The Surfeit and Emotional Lopsidedness (just a quickie).

There's something just that bit lopsided about aversions. Those emotions we associate with attraction – desire, love, lust etc. – are nowhere near as potent as their opposites – aversion, hate, repulsion etc. 

Let me put it this way. When we eat, smell, watch, touch, or even hear something that causes aversion we can dislike it, be worried, or irritated. If whatever is causing the aversion increases in intensity, it becomes disgusting, terrifying, horrible. We can come across something we hate, an object so bad we wish to destroy it; or if the amount of whatever is causing the aversion increases, we come to detest it and cannot even be close to it. The element of free will that accompanies hatred disappears and is replaced by an overwhelming need to act. It is all bad, it never, in our current cultural scheme at least, becomes a positive sensation.

If we encounter something desirable through our senses we can like it or desire it. We can even love the object, desiring it absolutely. We can also love it so much we have to have it and protect it. If the cause of any of these goes to excess, however, a peculiar thing happens. If something attractive goes to excess, we find it gaudy, or over sweetened, or vulgar, or too much. It becomes something we are averse to: the surfeit.

The surfeit is a powerful sensation. It is the result of ‘too much of a good thing’ and it shapes aesthetics, morals, ethics; almost everything in our daily lives. The overweight, oversexed, overdressed, over-polished, over-scented and over-done take what should be sensory pleasures and turn them into pains. 

Aversion and disgust are not simply a need to avoid the bad, but a desire to keep away from the surfeit. The input from elicitors of aversion and attraction are not a line, but a horseshoe, meeting at the top at the extremes of repulsion and hatred.

It is into the over-lit world of the surfeit I now go; sunglasses in hand and nose pegs firmly attached, to seek out those abominable excesses of pleasure.

@EmotionalObjects and a Philosophy of the History of Emotions

Firstly, I am aware that I said I'd write everyday, but this has proven to be difficult. I never get anything finished in 30 mins, so instead I'm going to aim for weekly, as a collection of the 30 mins.

Now that's out of the way, lets continue shall we!

In London Liverpool Street station stands an unregarded statue dedicated to the many Jewish children rescued from mainland Germany during the Second World War. This statue commemorates a moment of extreme emotional outpouring in our recent past; a moment that should not be forgotten. But judging by the mounds of litter covering the statue, not to mention the oblivious zombies rushing past in their thousands each hour, it would appear that it has been. This is not a criticism; I was one of those zombies until by chance I happened to sit on the object while waiting at the station for my wife. That moment of pause allowed me to actually stop and look, and this is likely as much a reason for neglect as any other. The pause got me thinking about changes in meaning over time, transference, sympathetic magic, and how the essential nature of the emotions attached to objects weakens and changes from person to person; time to time; generation to generation. It is the last of these that I'd like to talk about here.

'Das' Kind', statue commemorating rescued
Jewish Children from WW2

Last friday, I attended day one of a fascinating conference: emotional objects. Talks ranged from the emotional importance of apples to the feeling engendered by the cleanliness of household surfaces - particularly, when does the surfeit and the over-polished lead to anxiety [or disgust?]. One recurring theme struck me. As the objects mentioned by the speakers travelled through time, the emotions associated with them changed. Widows would feel differently to their deceased husbands, children to their parents, even we, as academics, imprint our own set of emotional sympathies upon the object. This leads to a problematic relationship between object and researcher, and one that reminds me of the work of Catherine Lutz.

In Unnatural Emotions, Lutz postulated three constructional elements to emotions. 

The first construction is 'the local theories of emotions': geographical or temporal understandings of what emotions are, the language used to describe them and the roles they and the cultural artefacts (rituals, beliefs, assumptions etc) surrounding them. In the case of material cultures, this would be what the object meant to the people at the time under scrutiny. This may be the intentions of the original creator or buyer of the object, or how the object was understood later. A dinosaur bone or a mountain would have a very different emotional meaning to someone from the 10th and the 20th centuries, for example. 

This is perhaps the hardest part to discover. It involves what Michael Baxandall called 'The Period Eye'. Baxandall suggested that it is probably true that in all sighted human beings certain frequencies of light hit the eye and are then converted to electrical impulses and fed into the brain in the same way. After this point, however, they are filtered though culture, and there is scientific evidence for this. Professor Jay Neitz, for example, has run a number of studies that suggests that both humans and non-human primates can see colours very differently depending on upbringing and circumstance. His findings are quite extraordinary to the point that my red may be your blue. 

