Jan 22, 2020 09:53 PM
(This post was last modified: Jan 23, 2020 05:21 AM by C C.)
The happy emotions are not necessarily what they appear
https://aeon.co/ideas/the-happy-emotions...hey-appear
INTRO (Rob Boddice): ‘Be happy!’ Mary Wollstonecraft exhorted her estranged lover and tormentor, Gilbert Imlay, in late 1795. What did she mean? It had been only days since she had been fished from the Thames, having failed in a bid to drown herself. Scorned, shamed and diminished in her view of herself in the world, Wollstonecraft had chosen death. Here too she was thwarted, ‘inhumanly brought back to life and misery’. Imlay’s philandering was the source of her ills, and she told him as much. Why, then, wish him to be happy? Was this forgiveness? Hardly. Wollstonecraft knew Imlay’s new mistress was ‘the only thing sacred’ in his eyes, and that her death would not quell his ‘enjoyment’.
Wollstonecraft’s use of ‘happiness’ was not idiosyncratic. Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary defined it as ‘felicity’ or ‘blissfulness’ or the ‘state in which the desires are satisfied’. Wollstonecraft was telling Imlay to satiate himself physically, implying that he had no depth of feeling. This fleshly happiness, in other words, was all she thought him capable of. In her suicide note, addressed to Imlay, she wrote: ‘Should your sensibility ever awake, remorse will find its way to your heart; and, in the midst of business and sensual pleasures, I shall appear before you, the victim of your deviation from rectitude.’ Be happy then but, if it turns out you are human, you’ll be thinking of me when you fuck her.
A recent paper in Nature Human Behaviour claimed to present ‘historical analysis of national subjective wellbeing’. To do so, it relied on a quantitative analysis of digitised books, newspapers and magazines from the past two centuries. It focused on ‘words with stable historical meanings’. The effort, by Thomas T Hills of the Turing Institute and the Department of Psychology at the University of Warwick in the UK, caused dismay and not a little mockery from historians. The Wollstonecraft story above shows what many ‘Twitterstorians’ pointed out: there are no words with ‘stable historical meanings’, particularly not big and important words. ‘Happiness’ is an unstable historical concept, a false friend in historical sources. Nonetheless, the popular press fastened onto the claim that the 1880s were the happiest Britons had ever been. If only the mill workers of Manchester and slum dwellers of London had known.
The ignorance of the basic methods of the discipline of history is surprising given the robustness of the subfield of the history of emotions. Over the past two or three decades, the historical study of emotions has developed a rich set of tools with which to chart the ways that emotions have changed over time. Emotions such as anger, disgust, love and happiness might seem commonplace, but they are not so readily understood in the past. These concepts and the experiences associated with them are not historically stable. In addition, many emotions have ceased to exist, from ‘acedia’ (apathy) to viriditas (greenness); from ‘ennobling love’ to tendre (the tender emotion). Accessing them involves building an understanding of past concepts and past expressions in order to unlock what people once felt and experienced. This requires the forensic reconstruction of cultural-historical context. It is inherently qualitative work.
Not too long before Wollstonecraft presented happiness as the shallow satiation of desire, her acquaintance and fellow revolutionary writer Thomas Paine had consciously remade happiness as part of a republican vision. To do this, he elaborated an innovative concept of ‘common sense’ as a social and political sensibility... (MORE)
Dadaism ridiculed the meaninglessness of modern life – with captivating results
https://aeon.co/videos/dadaism-ridiculed...ng-results
INTRO: Dadaism was an avant-garde artistic movement born amid the wreckage of the First World War in Europe and formed in reaction to the perceived meaninglessness of modern life – in particular, of capitalism and its violence. The Swedish artist Viking Eggeling’s stop-motion animation Symphonie diagonale is considered both a Dadaist masterpiece and an early example of experimental animation. Basing the imagery on drawings he created alongside the influential German artist and fellow Dadaist Hans Richter, Eggeling revised and screened several versions of the short from 1922 up until his death in 1925. Shown as a silent film upon its release, this version of Symphonie diagonale features an original score, exclusive to Aeon. The contemporary Illinois-based composer William Pearson intends his music to react to Eggeling’s original vision in both style and composition, with playful, occasionally mechanical organ sounds, and melodies forming in sequence with the visuals emerging on screen. (MORE - video)
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/HtMYyP7G0HU
https://aeon.co/ideas/the-happy-emotions...hey-appear
INTRO (Rob Boddice): ‘Be happy!’ Mary Wollstonecraft exhorted her estranged lover and tormentor, Gilbert Imlay, in late 1795. What did she mean? It had been only days since she had been fished from the Thames, having failed in a bid to drown herself. Scorned, shamed and diminished in her view of herself in the world, Wollstonecraft had chosen death. Here too she was thwarted, ‘inhumanly brought back to life and misery’. Imlay’s philandering was the source of her ills, and she told him as much. Why, then, wish him to be happy? Was this forgiveness? Hardly. Wollstonecraft knew Imlay’s new mistress was ‘the only thing sacred’ in his eyes, and that her death would not quell his ‘enjoyment’.
