Jay,
I am thinking about a three year old I knew very well explaining
that the
girl next door was his best friend because she made him cry --
apparently a
good thing, at least until he learned otherwise from the older
people in his
life!
But we adults relearn all the time from the children around us
that sadness
(maybe not fear and its opposite, but certainly sadness), is not as
different from happiness as we tend to assume.
Beth
On Sat, Nov 28, 2009 at 11:59 PM, Jay Lemke
<jaylemke@umich.edu> wrote:
I have had Scheff on my reading list for a while, but was away
from the
right kinds of libraries most of last year.
I'm afraid I just don't see why it's important to list
something as a
"basic" emotion? That usually just means that someone wants it
to count as
having academic or intellectual importance, or that they want
to link it to
our baser animal nature, or that it's a candidate for some
sort of
biological universal, pre-determined by evolution. All of
which agendas give
me the creeps!
But I've heard good things about Scheff, so I will get round
to him soon.
How about this: there are several hundred "basic" emotions?
In any case, I was thinking of anthropological arguments about
"guilt> cultures" vs. "shame cultures" and the kind of analysis
Achilles was citing
from LSV about how feelings, whatever their biological
functions or
antecdents, get infused and transformed by culture into
something a great
deal more.
Thanks for the reminder about Scheff!
JAY.
Jay Lemke
Professor (Adjunct, 2009-2010)
Educational Studies
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
www.umich.edu/~jaylemke
Visiting Scholar
Laboratory for Comparative Human Communication
University of California -- San Diego
La Jolla, CA
USA 92093
On Nov 28, 2009, at 8:47 PM, Andy Blunden wrote:
Thomas Scheff
http://www.soc.ucsb.edu/faculty/scheff/
makes a good case that guilt is among the basic emotions, Jay.
Andy
Jay Lemke wrote:
Achilles, and friends --
I am not sure of the best interpretation of LSV's position
on these
matters, but it seems to me to be in the spirit of his work
and the later
CHAT tradition that we imagine a culturally informed
"development" (probably
with phylogenetic antecedents) in which the "higher"
functions develop out
of the earlier ones by a progessive layering or refinement,
specialization,>>> and differentiation -- both for higher
feelings as well as higher
cognitions.
Indeed I don't think we want to separate affect and
cognition, or feeling
and meaning, emotion and reason, too much. A little
distinction is useful to
give us purchase on understanding their integration. I would
assume that in
the developmental and evolutionary sequence, these two
aspects of our
adaptive operating-with-the-world, are initially less
separable and less
distinguishable, aspects of a single functional process. And
that later in
the sequence we LEARN to MAKE a distinction, and perhaps
even to FEEL a
difference between them.
But it is their functional integration which is of the greatest
importance, not their difference (in my opinion). So to the
higher mental
functions viewed cognitively (and it is not at all clear
that LSV did view
them ONLY cognitively in our modern sense) there must
correspond also
"higher feelings", what we might call culturally refined or
culturally>>> differentiated and functionally specialized
feelings, which function as part
of the whole engagement in activity that enables us to
sometimes get a bit
ahead of our semi-predictable environments. Insight.
Intuition. A feeling
for the organism. Good hunches. Good judgment. A nose for
useful lines of
research. And so on.
Of course once we are immersed in a complex world of highly
culturally>>> differentiated feelings, we realize that their
functions are not simply
practical, not simply dictated by evolutionary fitness. Or
at least not in
very obvious ways. And so I have taken to making a heuristic
distinction of
my own in terminology among emotions (the more classical
ones, triggered by
environmental events, with obvious adaptive significance,
like those listed
by Darwin and borrowed by James, such as fear, anger,
disgust, desire,
etc.), affects (which I use to mean the "higher" feelings,
the more
culturally specific and "refined" ones, like feeling noble
or feeling
guilty), and feelings as such (the general category, of
which emotions and
affects are subclasses, and which also includes the more
auto-perceptual
feelings like feeling tired or feeling dizzy).
Again it is not so much the distinctions here that I value
theoretically,>>> but getting a sense of the scope of the whole
domain of feelings, and how to
make sense of any particular feeling-type within it.
(Distinguishing again
between the uniqueness of a particular feeling on a
particular occasion and
the more generic feeling-types recognized or recognizable
culturally across
instances.)
Whew! A lot to chew on ...
JAY.