Outside the synthetic world of the laboratory, the Himba Tribe of northern Nambia do not differentiate green and blue, but they do see many shades of green that we do not. Tested using something like the chart below, the people of the Himba had different names for each square, while to most of us, it is one shade of green repeated twelve times.

How many greens do you see?

To Baxandall it goes deeper than the mechanics of colour. The Himba see many greens due to their jungle environment in which knowing one green from another allows them to know which tree is which, what to eat from, where they are and so on. Not something we city dwellers rely on so much. The green has an important cultural meaning. Deeper still, the shapes and the images themselves matter. To take one simple example, two lines, one shorter than the other, drawn across each other at 90 degrees with the shorter one crossing the longer one just above centre means (or I suspect meant) nothing to the Himba, but it means a great deal to a Catholic. To Baxandall, then, the pursuit of art history, or visual cultures, is more than just a critique and an understanding of the materials used. It involves an attempt to get into the head of the people viewing and creating the art in historical context; viewing through 'the period eye'. This, of course, can get quite complicated and goes beyond art. Objects carry similar emotional and cultural symbolism, and this has to be understood by trying to get into the mind of the period. 

The second construction is that brought about by 'foreign observers and their emotional theories'. To understand the period eye at an emotional level, there is an extra level to be negotiated. We have our own idea of what emotions are, an idea that is hard to get around. The number of times I have heard words like 'anxious' and 'disgust' applied to periods when not only did the words either not exist or have a very different meaning, but it is not at all certain that what we think of as anxiety and disgust existed, is almost incalculable. 

Anxiety, for example, is a word that was used by James Strachey in his translation of Sigmund Freud's 1895 paper, 'On the Grounds for Detaching a Particular Syndrome from Neurasthenia under the Description "Anxiety Neurosis"' (I know, seriously snappy title). It was used to translate the German word 'angst', and Strachey himself said that Angst may 'be translated by any one of half a dozen similarly common English words - fear, fright, alarm, and so on - and it is therefore quite impractical to fix on some simple English term as its sole translation', but sole translation it became. If anxiety was all but invented whole cloth in 1895, is it right to use it on the feelings of a twelfth-century Crusader before battle, or are we imposing our own feelings upon him?

It is here that I suggest something along the lines of the period eye, what I like to call 'the period feeling'. Disability aside, all people see colour and all people have the capacity to learn language, but what colours they see, and what language they learn, depends on culture. Similarly, all humans have an amygdala, neurotransmitters, and a central nervous system that allow them to feel internal sensations triggered by external sensory stimulus, memories, or their imagination. But how we perceive these feelings, what we feel and what it means, depends on culture.  Some feelings will perhaps trigger a sudden physical reaction free from culture, in much the way a very bright light will make all humans squint or close their eyes, but for the most part these are neurological affects, not what I understand by the term 'emotion'. Just as a bright light is not really a colour, and certainly isn't art (although I'm sure the Tate modern would make room for it).

So how do we do this? Perhaps the best way is through translation. At the end of the day, we only have our words from our language and culture to go on as we attempt to describe the period eye or the period feeling. In fact all history is, in essence, an attempt to translate the past into the present. So anxiety might be the right word to use for how a Crusader Knight described his feelings if it is the closest word we have for that feeling. If it assists ourselves and a modern readership to get some way into the head of the Knight, so be it. Just don't say that the emotion he was feeling was actually anxiety, and that he understood it as such, because it almost certainly wasn't.

This, of course, can also be applied to objects much like art by understanding, a. what the emotional landscape/community/regime etc. of the period and culture you are looking at and b. by understanding the symbolism contained in the object. It has to be stressed that the translation can never be perfect, but it should be as close as it can be.

The third of Lutz's constructions is 'Culture and Ideology in Academic Emotional theory'. This is important; academic cultures can cause havoc. Take the same object to a psychologist, anthropologist, cultural theorist, social scientist, and a historian and you'll get five different explanations from five different methodological paradigms. I myself have my own methodological paradigm and though I like to think I try to stay above academic cultures's latest fad, I am not immune.

