Liah Greenfeld's Blog - Posts Tagged "emotions"
Are Human Emotions Universal?
It is widely believed that human emotions, from love to ambition to pride or desire for freedom, for instance, are hardwired into our brain and that, therefore, both their range and their nature are universal, shared by humanity as a whole. This belief is wrong and itself reflects the fundamental universalism of modern Western, particularly American, thought and its tendency to consider all human consciousness and behavior as a function of biology. Both comparative zoology and comparative history show that, above the limited range of emotions we share, as animals, with other animal species, what moves human beings and makes them suffer in one culture or society may be dramatically different from the emotions shaping the living experiences in another one.
Emotions, or feelings, as the name suggests, are experienced through physical sensations. In this they differ from other mental experiences, usually called “cognitive.” The part of sensations in an emotion allows us to place it into one of three categories: primary emotions, secondary emotions, and tertiary emotions. Primary emotions are experienced through specific sensations and represent the direct reaction of the organism to the stimuli of its physical environment. They include such experiences as pain and pleasure, fear, positive and negative excitement (joy and anxiety), hunger and satiation, and their biological function is to increase the individual organism’s survival. It is clear that these primary emotions are common to humans and other animals.
We also share with other animals more complex, secondary emotions which lack a physical expression specific to them and are expressed through various combinations of physical sensations. These are emotions such as affection, which we see plainly in the species of birds (penguins, swans) and mammals (wolves) which mate for life and in the relations between mothers and their young among numerous species of mammals. Physically, affection is, most probably, expressed through sensations of pleasure and joyful excitement. Animals that are capable of affection are also capable of sorrow, which must express itself through similar neurobiological mechanisms as pain. This is what they feel when they lose, as often happens in the animal kingdom (think how many mothers lose their babies and vice versa) the object of their affection. One could add to these the feelings of sympathy and pity, on the one hand, and anger--outraged authority, which have been regularly observed in great apes and monkeys, as well as in social mammals such as wolves and lions. Secondary emotions also perform an obvious biological function: they strengthen the social order within the species and thus ensure the survival of the species. For this reason, like sensations, or primary emotions, which ensure the adaptation and survival of the individual organism, they indeed must be hardwired into the brain and produced genetically.
But this is not so with the great majority of our emotions, twice removed, so to speak, from their physical expression, which we don’t share with other animals. These tertiary emotions include common feelings, such as love, ambition, pride, self-respect, shame, guilt, inspiration, enthusiasm, sadness, awe, admiration, humility and humiliation, sense of justice and injustice, envy, malice, resentment, cruelty, hatred, and so on and so forth. It is not that other animals don’t have the capacity for these complex emotions: first, capacities can only be observed in realization, and therefore we do not know what capacities other animals have or don’t have; second, anyone who has lived with a dog knows that dogs --our pets--are capable of many of these feelings, for sure. We do not share tertiary emotions with other (wild) animals, even such closely related to our biological species as chimpanzees, precisely because they don’t have a biological function; they are not needed for physical survival, and so they are not hardwired into our bodies. They are produced culturally, and not genetically. The brain supports but does not provide for them. Saying that the great majority of human emotions are produced culturally implies that each one of them is a product of a specific culture, that is, an historical product. This means that the emotional experiences of people in different cultures are not the same and may even be very different. But emotional experience is a major part of our mental life, our mind. This, therefore, means that mental life associated with different cultures is likely to be different, i.e., that, while there is a specific brain structure that represents every human brain, there is no one human mind that can serve as the model of all minds. (This, among other things, further leads us to conclude that psychology must be cultural psychology.)
In the next post, I shall begin focusing on specific emotions, such as love, ambition, happiness, etc., which are central to modern existential experience.
[Originally published on Psychology Today]
Mind, Modernity, Madness: The Impact of Culture on Human Experience
Emotions, or feelings, as the name suggests, are experienced through physical sensations. In this they differ from other mental experiences, usually called “cognitive.” The part of sensations in an emotion allows us to place it into one of three categories: primary emotions, secondary emotions, and tertiary emotions. Primary emotions are experienced through specific sensations and represent the direct reaction of the organism to the stimuli of its physical environment. They include such experiences as pain and pleasure, fear, positive and negative excitement (joy and anxiety), hunger and satiation, and their biological function is to increase the individual organism’s survival. It is clear that these primary emotions are common to humans and other animals.
