Ambivalence: A Philosophical Exploration

by Hili Razinsky Hili Razinsky is a researcher at the Center of Philosophy, University of Li

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781786601537
Publisher:	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	08/24/2018
Pages:	296
Sales rank:	1,143,593
Product dimensions:	6.04(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.75(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Hili Razinsky is a researcher at LanCog, The Center of Philosophy, University of Lisbon

Table of Contents

Part I: Beginnings / 1. Introduction / 2. Philosophical Approaches to Ambivalence: A Roadmap of a Rough Terrain / Part II: Life with Ambivalence / 3. Unity in Plurality: The Case of Emotional Ambivalence / 4. Behavioural Conflict: The Case of Emotional Ambivalence / 5. Conscious Ambivalence and Its Bearings on the Character of Consciousness / 6. Pursuits of Harmony, Integration and Freud’s Person / Part III: Structures of Ambivalence / 7. Self-deception, Ambivalence of Belief and Basic Rationality / 8. Ambivalence of Value Judgement, Deliberation and the Logic of Value / 9. The Openness of Desire and Action in Ambivalence / Appendix A / Bibliography / Bibliographic note

Editorial Reviews

What emerges from the book is that not only the subject cannot be able to leave the ambivalence out of consideration which in my opinion is closer to the Deleuzian conception of the difference, but it is also a winning tool in the field of the moral behaviour... Razinsky’s thesis convince the readers and they are based on firm foundations.

Vol 35

We find ambivalence so unsettling, I think, because its presence starkly reminds that we can’t always get what we want. But this goes too far, and Razinsky’s Ambivalence helps us to see why. Ambivalence does not disclose just how incoherent and fractured we are as agents. Rather, as Razinsky shows, it illuminates a space in which there is room for autonomous self-expression. Compromised actions are not compromises of agency. They, instead, reveal a deep spring of human creativity: the people we make ourselves into emerge from our limitations.

The Philosophical Quarterly

The author has produced a bold and fiercely independent account of ambivalence; an account which is rich, nuanced and detailed. Razinsky adopts a framework which, broadly speaking, is both Wittgensteinian and phenomenological. She turns to such diverse authors as Sartre, Freud, Bernard Williams and Philip Koch and with a little help from these friends devises her own notion of ambivalence.

Avishai Margalit

Hili Razinsky is comprehensive in her treatment of ambivalence, which she defines as a ‘tension-fraught’, first-personal state in which a subject has two opposed attitudes, simultaneously, towards the same thing, and holds them as opposed. ... If Razinsky succeeds in defending her position, then we would need to rethink, at the very least, personhood, (basic) rationality, and agency—and in particular the ways in which we understand mental states, like desires, judgments, and emotions, and their relations with rationality, personhood, and agency.

Philosophical Papers

Razinsky’s aim in Ambivalence is avowedly philosophical, and she hews closely to her course, though she embraces the psychological perspective that ambivalences arise organically through ordinary mental processes and depend on a whole psychical microcosm. Therefore, and given her convergence with the deepest psychological thinking on her subject, she might, with some loosening of the analytic straitjacket, find herself well positioned to advance both causes.

Philosophical Psychology

Ambivalence by Hili Razinsky is a rather theoretical and conceptual exploration of the ways in which a person’s mind oscillates between two opposing desires, reasons or other elements of mental life. The book’s impact on philosophical practice will grow in time because it is a fairly difficult yet rewarding read that provokes the reader’s reflection after turning its final page.

Philosophical Practice

Razinsky … argues that ambivalence is not merely common but pervasive, and that the possibility of ambivalent states, whether of belief, desire, or emotion, is built into the nature of those states and the way in which we conceptualize them from the start. One advantage of this approach is that it rejects from the start any possibility of treating the phenomena in question as merely marginal

Ethics: An International Journal of Social

What emerges from the book is that not only the subject cannot be able to leave the ambivalence out of consideration, which in my opinion is closer to the Deleuzian conception of the difference, but it is also a winning tool in the field of the moral behaviour.

Humana.mente - Elena Sbaragli

One of the main strengths of this book is a detailed map of terms and theories connected with the phenomenon of ambivalence Razinsky depicts. It could be useful for further research on such topics as emotions, values, personhood, rationality, as well as the relations between them. […] Razinsky’s work provides helpful insight into considerations of the problem of ambivalence in general. On the one hand, the author exhaustively reveals the problems of ambivalence, its rational character, the relations of ambivalence with consciousness, factual belief, value judgment and desire, the differences between the notions of “unity in plurality” and harmonized, plural persons. On the other hand, she provides insights into avenues of further research of related problems, such as doubt, cynicism and irony.

Eidos: A Journal for Philosophy Eidos of Culture

The merit of this book lies in showing that ambivalence is often central to our capacity to act, care, and respond to reality. This implies that flourishing is often a matter of how a person shapes her ambivalence, rather than of whether she succeeds in avoiding ambivalence. Razinsky’s book is full of real life examples which make the arguments clearer and more convincing. The book is well written, interesting, surprising, and original.

Philosophical News

By an impressive combination of acute analysis, rich phenomenological description and interpretation of narratives, Razinsky brings our propensity to possess ambivalent feelings, desires and beliefs about objects to the center of philosophical research on subjectivity. In this excellent study, she claims ambivalence is a capacity of rational creatures to simultaneously have two opposing attitudes, revealing the ineradicable plurality of their selves and prompting them to live with it in the right way, rather than an inability to fix one’s mind and make it consistent.

Axel Honneth

Hili Razinsky's philosophical exploration of ambivalence is not only about ambivalence: it might be read as a call for using more substantial, phenomenologically nuanced, and real-life faithful terms in contemporary analytic philosophy. Concepts, such as belief, desire or emotion, which are at the center of many philosophical discussions about subjectivity, are often difficult to project onto real subjects. They seem to be fossils that have already lost their vividness. Some of them are brought to life in Razinsky's book.

Metapsychology Online

While Razinsky ‘does not aim at some folk psychology regarding ambivalence or other mental concepts’, the book is motivated by what I see as the ethnographically informed insight that people are regularly ambivalent, and that analytical philosophy usually ignores this. Its conceptual richness will be useful to an anthropological readership interested in extending philosophical and anthropological theorizing of ambivalence on the basis of ethnographic fieldwork.

The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

What emerges from the book is that not only the subject cannot be able to leave the ambivalence out of consideration which in my opinion is closer to the Deleuzian conception of the difference, but it is also a winning tool in the field of the moral behaviour... Razinsky’s thesis convince the readers and they are based on firm foundations.

Humana.mente

Philosophers of essentially any tradition will be able to find something of interest in Razinsky’s exploration of ambivalence since it is so varied and wide ranging. Moreover, philosophers who are specifically interested in ambivalence will be interested in the account Razinsky advances since it not only diverges from traditional philosophical accounts of ambivalence, but also exceeds them in its ambitions.

Human Studies

What emerges from the book is that not only the subject cannot be able to leave the ambivalence out of consideration which in my opinion is closer to the Deleuzian conception of the difference, but it is also a winning tool in the field of the moral behaviour... Razinsky’s thesis convince the readers and they are based on firm foundations.

Vol 35 Humana.mente