Wollstonecraft’s use of ‘happiness’ was not idiosyncratic. Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary defined it as ‘felicity’ or ‘blissfulness’ or the ‘state in which the desires are satisfied’. Wollstonecraft was telling Imlay to satiate himself physically, implying that he had no depth of feeling. This fleshly happiness, in other words, was all she thought him capable of. In her suicide note, addressed to Imlay, she wrote: ‘Should your sensibility ever awake, remorse will find its way to your heart; and, in the midst of business and sensual pleasures, I shall appear before you, the victim of your deviation from rectitude.’ Be happy then but, if it turns out you are human, you’ll be thinking of me when you fuck her.
A recent paper in Nature Human Behaviour claimed to present ‘historical analysis of national subjective wellbeing’. To do so, it relied on a quantitative analysis of digitised books, newspapers and magazines from the past two centuries. It focused on ‘words with stable historical meanings’. The effort, by Thomas T Hills of the Turing Institute and the Department of Psychology at the University of Warwick in the UK, caused dismay and not a little mockery from historians. The Wollstonecraft story above shows what many ‘Twitterstorians’ pointed out: there are no words with ‘stable historical meanings’, particularly not big and important words. ‘Happiness’ is an unstable historical concept, a false friend in historical sources. Nonetheless, the popular press fastened onto the claim that the 1880s were the happiest Britons had ever been. If only the mill workers of Manchester and slum dwellers of London had known.
The ignorance of the basic methods of the discipline of history is surprising given the robustness of the subfield of the history of emotions. Over the past two or three decades, the historical study of emotions has developed a rich set of tools with which to chart the ways that emotions have changed over time. Emotions such as anger, disgust, love and happiness might seem commonplace, but they are not so readily understood in the past. These concepts and the experiences associated with them are not historically stable. In addition, many emotions have ceased to exist, from ‘acedia’ (apathy) to viriditas (greenness); from ‘ennobling love’ to tendre (the tender emotion). Accessing them involves building an understanding of past concepts and past expressions in order to unlock what people once felt and experienced. This requires the forensic reconstruction of cultural-historical context. It is inherently qualitative work.
Not too long before Wollstonecraft presented happiness as the shallow satiation of desire, her acquaintance and fellow revolutionary writer Thomas Paine had consciously remade happiness as part of a republican vision. To do this, he elaborated an innovative concept of ‘common sense’ as a social and political sensibility... (MORE)
Dadaism ridiculed the meaninglessness of modern life – with captivating results
https://aeon.co/videos/dadaism-ridiculed...ng-results
INTRO: Dadaism was an avant-garde artistic movement born amid the wreckage of the First World War in Europe and formed in reaction to the perceived meaninglessness of modern life – in particular, of capitalism and its violence. The Swedish artist Viking Eggeling’s stop-motion animation Symphonie diagonale is considered both a Dadaist masterpiece and an early example of experimental animation. Basing the imagery on drawings he created alongside the influential German artist and fellow Dadaist Hans Richter, Eggeling revised and screened several versions of the short from 1922 up until his death in 1925. Shown as a silent film upon its release, this version of Symphonie diagonale features an original score, exclusive to Aeon. The contemporary Illinois-based composer William Pearson intends his music to react to Eggeling’s original vision in both style and composition, with playful, occasionally mechanical organ sounds, and melodies forming in sequence with the visuals emerging on screen. (MORE - video)