We also share with other animals more complex, secondary emotions which lack a physical expression specific to them and are expressed through various combinations of physical sensations. These are emotions such as affection, which we see plainly in the species of birds (penguins, swans) and mammals (wolves) which mate for life and in the relations between mothers and their young among numerous species of mammals. Physically, affection is, most probably, expressed through sensations of pleasure and joyful excitement. Animals that are capable of affection are also capable of sorrow, which must express itself through similar neurobiological mechanisms as pain. This is what they feel when they lose, as often happens in the animal kingdom (think how many mothers lose their babies and vice versa) the object of their affection. One could add to these the feelings of sympathy and pity, on the one hand, and anger--outraged authority, which have been regularly observed in great apes and monkeys, as well as in social mammals such as wolves and lions. Secondary emotions also perform an obvious biological function: they strengthen the social order within the species and thus ensure the survival of the species. For this reason, like sensations, or primary emotions, which ensure the adaptation and survival of the individual organism, they indeed must be hardwired into the brain and produced genetically.
But this is not so with the great majority of our emotions, twice removed, so to speak, from their physical expression, which we don’t share with other animals. These tertiary emotions include common feelings, such as love, ambition, pride, self-respect, shame, guilt, inspiration, enthusiasm, sadness, awe, admiration, humility and humiliation, sense of justice and injustice, envy, malice, resentment, cruelty, hatred, and so on and so forth. It is not that other animals don’t have the capacity for these complex emotions: first, capacities can only be observed in realization, and therefore we do not know what capacities other animals have or don’t have; second, anyone who has lived with a dog knows that dogs --our pets--are capable of many of these feelings, for sure. We do not share tertiary emotions with other (wild) animals, even such closely related to our biological species as chimpanzees, precisely because they don’t have a biological function; they are not needed for physical survival, and so they are not hardwired into our bodies. They are produced culturally, and not genetically. The brain supports but does not provide for them. Saying that the great majority of human emotions are produced culturally implies that each one of them is a product of a specific culture, that is, an historical product. This means that the emotional experiences of people in different cultures are not the same and may even be very different. But emotional experience is a major part of our mental life, our mind. This, therefore, means that mental life associated with different cultures is likely to be different, i.e., that, while there is a specific brain structure that represents every human brain, there is no one human mind that can serve as the model of all minds. (This, among other things, further leads us to conclude that psychology must be cultural psychology.)
In the next post, I shall begin focusing on specific emotions, such as love, ambition, happiness, etc., which are central to modern existential experience.
[Originally published on Psychology Today]
Mind, Modernity, Madness: The Impact of Culture on Human Experience
Modern Emotions: Aspiration and Ambition
The claim of this post is that such characteristic emotions as ambition, happiness, and love as we understand it today, which form the very core and define the emotional experience of so many of us, are not universal, but specifically modern in the sense of being a creation of the modern culture; that members of pre-modern societies were unfamiliar with them, i.e., did not experience ambition, happiness, and love; and that even at present these emotions play only a minor role in the emotional life of billions of people living outside modern Western civilization. The sources of these three emotions, in other words, are to be sought not in human nature, but in modern culture.
The focus of this post is ambition, while the following two posts will be devoted, respectively, to happiness and love. Still later posts will explain what in modern culture called these emotions into being. (I’d like to remind the reader that this blog is continuous, i.e., it follows the agenda set in the first post, with each new post continuing the arguments of the preceding ones.)
Emotions which are central to our experience, that is, emotions which are shared across significant populations, rather than moving exceptional individuals, are necessarily conceptualized--captured in specific words or in concepts which use words earlier applied to other experiences with a new meaning. Emotional vocabularies of different languages, even from closely related cultures, usually cannot be fully translated one into another. For instance, there is no translation for the French word ennui--English language appropriates it as such, because no concept in English coveys its meaning perfectly. In English, the emotion to which ennui refers and which French people, apparently (as we can judge from the very existence of a word for it) experience on a regular basis, must be described in many words. (Per Oxford English Dictionary: “the feeling of mental weariness and dissatisfaction produced by want of occupation or by lack of interest in present surroundings or employments.” It is much less than depression and significantly more than boredom.) For us not only the word, but the experience itself is foreign.
