The world today is full of anger. Everywhere we look, we see values clashing and tempers rising, in ways that seem frenzied, aimless, and cruel. At the same time, we witness political leaders and others who lack any sense of shame, even as they display carelessness with the truth and the common good. In How to Do Things with Emotions, Owen Flanagan explains that emotions are things we do, and he reminds us that those like anger and shame involve cultural norms and scripts. The ways we do these emotions offer no guarantee of emotionally or ethically balanced lives—but still we can control and change how such emotions are done. Flanagan makes a passionate case for tuning down anger and tuning up shame, and he observes how cultures around the world can show us how to perform these emotions better.
Through comparative insights from anthropology, psychology, and cross-cultural philosophy, Flanagan reveals an incredible range in the expression of anger and shame across societies. He establishes that certain types of anger—such as those that lead to revenge or passing hurt on to others—are more destructive than we imagine. Certain forms of shame, on the other hand, can protect positive values, including courage, kindness, and honesty. Flanagan proposes that we should embrace shame as a uniquely socializing emotion, one that can promote moral progress where undisciplined anger cannot.
How to Do Things with Emotions celebrates the plasticity of our emotional responses—and our freedom to recalibrate them in the pursuit of more fulfilling lives.
Awards and Recognition
- A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year
"How to Do Things with Emotions is a welcome corrective to Anglophone philosophy’s tendency to frame Western presumptions as universal. And it presents an appealingly sensible moral program."—Becca Rothfeld, New Yorker
"Illuminating and engaging"—Sara Protasi, Times Literary Supplement
"[An] insightful book. . . . Flanagan recommends and provides careful attention to [other cultural practices around anger and shame] in the hope that they will open up possibilities for developing new ways of expressing emotional behaviors."—Choice Reviews
“This is no ordinary book on emotion. Flanagan sees society as ailing, and believes that two emotions, anger and shame, are the problem. He takes us on a tour of philosophical thinking about, and cultural difference in understanding of, emotions, all in the service of convincing us that emotions are things we do. If so, he says, we can learn to do anger and shame differently, and be better off for it. Reading this engaging and well-crafted book gave me hope. What a gift from an author.”—Joseph LeDoux, author of The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains
“This is an urgent book for our times, both inspiring and provocative. Flanagan invites us to work on our emotional style, to tamp down our anger, and to develop a mature and responsible shame. His argument involves a subtle theory of what emotions do and why we can intervene, and considers what culture and anthropology can teach us. We can learn to be different. And we must.”—T. M. Luhrmann, author of When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God
“In this state-of-the-art account, Flanagan examines the multilevel constitution and cultural diversity of emotions. He builds on the anthropological observation that shame and anger are complex moral emotions—not only felt, but also enacted and performed. In the West, and particularly in post-Trump America, Flanagan contends, ‘we can do shame better.’ Likewise, our ubiquitous rage can be channeled into reasoned, constructive anger. This forcefully argued book takes philosophy into the field.”—Andrew Beatty, author of Emotional Worlds: Beyond an Anthropology of Emotion
“How to Do Things with Emotions offers a fascinating commentary on contemporary American culture, a thorough social and cultural analysis of the emotions anger and shame, and a critique of the current state of moral philosophy. Taking us on a tour of how anger and shame are done across different times and places, Flanagan provides broader horizons of possibility and practice. This is an important and overdue update of the moral philosophy of emotions in a multicultural world.”—Batja Mesquita, professor of psychology and director of the Center for Social and Cultural Psychology, University of Leuven
“This fine and important book is driven by a genuine passion for reforming the misuse of anger and shame in our WEIRD culture. It is nourished by Flanagan’s exceptional mastery of scientific and philosophical thought as well as of the writings of the wisdom tradition—Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism, and Stoicism. Personal, clear, and occasionally pleasingly epigrammatic, How to Do Things with Emotions is both powerfully argued and politically timely.”—Ronald de Sousa, author of Emotional Truth
“How to Do Things with Emotions is a breath of fresh air. With delightful, insightful, and witty prose, Flanagan describes North American views of anger and shame, and introduces us to these emotions in other cultural contexts through a philosophical lens. He asks how we might learn from these ‘varieties of moral possibility’ to improve our own ways of experiencing and expressing anger and shame in contemporary times. A must-read for all who wonder about non-Western ethical systems and their importance for emotional life.”—Jeanne L. Tsai, Stanford University
