I hate you. On hatred and its paradigmatic forms

In a recent paper, Thomas Szanto (Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 2019) develops an account of hatred, according to which the target of this attitude, paradigmatically, is a representative of a group or a class. On this account, hatred overgeneralises its target, has a blurred affective focus, is co-constituted by an outgroup/ingroup distinction, and is accompanied by a commitment for the subject to stick to the hostile attitude. While this description captures an important form of hatred, this paper claims that it does not do justice to the paradigmatic cases of this attitude. The paper puts forward a “singularist” view of hatred, the core idea of which is that, in its simpler form, hatred is to aversively target the other qua this individual person, where the adverb “aversively” expresses the subject’s desire for the target to be annihilated. The conclusion develops some general considerations on the distinction between paradigmatic and marginal instances of an attitude by highlighting its importance for the study of affective phenomena.