Introduction to Special Section: On Being Moved. A Cross-Cultural Approach

At first blush, “being moved” is nothing more than a generic expression we use to account for states of emotional arousal. These can be as diverse as joy and sorrow, or pity and admiration, and are often generic themselves, which is why we do not need nor care to be more specific when we talk about them. On closer inspection, however, things are not so simple. For a start, there seem to be some emotional experiences (e.g., shame, envy, jealousy, or hate, as well as, on the positive side, cheerfulness or gaiety) that speakers of English would not normally describe in terms of “being moved.” Besides, if we were to render the phrase “to be moved” in another language – Italian, for example – we would be faced with two options: stick to its generic meaning of “feeling emotional” (emozionarsi) or further qualify it by translating it as commuoversi, therefore denoting a quite specific, bittersweet way of feeling that we typically experience “when something very dear to [us] makes it appearance” (Tan, 2009, p. 74). This would also be the case if we were translating the phrase into Spanish, German, French, Swedish, Russian, or Japanese, just to give some examples. ¹ To be able to differentiate between the generic and the specific sense of the phrase, a good translator would need to consider the larger narrative in which it is embedded and, looking for cues, she would ask questions such as “What is the emoter moved about?”, “Why is she moved?,” and “How does this experience make her feel and act?”

Over the past few years, scholars in philosophy and psychology have taken up the challenge of conceptualizing being moved as a distinct emotion ² and by specifying its intentional, phenomenological, and action-related features they have provided us with interesting insights into just the narrative cues we are looking for. As for the physiology and the phenomenology of the experience, scholars mostly agree on the ambivalence of being moved as a mixed emotion that brings about heart rate acceleration and piloerection, often gives us a sensation of warmth in the chest and a lump in the throat, and makes us smile through tears. ³ However, the intentionality of being moved is more controversial and different theories diverge on the definition of its formal object. According to Cova and Deonna (2014), the emotion of being moved is triggered when “positive values are brought to the fore and manifest themselves in a particularly salient way” (p. 453). The positive values specific to being moved are further qualified as those “that are important enough to make human life meaningful” (Cova, Deonna, & Sander, 2017, p. 362). At a psychological level, they belong to the category of “core values” and, as such, resist comparisons and trade-offs. Interpreted in this way, core values cannot be defined extensionally and vary across individuals and cultures. More specifically, however, it is not a core value as such, but its positivity or goodness that we experience when we are moved. So, while we may respond to success with joy, or to generosity with gratitude, in being moved we do not engage with these values per se, but with their overall goodness (Deonna, 2018). Somewhat in the same vein, Cullhed (2020) claims that the formal object of being moved is better understood in terms of “dearness.” While compatible with the idea that being moved is evoked by the apprehension of the positivity of a core value, Cullhed’s view also focuses on the affective quality of our relationship with it, which is “enduring and similar to interpersonal bonds” (p. 115).

Social bonds are central to the description that Menninghaus and colleagues provide of being moved as an “intensely felt response to scenarios that have a particularly strong bearing on attachment-related issues – and hence on prosocial bonding tendencies, norms, and ideals – ranging from the innermost circle of one’s personal life (spouse, children, friends) to higher-order entities of social life (one’s country, social and religious communities)” (Menninghaus et al., 2015, p. 12). On this view, therefore, being moved does not occur as a response to just any core value; rather, it is limited to the perception of prosocial norms and ideals. In a similar vein, Fiske and colleagues, who call being moved “kama muta” (the Sanskrit for “moved by love”), further restrict the domain of its core relational theme and submit that we are moved by objects, events, and values that specifically intensify “communal sharing relationships,” that is relationships “in which the participants feel one with each other. Their motives, actions, and thoughts are oriented toward something they have in common, some common essence. Thus they feel love, solidarity, identity, compassion, kindness, devotion to each other” (Fiske et al., 2017, p. 88). Finally, differences in the conceptualization of the formal object of being moved result in different interpretations of what its adaptive function might be. Cova and Deonna (2014) speculate that, from an evolutionary perspective, being moved might have been selected because it reveals the emoter’s attachment to values and, as a result, her potential to co-operate. From a subjective viewpoint, the experience of being moved focuses the emoter’s attention on what really matters to her, modulates her value system, and promotes her core values. For their part, Menninghaus and colleagues claim that being moved “facilitates prosocial acts of bonding and helping” (Menninghaus et al., 2015, p. 8), while Fiske and colleagues think it promotes “commitment and devotion to communal sharing” specifically (Fiske et al., 2017, p. 90).

