A Tragic Photograph: Emotional Journey of a Political Spectator

Abstract The essay defends a conception of emotion generated upon witnessing a tragic incident as embedding judgment and hence not to be dismissed as lacking cognition and intelligence. It takes a photograph of lynching as a tragic motif to interrogate the multiple emotions that are experienced by spectators based on their respective and differing emotional and political belief systems. The evaluative framework for emotions involving a thing of value that forms a part of the belief systems of the spectators and the consequent analysis of the belief system upon witnessing a tragedy in the form of emotional outlet is significantly discussed in the essay. Having sufficiently defended emotions as embedding cognitive judgment, the conversation orients towards emotions expressed by a lone spectator as being thickly political revealing the hidden political belief system of the spectator. Consequently, this unravels the unexamined belief system of the polity, breathing and operating under the veneer of a liberal constitutional framework. Having shown the centrality of emotions in shaping, denting or moulding the political belief system, the essay argues that citizens who express varying emotions upon witnessing a tragedy should consciously embrace ethical spectatorship which entails active seeing as opposed to viewing. Ethical spectatorship is a political obligation arising from individuals occupying the shared civic political space as citizens, thereby creating an imagination of a new polity based of duties of civility and felt politics. Through this essay, an avoidable tragedy involving loss of lives of fellow citizens is interrogated and rectified on the plain of belief system that has allowed such tragedy to become routine in a polity while opening avenues for alternative imaginations of shared community and political living.