David Konstan, professor of Classics and the Humanistic Tradition at Brown University, delivered a compelling lecture on Monday at the Russell House on ancient Greek conceptions of animal and human emotion. Konstan’s was the third in this semester’s Center for the Humanities lecture series, “Revision and Translation.”
He centered his address, entitled “Do Animals Have Emotions? The View From Ancient Greece,” with a central question—are emotions innate and universal, or do they depend on culture? Konstan traced one of the two divergent viewpoints on this question to Darwin’s theory of evolution and its descendent, evolutionary psychology. According to evolutionary psychology, human emotions are adapted to environmental constraints, and thus the emotional life of humans are an innate inheritance from our ancestors.
“As innate as snarling is to dogs,” Konstan elaborated.
The opposing view, proposing the cultural specificity of emotions, finds its proponents in cognitive approaches to the human psyche. Here, emotions are not raw reaction to stimuli, but rather are deeply rational and calculated. Konstan based the bulk of his lecture on Aristotle’s definition of emotions, which, interestingly enough, was part of the philosopher’s more practical discussions on rhetoric.
Aristotle defines emotions that seem quite basic and universal to us in the present age, such as love and anger, within extremely narrow terms. For Aristotle, anger is the desire for perceived revenge on account of a slight committed by someone not fit to return the slight.
From this exceedingly limited definition, Konstan concluded that, to the ancient Greeks, “anger cannot be aroused by inanimate objects, because they cannot insult you.”
The inability to take revenge also precludes the ability to feel anger. Konstan reminded his listeners that Aristotle came from a culture steeped in slavery and that, where revenge is impossible, one cannot be angry.
He compared the ancient Greek conception of anger to the notion of “losing face,” emphasizing how deeply embedded emotions were in the fabric of social relations and hierarchy. In this schema, animals cannot feel emotion because they do not realize their own social position.
Similarly, Aristotle defines love as the intention to provide an individual with something that they value, or an admiration for the individual’s character and merits. Even fear is defined rather narrowly as the recognition of the danger of an object. Both require the rational appraisal of a given situation, rather than an instinctual impulse.
Konstan also discussed the ways in which the limitations of language can distort the precise translation of emotions. Though the English word “anger” may correspond to a Greek equivalent, the quality of that emotion and how it is evoked can be drastically different. At the same time, Konstan’s lecture called into question the linguistic limitations of words that we use to describe emotion, even when we are speaking the same language, forcing us to ask whether other English speakers fully understand us when we use words such as “love,” “anger” or “pity” to describe our emotional experiences.
“Today, we tend to regard emotions as something to be neutralized, suppressed and controlled,” Konstan observed.
Aristotle’s discussion on human emotion, however, urges us to think of the social circumstances that bring them about, and to consider the almost instantaneous appraisal of those circumstances that each of us undergoes before the emotion can even be felt.
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