ABSTRACT
It is the Greeks who have had perhaps the strongest influence on our culture of fellow-feeling, developing the basic terms and concepts that continue to haunt our understanding of emotion in the West. Along with instituting this emotional nomenclature, they also inaugurate the West’s deep-seated suspicion of all feeling by introducing emotion’s younger sibling, reason. The result is a rivalry, or dialectic, that has subsequently been played out through the centuries, continuing to today. But the Ancient Greeks do not have the final word on this subject. The Sanskrit culture is equally impressive in its conception of the role of emotion and is worthy of equal consideration as we try to tease out the complicated place of so ineffable an emotion as fellow-feeling.
