[Bups-dis] hatred

[Russo, Matteo]

That's a really cool topic Ash, they're really good questions. 

I'd say hatred does not manifest itself immediately, it could be said to be a progression from antipathy or mild antagonism, so the question which follows is why do we feel antagonism or repulsion? Approaching this negatively, if we didn't feel antagonism, the boundaries which divide our personalities from those of others would become blurred since this would entail assent between everyone. Antagonism suggests an incongruency with our particular character traits, but then this can be rejected since totally opposite people can like each other, so what are the standards for attraction and repulsion? Well they differ from person to person because we each have different character traits, a provisional distinction can be made between two forms of antagonism, aggressive antagonism and passive antagonism. Aggressive is where an individual identifies features or items which conjure hatred in him towards someone and he conveys this to that person. The other is an acquired hatred as a result of attack. The latter is easier to define since it is a reactionary emotion therefore its cause is the attacker who provokes it, we can deduce from this that antagonism is geared towards self-defence and if sufficiently harvested it can transform into hatred. The prior however is more acutely based on the psychological structures which underpin emotion, however, upon closer inspection in every case which you can look at there is no situation where hatred is spontaneous, take Hitler, for example, who embodies or epitomises the manifestation of unfounded hatred, even he had personal reasons which caused him to be antagonistic towards Jews as well as political ones. Therefore I'd say that under no circumstances is hatred positive or aggressive, it is only ever reactionary and this is quite intuitive since spontaneous or unfounded antagonism would isolate from society and typically this reflects a person with thwarted or impaired social skills, hatred is only aroused through provocation.

As for your comment about reason, it's an assumption that reason points us in the right direction, how do you know our emotions or instincts don't point us in the right direction? What's the right direction? Who says there is one? The 'right direction' sounds like the objective realm but that is a very contentious notion it can be defined in terms of pragmatism, correspondence, coherence or any of the innumerable definitions given by philosophers in the past, yet I would assert that the 'objective realm' is nothing but a human concept and a human construct cast in stone by the deceptions of language. Hatred should be considered on its own terms since it is not summoned or governed by rationality and to reiterate what I said earlier the claim that reason inexorably justifies our beliefs or emotions is assuming that our beliefs or emotions need justification. Moral judgement is also controlled by psychological mechanisms. Your example of the holocaust, any example can be used, whenever someone says something's wrong it is because of another psychological mechanism, that of empathy. What role does empathy play in moral judgement? It is a mechanism which allows you to experience the experience of someone in a situation you are witnessing to the greatest degree possible without experiencing it directly (like in negative emotions in art), it's a mechanism which conveys to oneself whether or not a sensation or experience being witnessed is worth having, whether it is good or damaging to oneself. Someone being gassed to death or shot etc is going to provoke the negative side of this mechanism, therefore placing a moral label on it (that of 'bad') increases the likelihood that this will not happen to you, therefore moral judgements are ultimately motivated by self-interest and are not altruistic in nature as they're defined, this simply circumvents or disguises the reality of their origin. 

I agree that all emotions are reactionary, so maybe they're just a natural evolutionary process, a mechanism which motivates response when one is confronted by a situation or event. The emotion which arises from any particular situation may depend on many things, self-interest, other emotions, but they're all interlinked and revolve around the principle of reaction or response. 

Matteo Russo