By Michel Meyer
The topic of the passions has constantly haunted Western philosophy and, in most cases, aroused harsh judgments. For the passions symbolize a strength of extra and lawlessness in humanity that produces troubling, complicated paradoxes. during this booklet, famous ecu thinker Michel Meyer bargains a wide-ranging exegesis, the 1st of its type, that systematically retraces the background of philosophic conceptions of the passions within the paintings of such thinkers as Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Spinoza, Descartes, Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, and Freud. the good ruptures that resulted in ardour s condemnation as sin, and to romantic exultation because the fact of lifestyles, are meticulously registered and the common sense governing them astutely explicated. Meyer therefore offers new perception into an age-old trouble: Does ardour torture humans since it blinds them, or, to the contrary, does it enable them to recognize who and what we actually are?
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Additional resources for Philosophy and the Passions: Towards a History of Human Nature (Literature and Philosophy)
Example text
On the other hand, if we don’t know that we have been victims of our passions as long as we don’t perceive them for what they are in reality, how can we even have the idea of liberating ourselves from them? Passion is at once something of which we cannot become conscious, since it is a creator of illusions, and something which we must recognize as being a source of trickery. Isn’t this contradictory? Plato’s reply rests on the distinction between philosophy and nonphilosophy, the latter being the mode of thought for ordinary persons, or more precisely, of each person in his or her material and corporal life.
And at the same time, Plato, like Christians, thinks that there is an original state where desire is innocent and ignorant of itself, protected from good and evil. An alternative possibility to this untenable duality will nonetheless appear. We owe its existence to Aristotle, who will propose an original, if not contemporary, resolution to the problem of the passions which History will downplay, favoring instead Plato’s view. 2 Passion as a New Relationship with Being Being and Logos If it were possible to characterize the work of Aristotle with a single word, then the choice would have to be ontologization, a somewhat barbaric word that signifies the systematic reflection about what is.
The inclination that the subject’s reason overcomes but with great effort, or not at all, is passion. ”5 Such a distinction is of course the mark of Kant’s concern for ethics and goes beyond simple description. The asexualized neutrality of emotion cuts it off from passion in the name of the opprobrium cast upon it, which leads passion to be considered as autonomous. While emotion constitutes a normal state of the psychic life, passion expresses the pathological aspect. However, by saying this, one loses the trace of the passionate, its origin; one risks being unable to explain passion and to see it as a separate entity.