In the 16th century, numerous new concepts and words entered the English language to capture emotional experiences which were new for people in England and for a long time after that remained foreign for others. “Aspiration,” first used by Shakespeare, was one such completely new word. It denoted, as we all know, a hopeful desire to become, to acquire an identity of, something better or higher than one is, or has, at the present moment. (One would “aspire” to become an athlete or a writer, but not a thief or a slave, for instance). The word for this new emotion reflected the nature of a physical sensation that accompanied it--filling one’s lungs with pure, delicious air. That is, consciousness of such “upward desire” alone was enough to produce this physical sensation. [See Are Human Emotions Universal?] “Aspiration” was tightly connected to another new word, “achievement,” and, in fact, always presupposed it. One could aspire only to something one hoped to get to on merit: for example, to become rich, but not to win the lottery. Both these words (and several others) fell within the semantic space--that is, an area of meaning and experience--of the individual’s capacity and expectation to improve one’s identity and social position, to gain dignity, by one’s own effort. This area of meaning and experience itself was new. A new semantic space could emerge only if a possibility for self-creation that did not exist before came into being. The new emotions, therefore, while physically expressed through the existing neurobiological mechanisms, were a result of history.
The governing emotion within the new cluster was ambition. “Ambition” was an old negative term. Before the 16th century it was included among vices such as pride and vainglory and referred to inordinate desire for honor. Now it became neutral and would be characterized as base or noble, a sin or a virtue, depending on whether or not it was an aspiration and what kind of achievement it presupposed. The essential quality of ambition as an emotion now became its intensity. It is in connection with ambition that the word “passion”--which before that time referred to suffering, as in “Passion on the Cross”--began to acquire its current meaning of intense, overpowering emotion, an authentic movement of one’s innermost self. Ambition eventually became one of the two central modern passions. Love was to become the other one.
[Originally published on Psychology Today]
Mind, Modernity, Madness: The Impact of Culture on Human Experience
The focus of this post is ambition, while the following two posts will be devoted, respectively, to happiness and love. Still later posts will explain what in modern culture called these emotions into being. (I’d like to remind the reader that this blog is continuous, i.e., it follows the agenda set in the first post, with each new post continuing the arguments of the preceding ones.)
Emotions which are central to our experience, that is, emotions which are shared across significant populations, rather than moving exceptional individuals, are necessarily conceptualized--captured in specific words or in concepts which use words earlier applied to other experiences with a new meaning. Emotional vocabularies of different languages, even from closely related cultures, usually cannot be fully translated one into another. For instance, there is no translation for the French word ennui--English language appropriates it as such, because no concept in English coveys its meaning perfectly. In English, the emotion to which ennui refers and which French people, apparently (as we can judge from the very existence of a word for it) experience on a regular basis, must be described in many words. (Per Oxford English Dictionary: “the feeling of mental weariness and dissatisfaction produced by want of occupation or by lack of interest in present surroundings or employments.” It is much less than depression and significantly more than boredom.) For us not only the word, but the experience itself is foreign.
In the 16th century, numerous new concepts and words entered the English language to capture emotional experiences which were new for people in England and for a long time after that remained foreign for others. “Aspiration,” first used by Shakespeare, was one such completely new word. It denoted, as we all know, a hopeful desire to become, to acquire an identity of, something better or higher than one is, or has, at the present moment. (One would “aspire” to become an athlete or a writer, but not a thief or a slave, for instance). The word for this new emotion reflected the nature of a physical sensation that accompanied it--filling one’s lungs with pure, delicious air. That is, consciousness of such “upward desire” alone was enough to produce this physical sensation. [See Are Human Emotions Universal?] “Aspiration” was tightly connected to another new word, “achievement,” and, in fact, always presupposed it. One could aspire only to something one hoped to get to on merit: for example, to become rich, but not to win the lottery. Both these words (and several others) fell within the semantic space--that is, an area of meaning and experience--of the individual’s capacity and expectation to improve one’s identity and social position, to gain dignity, by one’s own effort. This area of meaning and experience itself was new. A new semantic space could emerge only if a possibility for self-creation that did not exist before came into being. The new emotions, therefore, while physically expressed through the existing neurobiological mechanisms, were a result of history.