One way around this is to examine with a similar eye to a philosopher of science. Examine your areas' accepted methods, see if they are the only way to go, or just the latest in a string of ideas about the subject. Be aware of the cultural construction of your discipline and look at what you are doing from a number of methodological angles.

I also suggest going one further. If I have one gripe with the philosophy of science is that it rarely turns its critical powers upon itself. So I endeavour not only to examine the paradigms of the areas of emotion research I engage in, but the cultural construction of the philosophy itself. For example, the philosophy of science is, right now, very critical of scientific approaches and particularly the language used by scientists. A throwaway 'scientific methods' causes great consternation on Twitter feeds and a distrust of science itself seems to be at the centre of the discipline. Importantly, this is itself a paradigm. The philosophy, and the sociology (perhaps more so) of science have this stance because at this moment, the theories of deconstructionists like Derrida and, more commonly, Foucault hold sway over their discipline. If they had been around 50 years ago, the Logical Positivism of people such as A. J. Ayer would have been accepted with as little question by the same people; because that was the paradigm, the excepted intellectual culture, then.

In my opinion, it is important to treat these 'meta-paradigms' in the same way as the paradigms of emotion research, and try many on for size. At the end of the day, the one you go with is unlikely to yield an exact truth, but so long as something close enough to the truth to stand up to scrutiny by those of other intellectual paradigms and meta-paradigms is produced, that is fine.

[Oh dear, I sound almost like a postmodernist. Not really, more a Poperian. I am well aware of the problems of induction and logical positivism, but I am also aware that without the ability to accept that certain levels of evidence are enough, no one would ever be convicted of any crime. That doesn't mean that jurisprudence should be left to stagnate, however.]

So where does this leave us? It leaves us looking at a statue in Liverpool Street Station and wondering what the emotions that triggered the construction of such an object were? What did it mean to those who commissioned, designed, and installed it? Who were these people? Why did they do what they do? What link do they have to the Jewish children of the first world war? What material is it made out of? Why that material? How much did it cost? Who paid for it? and so on. 

This in turn tells me something else about Emotional Objects. You cannot understand Emotional Objects by staring at the objects themselves. The objects can tell you a lot, but only after a whole raft of other questions have been answered, and with Emotional Objects, there are many more questions than there would be in trying to understand the history of the object alone.

References (in no particular order - hey, it's a blog!)

Catherine Lutz, Unnatural Emotions (University of Chicago Press, 1988)

Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (Oxford university Press, 1972)

Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention (Yale university Press, 1985)

BBC Horizon: Do you see what I see? "The Himba Tribe"

For a list of Jay Neitz's papers, see http://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=HY84TwUAAAAJ&hl=en

Daniel Freeman & Jason Freeman, Anxiety, A Very Short Introduction (Oxford university Press, 2012)

Sigmund Freud's 1895 paper, 'On the Grounds for Detaching a Particular Syndrome from Neurasthenia under the Description "Anxiety Neurosis"' (online verision, accessed 15/10/2013) see ftp: //ftp.lutecium.org/pub/Freud/pdf/1895_on_the_grounds_for_detaching_a_particular_syndrome_from_neurasthenia_under_the_description_%E2%80%98anxiety.pdf

Intersubjective Emotions

(Apologies in advance for type-o's/spelling mistakes. This was done on my phone on a rickety train)

Tonight, I attended a fascinating lecture by Professor Steven Connor. To cut a long but very interesting talk short, Professor Connor does not believe such a thing as 'collective emotions' exist, nor does he believe that subjective emotions exist, instead suggesting that emotions are a type of intersubjective communicative device. An emotion that is free from communication is not one that festers, but rather one that is either renegotiated internally before eventual communication into the intersubjective sphere, or it disipates over time. Those emotions we see as collective, such as shame or indignation, are the result of external attribution; they are 'meta-emotions' that exist as examples of what culture believes the group ought to feel, as opposed to what members of the group are feeling. Often, in defiance of Hume, the ought becomes an is and the group begins to feel, or rather individuals within the group begin to collectively feel, what is expected of them.

This doesn't mean that such emotions are entirely constructed; they manifest on the body as facial expressions, skin colour changes, heart-rate alterations, galvanic skin responses etc., but interpretations of these somatic responses are defined by cultures and language.

l have sympathy with much of this, and remain a strong advocate of the idea that emotions are an intersubjective judgement of internal sensations, or feelings, and language plays a major role. Where I depart from the good Professor is in his suggestion that collectives cannot have shared emotions due to a group being without a body.