These theories provide our translator, as well as scholars who study emotion from a cross-cultural perspective, with scripts that can be fruitfully employed to explore representations of being moved in ancient and modern literary sources. Of course, as always with emotion, one should not expect any of these models to be unrestrictedly valid across space and time. In the framework of a descriptive project that aims to understand folk emotion concepts cross-culturally, emotions are best thought of in terms of radial categories, patterns of experiences that admit variation, borderline cases, and exceptions. ⁴ Emotion is a cluster concept comprising a number of constitutive features, none of which must necessarily be possessed by all instances of emotion. This is true of “emotion” as a superordinate concept and of individual basic-level emotion categories. This is especially true of being moved, if only because of the intimate connection contemporary theorists envisage between this affective state and either core values that cannot be defined extensionally or prosocial ideals and behavior that by their very nature display a significant degree of individual and cultural variation. For this reason, the scripts that contemporary philosophical and psychological models provide us with are themselves best thought of as prototypes and cross-cultural emotion research should take a pluralist approach and look for relevant similarities while allowing for heterogeneity and fluctuations. ⁵

One of the main sources of fluctuation in cross-cultural emotion research is, of course, language, raising issues related to naming and lexicalization. This, again, is especially relevant for research on being moved, given the lack of consistency with which different languages (both ancient and modern) do or do not lexicalize it. No equivalent emotion term can be found in ancient or Byzantine Greek (see Konstan and Pizzone in this section), for example, and as far as English and other modern Western languages are concerned there are notions, such as that of the “sublime,” that can profitably be studied under the lens of being moved (see Caracciolo in this section).

The extent to which language influences nonlinguistic cognition, including affective experience, is widely debated. ⁶ To be sure, the absence of a particular emotion term in a given language does not mean that speakers of that language lack the corresponding concept and experience. As an Italian-speaking child, I knew no word equivalent to the German Schadenfreude, but when my little sister was reprimanded I did experience an intense degree of pleasure and entertainment. When we read Fernando Pessoa’s famous lines “E o português é saudades./Porque só as sente bem/Quem tem aquela palavra/Para dizer que as tem” we understand that, cultural specificity notwithstanding, he knew that we feel saudade everywhere in the world, because “Ter saudades é viver” even if you do not have a word for it. However, we also know that one’s linguistic options do inform one’s cognitive experience in many ways. For a start, different vocabularies and grammar systems force speakers to specify different kinds of information and enhance different kinds of associations. Compare languages that have a gender system with those that do not. While an English speaker can easily mention that she went out with a friend without making their gender explicit, speakers of Italian and Spanish cannot. Evidence also suggests that grammatical gender has an effect on people’s descriptions of objects: German speakers are more likely to say that a bridge (die Brücke, feminine) is elegant and slender, while for Spanish speakers (el puente, masculine) it is typically sturdy and towering. ⁷ In general, different languages modulate cognitive processes, such as attention and memory, in different ways, guiding speakers to emphasize certain features of their experience over others. ⁸ English speakers, for example, describe both intentional events and accidents using mostly agentive language. This means that, to them, if you broke a glass, you broke a glass, no matter whether you did it on purpose or if you just lost your hold on it. However, Spanish speakers would grammatically hold you accountable only if you had acted intentionally (rompiste el vaso as opposed to se rompió el vaso). As a result, while English and Spanish speakers remember the agents of intentional events equally well, English speakers are more likely to remember who the agent was in an accident, while Spanish speakers, for their part, are more likely to remember that it was an accident. ⁹ Using different languages, therefore, has consequences for what one pays attention to, for what one remembers, and even for the way one constructs agency and one’s attitude to blame and punishment.

The implications of all this for cross-cultural emotion studies are twofold. First of all, since from the absence of an emotion-specific term in a given language we cannot infer the non-existence of the corresponding experience for its speakers, we need to look for something other than labels in our sources. To this end, the scripts and narratives that contemporary theoretical models of being moved offer can be very useful to guide our search. Secondly, even if from the absence of an emotion-specific term in a given language we cannot infer the non-existence of the corresponding experience for its speakers, if and when we find a relevant script in our sources, we can interrogate them regarding this absence: is there a different label for the same script or is there none at all? And what are the implications of differences in vocabulary or lack of lexical specificity for what is affectively salient in the narrative? By interrogating ancient Greek, Byzantine, and Latin sources, as well as by rethinking the Romantic notion of the “sublime” in the aesthetics of nature, the papers collected in this section aim to answer these and similar questions.

