Emotion

The tragic poets, and Euripides above them all, are the writers to whom the tradition returns when it wants a case in which the passions are shown not as something to be analyzed but as something to be endured. The Medea has become the classical text for what the later philosophers will call the weakness of the will, or incontinence, or the defeat of reason by passion. At the center of the play stands a speech in which Medea, having weighed the claims of her murdered children against the claims of her revenge upon Jason, acknowledges the superiority of the former and proceeds to act upon the latter. She does not deceive herself. She does not mistake the worse for the better. The distinctive thing she says is that her thumos, her spirit or wrath, is stronger than her deliberations, and that she will follow it.

What this speech gives the tradition is an emotional fact which the purely intellectual treatment of the soul cannot quite accommodate. If the passions were merely a confused perception of the good, as some later writers will say, the clear perception of the better should be enough to set the agent right. Medea's case is that her perception is clear and that it fails to govern. Euripides does not try to explain this failure by assigning to her a secret love of her own suffering, or a hidden ignorance, or a demonic possession. He presents it as the simple working of the passion itself, which, once it has taken possession of the whole of the agent, does not leave room for the counsels of prudence to be heard. The problem is aggravated by the fact that Medea is not a foolish woman. She is, by her own account and by the chorus's, a woman of more than common intelligence.

The questions raised here are taken up under several heads. The relation of the passions to the will is discussed in the chapter on Will; the relation of the emotional to the rational soul in the chapter on Mind; the particular problem of how an agent can act against knowledge in the chapter on Good and Evil. What belongs to the idea of Emotion is the dramatization of a passion that is not merely a feeling which accompanies an action but is itself the cause of the action, and is felt by the agent as a force coming from within and not subject to her command.

Plato, in the Republic, will use the case of Leontius, who against his will looks at the corpses, to show the division of the soul into parts, and Aristotle, in the Ethics, will build on similar cases his analysis of incontinence. Both of them have the Medea in view, however distantly. Aquinas will make room within his account of the passions for the possibility that the sensitive appetite may draw reason after itself, rather than the reverse, and in doing so he is still working with a problem Euripides had raised for the tradition. What the philosophers do, Euripides had already shown.

In Republic Book IV, Plato divides the soul into three parts: the rational, the spirited, and the appetitive. The passions belong to the two lower parts. Appetite drives toward food, drink, and sex; spirit drives toward honor, anger, and competition. Reason, the highest part, has no passions of its own but the capacity to judge and govern. The well-ordered soul is one in which reason rules, spirit serves as its ally, and appetite submits. On this view, the passions are not evil in themselves; they become problematic when left without governance, and manageable when rightly ordered. The relation between these three parts of the soul is further examined under the idea of the Soul.

The Phaedrus offers a vivid illustration of the same structure. The soul is compared to a charioteer driving two horses: one noble and obedient, representing spirit, the other wild and unruly, representing appetite. The charioteer must govern both in order to ascend toward the vision of the Forms. This comparison does not call for the elimination of the passions but for their direction. The spirited element, when trained, assists the ascent; the appetitive element, when disciplined, ceases to impede it. The passions contain energy essential to the soul's movement; the difficulty lies in directing that energy toward worthy objects.

In Republic Book X, Plato considers the effect of poetry and dramatic art upon the passions. The audience at a tragedy indulges in grief and pity, emotions that reason would ordinarily restrain. Such indulgence, Plato argues, weakens the rational part of the soul and strengthens the irrational. The person who regularly surrenders to emotional stimulation may thereby become less capable of rational self-governance. This argument connects the psychology of the passions to questions of education and political order that are treated more fully under the ideas of Poetry and Education.

Aristotle will question Plato's sharp division between reason and passion, arguing that the virtuous person feels the right emotions at the right times and in the right degree. Aquinas will build an elaborate classification of the passions while preserving the Platonic insistence that reason must govern them. Subsequent thinkers who take up the question of emotion generally find it necessary to reckon with Plato's position that the passions, left to themselves, tend toward disorder.

