In the middle of the last century, psychologist Paul Ekman declared, on the basis of a thin body of poorly-designed research, that all of human emotional experience can be reduced to just six basic emotions that act in the mind like chemical elements do in the physical world, mixing together to produce the more complex world of chemical compounds we live in. One of the six basic emotions that Ekman claimed to have discovered was disgust.
Disgust is an easy feeling to understand, because it’s a simple physical experience. Disgust is the desire to dis – gust, to expel food from our bodies in a sudden and violent way. As an emotion, disgust can be metaphorical, but the basic impulse to throw up or to shit your pants remains the figurative foundation for the feeling you’re having.
But then, even in this gross biological metaphor we see that disgust can’t be just one emotion. We all know that when a person says, metaphorically, that something makes them want to puke, it’s a totally different emotion than when a person says that something makes them want to shit their pants. The former is a feeling of being revolted by something, and the latter is a feeling of fear.
A revolting feeling figuratively revolts against our logical minds. Our conscious control of our own bodies is rejected by a revolution of the physical, even though the response may be triggered by emotional associations rather than a stimulus of purely biological threat. The gut, more often than we think, overpowers the brain’s delusions of cognitive reign with waves of hormones that no mere concentration of neurons can resist.
