Doidge, Beatrice Caroline Ida; (2023) 'Becoming Habituated to Feeling Fear or Confidence': Aristotle on Feeling Correctly. Masters thesis (M.Phil.Stud), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

Developing virtuous character dispositions, for Aristotle, involves agents becoming reliably disposed to act and feel in the right way. What is particularly puzzling on Aristotle’s picture of moral development, and what is not well treated in the literature, is just how an agent’s emotions could become proper objects of such development. Habituation, the process through which agents cultivate virtues of character, primarily involves performing certain actions, while emotions do not fit straightforwardly into this picture. Indeed, Aristotle attaches an element of passivity to the emotions, depicting them as modes of being acted upon, rather than as modes of acting. This prompts the question of how to account for the development of the ‘passive’ dimension of the disposition produced through habituation. This dissertation considers the emotional landscape of Aristotle’s moral learner and examines what is needed for the learner to develop dispositions to feel correctly, with a particular focus on the Nicomachean Ethics, as well as the Rhetoric and Eudemian Ethics. It begins by exploring the problematic status of emotions in Aristotle’s moral theory, and, in line with Aryeh Kosman (1980), proposing that emotional cultivation, for Aristotle, is best understood in terms of the agent creating the conditions for this cultivation. It draws from recent work which examines how Aristotle establishes continuity between the practices of the moral learner, and the resulting virtuous dispositions. In particular, it focuses on the work of Marta Jimenez (2020), who appeals to the idea that the learner begins with a ‘proto-virtuous’ orientation towards the noble and inclination away from the shameful, and it extends these insights to the realm of emotional transformation.

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