Aristotle's account of the passions differs from Plato's in a fundamental respect. Where Plato treats emotions as forces that reason must subdue, Aristotle treats them as responses that can be appropriate or inappropriate, excessive or deficient. The virtuous person is not the one who suppresses anger but the one who feels anger at the right time, toward the right person, in the right degree, and for the right reason. Virtue is a mean between extremes, and this applies to the passions as fully as it applies to actions. The coward feels too much fear; the reckless man feels too little; the courageous man feels the right amount.

The Rhetoric provides the most systematic account. Aristotle analyzes anger, calm, friendship, enmity, fear, confidence, shame, pity, indignation, envy, and emulation, treating each emotion as a composite of judgment and feeling. Anger, for example, is "a desire, accompanied by pain, for a conspicuous revenge for a conspicuous slight." This definition has three components: a cognitive judgment (someone has slighted me), a feeling (pain), and a desire (for revenge). The emotion is not a blind impulse; it contains an assessment of the situation. To feel anger appropriately is to judge correctly that one has been slighted and to desire a proportionate response. This cognitive dimension makes emotions educable. They can be trained, refined, and corrected, because they involve beliefs that can be true or false.

This theory has large consequences for ethics. If emotions involve judgments, then moral education is partly the education of the emotions. The person raised well learns to take pleasure in noble actions and to feel pain at shameful ones. Habituation shapes not just behavior but feeling. Aristotle explicitly says that the person who abstains from bodily pleasures and delights in doing so is temperate, while the person who abstains but is pained by it is merely continent. The difference is internal: the temperate person's emotions are aligned with reason, while the continent person's emotions resist it. Full virtue requires that passion and reason speak with one voice.

Aquinas will draw on Aristotle's account in constructing his classification of eleven distinct passions under the concupiscible and irascible powers. Hobbes will set aside the evaluative content and reduce emotions to motions of the body. The question of whether emotions involve cognitive judgments that can be true or false, or whether they are simply bodily impulses, runs through the subsequent debate and connects the analysis of emotion to broader questions treated under Reason and Mind.

Aquinas devotes twenty-seven questions of the Summa Theologica to the passions, producing the most detailed analysis of emotion in the medieval period. He defines the passions as movements of the sensitive appetite, the faculty of the soul that responds to objects perceived as good or evil through the senses. The passions are not acts of the rational will; they arise in the part of the soul that humans share with animals. But because the human soul is a unity, the passions are subject to reason's governance, and their moral quality depends on whether they are ordered or disordered by the will.

The classification is precise. Aquinas divides the sensitive appetite into two powers: the concupiscible, which responds to objects perceived as simply good or evil, and the irascible, which responds to goods or evils that are difficult to obtain or avoid. Under the concupiscible power fall six passions arranged in three pairs: love and hatred, desire and aversion, joy and sorrow. Under the irascible power fall five: hope and despair, courage and fear, and anger (which has no contrary, since it arises only in response to a present evil and moves toward overcoming it). Every emotional experience, however complex, can be analyzed as some combination of these eleven basic movements. This is not mere taxonomy; it provides a framework for moral analysis. Each passion can be evaluated by asking whether it is directed at the right object, in the right measure, and under the governance of reason.

Aquinas also addresses whether the passions are morally good or evil. His answer is characteristic: the passions in themselves are morally neutral. They become good when reason and will direct them toward appropriate objects, and evil when they escape rational control. This distinguishes his position from both the Stoics, who regarded the passions as diseases of the soul to be eliminated, and from any purely permissive view that treats all feelings as equally valid. The virtuous person does not lack passions; he experiences them in the right way. The compassionate person feels genuine sorrow at another's suffering, and this sorrow, when governed by prudence, is morally praiseworthy.

Descartes will replace Aquinas's Aristotelian psychology with a mechanistic account of the passions as products of the body's interaction with the soul. Spinoza will carry this further, denying the distinction between sensitive and rational appetite entirely. The question of whether the passions are morally neutral in themselves, or whether they carry some moral significance independent of rational governance, connects the analysis of emotion to the broader themes treated under Virtue and Vice and Habit.