Setting to one side metaphorical bodies such as 'the body politique', I would suggest that the argument has the flavour of strawman about it: I don't think that anyone has ever suggested that a group, such as a 17th century millenarian group, in of itself, feels an emotion. 'Millenarian' is a label uniting people within a particular set. One of the shared conditions of that set is that the members of it feel a particular type of emotion: fear brought about by a belief that they are living in the last days. To use philosophical terminology, (due to lack of characters I'm using E for 'belongs to').

×E{millenarian} iff ×E{people with propositional attitudes including a belief that the end times are happening & :. fear}

To not be be a member of the later set would exclude them from the former. This is loosely true when discussing emotional regimes and communities. To be outside the set as defined by your regime/community makes you just that: an outsider.

So yes, such collective emotions are created by intersubjective judgements of somatic responses to stimulus, but that does not mean that these shared judgements don't define the group. 

And with that, I am at my train station. Thoughts are welcome, and see you tomorrow(ish).

It begins.

It has begun. I am officially a PHD candidate. The one recurring bit of advice I get is 'write something every dayfor at least 30 minutes'. That is what I m going to do, and I am going to do it right here, in my blog. This way I can gather my thoughts together, improve my writing and, with luck, be interesting.From Tuesday-Saturday stating this Tuesday expect regular, short updates that are likely filled with mistakes, grammar errors, and seeking chaos.

An I will be doing is thinking out loud,  Comments will be extremely welcome.

Rich

PS- It's much easier done on my lovely new Galaxy Note 3!

Letting my style run free (feedback please).

This shirt has nothing to do with the topic!

I have been considering something, and in considering that consideration I have come to the conclusive conclusion that my writing style may benefit from the removing of the mind-forged manacles of academia.

Whenever I sit at a keyboard, the ghost of the fantastic Peter Jones delivering the delicious dialogue of Douglas Adams takes over my mind, and tries to force my writing style. Half a decade of academic training has taught me to resist: “No, thou shalt not write that way”, my rational soul cries, but now I have had a rethink. I have decided that the little Peter/Douglas gremlin sitting in my head should be given free reign over my fingers, allowing the natural playfulness that is embedded in my child-like personality, and my utterances, to embed itself within my prose.

This does not mean that I will not be academic. The first role of academic writing, as far as I am concerned, is to get often nuanced and complex points across to the audience, and as a Humanist (as in Scholar of the Humanities) I think it beholden to me to get my point across as clearly as I can to as many people as I can.  To allow my sarcastic, irreverent side a bit of freedom will, I believe, achieve this better. Indeed, one of my great forefathers in the Humanist tradition, Erasmus, also believed this, even writing a famous treatise to celebrate it – In Praise of Folly.

“But academia is a serious matter” you say, and indeed it is. I do not intended to suffuse my work, blogs or rambles (unless it makes a point) with jokes about breasts, buttocks or badonkadonks (or to be gender neutral- knackers, knobs, and nether regions), or drape my prose with other excessively humorous haberdashery whose fanciful designs might obscure the windows into my arguments. However, I do think my writing style has, until this point, been rather forced down a path of severity I am not entirely comfortable with; I rather like playing with language and making reading (and writing) a fun and interesting experience.

So I resolve to rejig the rules laid down George Orwell in his essay ‘Language and Politics’ (which everyone should read, although it really isn’t very fun at all) coupled with a famous statement by Nietzsche (who certainly was fun, at first).

From now on I will ask of my writing the following questions (in this order):

1.       Can you be clearer?

2.       Can you be shorter (Like Nietzsche, can I aim to say with 3 lines what others say in a book, something more possible, as with Nietzsche, if there’s a touch of humour and creativity, show don’t tell etc. )?

3.       Can you be more entertaining?

So, I hope this has been entertaining, I hope it has been clear, and here is me making it short.

Rich 

PS- feedback would be wonderful. Should I remain shrouded in the gloom of expected academia and scholarship, or should I produce stuff that is rigorous, precise, but entertaining?

