The Anatomy of Disgust

William Ian Miller...meticulously dissects the notion of disgust with the rigor of a legal brief, trying to determine its boundaries and powers. -- Edward Rothstein * New York Times * Having ably dissected humiliation in his 1993 book of that title, Miller now sets his keen insights on something even more fundamental to the human condition: disgust. It is easy to dismiss disgust as a mere gut-level twinge; after all, the word (and thus, to some extent, the concept) did not even enter the English language until the 17th century. But Miller convincingly argues for disgust's wide-ranging cultural influence...With an Aristotelian zeal and thoroughness, he proceeds to explore the ramifications of disgust's various manifestations, from its role as the strict guardian of social hierarchies to its place as the gentle handmaiden of civilization...Miller has done a tasteful and intelligent job of shedding light on the muck of our most visceral and primordial emotion. * Kirkus Reviews * This is unique: an investigation into disgust and how we manage to sublimate aversion into sociological, psychological, and cultural channels...Readers willing to overcome their own disgust may find [Miller's idea] a brilliant one and also an unusual way to address how we love...and how we hate...More than mapping out revulsion, however, Miller maintains that moral outlooks emanate from disgust--a radical proposition that is argued provocatively. * Booklist * [A] learned book...Miller rightly perceives that disgust helps to define our identities, create hierarchies, and order our world. -- Anthony Storr * The Observer * Miller is a professor of law, but he brings to his task a mind well-stocked in literature, psychology, anthropology and history. He aims to bridge the academic and lay worlds, and to restore moral psychology to the wholeness it had for Montaigne and La Rochefoucauld...He wants us to treat disgust with the seriousness it deserves, as a determinant of love, sexuality, politics, and even our sense of self. And against all the odds he's succeeded: this is a fascinating book. Disgust is more than a feeling: it is an emotion with an inescapably moral tinge, and it has to be learned (the Wolf Boy of Aveyron did not know it). It is not simple misanthropy or plain nausea, but it is Sartre's existential nausee; it is Hamlet's view of the world and everyone in it. It is a response to defilement; it denotes a recoil from horror (cruelty and gore, or even Beauty and the Beast); it arises suddenly, but is slow to dissipate. And disgust is not a disembodied emotion like contempt. It is too visceral to be ironic, it always involves the senses, and it expresses itself in physical terms...Dealing in ideas which are frowstily familiar, [Miller] makes of them something startlingly fresh. This exploration of the psyche's murky byways would make a major book in itself, but Miller's purpose is deeper: he wants to prove that disgust is actually useful--in love, and possibly in the social arena. -- Michael Church * Financial Times * Although Miller is not the first scholar to bring disgust out from the spell of silence under which it has traditionally been kept hidden, he is the first to do so with a depth and empirical amplitude that corresponds to the complexity of the topic...Miller has written a compact study of a roiling subject, studded with local brilliances, that makes a large, but clearly arguable, point. Human society needs the "moral emotions," disgust perhaps most of all, to enforce its taboos, its armory of boundary-rules, and to keep pollution at bay. -- W. R. Robertson * Canadian Review of Comparative Literature * Miller is certainly an expert on the unsavory. He brilliantly marshals sources that span a millennium of Western history, drawing critically on the works of such diverse thinkers as Hume, Hazlitt, and Freud. * Library Journal * [A]n enjoyable, methodologically eclectic academic romp. -- Jen

William Ian Miller is Professor of Law at the University of Michigan.

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