The history of emotions has been a very European subdiscipline, so the writing is sometimes difficult to enfold and is also sometimes not in English. Ute Frevert at the Max Planck Institute is another scholar of note.
The drift in language is something that can be hard to keep in mind yet we know it's true. Keeping that in mind when it comes to emotions seems to be even harder to do because of the various sociological experiments that claimed to prove the universality of emotions.
Sociology operates in the present and in the modern world, we share a lot of culture due to globalization and imperialism, so it makes sense that we would be able to squint and see a lot of the same categories of emotion in the same period. We don't think we do, but compared to the past, we moderns share more context and reality than we do with 16th century Chinese or Ancient Mesopotamians, I think. When sociologists (or journalists) project onto the past these modern categories, historians usually just ignore them. For example, people love projecting game theory back onto the Greek city-states, mostly because we (like the Enlightenment philosophes) REALLY need to be like the Greeks. You have to teach a whole survey course to these people to tell them why they are wrong, so you just... walk away.
I would bet sociology also doesn't even really parse emotions in the present, because the purpose of sociology is to manipulate populations and it gets the authority to do that in part by making universalizing statements. It's sort of a circle. They are measuring happiness, lets say. "Happy" is just a general positive emotion to a sociologist. If they run into a diversity of opinions on what happy is, they will just elide "eudaimonia" behind "happy" and call it universal. Even disgust, which is as close to "universal" as it gets, doesn't show up historically as attached to the same things reliably over time, so to say that disgust is universal does not help an historian make sense of the world. To say "disgust was half the cause of the Holocaust" is meaningless, because it means disgust with sea cucumbers was equally responsible. "Disgust with Jews was half the cause of the Holocaust" explains something.
And, even if disgust did mostly show up in attachment to, say, something like feces, that's not universal either, as there are people out there with kinks and jobs where they are completely inured to dealing with feces and don't feel disgust. Parents of babies and toddlers universally are shit on and learn not to care at all. It only proves my point, that we (maybe most of us, as I have just conceded that there are outliers everywhere) can be trained to anything.
Full disclosure, I have almost zero respect for sociology. It never squares with historical research. If you had a study, I could take it apart more precisely.
Psychology is answering and asking different questions again as a discipline, so that's another story.
In terms of universality of the emotions he describes - it's still not universal. There are lots of people who don't feel fear because their neurobiology is different. The people who we used to call psychopathic can act afraid, too, without feeling it for a second. So, not only is fear not universal, the connection between facial expression and feeling is not universal, AND what makes us afraid changes over time due to historical context, so what even is the purpose of making these claims?
I just live in the historical details so much that I don't see the value of making these universal claims UNLESS you are trying to social engineer people in the aggregate. Which is what sociology and, sometimes, psychology do as a matter of course historically. Since their aim is power (either over policy or individuals, for benevolent or malicious purposes, it doesn't matter), they tend towards universalizing, they embed the goal of universalizing into their methodology, and it makes me trust them less.
Would this be like the Greek word empathia beginning as a neutral emotional response under ancient thinkers like Plutarch, changed by the stoics into a uncontrolled negative emotion which was pushed into the realm of a destructive emotion by the Byzantine theologian Saint Maximus the Confessor because passion distracts you from becoming like god or whatever.
In contrast, the Western world during the Rennaissance takes Latin philosophical texts and through a process that befuddles me comes up with empathy becoming a term for seeing into another person's feelings.
So you end up with a word which has evolved in the West to have a positive sense of connection with another person, and in Modern Greek warning about needless emotion.
ooooh this sounds fucking tantalizing. Every one of these ideas draws me in like crazy, even though I don’t know any of the examples. But, yes. Adjacently, St Anselm argued that empathy is bad insofar as you feel other people’’s feelings with them because that’s a human trait. Compassion, where you don’t feel others feelings but act in their interest anyway, is the purview of god, not humans. Not having empathy makes him god. People are making all of these arguments about what we call “empathy” throughout the last 2000 years, though I can’t verify these cases specifically.