The treatment of the passions in Shakespeare is given not in a treatise but in the progression of the tragic actions, and each of the major plays can be read as the showing of what a single emotion, when it has come to dominate a soul, will do with the man it has taken over. The philosophical tradition from Plato through Aristotle and the medievals had discussed the passions as movements of the sensitive soul, to be ordered by reason and by habit, and had given taxonomies of them and accounts of their proper function. Shakespeare takes the philosophical description for granted and shows instead what the passions look like in their fully developed tragic form. Othello is the case of jealousy, Macbeth of ambition, King Lear of rage and its exhaustion, and Hamlet of a grief which will not be put into action. Each play is in one aspect a case study in a particular passion and in what the passion does when the reason has not held it.

Jealousy is the clearest case. Othello is not, at the opening of the play, a jealous man; he is presented as the opposite, as one who has been slow to doubt where doubt might have been warranted. What Iago does is to provide, with patience and with the use of circumstantial signs, the occasion on which a new passion may arise. Once it has arisen, the passion does not wait upon further evidence; it generates its own evidence, it reinterprets past events in its own light, and it moves toward the act by which it will be satisfied. The play is at once a showing of how such a passion is aroused and a showing of what a man under its influence can no longer do, namely to pause and reason and wait for the evidence which would have disconfirmed it. Similar accounts might be given of the other plays. What they have in common is the showing of the passion as an event that takes over a life, and that can be mastered, if at all, only by a discipline which has to have been acquired before the occasion on which it would be needed.

The philosophical questions raised belong also to the treatments of Will, of Desire, of Love, of Good and Evil, and of the various particular passions under their own heads. What Shakespeare contributes to the idea of Emotion is the showing of the passions in their full tragic development, and the recognition that a philosophical taxonomy of the passions, however useful for understanding their nature, does not give the measure of what they are in the lives of the men who undergo them.

Hobbes, who treats the passions at length in the Leviathan and who writes with the Shakespearean tragedies in view, will give an account of ambition, of fear, and of the desire for power as the motions of the mind from which political life arises. Descartes, in the Passions of the Soul, will attempt a physiological and moral classification of the passions which preserves the philosophical tradition but responds to the Shakespearean cases in which the classification is put to the test. Spinoza, who knows the Shakespearean instances through the work of the moralists of his century, will give in the Ethics a geometric analysis of the passions in which the cases the plays had made familiar are offered as the material to be explained. Hume, at the end of this line, will take the passions as the springs of action and treat the reason as their servant, a position which the Shakespearean tragedies had in their own way anticipated.

Hobbes sets aside both the Aristotelian evaluative content and the Thomistic metaphysical framework in his account of the passions. Emotions are not judgments about good and evil; they are small beginnings of motion in the body, caused by the action of external objects on the sense organs. When the motion tends toward the object, it is called appetite or desire; when it tends away, it is called aversion. Good and evil are nothing but names for what a person desires or avoids. There is no objective good that the passions track; the passions constitute the only meaning that "good" and "evil" have.

Chapter 6 of Leviathan catalogs the passions with characteristic bluntness. Joy is the appearance of appetite satisfied. Grief is the appearance of aversion realized. Hope is appetite with an opinion of attaining. Fear is aversion with an opinion of hurt from the object. Courage is the same as anger. Laughter is sudden glory. Love is desire for a particular object. The entire emotional life of human beings is resolved into varieties of motion toward and away from things. There is no hierarchy of higher and lower passions, no distinction between rational and sensitive appetite. All passions are equally mechanical, and all voluntary actions spring from them. Deliberation is nothing but the alternation of appetites and aversions until one prevails, and the prevailing passion is the will.

