The Meaning of Disgust

Disgust has a strong claim to be a distinctively human emotion. But what is it to be disgusting? What unifies the class of disgusting things? Colin Mc Ginn sets out to analyze the content of disgust, arguing that life and death are implicit in its meaning. Disgust is a kind of philosophical emotion, reflecting the human attitude to the biological world. Yet it is an emotion we strive to repress. It may have initially arisen as a method of curbing voracious human desire, which itself results from our powerful imagination. Because we feel disgust towards ourselves as a species, we are placed in a fraught emotional predicament: we admire ourselves for our achievements, but we also experience revulsion at our necessary organic nature. We are subject to an affective split. Death involves the disgusting, in the shape of the rotting corpse, and our complex attitudes towards death feed into our feelings of disgust. We are beings with a"disgust consciousness"�, unlike animals and gods-and we cannot shake our self-ambivalence. Existentialism and psychoanalysis sought a general theory of human emotion; this book seeks to replace them with a theory in which our primary mode of feeling centers around disgust. The Meaning of Disgust is an original study of a fascinating but neglected subject, which attempts to tell the disturbing truth about the human condition. Additional ISBNs0199829535, 0199878269, 9780199829538, 9780199878260The Meaning of Disgust is written by Colin Mc Ginn and published by Oxford University Press. ISBNs for The Meaning of Disgust are 9780199912407, 0199912408 and the print ISBNs are 9780199829538, 0199829535. Additional ISBNs include 0199829535, 0199878269, 9780199829538, 9780199878260.