¿COMO TE SIENTES?
GUIA DE LA VIRTUD EN EL MUNDO CLASICO
DESEOS INDIOS
LAS PASIONES PAULINAS
EL AMOR DE LOS CRUZADOS
LO QUE TEMIAN LOS OTOMANOS
LAS ABOMINABLES CAZAS DE BRUJAS
EL DESEO DE UNA DULCE LIBERTAD
EL AUGE DE LA EMOCION
LA VERGUENZA EN EL PAIZ DE LOS CEREZOS EN FLOR
LA FURIA DE UNA REINA AFRICANA
NEUROSIS DE GUERRA
LA HUMILLACION DEL DRAGON
EL AMOR Y LA MADRE (PATRIA)
EL CHOQUE DE LAS GRANDES EMOCIONES
¿SUEÑAN LOS HUMANOS CON OVEJAS ELECTRICAS?
¿LOS ULTIMOS SENTIMIENTOS?

A slightly odd subject. How could emotion have a history? We, humans (and other animals too apparently) just have emotions surely and they have always been the same and are the same across the world. I remember reading about Darwins' pictures of emotions ...like fear, happiness etc. And these were supposed to be universal. However, Firth-Godbehere clearly demonstrates that the foundations of theories about emotions are very plastic. And are certainly not the same around the world. Actually, I've just read Lisa Feldman-Barrett "How Emotions are made" so I was somewhat prepared for some of the revelations that Richard F-G makes in the current Book. It seemed to me that Lisa had set out to really introduce a new paradigm and I wondered how successful she was going to be. So here, in the current book, is some evidence that she's gathering disciples.
FG opens with: "pets don't feel emotions. And before you find yourselves defending a hill marked MY CAT LOVES ME, it's not just pets. Humans don't feel emotions, either. Emotions are just a bunch of feelings that English-speaking Westerners put in a box around two hundred years ago. Emotions are a modern idea - a cultural construction.The notion that feelings are something that happens in the brain was invented in the early nineteenth century.
There is clearly a problem of definition: sensation of touching something. In the English language alone, various terms have been used at various points in history to describe cartain types of feelings. We've had temperaments (the way people's feelings make them behave), passions teelings felt first in the body that the affect the soul), and sentiments (the feelings you get when you see something beautiful or someone acting immorally). We've left most of these historical ideas behind, replacing them with a single catchall term that describes a certain type of feeling processed in the brain: "emotion". The problem is that it's difficult to pin down the types of feelings that do and don't constitute emotions. There are almost as many definitions of emotions as there are people studying them."
FG starts with Plato and Aristotle: "To Plato, feelings could either raise us to a greater good or condemn us to dangerous short-term pleasures. Aristotle thought emotions sprang from a part of the soul we share with animals and that they were useful when arguing or negotiating with an enemy. Both believed that emotions could be manipulated by reason, or lógos. Plato thought emotions should be directed toward something high, something spiritual, while Aristotle thought of them in a practical, down-to-earth way, as a tool for getting things done.
FG then moves to Buddha: "What the Buddha did was to draw on the beliefs of his culture and reinterpret them, What he came up with is now known as the Four Noble Truths,
1. There is suffering.
2. The cause of suffering is desire.
3. The way out of suffering is through nirvana (or, in Hinduism, connecting to your bliss sheath).
So far so good. But the last noble truth was something unique: there is a path to nirvana. This path came to be known as the Noble Eightfold Path.
Thence FGF moves to the stoics: if you are controlling your thoughts and feelings appropriately, you won't ever feel sorrow. A Stoic's life's work was to focus on giving thought priority over feeling until it became natural to stop and think about a situation before taking action". And thence FG segues from the Apostle Paul who used familiar stoic arguments with the Athenians until he got to the cusp of his arguments and mentioned the resurrection...where he promptly lost his audience. But "Paul managed to meld how he felt about Jesus as a Hebrew with how he felt about Jesus as a Stoic. It allowed more Greek-speakin people to believe. It allowed the word to spread and, eventually; allowed emperors to take up the cross.and led to 2.4 billion people describing themselves as Christians today. Arguably, as a Jewish sect, Christianity was never going to take off ....especially if voluntary circumcision was involved.
And then...well about 340 years later...Along comes Augustine of Hippo. To Augustine, and to many before him, emotions weren't intrinsically positive or negative; their moral value was determined by how they were used. Any feeling could be good if it was used in service of God, and likewise, any feeling could be sinful when it was used for personal gain. Even today, most branches of Christianity put Augustinian love at the center of their faith. The idea that God is love comes straight from Augustine. Augustine is also the source of the idea that Jesus's crucifixion was not a blood sacrifice, as the early Christians believed, but an act of pure grace and love -an act of forgiveness by God", I must confess that I find it fascinating at the way that both Paul and Augustine effectively invented most of the Christian doctrines disseminated today. They did not originate with Christ ....except in a fairly remote and indirect sense....... but were products of the imagination of these two guys.