The implications for moral philosophy are considerable. If good and evil are defined by desire and aversion, there is no natural law in the traditional sense, no objective standard by which the passions can be judged appropriate or inappropriate. The only difficulty with the passions is practical: unchecked, they lead to conflict. In the state of nature, where every person pursues his own desires without restraint, the result is war. The remedy Hobbes proposes is not the education of the passions, as Aristotle had urged, nor their governance by reason and will, as Aquinas had maintained, but the imposition of a sovereign power that redirects the passions through fear of punishment. The connection between the psychology of passion and the necessity of political authority is treated more fully under the ideas of Government and Law.

Spinoza will carry the mechanistic approach further, arguing that the passions are confused ideas rather than bodily motions. Hume will share Hobbes's rejection of reason's sovereignty over passion but will develop a more elaborate account of the moral sentiments. The question of whether emotion or reason is the primary motive of human action, which Hobbes's analysis raises in a particularly sharp form, is one of the central issues of debate among the modern philosophers.

Descartes writes the Passions of the Soul as a physiological and philosophical treatise, applying to the emotions the same mechanistic principles he had employed in his work on physics and medicine. His starting point is the radical dualism of mind and body. The passions are perceptions of the soul caused by the body, specifically by the movement of "animal spirits" through the nerves and brain. They belong to neither pure thought nor pure extension but arise from the mysterious union of the two substances. This makes them fundamentally different from clear and distinct ideas; the passions are by nature confused, and their confusion is what makes them powerful.

Descartes identifies six primitive passions from which all others derive: wonder, love, hatred, desire, joy, and sadness. Wonder is the first and most basic, the soul's response to what is new or unexpected, prior to any judgment of good or evil. Love is the soul's consent to join itself to an object perceived as good; hatred is its movement away from what is perceived as evil. Desire, joy, and sadness orient the soul toward future, present, and past goods and evils respectively. Every complex emotion, from jealousy to generosity, is a compound of these six primitives combined with particular judgments about their objects. The taxonomy is more economical than Aquinas's eleven passions, and it replaces the Aristotelian faculty psychology with a mechanistic account of how the body produces emotional states in the soul.

The practical question is how the soul can govern the passions. Descartes rejects the Stoic ideal of eliminating them; the passions are useful, even necessary, because they dispose the soul to want the things that the body needs. But they can mislead, representing as urgent goods that are trivial and as terrifying evils that are slight. The remedy is the will's power to redirect attention and, through habituation, to associate particular passions with different judgments. A person cannot simply will away fear, but he can train himself to associate the perception of danger with thoughts of courage and honor rather than thoughts of death. This indirect governance through trained association is Descartes's alternative to both Stoic suppression and Aristotelian habituation of the passions themselves.

Spinoza will reject Descartes's dualism and with it the account of passions as perceptions caused by the body in the soul. For Spinoza, the passions are confused ideas in the mind, and the remedy is adequate knowledge rather than the exercise of willpower. Hume will reject the will's sovereignty over passion entirely, arguing that reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions. The question of how, or whether, the passions can be governed connects the analysis of emotion to the problems treated under Will and Habit.

Spinoza's account of the passions rests on a rejection of Cartesian dualism. There are not two substances but one: God or Nature, expressing itself in infinite attributes, of which thought and extension are the two we know. The human mind and the human body are not two things interacting but one thing expressed in two ways. This eliminates the problem of how a bodily motion causes a mental passion; every bodily state simply is, considered from another angle, a mental state. The passions are not perceptions caused by the body in the soul. They are confused or inadequate ideas, states in which the mind is determined by external causes rather than by its own nature.

Spinoza identifies three primary affects: desire, joy, and sadness. Desire is the essence of man insofar as it is conceived as determined to action. Joy is the passage from lesser to greater perfection. Sadness is the passage from greater to lesser perfection. All other emotions are compounds or modifications of these three in relation to their objects. Love is joy accompanied by the idea of its external cause. Hatred is sadness accompanied by the idea of its external cause. Hope, fear, envy, pride, humility, and the rest are generated systematically from the three primitives. The derivation proceeds geometrically, from definitions and axioms, applying to human psychology the same demonstrative method Euclid applied to geometry.