Jay Lemke
Professor (Adjunct, 2009-2010)
Educational Studies
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
www.umich.edu/~jaylemke
Visiting Scholar
Laboratory for Comparative Human Communication
University of California -- San Diego
La Jolla, CA
USA 92093
On Nov 27, 2009, at 10:45 PM, Achilles Delari Junior wrote:
Jay,
Thank you very much.
Something near to this distinction between feelings and emotions
was posed by William James too, according Vygotsky, but James
saw this distinction in terms that these social dimension
of affective
world, the higher feelings, have almost nothing related to
biological,>>>> physiological, material, body, conditions. And
Vygotsky criticizes
this like a way of dualistic thinking - this dualism can be
understood>>>> as based in ideological motivations too: "the
human is not an animal,
nor a material been, but a divine been, in his higher, superior
feelings..."
A distinction between feelings and emotions is present in
Damasio too
in neurofunctional terms... But Vygotsky proposed the
question of
a systemic inter-relationship in that the lower can turns
higher, and
vice versa... I don't know what we can thing about this...
In this
case, distinction between feelings and emotions are useful,
but if
we want to understand the entire human been, his/her whole
personality,>>>> the integration and inter-functional relations
between feelings and
emotions turns relevant too, In my point of view.
Best wishes.
Achilles.
From: jaylemke@umich.edu
To: lchcmike@gmail.com; xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
Subject: Re: [xmca] about emotions
Date: Fri, 27 Nov 2009 19:28:26 -0800
CC:
I am certainly one of those people interested in emotion,
or feeling,
or affect, or whatever we choose to make of the phenomenon.
The topic seems to have historically accumulated a lot of
ideological>>>>> baggage. And while its expression may be more
sophisticated today than
in times past, there doesn't seem to be that much less of
it (as for
example in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy review
noted by
someone earlier).
Emotion tends to be seen as bad in our philosophical
tradition. As the
enemy of reason, the motor of self-deception, etc. It
links us to the
animals, to our "baser" nature, etc. A bit of this in the pagan
tradition, a lot of it in christian asceticism, and tons
of it in
Enlightenment rationalism and its successors.
Emotions are also associated with the unreliable feminine
vs. the cool
and collected masculine, with the passions of the mob vs. the
thoughtful elite, with peasants, workers, and children,
and pretty
much every social category whose oppression needs some
legitimation.>>>>> Indeed one of the near universal
legitimations of elite power is "we
know what's good for you", not just because of what we
know, but
because you can't be trusted to see your own best
interests through
the haze of your emotions.
Useful as this is to elite interests, it combines further
with the
cult of individualism to make emotions a purely
individual, mental,
subjective matter. Non-material, non-social, non-cultural, and
universal (the easier to apply the stigma of emotionality
to non-
European cultures). It is rather hard to crawl out of this
pit of mud.
As I've been trying to do for the last year or two. There
would be too
much to say for a short post on this list, but here are a
few basic
suggestions:
Feeling is a broad enough category to get back to the
phenomenology of
affect/emotion, whereas "emotion" is too narrowly defined
within the
tradition of animal-like and universal.
There are a LOT of different feelings, and that is more
important than
efforts to identify some small number of basic emotions.
Many feelings are associated with evaluative judgments and
this may be
a key link to re-unify affective and cognitive.
Feelings do differ significantly across cultures, and are
part of a
larger system of meanings-and-feelings specific to a community.
You can't make meanings across any longer term process of
reasoning>>>>> without feelings and evaluative judgments.
It is likely that feelings have histories, both in
cultures and in
individuals.
Feelings are often reliable guides to survival, to
adaptive action,
and to finding ways to meet our needs.
Feelings are just as situated and distributed as are
cognitions. And
just as active and actively made and produced.
In short -- pretty much everything in our dominant
tradition about
emotions and feelings is exactly wrong -- and for the
worst possible
ideological-political reasons, I believe.
JAY.
Jay Lemke
Professor (Adjunct, 2009-2010)
Educational Studies
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
www.umich.edu/~jaylemke
Visiting Scholar
Laboratory for Comparative Human Communication
University of California -- San Diego
La Jolla, CA
USA 92093
On Nov 26, 2009, at 8:08 AM, mike cole wrote:
With so much interest in achieving an integrated
understanding of
emotion,
cognition, and development, Achilles, your focus on this
topic is a
helpful
reminder of its continued importance.
Seems like one of those many areas in psychological
research where
we cannot
keep from murdering to dissect.
mike
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