Abstract

This essay is dedicated to exploring the experience of multiple, perhaps conflicting, emotions occurring at the same time. Though this experience is part of our common language, such as when we speak of feeling conflicted or torn, philosophical accounts of the emotions and the research on these accounts tends to approach emotion sequentially, as a process of one emotion after another. This essay thus offers an account of simultaneous emotions in the work of two thinkers, Thomas Aquinas and Zhuangzi 莊子, focused on the coincidence of grief and joy as found in exemplary persons. I argue that both Aquinas and Zhuangzi offer accounts which acknowledge the reality of simultaneous emotions, and both offer different explanations of how this is possible, as well as how these emotions are moderated or forgotten.