Rehabilitating emotion: the troublesome case of the Ku Klux Klan.

• Author: McGee, Brian R.

The impulse that leads us to reject instruments . . . that can be turned to any and every purpose is that we know that we are the good guys and the Nazis are the bad guys. We should like to find some way of making this knowledge as clear to everyone as it is to us . . . . The trouble is, of course, that this same sort of knowledge-claim is made, in all sincerity, by the bad guys, and that we shall never have any resources available that will not be equally available to them.

Richard Rorty (1990, pp. 639-640)

Intellectual historians may observe at some future time that the closing decades of the twentieth century were not kind to logos, or reason.(1) After centuries of reason reigning supreme in Western metaphysics, many scholars in the humanities and social sciences now look suspiciously on appeals to reason or rationality as providing the single, preferred procedure for knowledge validation. Those who call themselves poststructuralist or postmodern frequently have criticized reason as a central facet of a dysfunctional and untenable Enlightenment project. Jacques Derrida's (1967/1976) critique of logocentrism provides only one example of this poststructuralist orientation. Joining Derrida, Lyotard (1979/1984), and others in opposition to grand narratives of reason are those feminist scholars who depict the domination of logos as instrumental to the maintenance of patriarchy. For example, given modernity's many problems, including the valorization of reason over emotion, Sandra Harding (1986) notes with approval the "often beneficial ways in which the modernist world is falling apart" (p. 164).

Responses to this critique of logos in recent years have been manifold, and no single satisfactory alternative to the modern vision of rationality is certain (or even likely) to emerge. The conceptualization of alternatives to Enlightenment reason has begun (e.g., Fisher, 1987), but no end to this theorizing is imminent. Minimally, many scholars now conceive of rationality as a contested and contestable notion, given that multiple rationalities are said to exist. Some academics have even rejected reason altogether as a dangerous and confining idea (see Bernstein, 1986), although Mary E. Hawkesworth (1989) and others complain in response that such thinking wrongly elides reason with Enlightenment reason. Instead, scholars like Hawkesworth conclude that "a critical feminist epistemology must avoid both the foundationalist tendency to reduce the multiplicity of reasons to a monolithic 'Reason' and the postmodernist tendency to reject all reasons tout court" (Hawkesworth, 1989, p. 556).

Against this backdrop of efforts to fashion more satisfactory accounts of reason, I wish to warn that one increasingly popular move in remaking moral philosophy and rhetorical and argumentation theory, the choice to ally reason with emotion, is not without peril.(2) A monolithic "Emotion" - or even a commitment to some specific emotion - is not a simple corrective for a metaphysical faith in reason, and those scholars who make the admirable attempt to deconstruct the reason/emotion binary in Western metaphysics must be aware that reconstructive efforts in this area have their own pitfalls. By calling attention to these pitfalls, I do not mean to discourage this reconstructive effort. Instead, I suggest that scholars should be aware of the potential problems that confront them in undertaking such a project. While more promising than the uncritical valorization of reason by their Enlightenment predecessors, contemporary theories that link emotion to reason or fuse reason with emotion are not guaranteed to produce an improvement over the Enlightenment's marginalization of emotion.

In what follows, I make my case by examining the rhetoric of that most troublesome of sources, the Ku Klux Klan. In the discourse of one Klan leader, I find a theory of rationality that links a concern with giving reasons to an insistence on the importance of racial instinct and emotion. As suggested below, this Klan theory has significant shortcomings from the typical feminist and other revisionist perspectives on emotion. However, as I hope to demonstrate by examining Klan rhetoric, attempts to retheorize emotion and reason face significant problems. First, I will provide a sketch of the linkages that have been posited between reason and emotion, a subject too rarely considered by contemporary rhetoricians. Second, I will scrutinize the place of emotion and reason in the discourse of Hiram Wesley Evans, a one-time Imperial Wizard and Emperor of the Ku Klux Klan. Third, given this analysis of 1920s Klan rhetoric, I will suggest some implications for theorizing the connections between reason and emotion.

