The Meaning Of Disgust

Download or read book The Meaning of Disgust written by Colin McGinn and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-11-18 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Disgust has a strong claim to be a distinctively human emotion. But what is it to be disgusting? What unifies the class of disgusting things? Colin McGinn sets out to analyze the content of disgust, arguing that life and death are implicit in its meaning. Disgust is a kind of philosophical emotion, reflecting the human attitude to the biological world. Yet it is an emotion we strive to repress. It may have initially arisen as a method of curbing voracious human desire, which itself results from our powerful imagination. Because we feel disgust towards ourselves as a species, we are placed in a fraught emotional predicament: we admire ourselves for our achievements, but we also experience revulsion at our necessary organic nature. We are subject to an affective split. Death involves the disgusting, in the shape of the rotting corpse, and our complex attitudes towards death feed into our feelings of disgust. We are beings with a "disgust consciousness", unlike animals and gods-and we cannot shake our self-ambivalence. Existentialism and psychoanalysis sought a general theory of human emotion; this book seeks to replace them with a theory in which our primary mode of feeling centers around disgust. The Meaning of Disgust is an original study of a fascinating but neglected subject, which attempts to tell the disturbing truth about the human condition.

Download or read book The Meaning of Disgust written by Colin McGinn and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-11-04 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Disgust has a strong claim to be a distinctively human emotion. But what is it to be disgusting? What unifies the class of disgusting things? Colin McGinn sets out to analyze the content of disgust, arguing that life and death are implicit in its meaning. Disgust is a kind of philosophical emotion, reflecting the human attitude to the biological world. Yet it is an emotion we strive to repress. It may have initially arisen as a method of curbing voracious human desire, which itself results from our powerful imagination. Because we feel disgust towards ourselves as a species, we are placed in a fraught emotional predicament: we admire ourselves for our achievements, but we also experience revulsion at our necessary organic nature. We are subject to an affective split. Death involves the disgusting, in the shape of the rotting corpse, and our complex attitudes towards death feed into our feelings of disgust. We are beings with a "disgust consciousness", unlike animals and gods-and we cannot shake our self-ambivalence. Existentialism and psychoanalysis sought a general theory of human emotion; this book seeks to replace them with a theory in which our primary mode of feeling centers around disgust. The Meaning of Disgust is an original study of a fascinating but neglected subject, which attempts to tell the disturbing truth about the human condition.

Download or read book The Anatomy of Disgust written by William Ian MILLER and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William Miller details our anxious relation to basic life processes; eating, excreting, fornicating, decaying, and dying. But disgust pushes beyond the flesh to vivify the larger social order with the idiom it commandeers from the sights, smells, tastes, feels, and sounds of fleshly physicality. Disgust and contempt, Miller argues, play crucial political roles in creating and maintaining social hierarchy. Democracy depends less on respect for persons than on an equal distribution of contempt. Disgust, however, signals dangerous division.

Download or read book Savoring Disgust written by Carolyn Korsmeyer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-17 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Disgust is among the strongest of aversions, characterized by involuntary physical recoil and even nausea. Yet paradoxically, disgusting objects can sometimes exert a grisly allure, and this emotion can constitute a positive, appreciative aesthetic response when exploited by works of art -- a phenomenon labelled here "aesthetic disgust." While the reactive, visceral quality of disgust contributes to its misleading reputation as a relatively "primitive" response mechanism, it is this feature that also gives it a particular aesthetic power when manifest in art. Most treatments of disgust mistakenly interpret it as only an extreme response, thereby neglecting the many subtle ways that it operates aesthetically. This study calls attention to the diversity and depth of its uses, analyzing the emotion in detail and considering the enormous variety of aesthetic forms it can assume in works of art and --unexpectedly-- even in foods. In the process of articulating a positive role for disgust, this book examines the nature of aesthetic apprehension and argues for the distinctive mode of cognition that disgust affords -- an intimate apprehension of physical mortality. Despite some commonalities attached to the meaning of disgust, this emotion assumes many aesthetic forms: it can be funny, profound, witty, ironic, unsettling, sorrowful, or gross. To demonstrate this diversity, several chapters review examples of disgust as it is aroused by art. The book ends by investigating to what extent disgust can be discovered in art that is also considered beautiful.

Download or read book That's Disgusting: Unraveling the Mysteries of Repulsion written by Rachel Herz and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2012-01-23 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Disgust originated to prevent humans from eating poisonous food, but this simple safety mechanism has since evolved into a uniquely human emotion that dictates how people treat others, shapes cultural norms, and even has implications for mental and physical health. This book illuminates the science behind disgust, tackling such colorful topics as cannibalism, humor, and pornography to address larger questions including why sources of disgust vary among people and societies and how disgust influences individual personalities, daily lives, and values. It turns out that disgust underlies more than we realize, from political ideologies to the lure of horror movies.

Download or read book The Moral Psychology of Disgust written by Nina Strohminger and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2020-01-14 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an introduction to the major findings, challenges and debates regarding disgust as a moral emotion, and brings together scholarship from multiple disciplines such as philosophy, psychology, anthropology and law.

Download or read book The Revolting Self written by Paul G. Overton and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-04-17 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book looks at the phenomenon of self-directed disgust and examines the role of self-disgust in relation to psychological experiences and potential ensuing psychopathology and to physical functioning such as disability, chronic physical health, and sexual dysfunction.