"Letting Oneself Go": John Stuart Mill and Helmuth Plessner on Tears

Journal article

This essay examines the meaning and value attached to tears in the writings of John Stuart Mill and Helmuth Plessner. Mill's recollection in his Autobiography of the moment in 1826 when he was moved to tears reading the Mémoires of Marmontel has became a famous statement of the limitations of a utilitarian education (and by extension any education) which cultivates the rational analytic powers of mind at the expense of developing the emotions. Helmuth Plessner's work of "philosophical anthropology" Laughing and Crying (1941; first translated into English in 1970) remains less well known outside Germany, though it has attracted wider and increasing attention in recent years. Like Mill, but without reference to him, Plessner pursues an account of crying as a distinctively human expression of emotion that signals to us the limits of our capacity to reason adequately about our own human condition. This essay pursues the exact nature of that claim in both instances, and the further claims it yields about the nature of emotion and its relation to knowledge, as viewed from the shifting borderlines between philosophy and psychology.

Authors: Small, H

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures, Faculty of Arts of Charles University in Prague
• Journal: Litteraria Pragensia: studies in literature and culture
• Volume: 22
• Issue: 43
• Pages: 112-127
• Publication date: 2012-01-01
• ISSN: 0862-8424