My thinking about empathy started when that punk ass bitch elon said "The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy," and then spouting off about "civilizational suicidal empathy" that new shit from gad shaad going around. Maybe folks got the ten-year itch and got tired of paul bloom’s “Against Empathy” like fucking vance seems to imply.
I came across the first article after I read this entry you wrote, and it kind of synched with what you put forward. Not exactly the same theme, but how we think of a word but it would be different for people in earlier times in other places. The idea that empathy could be seen as positive and negative depending on the hemisphere or philosophical tradition floored me. I threw together a general summary - not the best, but it works for me.
The first is the article about the duality of empathy. The second is on empathy, elon, vance, and the current waste of political being.
Why the Word “Empathy” Has Opposite Meanings in English and Its Native Greek
Great! I wish that guy Aristopolous had put in more citation for some of his claims because I would love more information on this business that humans are naturally passionate in Ancient Greece.
This is exactly the stuff I'm mired in. Like people think everything they think and everything they are is human nature and that's why they are it, but you don't even need to go that far... next door maybe... to find someone who is fundamentally different from you. Maybe they live in your house. I can't figure out if the pace of change encourages or scares me. Doesn't matter, I guess. It only is, right?
I'm not a big fan of change (the autistic in me LOL). But I can roll with it. Learned to make those split second decisions and damn the torpedoes. Urg. I think lots of people are just going through life minute by minute not even reflecting, just doing. Why is it just certain people like us that demand the time to say "Wait. What?!" and truly try to figure something that is itching in our brain out? It's just not rote and human nature, psychology, Freud or Jung or Russell or whoever is the new person on Psychology Today's website. There is more. And it is different for each person. My interest right now in Marian Apparitions and UFO activity around them and Sasquatch and UFOs (weird no scratch that eccentric stuff LOL) is very very not the same for others. And I think that's very cool and makes for intersting, vital, and functioning humans. IMHO.
Been mulling this over for a few hours. Time to put some books on my wish list...
Producing mulling is my fondest wish.
The history of emotions has been a very European subdiscipline, so the writing is sometimes difficult to enfold and is also sometimes not in English. Ute Frevert at the Max Planck Institute is another scholar of note.
The drift in language is something that can be hard to keep in mind yet we know it's true. Keeping that in mind when it comes to emotions seems to be even harder to do because of the various sociological experiments that claimed to prove the universality of emotions.
Sociology operates in the present and in the modern world, we share a lot of culture due to globalization and imperialism, so it makes sense that we would be able to squint and see a lot of the same categories of emotion in the same period. We don't think we do, but compared to the past, we moderns share more context and reality than we do with 16th century Chinese or Ancient Mesopotamians, I think. When sociologists (or journalists) project onto the past these modern categories, historians usually just ignore them. For example, people love projecting game theory back onto the Greek city-states, mostly because we (like the Enlightenment philosophes) REALLY need to be like the Greeks. You have to teach a whole survey course to these people to tell them why they are wrong, so you just... walk away.
I would bet sociology also doesn't even really parse emotions in the present, because the purpose of sociology is to manipulate populations and it gets the authority to do that in part by making universalizing statements. It's sort of a circle. They are measuring happiness, lets say. "Happy" is just a general positive emotion to a sociologist. If they run into a diversity of opinions on what happy is, they will just elide "eudaimonia" behind "happy" and call it universal. Even disgust, which is as close to "universal" as it gets, doesn't show up historically as attached to the same things reliably over time, so to say that disgust is universal does not help an historian make sense of the world. To say "disgust was half the cause of the Holocaust" is meaningless, because it means disgust with sea cucumbers was equally responsible. "Disgust with Jews was half the cause of the Holocaust" explains something.
And, even if disgust did mostly show up in attachment to, say, something like feces, that's not universal either, as there are people out there with kinks and jobs where they are completely inured to dealing with feces and don't feel disgust. Parents of babies and toddlers universally are shit on and learn not to care at all. It only proves my point, that we (maybe most of us, as I have just conceded that there are outliers everywhere) can be trained to anything.
Full disclosure, I have almost zero respect for sociology. It never squares with historical research. If you had a study, I could take it apart more precisely.
The specific study I was thinking of was Paul Ekman's universal emotions.