Abomination taking the Sheqets (Abomination, Language and the Bible, Part 1)

Abominable and abomination are fascinating words. They come to us from the Latin abominabilis which, according to my copy of the Lewis and Short Latin dictionary means ‘deserving of  imprecation or abhorrence’ but originally meant ‘deplore as an evil omen’, according to the pretty good Online Etymology Dictionary by Douglas Harper. This makes sense as it becomes ab ominatis ([away] from the prophesied), suggesting a movement from that which might indicate bad tidings, or the feeling you might have on receiving an evil omen.

The main source of these word is, of course, the Bible, where they occur  around 130 times, depending on version. Related terms are also common; another word that would later become interchangeable with abomination - detestable - occurs around 120 times.
In the Old Testament, abominable and abomination are usually translations of the Biblical Hebrew words shiqquwts, shâqats and sheqets, tōʻēḇā or to'e'va, ta'ev or taab, ba_ash, zaam, and pigguwl or piggul. It would appear that abominable and abomination were a much more complicated affair than most modern English Bibles would have us believe.

To begin with, let’s take a quick look at the first three of these: shiqquwts, shâqats and sheqets. These words did not always have the same moral connotations as implied by the use of abominabilis in the Vulgate, and abomination in most modern English Bibles. They more relate to something taboo or forbidden, rather than the exceptional type of revulsion, hatred and disgust that the words relating to abomination are currently associated with. Where shiqquwts, shâqats and sheqets are always translated as abomination/abominable in most modern English Bibles, they were often rendered using different words in the Vulgate.

Shiqquwts

Referring to idolatry

abominations (Deuteronomy 29:17)
idolum/idolos (1 Kings 11:5-7) Idols.

abominations (Jeremiah 13:27)

abominatio (Daniel 9:27)

abominationem (Daniel 11:31)
Referring to scandals

offensiones (Ezekiel 20:7) 

abominations (Ezekiel 20:8). 

Referring to sinful sacrifices, or sacrifices done incorrectly

abominationibus (Isaiah 66:3)

Referring to witchcraft

abominationesque (2 Kings 24:25) or, [and] abominations.

Shâqats

Referring to contamination or pollution

‘contaminare’ (Leviticus 11:43)

‘polluatis’ (Leviticus 20:25)

Sheqets

Referring to pollution/the uncleanliness of certain creatures

polluta (Leviticus 11:12) shellfish

abominabile (Leviticus 11:41) Creepy crawlies

abominatus (Leviticus 20:23) More creepy crawlies

Generally, these words mean things to be avoided and taboo, from shellfish to worshipping God in the wrong way, but aren’t (apart from the creepy crawlies) necessarily disgusting or revolting in that yucky/icky way. It is also worth noting where the Vulgate and most modern English Bibles differ. It would seem that both the Hebrew and the Vulgate had more subtle meanings than we find in most modern English Bibles, with pollution separate from what we might now call abomination in the Latin, and a division of action (Shiqquwts), contamination (Shâqats) and the pollution of certain creatures (Sheqets) in the Hebrew.

This merging of subtle emotional states into a single blanket emotion through a change in language – by either natural drift or translation – is an intriguing peek at how emotions at a sociocultural level and language seem to exist in symbiosis. When one changes, so does the other.

In the next few posts, I’ll look at the other Hebrew words for abomination, and finally the Greek New Testament words bdelugma, bdeluktos, bdelusso, and athemitos. Once I have done that, I shall reflect back and see what these snapshots can tell us about the shifting landscape of abomination and disgust through history.

That should keep me out of trouble for a while.

Why I am an [Emotional] Agnostic.

Academics who argue about the emotions tend to get, well, rather emotional about it. 

They attach themselves to an emotional paradigm formed from their intellectual cultures, with nothing more, as far as I can tell, than  a feeling that it is the right idea. ‘Emotions are biological and natural’ cry neuroscientists while they scratch their heads about why they keep getting conflicting results from the Amygdala, Insular Cortex and so on. ‘No it is clearly a sociocultural construction and nurtured’ shout the anthropologists, as they try to hide those elements of emotions that do seem to be universal at some level or other behind the tangled brambles of theory.

Deep within this, perhaps the last vestige of the nature/nurture civil war within the social and biological sciences, are two uncomfortable truths. 

1. Their epistemic choices are almost always based upon their commitment to their formal education more than they are critical thinking and   

2. (and I this I think backs-up 1). The argument is too far from a consensus to call.

