Schadenfreude

[Philip A. Bralich, Ph.D.]

At 03:43 PM 5/6/97 -1000, Bert Peeters wrote:

>A little too basic, of course, but from whose point of view? From an
Anglo-Saxon
>one, I guess - if such a generalization is permissible. What is it that allows
>us to say that if something is "a little too basic to ignore FOR US" it is
going
>to be the same for everyone else? Emotions are a highly language-specific area,
>as recent research (e.g. by Anna Wierzbicka) has painstakingly tried to show.
>Typologies of emotions are nice, but most of them suffer from an ethnocentric
>bias and what a lot of people do is impose the English way of seeing things
upon
>everything else. I'm not saying for one moment that there are cultures that
>don't have any form of envy or anger, or indeed Schadenfreude. What I'm saying
>is that they may have slightly different concepts, different forms of envy,
>anger
>and Schadenfreude. It would be wrong for us to try and force our world view in
>the realm of emotions upon theirs.

Who could argue with this?  Yet at some level I guess I am still
presupposing a strata of emotionality that is common to all
humans--what form that may take is unclear and whether or not
Schadefreude would make the cut into that strata is certainly not
clear either.  But surely there are at least a few emotions
that exist throughout the species and maybe in other species as
well.

Phil Bralich


Philip A. Bralich, Ph.D.
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