The Anatomy of Disgust

William Ian Miller

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 1998
• Print ISBN:
  9780674031555
  9780674031548
• eBook ISBN:
  9780674256392
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

William Miller embarks on an alluring journey into the world of disgust, showing how it brings order and meaning to our lives even as it horrifies and revolts us. Our notion of the self, intimately dependent as it is on our response to the excretions and secretions of our bodies, depends on it. Cultural identities have frequent recourse to its boundary-policing powers. Love depends on overcoming it, while the pleasure of sex comes in large measure from the titillating violation of disgust prohibitions. Imagine aesthetics without disgust for tastelessness and vulgarity; imagine morality without disgust for evil, hypocrisy, stupidity, and cruelty.

Miller details our anxious relation to basic life processes: eating, excreting, fornicating, decaying, and dying. But disgust pushes beyond the flesh to vivify the larger social order with the idiom it commandeers from the sights, smells, tastes, feels, and sounds of fleshly physicality. Disgust and contempt, Miller argues, play crucial political roles in creating and maintaining social hierarchy. Democracy depends less on respect for persons than on an equal distribution of contempt. Disgust, however, signals dangerous division. The high's belief that the low actually smell bad, or are sources of pollution, seriously threatens democracy.

Miller argues that disgust is deeply grounded in our ambivalence to life: it distresses us that the fair is so fragile, so easily reduced to foulness, and that the foul may seem more than passing fair in certain slants of light. When we are disgusted, we are attempting to set bounds, to keep chaos at bay. Of course we fail. But, as Miller points out, our failure is hardly an occasion for despair, for disgust also helps to animate the world, and to make it a dangerous, magical, and exciting place.

1

DARWIN’S DISGUST

MODERN PSYCHOLOGICAL INTEREST in disgust starts with Darwin, who centers it in the rejection of food and the sense of taste. Consider his account:

The term “disgust,” in its simplest sense, means something offensive to the taste. It is curious how readily this feeling is excited by anything unusual in the appearance, odour, or nature of our food. In Tierra del Fuego a native touched with his finger some cold preserved meat which I was eating at our bivouac, and plainly showed utter disgust at its softness; whilst I felt utter disgust at my food being touched by a naked savage, though his hands did not appear dirty. A smear of soup on a man’s beard looks disgusting, though there is of course nothing disgusting in the soup itself. I presume that this follows from the strong association in our minds between the sight of food, however circumstanced, and the idea of eating it.¹

Darwin is right about the etymology of disgust. It means unpleasant to the taste.² But one wonders whether taste would figure so crucially in Darwin’s account if the etymology hadn’t suggested it. The German Ekel, for instance, bears no easily discernible connection to taste. Did that make it easier for Freud to link disgust as readily with the anal and genital as with the oral zone?³ I suspect that the English word is in some unquantifiable way responsible for the narrow focus on taste, oral incorporation, and rejection of food in psychological treatments of disgust.⁴ Before the word disgust entered the English lexicon in the first quarter of the seventeenth century, taste figured distinctly less prominently than foul odors and loathsome sights. Disgust undoubtedly involves taste, but it also involves—not just by extension but at its core—smell, touch, even at times sight and hearing. Above all, it is a moral and social sentiment. It plays a motivating and confirming role in moral judgment in a particular way that has little if any connection with ideas of oral incorporation.⁵ It ranks people and things in a kind of cosmic ordering.

This book is more than an anatomy of a narrow reading of the word disgust. I use the word to indicate a complex sentiment that can be lexically marked in English by expressions declaring things or actions to be repulsive, revolting, or giving rise to reactions described as revulsion and abhorrence as well as disgust.⁶ Disgust names a syndrome in which all these terms have their proper role. They all convey a strong sense of aversion to something perceived as dangerous because of its powers to contaminate, infect, or pollute by proximity, contact, or ingestion. All suggest the appropriateness, but not the necessity, of accompanying nausea or queasiness, or of an urge to recoil and shudder from creepiness.

