These were/are: Anger, Disgust, Fear, Happiness, Sadness, and Surprise.

This generates the knock on conclusion that all other facial expressions and associated emotions are derived from these 6 elemental expressions/emotions. All non-elemental expressions/emotions, therefore, are combinations, in varying ratios, of two or more elemental expressions/emotions.

In the 90s he added the following to the elemental expressions: Amusement, Contempt, Contentment, Embarrassment, Excitement, Guilt, Pride in achievement, Relief, Satisfaction, Sensory pleasure, and Shame. (What about Love? I hear you ask. I refer you to Tina Turner who said: “What’s love got to do, got to do, got to do with it? What’s love but a secondhand emotion?”)

Personally, I’m not so sure about these later additions, but if these too are elemental, the same knock on conclusion applies – all other emotions are derived from combinations of two or more of these seventeen.

In these left brain driven times, there is currently, among the chattering classes, a sort of back lash which celebrates “intuition”, “feelings”, and, of course, sensitivity to emotions. This is not necessarily a bad thing. But it is worth voicing a note of caution as we strive not to forget the black hole out of which we Europeans were fortunate enough eventually to climb during the Renaissance. As we squirmed under the crushing weight of a “christian” hegemony gone mad – a system of insubstantiable belief-statements based largely on superstition, hysteria, and the urge of the few to control the many – news of mathematics and libraries and logic and critical thinking began slowly to seep in from what was then the
largely arab/muslim world to the south and east. Much of it had of course accumulated during classical times but got driven out by the non-negotiable belief plague. It was these mischievous and subversive concepts that eventually began to undermine the beliefstatements of the christian rulers and erode their hysterical power base.

However, having noted the caution above about black holes and the importance of avoiding them, and assuming that centrally manipulated superstition does not again become the ruling force, we might give restrained and measured welcome to the re-advent of intuition and the subjective interpretation of events.

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© 2016 Deacon Martin