regarding subjectivity, agency, and judgment. Chapter 2 explores the character of ambivalence by drawing a map of the ways in which a wide range of philosophers, thinkers, and researchers have dealt with ambivalence, and especially the ways ambivalence is disavowed, marginalized, and explained away.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Ambivalence: Reuben wants to go to the theater, but also to stay at home and rest. Simeon wants and does not want to be respected. Levi loves his mother, but hates her as well. Judah loves his father, yet is a bit ashamed of him. Zebulun thinks that the show is fantastic, although, perhaps, too long. Issachar judges Judah to have been right, and yet terribly wrong, in convincing his brothers to sell Joseph. Dan understands that the family should leave for Egypt, but really does not want to. Gad wants to harm Joseph, for which he despises himself. Asher wants to save Joseph, but does not try to. Naphtali does not know what he wants. While ordering the arrest of his brothers, Joseph is sure that he loves them. Grieving for his dead mother for years and years, Benjamin is ambivalent as to whether it is good that he feels this way. Dinah, having heard that her brothers sold Joseph, cannot believe it, yet believes it anyway.

The situation is peculiar: people are regularly ambivalent. Again and again, language invites us to characterize the conduct, feelings, thoughts, and enterprises of people in terms of ambivalent attitudes that they have. This is manifested in everyday conversations, in literature, and in various theories about human issues. However, in many other theories, ambivalence disappears from the scene, and in particular it is often disregarded, denied, or reinterpreted when basic aspects of subjectivity, action, belief, and value are under investigation. To a philosophical eye, ambivalence appears to be impossible, or at best to characterize only marginal human possibilities, irrationality, and paralysis. It seems that by attributing contrary attitudes to a person, we must be contradicting ourselves. Alternatively, if a person can have contrary attitudes, it seems that she is somehow split in two. Or, if she is one in her ambivalence, it would appear that the conflicting poles of ambivalence cancel each other, leaving her with nothing to want, judge, or feel.

Ambivalence often calls for metaphors of division and might verge on states of confusion; yet it is neither of these. To have a tension-fraught attitude toward something or someone is, all the same, to have some attitude. Levi, for example, is not indifferent to his mother. Rather the contrary: he both loves and hates her. United in a conflicted attitude, his love and hate constitute interdependent points of view. He loves the mother who is hateful to him and he hates her whom he loves. The topic of this book is ambivalence in this rather strong sense. Yet predominant conceptions of subjectivity exclude such ambivalence. If we are to accept them, ordinary cases of ambivalence are illusionary, and the task they pose us is to explain the illusion and redescribe the phenomena. Should we, however, accept such views of personhood that debar ambivalence? The main thought behind this book is that if human lives are in fact often ambivalent, this may be conceived as an invitation to rethink our notions of personhood and rationality, as well as those of mental attitude, desire, judgment, emotion, action, and consciousness. Thus, one aim of this book is to study ambivalence and subjectivity together—namely to analyze ambivalence as an ordinary mode of subjectivity and investigate subjectivity in a way that takes the phenomenon of ambivalence as seriously as it takes, for instance, emotions and beliefs.1 In working toward such an analysis, I also aim at exhibiting the variegated field of ambivalent life. Indeed, we shall find that in some form or other, ambivalence is always part of the game of life, so much so that the character of one’s ambivalence often counts more than the question of whether one is ambivalent.

It may be objected, however, that some domains of human life are surely exempt of ambivalence. In particular, ambivalence regarding objectivity seems impossible on special grounds. Perhaps, the objection would go, it is possible to have conflicting desires, or be sad and happy about the same thing, but when someone believes that such and such is true, she could not also believe it false, or wonder if it is true; nor, presumably, can one judge that a certain person is kind, or that some action ought to be performed, yet also entertain a value judgment to the contrary. For what could it mean to believe and yet not to believe that your spouse loves you? What would you judge if you ambivalently judge both that you ought and that you ought not to resign from your position? It seems that the relations between objectivity and belief, as well as the logic of objectivity, undermine such attributions. So it often seems, yet it is hardly unusual, that a person believes and does not believe that her spouse loves her or that her friend did something she takes to be unlike him, and questions of value often call for ambivalence if anything does. It is hence a concern of this book to analyze such ambivalence and its implications.

Ambivalence can be described as a unitary tension-fraught attitude toward something or someone. It can also be described in terms of a person’s having two opposing attitudes to one and the same thing.2 Both descriptions may seem confusing, but if this book is not entirely wrong then they are neither inappropriate nor vacuous. Conversely, if they are appropriate, then the various ways that suggest themselves for denying that people may be strictly ambivalent are inadmissible. Thus, it might be thought that when people are “ambivalent,” then they, in fact, want one aspect of a thing and do not want another aspect of it, or they love one aspect of a person and hate another. Yet in many cases the person is not at all concerned in her conflicting attitudes with different aspects of the object, and when different aspects play a role in putting the person in conflict, the person is not merely concerned with these aspects but rather has opposed attitudes toward the person, state of affairs, or action themselves (appendix A). In quite another direction, can ambivalence be discarded by relegating it to some “low” order or level of human life? In Phaedrus, for example, Plato describes the soul as a chariot consisting in a charioteer and two horses drawing in different directions. However we interpret Plato’s parable, the imagery suggests that the soul as a whole perhaps involves conflicting parts, yet the true soul is the inherently wholehearted charioteer.3 Yet identifying “the true soul” as the domain of mental harmony is not a good way to deal with ambivalence if there is no level of personhood that is exempt from ambivalence, or again if hierarchic aspects of personhood presuppose ambivalence between levels. In fact, the horses are problematic even if we throw away the charioteer. Ambivalence involves two opposed attitudes of a person, but it is nothing like two horses, or two persons.