Most of us know our Ekman’s from our Panksepp’s, our Mead’s from our Lutz’s, our Reddy’s from our Rosenwien’s, our Affective Neuroscience from our Core Affect and our Melancholia from our Depression, and it seems to be necessary that we choose a side. But is it really?

Studying emotions is at its core scientific, and I do not think it is desirable to make assumptions about the data when we do not yet have enough of it. Both the nature and nurture sides make compelling cases, and both sides have compelling, well researched and potentially falsifiable  evidence to back up their positions. This would suggest that any comprehensive understanding of emotions will involve all of this data, not just one set or another.

Emotions are complex brutes. They may well have an objective reality: an evolved task to perform that is, or was, essential to the wellbeing of our species and the transmitting of our genes. Indeed, it is rather obtuse to suggest that these, what I like to call ‘affects’, are otherwise for humans when few would argue the case for other animal species. It is clear that these sensations also have culturally based intersubjective elements tied to causes, expected behaviours, moral codes and social hierarchies. These intersubjective elements, which I like to call ‘emotions’, no less constitute the overall emotional structure than does affect, and to call them simply window-dressing is like calling a formula one driver just an add on to the car. Finally, there is a subjective element; the best word for these, I believe, is ‘feelings’. Some things I find disgusting you will not; some things I get excited about you will not.  

Beyond this, it is hard to say what is right. It is just as likely that Russell’s core affect model is right as it is Gray’s model of emotional systems or Smith and Ellsworth’s eight dimensional model. They all work; they all don’t work. 

For those of us engaged in the humanities,  there is good news: it doesn’t matter. We can review textual, visual and material expressions of affects, emotions and feelings without needing a final explanation. We don’t even need to get into the nature/nurture debate as the stomping ground for most of us is in the intersubjective, with the objective scarcely to be found in the sources directly and the subjective, well, far too subjective. As a result,  we can take a step back and focus on how emotions shape, and are shaped by, groups of people.

For me, until we have more data and are closer to a consensus, anything other than emotional agnosticism would be intellectually dishonest. 

This is a test, it is not rock n'roll.

listen to ‘This is a test, it is not rock n'roll.’ on Audioboo

Abominable Sex: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly

The role sex played in abomination is rather more complicated than you might think. Humphrey Brooke was one time Censure of the Royal College of Physicians and a man who died a very successful and wealthy man in 1693. In between becoming a Bachelor of Medicine (MB) in 1646 and a Doctor of Medicine (MD) in 1659, Brooke wrote a little book on how to stay healthy, ‘A Conservatory of Health’ (1650). He was alarmed that no such book existed in English at a time when the preservation of health was rarely the remit of a Doctor. Physicians were then, as now, more likely to get involved when things got bad, rather than when everything was fine. In this book, Brooke eulogised the era’s well-trod virtues of temperance, claiming that moderation in all things was fine; including a little of what you fancy, whatever you fancy. Sex, therefore, wasfine, done in moderation and in the right way, viz. in marriage. Not only was perfectly proper sex perfectly fine, it was perfectly good. It could perk your spiritsup, rebalance your passions and improve your health. Excessive sex or impropersex, however, was bad and could lead to very bad things. I’ll let Humphrey himself explain.

.

‘Its immoderation hath these damages attending it, a dissolution of strength and spirits, dulness of memory and Understanding, decay of Sight, tainture of the Breath, Diseases of the Nerves and Joynts, as Palsies and all kinds of Gowts, weakness of the back, involuntary flux of Seed, Blood Urine’. (pp.187-188)

I can certainly understand the ‘weakness of back’ and ‘dissolution of strength’, and I realise I do often wear glasses- don’t we all these days- but I really don’t want to even think about the possible causes of ‘tainture of breath’; well, not for long anyway.

‘Prostitution’ by Bouge Flamand, from Pierre Dufour, Histoire de la Prostitution chez tous les peuples du monde : depuis l'antiquité la plus reculée jusqu'à nos jours, (Bruxelles: Librarie Encylopedique de Perichon  1851), Wellcome Library, London.

 Things got really ugly if your partner in this liaison was not who it should be.