The governing emotion within the new cluster was ambition. “Ambition” was an old negative term. Before the 16th century it was included among vices such as pride and vainglory and referred to inordinate desire for honor. Now it became neutral and would be characterized as base or noble, a sin or a virtue, depending on whether or not it was an aspiration and what kind of achievement it presupposed. The essential quality of ambition as an emotion now became its intensity. It is in connection with ambition that the word “passion”--which before that time referred to suffering, as in “Passion on the Cross”--began to acquire its current meaning of intense, overpowering emotion, an authentic movement of one’s innermost self. Ambition eventually became one of the two central modern passions. Love was to become the other one.
[Originally published on Psychology Today]
Mind, Modernity, Madness: The Impact of Culture on Human Experience
Modern Emotions: Happiness
Our Declaration of Independence includes the pursuit of happiness among the inalienable human rights, alongside life itself. It is so included because the founding fathers evidently assumed that such pursuit was a human universal of the most important, that human beings, in other words, have always and everywhere had the capacity for experiencing happiness and have been naturally drawn to it. The readers of this blog would, probably, agree with this assumption and it is quite likely that many would consider happiness the very purpose of human existence. And yet, this assumption is wrong. Happiness is a modern emotion. No one – no society, no language – had a concept of it before the 16th century, when the idea of happiness first appeared in England, and this means that it was inconceivable for people who lived before the 16th century and to those who lived outside of England even for some time after it. If it was inconceivable, it could hardly been experienced, and certainly could not be consciously desired and pursued. As to whether it could be felt, desired, and pursued unconsciously we cannot know, because for obvious reasons, we cannot have any evidence regarding this possibility.
The English word “happiness” was created in the 16th century. At that time it had no equivalent in any other language. The words in French, German, or Russian, with the help of which we translate it, specifically meant “good luck,” a concept that existed in English as well, the word for any kind of luck being “hap.” The idea of “good luck” itself went back to the pagan antiquity. From the eudemonia of the Ancient Greeks on, all the synonyms of it connoted the benevolence of fate. To experience good luck meant to be subject to such benevolence, to be “blessed.” Luck was an objective state, not an emotion. The Greek eudemonia, in fact, could not be experienced at all, one of its defining characteristics was an easy and honorable death, and it was impossible to say whether one was or was not subject to the benevolence of fate until one was dead.
Luck, good or bad, is completely outside of one’s control, therefore, one cannot blame oneself for not being lucky or take pride in one’s good luck. Jewish monotheism rejected the idea of luck, opposing to it a view of the world predicated on the concept of justice. Man became to a certain extent responsible for his own fate. Under the influence of Jewish monotheism, which began to spread sometime in the 6th century BCE, eudemonia was reinterpreted and could now be applied to actual experience. From our, modern, perspective, however, it was certainly not a happy experience. The word now referred to the acceptance of mortality. Because the task of philosophy was to prepare one for death, eudemonia became the goal of philosophy. Today, when we translate eudemonia as “happiness,” this leads to the misconception that happiness is the goal of philosophy. But, actually, the advice of the philosophy which pursued eudemonia was to live a life that, while free of actual suffering to the extent that was possible, would be so devoid of enjoyment that one would not regret leaving it when time comes – a sort of nirvana. Such life was considered the “good life,” and eudemonia became a name for it.
This interpretation was reinforced and at the same time further modified in the Christian thinking. “Good life” acquired the meaning of faith, in particular, the absolute faith in eternal life, which often sought to express itself actively. Therefore Christian felicity (a derivative from Latin for “luck” – felix, which we also wrongly translate as “happiness”) could be found in martyrdom, an especially painful death one chose to demonstrate how free of fear of death one was.
