Chapter 3 ‘Holism’ in Cognitive Approaches to the Ancient Emotions
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Abstract
Emotional experience is at once bodily, mental, cultural and social. Methods for studying the emotions, especially those of historical societies, must therefore be equally multidisciplinary to avoid reducing affective experience to a single dimension. This chapter evaluates two kinds of approach to studying the ancient emotions drawing inspiration from the cognitive sciences: in particular, the Wierzbickian script-based and Lakovian metaphor-based methods. It argues that whereas the Wierzbickian approach falls short of an adequate cultural emotionology, an embodied semantics along cognitive-linguistic lines can enable emotion concepts to be studied in a way that is both emically sensitive and etically sound, as well as in their several dimensions simultaneously – thus affording a more holistic perspective on this aspect of ancient experience.