Huckleberry Finn – Pionier einer neuen Wertwahrnehmung

Sabine A. Döring

doi:10.1515/ARCA.2009.005

After having helped his friend Jim to run away from slavery, Mark Twain's character Huckleberry Finn decides to turn him in, but finds himself doing just the contrary. This example is used in the philosophical literature to illustrate the rationality of emotion: even though his sympathy for Jim causes Huck to act against his better judgement, he seems to be doing exactly the right thing. The question is what is meant by “rationality” here. Three different meanings of this notion are distinguished, in order to show that Huck's sympathy is rational in the cognitive or epistemic sense of being appropriate to some objective feature of his actual situation. It is argued that, to be capable of this kind of rationality, emotions must have an evaluative-representational content. Finally, it is shown that emotional representations are partly determined by society and culture, without this implying the arbitrariness of emotional evaluation. We may then understand Huck's sympathy as a new and better evaluative perception and as a pioneering step in a continuous socio-cultural process of refining and improving our value categories.

Huckleberry Finn – Pionier einer neuen Wertwahrnehmung

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