I’m always on the lookout for concepts and tools that can help us negotiate the difficulties humans have determining right from wrong without pollution from emotions, non-ethical considerations, logical fallacies and rationalizations. Somewhere in this list of strange emotions there may be some.
I’m thinking about them while I recuperate from my last week of exhausting travel and daily seminars—I feel like I’ve been run over by water buffalo—and invite you to think about them along with me. I’m interested in your reactions.
UPDATE: I was just schooled that the origin of this list, not mentioned where I say it, is “The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows,” the invention of artist and blogger John Koenig.
Ethics Alarms 
I’m looking into DSM IV to see if any of these can potentially get me some disability money.
Kuebiko could destroy the economy even faster than global warming.
Interesting…
Actually, I did not know of the term “Ellipsism” but have frequently experienced the feeling as you have described ” A sadness that I will never be able to know how history will turn out.” I often wonder what the average, ordinary Roman citizen/person was thinking about their culture when… as we know now… that the Roman civilization was far past its “expiration date” but had not yet realized what had happened.
What about the French? What about the Brits?
Did the mass media of those times fail them? Why didn’t they know that times were changing?
I have this thought… as you call it “Ellipsism”… in the context of the United States of America. I wonder if we Americans have seen our “Golden Age” and watched it go by but still assume that our greatness will continue forever, and forever.
I am not sure that this is a safe assumption.
J. Houghton
Where on earth did you get the idea that they didn’t know? Kipling’s Recessional was hardly unique in acknowledging what was to come.
They didn’t know because Bob Dylan hadn’t written the song yet.
They were, however, familiar with the Latin original: tempora mutantur et nos mutamur in illis (many, perhaps most, people forget that last part).
I had no idea there was a tune to that!
Recessional wasn’t an acknowledgement of fading away it was a warning against debasing the moral fabric of society which would lead to fading away…more specifically that the moral debasing would always begin when forgetting Christ’s Finished Work on the Cross and replacing that memory with the boasts of a successful society.
How do you get from “it was a warning against debasing the moral fabric of society which would lead to fading away…more specifically that the moral debasing would always begin when forgetting Christ’s Finished Work on the Cross and replacing that memory with the boasts of a successful society” to “Recessional wasn’t an acknowledgement of fading away”? It was written in order to do the former, certainly, but in passing – as part of setting things up – it did the latter. I cited it here because my purpose was to show that the Victorians were indeed well aware of these matters – even though Kipling’s purpose was quite other. In fact, he couldn’t have used his set up material that way if it hadn’t been part of his audience’s background knowledge; it was only the point he wanted to make that he might have thought they might not know.
To remind readers, here are the relevant set up lines, from the 2nd and 3rd verses:-
Even if you are not satisfied with that evidence, it is hardly unique, as I pointed out. A couple of generations earlier Macaulay hypothesised a future visitor to a ruined London from New Zealand (not a British possession in his day but a figure for the utterly remote), an analogy he was bringing out to support the idea that the Roman Catholic Church was likely to outlast Britain’s greatness. Again, he was taking the latter decline as read, as supporting material for the new or at least unfamiliar point he wanted to make.
Not every Victorian accepted such predictions as true, but practically all knew of them; they were in no wise unaware of these issues. The commentary in the article linked just above even includes, “It had always been known that great cities were all doomed to fall” – and much more to that effect.
Context matters.
You said “Where on earth did you get the idea that they didn’t know?” replying to the original comment asserting that their empires were already fading.
Therefore your comment is this: “Where on earth did you get the idea that they didn’t know [that their empires were already fading]?”
You then cited “Recessional” as proof they did know [that their empires were already fading]. I demonstrated this is the not the case, as “Recessional” was a warning against the causes of fading greatness not an acknowledgement that greatness was actually fading. Same goes for your “other example”.
Context matters.
Context does indeed matter – and getting the arguments and issues right matters even more.
You just asserted that I was “replying to the original comment asserting that their empires were already fading”. That is a misrepresentation, no doubt due to inattentiveness; I was replying to the original comment asserting – and I quote – “Why didn’t they know that times were changing?”, which is something else again. Even if that contributor had the – much later – fading in mind, I was actually addressing the deeper theme he used just there, of change underway earlier that led ineluctably towards that later development, just as childhood portends old age even without having its frailties.
Therefore my comment is most definitely not: “Where on earth did you get the idea that they didn’t know [that their empires were already fading]?” You made that interpolation up. I was pointing out – accurately – that the people of that time and place knew that there would one day come an end, that they therefore knew that times were changing like that. They also knew that that day had not yet come, and I would never have claimed that they knew anything as false as that that fading was already underway. For that reason ‘You then cited “Recessional” as proof they did know [that their empires were already fading]’ is also incorrect, because I cited it in support of my actual point which I have just now repeated, not in support of your distortion of it.
‘I demonstrated this is the not the case, as “Recessional” was a warning against the causes of fading greatness not an acknowledgement that greatness was actually fading. Same goes for your “other example”.’ is argument by repeated assertion, and utterly fails to address the point: Recessional, while definitely a warning (though not of “fading greatness” but of degeneration), nevertheless brought out an understanding that “greatness” would eventually fade, that times were changing in that direction; rather than repeating your position you would be better served by searching independently for commentary on this, as then you would know it did not proceed from me. You tilt at windmills by making out that I claimed it “was actually fading” or that that material acknowledged that that was happening even then (in fact, the British Empire reached its apogee around the time of the Boer War – and its greatest formal extent as late as 1945, when various notionally distinct territories such as Sarawak were formally incorporated preparatory to decolonisation).
