Ideas Matter: Culture Wars: then and now, episode 7: Emotion and Reason

Under the seemingly all-encompassing umbrella of ‘mental health’, the public sphere appears saturated with claims about emotional damage. This lecture explores such claims of emotional harm and analyses the conversation-stopping effect of dismissing the rational human subject and the degeneration of public debate into never-ending culture wars.

LECTURER
Dr Ashley Frawley – senior lecturer in public health, policy, and social sciences at the University of Swansea; author, Semiotics of Happiness: rhetorical beginnings of a public problem

TALKING POINTS IN THIS PODCAST
• The rise of new emotional problems and emotional solutions to existing problems.
• Underlying their rise and fall is a belief that human subjectivity, conceived of as defective psychology, ultimately underlies most social problems.
• Diminished views of subjectivity are partially rooted in a perceived gap between Enlightenment beliefs in the rational, free-willing subject and the apparent failure of these ideals to exist in practice.
• Human nature is conditioned by the real possibilities of a given time period and social formation. It is not that human beings are by their nature irrational, but the possibility of a society governed by human rationality emerged at a time when the conditions for the full exercise of that rationality did not exist.
• Instead of trying to understand social conditions and their constraints on human freedom and rationality, we have jettisoned freedom and rationality altogether.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Resilience: The Governance of Complexity by David Chandler, Routledge, 2014

The Death of the Subject Explained by James Heartfield, School of Cultural Studies, Sheffield Hallam University, 2006

The Meaning of Race by Kenan Malik, Palgrave, 1996

THE ACADEMY 2019
In the context of today’s instrumental approaches to knowledge, The Academy summer school is a modest attempt to demonstrate the value of scholarship, and of the worth of the university as a place of free enquiry dedicated to the pursuit of truth.

IDEAS MATTER PODCAST
Ideas Matter is a podcast that takes the most important issues of our times and explores the ideas and intellectual trends that have shaped where we are today.

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