Disgust, however, is not nausea. Not all disgust need produce symptoms of nausea, nor all nausea mark the presence of disgust. The nausea of the stomach flu is not a sign or consequence of disgust, although, should we vomit as a result, the vomiting and the vomit might themselves lead to sensations of disgust that would be distinguishable from the nausea that preceded it. The nausea of a hangover, however, is more complex, accompanied as it often is by feelings of contamination, poisoning, and self-disgust, as well as shame and embarrassment. On the other side, things or deeds we find disgusting put us in the world of disgust when we have the sense that we would not be surprised should we start feeling queasy or nauseated, whether or not we actually do so. Disgust surely has a feel to it; that feel, however, is not so much of nausea as of the uneasiness, the panic, of varying intensity, that attends the awareness of being defiled.

Let us put that aside for now and look more closely at the passage from Darwin. Is it food and taste that elicit disgust as a first-order matter?

In Tierra del Fuego a native touched with his finger some cold preserved meat which I was eating at our bivouac, and plainly showed disgust at its softness; whilst I felt utter disgust at my food being touched by a naked savage, though his hands did not appear dirty.

In this passage, long before food ever reaches a mouth to raise the issue of its taste, we have suggestions of other categories that implicate disgust: categories of tactility as in cold (meat) vs. hot, soft vs. firm; overt categories of purity such as raw vs. cooked, dirty vs. clean; categories of bodily shame, naked vs. clothed; and broader categories of group definition, Tierra del Fuego vs. England, them vs. us. For the native, it is not ultimately the softness of the preserved meat so much as what eating it means about the person eating it. For Darwin, it is not just that someone touched his food (with clean hands no less), but that the person doing the touching was a naked savage who had already offended him. In the first clause the savage is merely a curious native in the two senses of curious: curious because strange and curious subjectively as a dispositional trait that makes him poke at Darwin’s food. But once he finds Darwin’s food disgusting, Darwin redescribes him downward as a naked savage capable of polluting his food. Before this interaction Darwin could look at the native with the contempt of bemusement or indifference or with a kind of benign contempt that often is itself a component of curiosity. The native, however, gets too close and gives real offense, and the inkling of threat is enough to transform a complacent contempt into disgust.

Would Darwin have been as disgusted by the native touching his food if the native had not insulted it by registering his revulsion? Or had the native already discerned Darwin’s disgust for him and decided to use it to toy with him by touching his food? Would Darwin have been less disgusted if the native had touched him rather than his food? Food plays a role here, to be sure, and both actors share a deep belief that you pretty much are what you eat. The native recoils at the idea of what manner of man could eat such stuff, whereas Darwin fears ingesting some essence of savagery that has been magically imparted to his food by the finger of the naked savage. But oral ingestion is put in play here only because food is acting as one of a number of possible media by which pollution could be transferred. The issue is the doubts and fears each man’s presence elicits in the other and the little battle for security and dominance by which they seek to resolve it; it is a battle of competing disgusts.

Less loaded with politics is the smear of soup on a man’s beard, “though there is of course nothing disgusting in the soup itself.” Again it is not food that is disgusting; Darwin’s own explanation says it only becomes disgusting by the “strong association . . . between the sight of food . . . and the idea of eating it.” But this can’t be right. The sight of the man with his beard befouled is disgusting long before any idea of eating the soup on his beard ever would, if ever it could, occur to us. The association of ideas is not of seeing food in a beard and then imagining eating that food. If the soup is disgusting as food, it is so only because beard hair would be in it. Now that is disgusting. We could see this, in accordance with the structural theory of Mary Douglas, as a manifestation of things becoming polluting by being out of place.⁷ That captures some of the problem but doesn’t explain the sense that it is more the hair than the soup, more the man than the food, that elicits disgust. The soup on the beard reveals the man as already contaminated by a character defect, a moral failure in keeping himself presentable in accordance with the righteously presented demand that he maintain his public purity and cleanliness of person and not endanger us by his incompetence. It needn’t have been soup or bread crumbs that incriminated him; it could just as well have been bits of lint or even soap residue. No doubt, however, the soup would be more disgusting than either lint or soap. The soup, after all, unlike lint or soap, might have fallen onto his beard from his mouth or from a spoon that had already been in his mouth. It is thus not our fear of oral incorporation that makes the soup disgusting to us but his failure to have properly orally incorporated it.

