Jessica Isserow (University of Leeds): 'Mixing Pride with Pleasure'
As Hume once observed, feelings of pride seem capable of attaching to most anything: “Every valuable quality of the mind” or “body” could, to his mind, be found among “the causes of pride” (T. 279). But even so, pride has its limits. I can be proud of myself for writing a novel. Yet it seems that I cannot be proud of a stranger for achieving the same. These observations reflect two central features of pride; its Promiscuity on the one hand and its Positionality on the other. Many accounts struggle to accommodate both. In this paper, I diagnose this struggle as a symptom of two tendencies found in previous investigations: (i) a tendency to focus upon self-directed pride to the exclusion of other-directed pride, and (ii) a failure to pay proper mind to the joy that accompanies pride. Correcting for these tendencies, I develop an Investment-Based account of pride, which improves upon previous proposals in its smooth handling of pride’s Promiscuity, Positionality, and many other central features besides.