What! A blog! Never!
Okay I know it's been a while but it's not you, it's me, I just needed some space and now I'm here to beg forgiveness. Now that's out of the way, let's crack on.
My research, simply put, is into the moment that a passion underwent a mutation. When disgust came into being from its parents - abomination, aversion, and horror. It wasn't so much a new idea or concept, as much as the creation of a separate category from within an earlier concept.
Let me clarify. Abomination and aversion were wide passions. They covered everything that was the opposite of desire. The need to avoid rotting meat lay alongside the need to avoid a crack in the pavement in the emotional lexicon of the time. Both, it seems, we're understood as part of the same passion. What I am working out is how and why the first part, the icky rotting meat avoidance part, got its own lexicon around the mid-eighteenth century and became the premier league passion disgust, while abomination, aversion, horror etc. were relegated to the championship.
Interestingly, a similar movement may now be taking place. Ever since John Florio introduced the English to the word 'disgust' in 1597, it has been associated with 'distaste', although the word distaste is not much older, part of the canon of 'inkhorn terms' introduced into an English struggling to adequately express itself. Nevertheless, 'distast[e]' remained the staple definition of 'disgust' in dictionaries for around one hundred and twenty years, alongside 'dislike'. Seemingly, the dislike part became linked to the distaste part, creating a useful word that related to abominations of taste.
This idea of the orally horrible is still found in modern ideas of disgust: Paul Rozin and his colleagues claim 'oral fixation' as part of a universal 'core disgust'. The problem is, this oral component does not have to be present. Moral and visual disgust often exits outside this masticatory framework. Many thinkers in the field, from disgust pioneer Aurel Kolnai, to the oft-cited William Ian Miller, see other senses as primary to disgust, claiming that the oral fixation is more a hangover of the word's etymology and initial use in aesthetic theories of taste.
It appears that others are starting to agree with the anti-mouth heretics. I have noticed the increasing use of the word 'distaste' as an emotion separate to 'disgust' in the psychological literature. The difference is often spelled out explicitly, with distaste taking the mantle of the orally disgusting, and disgust covering the rest. I can't help but wonder: 'is another mutation taking place?'
Science, and so perhaps the culture it is situated within, appears to be starting to differentiate a subset of disgust into it's own entity, and this is exciting. Not only because I may be able to examine a processes I am studying in the past happening in real time, but because it asks all sorts of questions of the assumed universality of disgust. Is distaste universal but disgust not? Are both? Are neither? Is distaste an emotion as some maintain, or simply a physical sensation like pain? If so, what is disgust? Is it feelings of horror, abomination, and aversion that can be brought about by distaste-like sensations? Were the early moderns right all along? What does this mean for the study of phobias etc.?
To answer these questions, I may need to read shiny new papers just as closely as dusty old books and archive documents, once again showing how the understanding of lost emotions can, sometimes, be assisted by understanding the found.
I, for one, think it's rather exciting. But then, I'm a disgust nerd.