Very much later, around 1000 AD Ibn Sina placed feelings firmly inside the body. To him, the passions were a medical issue, and cures for unruly emotions no longer had to involve religious penance, prayer, or exorcism. You could find the right treatment by balancing the humors. It also meant that monitoring the source of emotions--the heart -could help control your feelings and keep you on the path Allah set for you.
Slightly later..around 1270.... along comes Thomas Aquinas:"Aquinas actually dedicated an entire section of his book 'Summa Theologiae' to emotions. ....." but technically he was writing about the category of feelings known as passions, or passiones animae (passions of the soul). These were feelings that began in the body and influenced the mind, not unlike pathe.
Aquinas also identified another category of feelings, affects, or affections, that travel in the opposite direction: the mind thinks about something for a bit, perhaps even for a long time, then makes the body feel the appropriate response. To put it simply, passions are the feelings that Plato and the Stoics so desperately wanted people to control"......"But Aquinas didn't only categorize the passions as desiring or angry. He also split them up according to when they occur. Some emotions-joy, sorrow, courage, fear, and anger--are about what is happening to you in the moment. So if you win a game, you feel joy at that particular time. If you lose, sorrow. Other passions -desire, flight or abomination, hope, despair--are felt when you know what is likely to happen to you sometime in the future. If you want something but don't have it, you feel desire or hope. Love and hate are outliers because they exist, according to Aquinas, at all points in time".
Then , in the period 1560-1630 around 50,000 so called witches were burned or killed. Of the many passions people felt toward witches in the period, two were particularly important. The first is fear, and the second is a particular type of disgust -abomination. Important to emphasise here that FG is a specialist in "disgust" and I've found it particularly interesting how much of moral judgements come down to a feeling of abhorrence or disgust....which is probably an outcome of conditioning. (The ugh theory of morality).
FG briefly touches on fist and second order desires. I'm especially interested in this because I completed a Masters thesis on such desires. First order desires "are the selfish desires for riches, for possessions, for personal wealth. You might call first-order desires greed.* It's better to embrace second-order desires: the desire to desire, or, perhaps, as is the case in Buddhism, the desire not to desire. Second-order desires help you control your feelings and achieve something better than material gain: a virtuous life, eudai-monia, nirvana, and heavenly rewards".
FG comments that "the word emotion has become so ingrained into the language and culture that we give the word no more thought than we do the word arm. The difference is, last time I checked, that I knew exactly what an arm is. By contrast, the last time someone tallied them up (back in 1981), there were 101 different definitions of emotion in use by psychologists. Things have only gotten more complicated since."
I found myself wondering if Fg oversimplifies the situation ...for example the following "If there is something universal about emotions, it's that they ebb and flow --a bit like qi.....The drive to get past the century of humiliation, both internally and internationally, still motivates China today. It has since become one d the wealthiest and most powerful countries on earth, and that, in no small part, is the result of an emotional tide that first began at the beginning of the century of humiliation". It maybe sounds reasonable that the Chinese were suffering from humiliation at Western hands. But this is a big claim...is there any evidence that it was 'humiliation' that has driven the demand for progress. How does one describe the similar drive in Singapore where there was no equivalent humiliation ofr in Thailand. One might equally argue that it was the peasant's rage at being kept down by the ruling class that drove the civil war ending in a victory for the communists. And the drive for prosperity and modernism was little different to what had occurred in Japan ....not in relation to humiliation as much as in a desire to not be left behind and lose autonomy.
There is a lot in this book and I've only captured part of it. He men lions some fMRI studies; Hate is an interesting emotion: MRI studies struggle to find a single specific pathway or neurochemical responsible for it. The best candidate is what researchers call the brain's "hate circuit," involving a combination of the insula (thought to be implicated in disgust) and those areas that link aggression to decision making - the putamen, frontal cortex, and premotor cortex.® The neuropsychological gap between disliking something because it revolts you and because it makes you want to punch it seems to be narrow"
And I found myself quite fascinated by the story of Paul Ekman journeying in PNG to check out pictures of faces with emotions with people who had never seen a European. But turns out that it was really pretty hard to find such people and the techniques left a lot to be desired....thus giving fuel to Lisa Barrett's thesis that emotions are much more complicated than faces and voices...She posits that emotions are constructed when the brain processes a number of psychological factors simultaneously--internal feelings, perceptions of what's going on in the outside world, patterns that individuals have learned. All of which tends to rule out mechanical recognition of emotions simply by "reading faces".
Overall, I found it pretty interesting. It's a big subject and FG has not covered it all. How could you. We don't know how Australian Aboriginals view emotions, for example. But happy to give it four stars. ( )