About the Project
Alongside with rationalism, enlightenment, empirism, and realism, emotionalism is one of the most prominent, though hitherto little studied forms in which the new secular-educated, world-oriented elites of early modernity in the Middle East, the efendiyya, sought to discover, express, experience, test out, and assert their identity as an ever-growing group of new "players" in politics and society. Emotionalism is a key marker of the emerging "middle class" subjects’ agency and their interaction with the world. Among its most important functions is the self-empowerment through emotional-moral ennoblement, endowing them the nobility of the cultured citizen, a member of the global community of a modern, civilised humanity.
Methodology and objectives
Methodology consists, for the main part, in a close reading of all kinds of texts from the second half of the 19th and first decades of the 20th century. It seeks to achieve a fruitful integration of Literary Studies, Conceptual History, and Nahḍa Studies, combined with the insights generated by the MPI research focus History of Emotion as well as those gained in the Literature, Cognition, and Emotion (LCE) research group.
Outcome
Together with the overarching Emerging Subjectivities project, Civilizing Emotions is meant to shed fresh light on the transition from premodern to modern attitudes and worldviews in the Middle East with a focus on the psychological processes involved in this process, in particular the efendiyya's emotional-affectual "mind-set".