But you have kept me up well past my bedtime, so I shall pause here for a while. That will at least give you a chance to go and see for yourself without prejudicing yourself with the idea that I am pointing you at sources that merely repeat what I have told you.
This is quibble factor 10. His entire comment was holistic. You’re Cherry Picking now, the father of Out of Context arguments.
My objection to your analysis holds just as well with the “did’t know their times were changing” just as much as with the “empires fading” bit.
Recessional was a *warning* against what could cause such “times to be a changing” not an declaration that they were definitely changing.
There were surely those who knew, and they were just as surely outnumbered by those who would insist that every generation has always felt that way and that this time around was surely not so different from the mundane.
WordPress quote formatting fails me.
Is it ethical to use the Compendium without attribution to John Koenig!
I would say “No”….Here’s his “Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows,” and I’m adding the link to the post as well. Thanks–I had never heard of Koenig!
I’ve experienced all of these to one degree or another except Enouement, Vemodalin, and Lachesism. They must be pretty universal. Jouska is one of my favorites and I have to tell you, in my head, I’m pretty brilliant.
“There may be some useful ethical analysis tools buried here. Or not…”
I’m thinking “not.” Interesting and mildly entertaining, but I wouldn’t call these “emotions” at all, but rather descriptions of situations or scenarios that may (or may not) prompt a particular emotion or set of emotions . I’m pretty sure the range of human emotions was settled long before Koenig arrived on the scene. “Invention” is the correct term for this.
14, 16, 21, 23 may have ethical analysis uses. None of the others. It’s likely that you are right, but I’m not ready to concede that.
What you defined is exactly what ’emotions’ are, by definition, instinctive or intuitive “state[s] of mind deriving from one’s circumstances, mood, or relationships with others”. I have often thought we need more words like these to describe different states of mind. When I read them, I think I have (or have not) FELT them, and did not have a word to describe that feeling. Some on the list don’t work at all: For example, Onism is off on another tangent entirely: it’s an emotion a character in a science fiction novel would feel; Liberosis, on the other hand, is something I thought I felt quite deeply until I started reading Jack Marshall on particular subjects and it got a lot worse; and I frequently suffer from exulansis when reading these comments, which is why I rarely join in.
Whoops. Quotation marks around the first paragraph, please. They are Jim Hodgson’s words.
Thanks, Jack
I beg to differ regarding onism. It’s a fairly common emotion for me, not being able to participate in as many different cool things as I’d like. There’s always an opportunity cost to what I do, because whatever I do, there are many interesting things I’m not doing. It’s sometimes brought on by sonder.
I’m either familiar with or can imagine all of these “emotions”, but I’m not sure I would classify them as such. They do seem to be a combination of an emotion and a cause, which together create a distinct experience. I one tried to classify emotions, but some friends of mine did it better, I think: positive/negative, active/passive, long-term/short-term. Any emotion can be described using those axes. What causes the emotion or what you want to happen is something else entirely. We may need a new word for that.
What? Another new word?
#16 is an emotion Soldiers experience OFTEN.
Kenopsia – I’ve experienced some of the others but this is, how do I say this? My favorite? I first experienced the feeling (which I found tremendously exhilarating!) while watching Target Earth as a child. The emptiness of the Chicago streets, the eerie silence, made me shiver with delight. Even today, as a 68-year-old man, I long for those deserted cities. Go figure.
http://youtu.be/WQtPzAC76zM
The Omega Man did it for me.
“The Day the Earth Stood Still.” Creepiest movie ever. Saw it when I was probably seven or eight. I’ve never recovered.
There was more than one Twilight Zone or Night Gallery that gave me daymares, making me see the ordinary world just a trifle askew for awhile, but the real killers were seeing Wages of Fear at 13 and Diabolique a year later.
Just before I reached shaving age, I confess, I was terrorized by the Twilight Zone scene where the electric razor, cord trailing behind, descended the staircase. Probably explains my technophobia.
Lame episode, but that scene was a classic. Stephen King turned it into a whole, lousy horror movie based on his short story, “Trucks”: “Maximum Overdrive.”
Genius. Really, thanks for the link.
I agree generally with JimHodgson and SamePenn. I’ll stick with the four basic emotions of joy, grief, fear and anger. A few on that list might be subtle manifestations of one or more of those basics. While I agree that particular mental states could be described by many of them, I think they are states which are not emotions themselves, but instead are “frames of mind,” or products of intellectual processes which reflect that a person has either harnessed, or failed to harness, one or more of the basic emotions.
You forgot the 5th emotion: Going from 1st place to 8th place in MarioKart on the last half of the last lap. And no, “anger” is insufficient to describe that emotion.
You’re right; I forgot “road rage,” too.
Kuebiko is a state that I reach from time to time watching the latest “black lives matters” protests in tv news and other zombie shows. My solution is to turn off the damn tv and read an old Wayne Dyer Book (RIP).