THE REASON/EMOTION CONTROVERSY

How might people make good decisions? Historically, the answer for Western philosophers typically has involved avoiding or bracketing reliance on emotion in favor of dependence on reason. Aristotle encouraged the division between reason and emotion in Book Two of the Rhetoric, to which scholars in philosophy and psychology sometimes turn in their search for a systematic Attic discussion of the emotions. While Aristotle did suggest that reason (logos) required the assistance of credibility (ethos) and emotion (pathos) to make rhetorical success possible, he did not posit any necessary relationship between logos and pathos (see 1377b-1378a), though, according to Martha C. Nussbaum (1990), Aristotle, contra Plato, restored emotions to a role of prominence in practical reasoning and morality.

Rhetoricians after Aristotle included sections on emotion in their treatises, but generally they did not suggest that emotion was a vital concern in making good decisions. Emotion and audience psychology were discussed because auditors usually were imperfect logicians at best and dullards at worst. Alternatively, emotion was considered because the passions were needed to give spirit and energy to ideas for purposes of persuading an audience to action (e.g., Campbell, 1776/1988). From these traditional perspectives, one would not discuss the emotions in rhetoric if audiences were composed of educated and intelligent interlocutors who would not be swayed by appeals to the emotions. One of the first complaints about the "artificial" distinction between reason and the emotions in rhetorical and argumentation instruction was made by Mary Yost (1917). Nevertheless, some students of rhetoric and argumentation still maintain that emotions are "not directly relevant" to argumentation studies (van Eemeren et al., 1996, p. 2).

Following the near-universal abandonment in the twentieth century of the James-Lange theory of the emotions, which posits that emotion is a response to (rather than a cause of) physiological changes, scholars have suggested a range of possible relationships between reason and emotion. Some of these theories sharply divide emotion from reason, as with the traditional perspectives outlined above, while other theories suggest that an intimate intertwining of reason and emotion is necessary.

Two theories illustrate the clear separation between reason and emotion in much twentieth-century scholarship. First, Jean-Paul Sartre's (1962) short monograph, Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions, suggested that emotion is "a transformation of the world" (p. 63), where emotion "magically" alters the relation of the self to the world: "Emotion arises when the world of the utilizable vanishes abruptly and the world of magic appears in its place" (pp. 90-91). This magical state of affairs, which exists when emotion is aroused, is inconsistent with rational activity as such, since "the magical . . . is . . . an irrational synthesis of spontaneity and passivity" (p. 85). While Sartre's theory of the emotions has been criticized on several fronts, the division of reason from the emotions in his theory exemplifies a common trend in Western philosophy.

In contrast to Sartre, positivism provides a theory of reason, rather than a theory of emotion per se. However, positivism, as described by A. J. Ayer and his cohort, hints at a theory of emotion by insisting on a science that is free of values and all else not verifiable via empirical observation. According to Ayer in his early statement on logical positivism, "statements of value" could not be "scientific" in cases where they were "simply expressions of emotion which can be neither true nor false" (Ayer, 1936/1946, pp. 102-103). Since a positivist does not expect that emotion could be explained by or function as argument, she or he will seek to eliminate the influence of emotion in scientific research. An emotional scientist might lose her or his ability to evaluate dispassionately the object of her or his research. Anything that might interfere with the scholar's objectivity by injecting some confounding variable into the investigative process is rejected as either interfering with the rational production of knowledge or as extra- or ir-rational itself.

Thus, positivism suggests that producing knowledge necessarily requires the separation of reason and emotion. Like Sartre, positivists declare that emotion and reason cannot successfully coexist. Unlike Sartre, positivists make clear their preference for reason over emotion. Following Spelman, Alison M. Jaggar (1989) summarizes this positivist "Dumb View" of the emotions as not "being about anything: instead, they [emotions] were contrasted with and seen as potential disruptions of other phenomena that are about some thing, . . . such as rational judgments, thoughts, and observations" (pp. 148-149). Thus, adherents to positivism continued what had become the Enlightenment tradition of separating reason from emotion and preferring reason to emotion.

In comparison with these theories that bifurcate reason and emotion, other, typically feminist scholars in recent decades have provided various reconstructions of the relationship between reason and...