Psychology is answering and asking different questions again as a discipline, so that's another story.
In terms of universality of the emotions he describes - it's still not universal. There are lots of people who don't feel fear because their neurobiology is different. The people who we used to call psychopathic can act afraid, too, without feeling it for a second. So, not only is fear not universal, the connection between facial expression and feeling is not universal, AND what makes us afraid changes over time due to historical context, so what even is the purpose of making these claims?
I just live in the historical details so much that I don't see the value of making these universal claims UNLESS you are trying to social engineer people in the aggregate. Which is what sociology and, sometimes, psychology do as a matter of course historically. Since their aim is power (either over policy or individuals, for benevolent or malicious purposes, it doesn't matter), they tend towards universalizing, they embed the goal of universalizing into their methodology, and it makes me trust them less.
Would this be like the Greek word empathia beginning as a neutral emotional response under ancient thinkers like Plutarch, changed by the stoics into a uncontrolled negative emotion which was pushed into the realm of a destructive emotion by the Byzantine theologian Saint Maximus the Confessor because passion distracts you from becoming like god or whatever.
In contrast, the Western world during the Rennaissance takes Latin philosophical texts and through a process that befuddles me comes up with empathy becoming a term for seeing into another person's feelings.
So you end up with a word which has evolved in the West to have a positive sense of connection with another person, and in Modern Greek warning about needless emotion.
Does this make any sense?
ooooh this sounds fucking tantalizing. Every one of these ideas draws me in like crazy, even though I don’t know any of the examples. But, yes. Adjacently, St Anselm argued that empathy is bad insofar as you feel other people’’s feelings with them because that’s a human trait. Compassion, where you don’t feel others feelings but act in their interest anyway, is the purview of god, not humans. Not having empathy makes him god. People are making all of these arguments about what we call “empathy” throughout the last 2000 years, though I can’t verify these cases specifically.
Got any references, she asked, twitching?
My thinking about empathy started when that punk ass bitch elon said "The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy," and then spouting off about "civilizational suicidal empathy" that new shit from gad shaad going around. Maybe folks got the ten-year itch and got tired of paul bloom’s “Against Empathy” like fucking vance seems to imply.
I came across the first article after I read this entry you wrote, and it kind of synched with what you put forward. Not exactly the same theme, but how we think of a word but it would be different for people in earlier times in other places. The idea that empathy could be seen as positive and negative depending on the hemisphere or philosophical tradition floored me. I threw together a general summary - not the best, but it works for me.
The first is the article about the duality of empathy. The second is on empathy, elon, vance, and the current waste of political being.
Why the Word “Empathy” Has Opposite Meanings in English and Its Native Greek
Dimitrios Aristopoulos
April 29, 2026
https://greekreporter.com/2026/04/29/greek-word-empathy-meaning/
Loathe thy neighbor: Elon Musk and the Christian right are waging war on empathy
Julia Carrie Wong
Tue 8 Apr 2025
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/apr/08/empathy-sin-christian-right-musk-trump
Great! I wish that guy Aristopolous had put in more citation for some of his claims because I would love more information on this business that humans are naturally passionate in Ancient Greece.
This is exactly the stuff I'm mired in. Like people think everything they think and everything they are is human nature and that's why they are it, but you don't even need to go that far... next door maybe... to find someone who is fundamentally different from you. Maybe they live in your house. I can't figure out if the pace of change encourages or scares me. Doesn't matter, I guess. It only is, right?
I'm not a big fan of change (the autistic in me LOL). But I can roll with it. Learned to make those split second decisions and damn the torpedoes. Urg. I think lots of people are just going through life minute by minute not even reflecting, just doing. Why is it just certain people like us that demand the time to say "Wait. What?!" and truly try to figure something that is itching in our brain out? It's just not rote and human nature, psychology, Freud or Jung or Russell or whoever is the new person on Psychology Today's website. There is more. And it is different for each person. My interest right now in Marian Apparitions and UFO activity around them and Sasquatch and UFOs (weird no scratch that eccentric stuff LOL) is very very not the same for others. And I think that's very cool and makes for intersting, vital, and functioning humans. IMHO.