Beyond Ontology: Ideation, Phenomenology and the Cross Cultural Study of Emotion

In this essay, I want to raise certain questions about the nature of emotions, about the similarities and differences in human psychology (“human nature”), and about the relation of psychological inquiry to ethics (in particular, the relationship between emotions and ethics). The core of my thesis, which I have argued now for almost twenty‐five years, is that emotions are (in part) a form of cognition, a matter of “ideas”, or in the current lingo, ideation . David Hume, rather famously, analyzed several “passions”, notably pride, in terms of “impressions” and “ideas”. While he held onto the traditional view that emotions were essentially sensations (“impressions”), he also elaborated an account of emotions defined by a complex (“a monstrous heap”) of idea, for example, the idea of self and of achievement in pride. Moreover, such ideas are relevant to ethics. For Hume, in particular, morals are a matter not of reason but of “sentiment”, thus bringing the understanding of emotions squarely into the arena of ethical discourse. Which opens the question whether different cultures with different ideas might have a very different conception and/or experience of pride as well as any number of different emotions. One might also ask, not very fruitfully, whether different cultures have different sensations, impressions or “affects”, but the promise of cross cultural emotions research clearly seems to lie on the side of “ideas”, in terms of different ways of seeing, different ways of conceiving, different ways of carving up and evaluating the world.