Summer's Nameless Emotions

Picture of man at night on Wall Street at night time. Photograph by Ashley Gilbertson. Image Source: National Geographic.

A heat wave here inspired today's collection of my best previous summer posts, along with Ashley Gilbertson's photo of Wall Street, above. All of these earlier posts explored summer's sultry, nostalgic or noir atmosphere and together illustrate one of the relationships between the environment and brain function, a cornerstone of cognitive science.

• Love in the New Millennium 6: Summer Solstice Stardust Reveries (21 June 2011)
• Midsummer's Simmering Collective Unconscious (22 June 2011)
• Summers Past, Summers Present (24 June 2011)
• Interlude: Sultry Summer Nights (18 July 2011)
• Heat Waves and Fraying Realities (21 July 2011)
• Welcome Midsummer's Unconscious (20 June 2012)
• Lovecraftian Heat Wave Film Night (6 July 2012)
• Photo of the Day: Lion's Head, Cape Town, South Africa (24 July 2014)

Psychoanalysts have particularly focused on nameless emotions as points at which experience moves past the capacity of language to describe it. See popsci's 2013 list by Pei-Ying Lin of twenty-one emotions for which there are no English words; and below, twenty-three emotions people feel, but cannot explain.

Image Source: Art of Manliness.

You can see a list of lost or unnamed emotions described by Aristotle in The Rhetoric, here and discussed in Kakos: Badness and Anti-value in Classical Antiquity. These were the emotions of in Classical Athens "concerned with the fortunes of others (eleos, nemesis, phthonos, zêlos and their (mostly unnamed) contraries)." In some cases, these emotions were depicted as divine entities or were personified as mythical characters, which means the Greeks actually worshiped the space between experience and mental awareness of that experience. In modern noir, this would be equivalent to presenting the heat wave's sultry atmosphere as an anthropomorphically personified character in the story.

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