Happiness has nothing in common with the phenomena whose names are used to translate this utterly novel English experience into other languages. To start, it is a joyful and pleasant emotion. Of course, human beings, like animals, have always been familiar with the sensations of joy and pleasure. Happiness incorporates them but implies much more. Examine yourselves and you’ll recognize that the word refers to a lasting, profound, fully conscious feeling of satisfaction with one’s circumstances – the sense that one’s life fits one like a glove. This implies that one experiences existence as meaningful, feels there is a reason for being here and now, and that one has a firm and satisfactory identity. Above all, perhaps, happiness is experienced as an achievement. It is a conscious realization that one reaps the results of right choices.
It is an historical fact that for much of human history people could not be happy. This was not because the capacity for happiness did not exist, but because happiness the emotion did not exist. It was created at the dawn of modernity. In future posts I’ll discuss what exactly brought this new experience, so important in our emotional life today, into being. Perhaps the reader already begins to see what connects the modern emotions on which we focus: ambition, happiness, and love, together.
[Originally published on Psychology Today]
Mind, Modernity, Madness: The Impact of Culture on Human Experience
The English word “happiness” was created in the 16th century. At that time it had no equivalent in any other language. The words in French, German, or Russian, with the help of which we translate it, specifically meant “good luck,” a concept that existed in English as well, the word for any kind of luck being “hap.” The idea of “good luck” itself went back to the pagan antiquity. From the eudemonia of the Ancient Greeks on, all the synonyms of it connoted the benevolence of fate. To experience good luck meant to be subject to such benevolence, to be “blessed.” Luck was an objective state, not an emotion. The Greek eudemonia, in fact, could not be experienced at all, one of its defining characteristics was an easy and honorable death, and it was impossible to say whether one was or was not subject to the benevolence of fate until one was dead.
Luck, good or bad, is completely outside of one’s control, therefore, one cannot blame oneself for not being lucky or take pride in one’s good luck. Jewish monotheism rejected the idea of luck, opposing to it a view of the world predicated on the concept of justice. Man became to a certain extent responsible for his own fate. Under the influence of Jewish monotheism, which began to spread sometime in the 6th century BCE, eudemonia was reinterpreted and could now be applied to actual experience. From our, modern, perspective, however, it was certainly not a happy experience. The word now referred to the acceptance of mortality. Because the task of philosophy was to prepare one for death, eudemonia became the goal of philosophy. Today, when we translate eudemonia as “happiness,” this leads to the misconception that happiness is the goal of philosophy. But, actually, the advice of the philosophy which pursued eudemonia was to live a life that, while free of actual suffering to the extent that was possible, would be so devoid of enjoyment that one would not regret leaving it when time comes – a sort of nirvana. Such life was considered the “good life,” and eudemonia became a name for it.
This interpretation was reinforced and at the same time further modified in the Christian thinking. “Good life” acquired the meaning of faith, in particular, the absolute faith in eternal life, which often sought to express itself actively. Therefore Christian felicity (a derivative from Latin for “luck” – felix, which we also wrongly translate as “happiness”) could be found in martyrdom, an especially painful death one chose to demonstrate how free of fear of death one was.
Happiness has nothing in common with the phenomena whose names are used to translate this utterly novel English experience into other languages. To start, it is a joyful and pleasant emotion. Of course, human beings, like animals, have always been familiar with the sensations of joy and pleasure. Happiness incorporates them but implies much more. Examine yourselves and you’ll recognize that the word refers to a lasting, profound, fully conscious feeling of satisfaction with one’s circumstances – the sense that one’s life fits one like a glove. This implies that one experiences existence as meaningful, feels there is a reason for being here and now, and that one has a firm and satisfactory identity. Above all, perhaps, happiness is experienced as an achievement. It is a conscious realization that one reaps the results of right choices.
It is an historical fact that for much of human history people could not be happy. This was not because the capacity for happiness did not exist, but because happiness the emotion did not exist. It was created at the dawn of modernity. In future posts I’ll discuss what exactly brought this new experience, so important in our emotional life today, into being. Perhaps the reader already begins to see what connects the modern emotions on which we focus: ambition, happiness, and love, together.
[Originally published on Psychology Today]
Mind, Modernity, Madness: The Impact of Culture on Human Experience