Yet suppose that it was not a naked savage who touched Darwin’s meat but a cockroach that walked across it. Would the issue then be one primarily of ingesting food? Even here I think the matter is more complex. A roach walking across our arm would elicit disgust too and perhaps even more than if it walked across our food, and we are not about to eat our arm. The roach (and the naked savage) is disgusting before it touches our food; its contaminating powers come from some other source.

* * *

Disgust has elicited little attention in any of the disciplines that claim an interest in the emotions: psychology, philosophy, anthropology. It is not hard to guess the likely reason. The problem is its lack of decorum. Civilization raised our sensitivities to disgust so as to make disgust a key component of our social control and psychic order, with the consequence that it became socially and psychically very difficult for civilized people to talk about disgusting things without having the excuse of either childhood, adolescence, or transgressive joking. Other negative passions—envy, hatred, malice, jealousy, despair—can be discussed decorously. Talking about them need elicit no blushes, no urges to giggle, no shock, no gorge raising. They do not force upon us the grotesque body, unrelenting physical ugliness, nauseating sights and odors; no suppuration, defecation, or rot. The sinful and vicious soul, in other words, is a lot easier to own up to than the grotesque body and the sensory offenses that life itself thrusts upon us.

One scholar studying disgust recently complained that “contact with the disgusting makes one disgusting. To study disgust is to risk contamination; jokes about his or her unwholesome interests soon greet the disgust researcher.”⁸ And indeed it is hard to suppress ironic suggestions which seem necessarily to intrude when one commits oneself to a project such as this one. Darwin was the first to risk studying disgust in its own right. Evincing neither overt anxiety nor irony, he nonetheless limited his risk by keeping the discussion very brief, not even five pages. Freud was more expansive; he lumped disgust with shame and morality, treating them as “reaction formations,” whose function it is to inhibit the consummation of unconscious desire; indeed reaction formations are part of the mechanism of repression that makes the desire unconscious.⁹ Freud did not give disgust much direct attention except generally as a reaction formation. But without disgust lurking about, one suspects, his oeuvre would have been half as long. What else, after all, makes sex so difficult, so frequently the basis for anxiety, neurosis, and psychosis? One might suspect that Freud’s theories are themselves grand efforts to overcome a deep disgust with sex.

Until the last decade or so there was little else of much interest except for one superb article, straddling both psychological and psychoanalytic styles, published in 1941 by Andras Angyal.¹⁰ Angyal understands disgust to be directed against close contact with certain objects with the associated fear of becoming soiled. These objects are usually wastes of the human and animal body. These wastes are not contaminating because of any obvious noxiousness but because they signify “inferiority and meanness.”¹¹ Angyal also links disgust to various manifestations of the uncanny. His disgust is richly cognitive and social, not some primitive hard-wired reflex.

It was not until the 1980s that any consistent attention was paid to disgust.¹² And most of that work has been undertaken by the experimental psychologist Paul Rozin.¹³ Building on Darwin and Angyal, Rozin has written, in conjunction with several associates, numerous articles on various aspects of disgust. He argues for a core disgust centered on oral incorporation and food rejection. Taste is the core sense, the mouth the core location, ingestion and rejection via spitting or vomiting the core actions. Core disgust, he maintains, is a cognitively sophisticated emotion, depending on well-developed ideas of contamination and contagion. Disgust is organized by laws of sympathetic magic: a law of similarity holds that similarities in appearance mean deeper similarities in substance, and a law of contamination holds that once in contact always in contact. He has proven people reluctant to eat imitation dog feces realistically fashioned out of chocolate or to drink a favorite beverage stirred by a brand-new comb.