‘if to immoderation is added, the base and sordid accompanying of harlots and impure Women; What follows but aConsumption of Lungs, Liver and Brain, a putrefaction and discolouration of the blood; loss of colour and Complexion; A purulent and violent Gonorrhoea, an ulceration and Rottenness of the Genitals: noysom [‘hurtful’, ‘offensive’ or‘pestilent’, according to Thomas Blount’s Glossographiaor a Dictionary, (1653)] and Malignant Knobs, swellings, Vlcers, andFistulates in the Head, Face, Feet , Groin, and other Gandulous and extreamparts of the body’ (p.188-189)

I don’t know about you, but I think that the thought of ‘Malignant Knobs’ should be enough to put anybody off. Brooke agrees, and adds other reasons to stay safe.

These, the loss of credit, the sense of sin, should me thinks be sufficient to deter all sorts of People fromthat noysom Vice which Almighty God hath cursed with so many attendant evils.’ (p.189)

I wondered why I had a bad creditrating. 

Sex is not all bad in the seventeenth century. Indeed, it can be good for your health. But when done to excess, or with the wrong women (and you notice, this is aimed at men having sex; I can only assume that the 'harlots' in question come off the same way, or worse) it becomes an abomination against God. Worse still, it becomes an abomination punished by another abomination. But here is the history part. In this era, the true focus ofabomination was sin and only sin. Other things were thought to be abominable but, according to many divines, they shouldn't be. So are these awful punishments really abominable things, or are they not? Is it that elite thought says they shouldn't be, but newly postgraduate medics and the general public thought they were regardless? I think so. Otherwise, why would the intellectual elites would bang on about what  SHOULD abominable rather than what is so much? 

My advice for anybody outthere worried about the above is, as it will always be, stay abominable.

Cited: Humphrey Brooke, Hygieinē. Ora conservatory of health. Comprized in a plain and practicall discourse uponthe six particulars necessary to mans life, viz. 1. Aire. 2. Meat and drink. 3.Motion and rest. 4. Sleep and wakefulness. 5. The excrements. 6. The passionsof the mind. With the discussion of divers questions pertinent thereunto /Compiled and published for the prevention of sickness, and prolongation of life, (London, R. W., 1650).

INTRODUCTION: Abomination, Aversion and Disgust.

Sometime between 1265 and 1274, Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote his Summa Theologeae. In the Prima Secundae Partis, he placed some of Aristotle’s rather unstructured passions into a framework first suggested by Plato: the concupiscible and irascible.  To the concupiscible, or easily felt, powers he added the pairs of Love/Hate, Desire/Aversion (also Flight) or Abomination, Joy and Sorrow. If we love something, we desire it, and if we attain it, it brings joy. Conversely, if we hate something, we wish to avoid it or run away from it and if we do not do so, we feel sorrow. But if this sequence becomes difficult, the irascible passions move in to help us struggle. To help us attain what we desire we use hope and courage, and the route from aversion to sorrow becomes littered desperation, fear and anger. These passions are clear; they are seemingly obvious to us, they use words we understand to this day in a structure that remained dominant for centuries. But there is  one exception to this otherwise clear set of emotional labels: what on Earth is aversion or abomination? Aquinas used these descriptive terms because he didn’t really know what to call it; he wasn’t quite sure what it was, only that there was some type of 'opposite to desire' and involved avoiding evil, or that which we think can harm us. These two terms, aversion (or flight) and abomination, describe its properties: the first describes our reaction, the effects of the passion, the avoiding of the evil. The second, abomination, describes the properties of the object that causes the passion, the evil itself, and the feeling we get on sensing this evil. As with anything not nailed down in the world of ideas (and plenty of things that are), this passion was debated and altered and updated for centuries. Then, at some point in the late 17^th Century, a new word appeared, a word describing something similar to aversion/abomination, but not exactly the same. This new word, borrowed from French, seemed to fit; it seemed to work to simplify this complex passion; it seemed to finally give it a name. That name was Disgust.

I am Richard Firth-Godbehere, The Abominable History Man, and I have decided to make it my life’s work, using history, psychology, anthropology, linguistics, philosophy and anything else I need, to find out how these passions were understood, described and felt  and what influence they had throughout history up to the present day. My main, initial, focus is the early modern period in Europe, but that net will widen. In this blog, I will be sharing what was thought abominable, detestable, and what caused flight, aversion and eschewing, as I research into the deeper understandings of aversion, abomination and disgust in mind and body. The hard stuff, the deep stuff, the working out, will go into my thesis. The fun extras, I want to share with you here.