I SECOND THAT EMOTION ...Carried Unanimously

If you imagine the human brain as a triple-decker sandwich, the bottom (deep subcortical) layer would contain the oldest, most important ‘filling,’ the neural systems managing unconscious functions such as breathing and heartbeat regulation, and the four ‘desperados’ of our magnificent seven emotions: FEAR, LUST, RAGE and SEEKING.*

From an evolutionary perspective,** the SEEKING emotion is the engine that drives us to explore our environment for survival stuff, i.e. food and water, tools and weapons, mates and allies, places of safety. But SEEKING also powers the nine ‘aesthetic’ emotions (BELOW)*** which are our stock-in-trade in The Business of Pleasure. The stuff that keeps our audiences glued to their seats, queuing around the block, or camping round their laptops on a Friday morning on-sale. They bring them in and bring them back. Or as that celebrated party animal, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) succinctly put it: “We linger in and extend the observation of beauty, because this observation reinforces and reproduces itself.”

These are our nine building blocks in The Business of Pleasure. They can be interwoven, juggled and cooked to produce an almost infinite number of combinations (DNA only has four building blocks, after all). They may appear, on the surface, to be frothy, foppy and insubstantial, but they spring from our oldest, most reptilian, brain layer, alongside Breathing, Heart-Beats, Fear, Lust and Rage. And are almost as indispensable, I would argue, for supporting human life.

DT 25 October, 2024

Pictured: Hohle Fels flute and Lion Man statue, 40,000 years old, Chauvet Cave Painting, 30,000 years old

*The other three emotions, CARE, PANIC and PLAY, are located one floor up.

**’Emotions are the pyschoneural processes that are influential in controlling the vigour and patterning of actions in the dynamic flow of intense behavioural interchanges between animals as well as with certain objects important for survival. Hence, each emotion has a characteristic “feeling tone” that is especially important in encoding the intrinsic values of these interactions, depending on their likelihood of either promoting or hindering survival (both in the immediate “personal” and long term “reproductive” sense. Subjective experiential-feelings arise from the interactions of various emotional systems with the fundamental brain substrates of ‘the self,’ that is important for encoding as well as retrieving information on new events as well as retrieving information on subsequent events and allowing individuals efficiently to generalize new events and make decisions.’ Jaak Panksepp 1998

***Table of 9 aesthetic emotions Menninghaus et al., 2019