A Human History of Emotion

Artha is a desire for things; dharma is the desire to follow your path, regardless of things.

It contains, for example, advice on consolidating your power by predicting someone’s death just before that person is mysteriously executed—by you—thus proving that you can see into the future.

By the way, when I use the word desire, I also mean things that are found under that word in a thesaurus—need, want, appetite, longing, craving, yearning, wish, aspiring, hankering, and so on—partly because it stops me from unnecessarily overcomplicating things but mostly because people throughout history didn’t often differentiate between their desires and needs, either.

The first is motivational desire: the desire to get up and do things. The second is hedonic desire: the desire to experience pleasure and avoid pain. Finally, there is learning desire: the desire to learn through experience what will be good for us and what will not.

In other words, while most feelings are “world-to-brain”—that is, we sense something in the world, and it creates feelings inside us—desire is “brain-to-world.” We feel desire, then we do something.

Both believed that emotions could be manipulated by reason, or lógos. Plato thought emotions should be directed toward something high, something spiritual, while Aristotle thought of them in a practical, down-to-earth way, as a tool for getting things done.

Understanding your audience is also essential to rhetoric.

when we are convinced that we excel in the qualities for which we are jeered at, we can ignore the jeering

The ability to manipulate the pleasure and pain of others is what makes a good rhetorician.

To act virtuously, you can’t just let your pathē guide you. You have to learn to think about what’s really best—to evaluate, to judge. You have to stop and think, “Is this really the right thing to do?” You can’t just do it because it gives you nice feelings.