A fine example of the way contemporary theories of being moved can inform cross-cultural literary research is offered by Cullhed (2019), who sheds new light on the interpretation of a number of Homeric passages representing characters’ tearful reactions. Reading these passages in the light of contemporary philosophical and psychological models of being moved, Cullhed invites readers to revise traditional interpretations of the narrated emotional episodes in terms of sadness (the grief one feels when faced with the irrevocable loss of something valuable), compassion (responding to the distress of someone whose welfare we value) and tenderness (the appraisal of someone’s vulnerability). By doing so, he shows how an understanding of such episodes in terms of being moved allows us to notice that the weeping characters “respond to the fact that the object is ‘dear’ (philos) and/or that it instantiates certain virtues (beauty, prowess, gentleness, intelligence etc.), not only in contexts of loss but also of recovery and relief, and the main action tendency involved is to communicate this evaluation and, if possible, embrace the object rather than withdraw in sadness” (p. 11).

Cullhed’s approach is very promising and in this special section we propose to follow it up and contribute to the diachronic cross-cultural exploration of being moved in two ways. First, we shall use current conceptualizations of being moved heuristically, with the goal of uncovering scripts and scenarios within which affective experiences encompassing being moved might be embedded in both ancient and modern literary narratives. Tracing lexicalization (or lack thereof) is also part of this task, with the purpose of analyzing its implications for what narratives represent as affectively salient. Pizzone’s and Konstan’s contributions go in this direction.

In her paper, Aglae Pizzone explores the potential of objects and artifacts to evoke being moved. She focuses on the meaning we attribute to objects based on the affordances they provide us with, that is the way we functionally interact with them in ordinary situations. She argues that literary and artistic representations of objects that have lost their original function evoke being moved by attributing to these objects the new function of reminding us how important they used to be. These objects (or their representations) are no longer there for us to interact with them as we used to: when we now look at them, we see functional disruption and broken affordances and, at the same time, we attribute to them a new meaning and purpose, that of signifying the dearness of what we have lost. Pizzone’s case-study is that of Psellos’ lament for his nine-year-old daughter, Styliane, who died of smallpox in Constantinople in 1054. Pizzone focuses on Psellos’ representation of Styliane’s hand, that could no longer be touched when the child was dying because of the wounds the disease had carved in it and that Psellos describes as an ivory hand. By doing so, Pizzone argues, Psellos remembers how delicate his dear child’s hand was by turning it into an inorganic object that, unlike Styliane’s hand in her last moments, affords touch and caresses. Because ivory is not living matter, Psellos and his readers are reminded of the irrevocable loss represented by Styliane’s death; but the unique tactility that ivory affords (which was especially appreciated by the Byzantines) conveys and preserves the preciousness of the child’s hand, whose dearness stands out against the background of death and tragedy.

David Konstan, for his part, deals with the absence of an emotion term equivalent to being moved in ancient Greek and Latin. Verbs of movement, such as the Greek kinein or the Latin movēre (as well as commovēre), were regularly employed in connection with emotional reactions and, more in general, with psychophysical responses to a wide variety of different stimuli, but they never designated being moved as a distinct affective state. Focusing on emotional reactions to music in particular, Konstan offers a strongly cognitivist interpretation of ancient views of emotion and argues that the relation between “movements of the body” and “movements of the soul” was not especially important to the ancients. His conclusion is that not only is the notion of being moved historically specific, but the association that “being moved” in its generic sense establishes between emotions and movement is far from being common to all cultures.

Our second goal is to provide current theories with new insights by investigating literary sources and by engaging in literary criticism. Because emotions are not fixed essences, historical research and cross-cultural comparison have the potential to shift the focus of attention to new and different features of affective experience and thus to enrich the way we understand it. This is what Marco Caracciolo does in his paper, where he investigates human emotional interactions with nature in the Anthropocene in the light of the impossibility of distinguishing natural from anthropic processes. He unveils the dualistic assumption of the Romantic idealist notion of the “sublime” as the perception of a scalar disparity between the human and the nonhuman, shows that such assumptions still inform Western philosophical attitudes towards nature, and suggests they should be abandoned in favor of the recognition of the entanglement of natural and human processes in the current geological era. From this new perspective being moved by nature “involves a sense of ethical responsibility vis-à-vis the nonhuman,” constitutes “a way of experiencing our collective involvement in a disaster of planetary proportions,” and can be understood in terms of the perception of core values along the lines of Cova and Deonna’s proposed model. At the same time, Caracciolo urges us to integrate this ethically relevant dimension of being moved by nature in the Anthropocene with an approach to this emotional experience that is centered on “patterned resonances between the embodied mind and the physical world.” Building on Burke’s material account of the “sublime,” Caracciolo understands being moved by nature as the physical experience of ethical values, thus suggesting that the intellectual apprehension of core values posited by contemporary philosophical theories should be reformulated in a nondualistic, embodied way.

The papers in this section derive from the Marcus Wallenberg Symposium On Being Moved, held at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, Uppsala, 25–26 October 2019. ¹⁰