Just to round out our picture a little bit more. A mid 20th century diametrically opposed view to those that we've considered thus far is associated with the existentialist philosophers, Jean-Paul Sartre, who talked about notion of nothingness. For him the notion of nothingness is not so much complete nonexistence, but rather the idea that ourselves are a kind of a clean slate on which we've got to write. The existentialist movement held that there's no reason to believe in existence of divine being, from whom perhaps one might hold morality can be derived or some other set of guidelines as to how one should live. Rather, one's got to, so to speak, create one's morality. One's got to, so to speak, take responsibility for being yourself and being yourself of particular type. The idea of nothingness then is supposed to suggest that if you hold that, it's human nature to do so and so, then the existentialists might hold that that's a bit of a cop-out. That's shirking responsibility from the thought that every time you decide to act, you've got to see yourself as a responsible agent, otherwise, you're acting in what they might call bad faith. So the idea of nothingness is, there's hardly any nature there to know. Furthermore, in so far as you posite in nature, there's an attempt that sort of deception to simulation, because you're acting as if something other than you yourself is responsible for the things that you do, whereas, the existential is going to say, no, you and no one else is responsible for the things that you do. If that's right, then you have to start out with a blank slate and write it and take responsibility for what you write. This idea then of nothingness is one that it's hard to stare, hard to hold onto, hard to keep fixed in your mind, but it's something that the existentialists will say, is required to keep fixed in order to take full responsibility for living your life fully in the moment, living your life with full responsibility. By contrast, this was mid-century, later in the 20th century we began to see theories of, for example, human emotions that had some substance that denied the claim that for example existentialist wanted to make of complete emptiness, nothingness, extreme malleability. Theories of emotions that have developed in the last 50, 40 years, suggests the following; that across our species, no matter whether you live in Papua New Guinea or whether you live in Canada, Chile, Argentina, Uganda, elsewhere, you share something with all other members of your species or at least all neurotypical, as they will call them, members of your species that has the capacity for various emotions and not just various emotions, that particular set of emotions often referred to as the basic ones. So, it's fairly widely held among, for example psychologists concerned with affect, that is theories of emotions and moods, that everybody is subject to at least the following types of emotions; happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and surprise. Furthermore, each of those emotions has a kind of signature characteristic way of running through a person. We know, for example that happiness behaves in a certain way no matter what culture you're from, no matter what country you live in, pretty much no matter how you grew up or how you were raised, the idea being that happiness has a certain way that it feels phenomenologically. When you feel happy, you feel kind of uplifted. It feels good, of course to feel happy as opposed to bad. That's almost too obvious to be worth stating. Furthermore, happiness as we now know various characteristic physiological aspects, such as the release of certain hormones, endorphines and so forth. Thirdly, happiness has a characteristic way that it presents itself physically on your body, for example happy people tend to look a certain way. They smile. Generally speaking, happy people tend to behave a certain way. They have a lightness in their step. They have exuberance about them et cetera. So, there's a signature that's associated with the emotion of happiness, likewise for sadness. We have a sense of what it is to be sad. How sad people behave. There is now a physiological understanding of sadness, as well. When people are sad, certain things happen inside their central nervous systems, for instance. Certain way your face tends to look when you're sad et cetera. Anger, we know the shape, the signature of anger, for instance. It feels a certain way, like you're boiling inside. There's a certain way your face will look if you're angry. There are studies that suggest that people who are angry have increased flow of blood to their arms. Whereas, people who are experiencing fear of a relatively substantial kind have an increased flow of blood to their legs, which if you think about it from an evolutionary point of view, is not a crazy way to be, because people who are angry tend to be ready to fight. People who are afraid tend to be ready to run. Likewise disgust. Disgust is considered one of the basic emotions. It's got a certain way that it looks. Probably a certain way that it feels from the inside phenomenologically. A certain physiology, as well as a certain way that it will cause you to behave. When you are disgusted, literally disgusted by for example something that just ate or smelled, you're going to wretch perhaps, you're going to make your face into a certain contorted way et cetera. Likewise, surprise. We know what a person's face looks like when they're surprised et cetera. So the idea is that these basic emotions are fairly pan-cultural, and if we need some substantial content to fill in our story about what human nature is, one good place to start I suggest would be the so-called basic emotions. Now when I say the basic and pan-cultural, I also want to acknowledge that there will be variation from one society to another, and maybe from one individual to another, and how emotions run through them. So according to some well known theories of the emotions on the basic level, we've got the substratum of basic emotions, but on top of that we have what are called display rules. So for example, even if you are a Westerner on whose face happiness tends to display itself spontaneously, nevertheless, if you're at a funeral. The rules for funerals say things like this, don't smile too broadly, even if you see somebody you have not seen for many years. You are indeed happy to see them, and you have a tendency to smile, but your rules as to how to behave will tell you generally, that you should keep that smile under control, lest you do something to embarrass yourself or someone else. Likewise, you can be angry, but there are situations in which you're supposed to keep your anger to yourself. At least in our society, or at least in western societies, if you're watching this course, engaging in this course from a non-western societies, then I hope you'll share your experiences with these emotions on our discussion board. I will be very interested to hear what you've got to say about your local societies' rules for how people who are feeling fear, how people who are feeling surprise or disgust or anger or sadness are supposed to or not supposed to let them express themselves on their faces, in their behavior, in what they say and so on. Nevertheless, even if there are variations from one person and one culture to another, in terms of how emotions are expressed, we can still discern, I suggest, a certain amount of commonality that has a physiological character, a behavioral character, and as well as an experiential characters as well. That's a commonality that I would suggest is one piece of a larger puzzle that we might try to understand as the theory of human nature.
