A Human History of Emotion

Despite their superficial differences, there are many similarities between the ancient Greek and ancient Indian conceptions of emotion. Both see pleasure and pain as crucial. Both say that desire can be dangerous, and both believe that it must be controlled. Both suggest that thoughts and feelings are usually intertwined, as are actions and perceptions of the world. Of course, both these ancient views of emotion are quite different from the way we understand emotion today.

Avoiding sorrow by sticking to his path only seemed to cause more sorrow.

Is it possible to have control over your body, senses, feelings, thoughts, and consciousness?

After three days and nights under that tree, Gautama achieved that same childhood state of enlightenment: nirvana.

Artha is a desire for things; dharma is the desire to follow your path, regardless of things.

It contains, for example, advice on consolidating your power by predicting someone’s death just before that person is mysteriously executed—by you—thus proving that you can see into the future.

By the way, when I use the word desire, I also mean things that are found under that word in a thesaurus—need, want, appetite, longing, craving, yearning, wish, aspiring, hankering, and so on—partly because it stops me from unnecessarily overcomplicating things but mostly because people throughout history didn’t often differentiate between their desires and needs, either.

The first is motivational desire: the desire to get up and do things. The second is hedonic desire: the desire to experience pleasure and avoid pain. Finally, there is learning desire: the desire to learn through experience what will be good for us and what will not.

In other words, while most feelings are “world-to-brain”—that is, we sense something in the world, and it creates feelings inside us—desire is “brain-to-world.” We feel desire, then we do something.

Both believed that emotions could be manipulated by reason, or lógos. Plato thought emotions should be directed toward something high, something spiritual, while Aristotle thought of them in a practical, down-to-earth way, as a tool for getting things done.