Passion, a forgotten feeling

Abstract

When contemporary sciences and humanities use the term emotion while discussing human mental-sentient dynamics, they usually don’t question its supposed status of a conceptual universal. Yet, despite its frequent usage, the term is surprisingly ambiguous, and its universality status is highly dubious. For instance, it shows not to be particularly adequate for the analysis of the Croatian Church Slavonic (acr. CCS) lexis that expresses phenomena linked to the human mental-sentient dynamics. Instead, this lexis seems to be in concordance with the concepts pertaining to the medieval paradigm relying on the Latin terms passio (Eng. equivalent: passion) and affectus (Eng. equivalent affect). The paradigm is articulated in the most interesting way by Thomas Aquinas (Summa theologiae, acr. ST Ia.IIae.22–48) and unfortunately almost forgotten or unwarrantably confounded with the paradigm of emotions.The third option in conceptualizing human mental-sentient dynamics (besides those that rely on emotions on one hand, and passions and affect on the other) argues that the concept FEEL is the most convincing universal candidate. Namely, the researchers of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (acr. NSM) hypothesis present substantial theoretical evidence and ample amounts of corroborating data from typologically different languages of the world that back up such a proposal. This paper benefits from this finding, since the word FEEL, and NSM in general, proved to be an adequate tool for delineating similarities and differences between concepts of ‘emotion’, Lat. ‘passio’ and Lat. ‘affectus’.