Image, imagination, and emotions, according to Gilbert Simondon and Martha Nussbaum.

Abstract

This article offers an approximate overview of the ideas of Martha Nussbaum and Gilbert Simondon regarding emotions, image, and imagination, with a view to synthesizing the thinking of these two figures, who, in this regard, show more similarities than incompatibilities. Both philosophers have addressed emotions with their distinctive richness of argument. For Nussbaum, good emotions enhance “aspirational societies”; for Simondon, emotions play an important role in “normative formalizations”. It could be said that Simondian ethical “inventions,” with their metastable charge, would also be capable of promoting “aspirational societies,” in the Nussbaumian manner.