BASIC EMOTIONS, BASIC EMOTION CONCEPTS, BASIC EMOTION NAMES: IN SEARCH OF EMBODIMENT
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.32782/philspu/2024.7.3Keywords:
basic emotion, basic emotion concept, basic emotion name, embodiment, mental imageAbstract
This paper exposes the aspects of human embodiment in basic emotions, basic emotion concepts, and basic emotion names. The aspects of embodiment in basic emotions are shown to be different from those in basic emotion concepts and basic emotion names. This paper presents its argument in the succession of four steps. First, the evolution of a linguistic concept is shown to embrace this concept’s diachronic depth and this concept’s diachronic variation in the worldview this concept belongs to. The diachronic depth of a concept is the archaic image that was prerequisite for this concept to emerge. This image had formed perceptually in the mind of a human being who sensed and cognized the surrounding world through interaction with this world, which is assumed to account for this concept’s embodiment in terms of those opportunities for conceptualization that the human body with its peculiar morphology then afforded to the human mind. Second, mental images and concepts are shown to undergo a mutual conversion in the human mind, whereby a modal mental representation (a mental image as a non-propositional object in the mind) is converted into an amodal mental representation (a concept as a propositional object in the mind), and back. This conversion is shown to be the case in the past when in the evolution of human consciousness the archaic consciousness with its rich mental images transitioned to the modern consciousness with its developed concepts, and also to be the case in the present when in verbal communication humans switch between the visual and auditory codes, which orchestrates the visual and auditory areas of the brain, with the respective organs of sense, and the deep and shallow layers of the mind, with the individual (un)consciousness transcending into the collective unconscious and its archetypes. On that, all concepts generally are embodied as long as all such concepts have diachronic depths in their worldviews and also in the minds of the people(s) who inherit these worldviews together with the languages they come to speak. Words (linguistic entities) manifest concepts (mental entities); linguistic concepts are the lexical meanings of those words that act as these concepts’ names in language. Third, basic emotion concepts in the English and the Ukrainian worldviews are specifically shown to be embodied in virtue of the archaic image of movement that lies at the diachronic depths of these concepts, whereas basic emotion names in the English and the Ukrainian languages are embodied in virtue of their capacity to carry in their inner forms this image from within the diachronic depths. Fourth, basic emotions of humans are characterized as biological universals in terms of their modality, which suggests that these emotions are evolutionarily determined by the properties of the human body. It is then concluded that basic emotions are embodied in virtue of their psychosomatic (the mind-body, or psychology-physiology, interaction) and sensorimotor (the interaction of physical senses and body movements, and of the nerve signals controlling these) nature.
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