Asp-Z wrote:
There is a philosophical theory which says that emotions are social roles. We are meant to feel guilty when we do something wrong to dissuade us, and feel happy when we do something good to reward us - they are there to keep us abiding by society's values and expectations. Evidence for this exists in societies where they have emotions which are unheard of in other societies, for example the Japanese have the emotion amae, which is a feeling of dependency upon another’s love. This is similar to the feeling that children have towards their mothers, but it is experienced by adults, and the people of Ifaluk, a small island in the Pacific, have an emotion that they refer to as fago, which is “compassion/love/sadness” and is unlike any western emotion.
Source link.Given this, I believe that romantic love is also the same. It's a part of society, there to enforce the idea of family.
What are your thoughts on this?
While our emotions do run along with our cultural views, it would be a gross oversimplification to say that was the whole picture. Our entire range of feeling is based on natural phenomena. It's just that society tunes those feelings to specific situations, and outlets.
Individualism has taken off to the point that dependence on love is looked down on, and matching terms for Amae can be found in the conversation of any high school girl. I don't think many people have gone without hearing the terms 'clingy' and 'needy' in reference to some guy.
The Ifaluk's experience of Fago is something a lot of people experience, even here in America, but that doesn't mean we have a word for it. Don't you ever watch romantic comedies, and see these people struggle to define what they're feeling? The only difference is that we don't have a word for it, and that's part of what seems to make it so meaningful.
For the most part, emotions are universal among human society. The only difference is how those emotions are directed, for what end, and how they define it. The experience is relatively unchanged.
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"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
~ Albert Einstein
07 Jun 2010, 4:50 am
