Emotion, Thought, and Estrangement: Emotion as a Cultural Category

Abstract

The extensive discussions of the concept of the emotions that have occurred in the West for at least the last two thousand years have generally proceeded with either philosophical, religious, moral, or, more recently, scientific psychological purposes in mind. This discourse includes Plato's concern with the relation between pleasure and the good; the Stoic doctrine that the passions are naturally evil; early Christian attempts to distinguish the emotions of human frailty from the emotions of God; Hobbes's view that the passions are the primary source of action, naturally prompting both war and peace; the argument of Rousseau that natural feelings are of great value and ought to be separated from the "factitious" or sham feelings produced by civilization; the 19th-century psychologists' move to view emotions as psychophysiological in nature, with consciousness seen less and less as an important component of the emotions.' One of the notable aspects of this discourse is its concern with emotion as essence; whether the passions are portrayed as aspects of a divinely inspired human nature or as genetically encoded biological fact, they remain, to varying degrees, things that have an inherent and unchanging nature. With the exceptions of Rousseau, to some extent, and of Wittgenstein more recently, emotions have been sought in the supposedly more permanent structures of human existence-in spleens, souls, genes, human nature, and individual psychology, rather than in history, culture, ideology, and temporary human purposes. In this article, I explore the concept of emotion as a master Western cultural category. An examination of the unspoken assumptions embedded in the concept of emotion is important for several reasons. In the first instance, those assumptions guide the investigation of people's lives in social science, including anthro-