Is ambivalence one tension-fraught attitude or two opposing attitudes? This book centers on the second formulation. According to the main definition we shall use, a person is ambivalent if she holds two opposed attitudes toward the same object, given that the term “opposed attitudes” implies that the attitudes are held by the person as opposed. At the same time, it is central to this book that ambivalence can be described both as two attitudes and as one ambivalent attitude. We shall see that some forms of ambivalence are significantly unitary—think of love in which one inherently “kills the thing one loves”—whereas other cases of ambivalence include rather distinct opposed attitudes. We shall also see that ambivalence always involves taking two opposed life courses, but in taking them, the ambivalent person always also takes a unitary ambivalent course. While internal conflicts depict us as irreducibly plural creatures, they also demonstrate mental unity rather than challenging it.

Yet mental unity appears to exclude an ambivalent plurality. In particular, the momentary consciousness of the individual person—the bits of the ongoing first-personal waking (or dreaming) hours experiences of individuals—may be thought of as a locus of personal unity, which is one reason why it is supposed to be impossible to maintain two opposed attitudes in one stroke of consciousness. It seems that at any particular time that a person consciously wants something, it is necessarily not the case that she consciously averts from it, or that whenever someone feels shame about a matter, she is not feeling pride about it. All the same, ambivalence is often strictly conscious in a way that sheds light on ambivalence and consciousness alike (chapter 5). Again, one can manifest one’s ambivalence by performing a single act that expresses the opposed poles together (chapters 4 and 9). The appearance to the contrary is presented in chapter 2, sections 1 and 2.4. At the same time, it is central to this study that ambivalence is not a mere momentary feeling or behavior, but rather it has the time span of attitudes, and in particular it often characterizes our medium- and long-term attitudes: we are ambivalent in our relationships, toward our work and regarding public matters, and in appreciating the facts regarding important matters, and also as to what is important. As is the case for other ways of engaging with people and things, instances of ambivalence constitute threads in our lives. We spin these threads in dealing with our ambivalence, and by the same token, we give the ambivalence its shape. Should we attempt to solve our ambivalence, this would itself be part of an ambivalent path (chapter 6). In other cases, we do not try to solve it at all.

Some readers who have been tolerant so far may be alarmed by the last claim. Why? Partly because of something true: namely that ambivalence is, by definition, problematic for the ambivalent person. Then, again, because of a purported philosophical problem: it seems that if the notion of an ambivalent subject is not self-contradictory, then the unity of an ambivalent subject must consist in her trying to resolve her ambivalence. To strike a different note, it appears that if ambivalence has a place within rational life, then ambivalent people must aim at resolving their ambivalence.

Indeed, whether rationality is thought of in regard to the way we act or to the way we judge, or to our well-being, freedom, integration, development, or creativity, ambivalence always seems to threaten it, and if there is a sense that persons are by definition rational, then it seems that people just cannot be ambivalent. Why think, however, that persons are inherently rational? This view, which is as old as philosophy, has been defended in a new way in the twentieth century by Donald Davidson. Davidson argues that in saying of a person that he takes some attitude to something4 or acts in a certain way, we necessarily appeal to rational connections between this attitude or action and other attitudes of this person (and, more generally, to actual and possible connections between any of the person’s attitudes). Underlying this analysis is the fact that attributions of attitudes only make sense together and that the sense of utterances about attitudes is not only a matter of speaking about attitudes, but also a matter of having attitudes. If, for example, you think that a person is going home to take a rest, you also think, typically, that she believes that she would be able to rest at home. If a person is supposed to want to go home to rest, but entertains neither this belief nor any other attitudes that would make her desire rational, then we do not merely ascribe to her an irrational desire, but our ascription becomes incomprehensible.

The pages that follow defend the view that rationality is constitutive of personhood—we shall speak with Davidson of basic rationality in order to emphasize that such rationality is basic for personhood and that any particular attitude, behavior, and so forth that a person might have is rational in the relevant sense. A further aspect of this view is that although a particular attitude consists in its actual interlinkages with the rest of one’s mind, these interlinkages are not logically necessary for this attitude.5 Dan’s desire, or Gad’s emotion, is rational in terms of its connections with other attitudes and complementary because it could and can form other connections.

If personhood is bound up with basic rationality, are we to infer that people are not ambivalent, or stop being persons when they are ambivalent ? Davidson shares with many others the view that rationality excludes ambivalence.

The thought would often be that in understanding a person as rationally having a certain attitude, we, by the same token, accept that she does not maintain an opposed attitude. When rationality is conceived as basic, such that attitudes must be rational, this becomes the thought that in understanding a person as having some attitude, we already accept that she does not have a conflicting attitude.6 And yet you may have understood some of the opening examples, and have understood them as examples of ambivalence. Indeed, we daily take people to maintain two opposed attitudes, which are opposed for them who take them. What then?

According to Davidson, the “consistency” of attitudes is a part of the definition of basic rationality, but this does not follow. Attitudes do not have to be consistent or harmonious to be understood in terms of the ...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Halftitle
• Part I: Beginnings
• Part II: Life with Ambivalence
• Part III: Structures of Ambivalence
• Appendix A
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author