Without ever abandoning his notion of a core disgust in food rejection, Rozin has come to recognize that disgust is too rich to be accommodated by such a narrow notion. In later works the core expands beyond food to include bodily products and animals and their wastes¹⁴ and then five additional domains: sex, hygiene, death, violations of the body envelope (gore, amputations), and sociomoral violations.¹⁵ All these are gathered under one new generalizing theory of disgust: a psychic need to avoid reminders of our animal origins.

Rozin’s early research was in food and appetite; his interest in disgust followed upon this research, and his theories, not surprisingly, bear the mark of his initial interests. Rozin’s work has much to recommend it. His claim about the necessary connection between disgust and ideas of contamination and contagion is clearly right; he also organized the subject and developed clever experiments to prove his claims.¹⁶ Much of my discussion in Chapters 3–5, in which I provide an interpretive phenomenology of disgust, is organized in response to his work. As will be seen, I reject rather more than I accept, especially both notions of a core disgust residing either in food rejection or in anxieties about our animal origins. But I must acknowledge a major debt to Rozin and his colleagues. For one, they have given the study of disgust some small bit of legitimacy. For another, they have provided much empirical work that rescues many of my claims from being dismissed as pure speculation. They are also aware of social and cultural issues in a way one has come to expect academic psychologists not to be. Rozin and his coauthors recognize the complex interaction of disgust with the social and moral situations that engender it. And finally, as is the case with all good work, they raise interesting issues and define an area of inquiry that are suggestive and productive of further work and speculation.

Disgust owes what little acceptability it has as a topic of academic discourse to two main developments, one social and cultural, the other more narrowly intellectual: (1) the general loosening of norms surrounding once taboo topics of bodily functions and sexuality, what we might more tendentiously call the coarsening or pornographization of public discourse; (2) the resurgence across a multitude of disciplines of interest in the emotions. It is hard to imagine that Rozin’s work could have taken place much earlier than it did. Let me put aside point 1 as having been adequately dealt with by its mere mention and briefly take up point 2. I am not about to take the space to review the various theories of emotion, but a few general remarks are in order.¹⁷

Disgust is an emotion. Some may resist this claim because disgust looks too much like a purely instinctual drive, too much of the body and not enough of the soul, more like thirst, lust, or even pain than like envy, jealousy, love, anger, fear, regret, guilt, sorrow, grief, or shame.¹⁸ Such resistance either confuses nausea with disgust or is better seen to evince a claim about disgust’s more embodied “feel” than other emotions. Yet the latter claim ultimately depends also on confusing disgust with nausea. As we have noted, disgust’s relation with nausea is not a necessary one. Like all the emotions, disgust is more than just a feeling. Emotions are feelings linked to ways of talking about those feelings, to social and cultural paradigms that make sense of those feelings by giving us a basis for knowing when they are properly felt and properly displayed. Emotions, even the most visceral, are richly social, cultural, and linguistic phenomena. How else do we learn to name them? How do we learn the rules governing how to feel, when to feel, whether to feel, and how much to feel in what settings? Emotions are feelings connected to ideas, perceptions, and cognitions and to the social and cultural contexts in which it makes sense to have those feelings and ideas.¹⁹ Emotions also have functions and often are motives for action. They give our world its peculiarly animated quality; they make it a source of fear, joy, outrage, disgust, and delight.²⁰ They also can de-animate the world by making it a cause for boredom and despair. They even provide ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue
• 1. Darwin’s Disgust
• 2. Disgust and its Neighbors
• 3. Thick, Greasy Life
• 4. The Senses
• 5. Orifices and Bodily Wastes
• 6. Fair is Foul, and Foul is Fair
• 7. Warriors, Saints, and Delicacy
• 8. The Moral Life of Disgust
• 9. Mutual Contempt and Democracy
• 10. Orwell’s Sense of Smell
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index