The remedy for destructive passion is not willpower, which Spinoza regards as an illusion, but understanding. An affect that is a passion ceases to be a passion as soon as we form a clear and distinct idea of it. When we understand the causes of our anger, the anger does not simply vanish, but it is transformed from a confused passion into an active emotion that the mind produces from its own power. Part V of the Ethics describes this transformation in detail. The mind's blessedness consists in the intellectual love of God, which is not a passion at all but the mind's adequate understanding of itself as part of the infinite whole. Freedom from the passions is freedom through knowledge, not through repression.

Hume will share Spinoza's naturalism about the passions but question the confidence that adequate knowledge can liberate us from them. Freud will take up the idea that forces outside conscious awareness shape emotional life, though his account of those forces and the prospects for their resolution differs considerably from Spinoza's. The question of whether freedom from the passions is achievable through reason or understanding, or whether it remains at best partial, connects Spinoza's Ethics to the broader problems treated under Liberty and Mind.

From Plato through Descartes, the prevailing view had held that reason should govern the passions. Hume argues that reason alone can never motivate action, can never produce or prevent any passion, and can never serve as the foundation of moral judgment. Reason discovers matters of fact and relations of ideas; it informs us what is the case but does not of itself determine what we should care about. Only the passions move us to act. "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them." This is presented not as a confession of human weakness but as a consequence of analyzing how the mind actually works.

Book II of the Treatise analyzes the passions with empirical precision. Hume distinguishes direct passions (desire, aversion, joy, grief, hope, fear), which arise immediately from good or evil, pleasure or pain, from indirect passions (pride, humility, love, hatred), which require a more complex mechanism involving the association of ideas and impressions. Pride, for example, requires both a cause (some quality or possession of mine) and an object (myself). The quality produces pleasure, and the pleasure, through the association of ideas, is directed toward the self. This double relation of impressions and ideas generates the passion of pride. The analysis is mechanistic in spirit but attentive to the subtleties of emotional life in a way that Hobbes's catalog was not.

The moral implications of this position are considerable. If reason cannot motivate action, then moral judgments, which do motivate action, must be founded on sentiment rather than reason. Hume argues that we call an action virtuous because it produces a feeling of approbation when contemplated from a general point of view. This feeling is rooted in sympathy, the natural tendency to share the feelings of others. Moral distinctions are real and important on this account, but they are products of human emotional constitution rather than discoveries of pure reason. The question of whether morality is grounded in feeling or in rational insight is treated more fully under the ideas of Duty and Good and Evil.

Kant will argue in direct response to Hume that reason can and must determine the will independently of all passion, and that only action from duty possesses genuine moral worth. William James will approach the passions differently again, asking not what role they ought to play in the moral life but what they physically are as facts of psychology.

Kant's moral philosophy is in large part a response to the position Hume had advanced. If morality were grounded in feeling, it would be contingent on the emotional constitution of the agent, varying from person to person and moment to moment. A morality worthy of the name must be universal and necessary, and only reason, Kant argues, can provide such a foundation. The will that acts from duty, from respect for the moral law, acts rightly regardless of what the agent happens to feel. The sympathetic person who helps others out of natural kindness does something agreeable, but his action has no specifically moral worth. Moral worth belongs only to the action done from duty, against or apart from inclination.

Kant does not deny that emotions exist or that they influence behavior. His point is that they must not be the determining ground of the will. The Critique of Practical Reason introduces a single exception: "respect" (Achtung) for the moral law. Respect is not a passion in the ordinary sense; it is not produced by sensible objects but by reason's recognition of the moral law's authority. It is the emotional correlate of rational insight, the feeling that accompanies the awareness that the law commands unconditionally. Respect humbles our self-conceit and elevates our awareness of our rational nature. It is the only feeling that has moral significance, because it is the only feeling produced by reason rather than by sensibility.

The practical consequences are severe. Kant insists that moral education must cultivate the disposition to act from duty, not the disposition to feel the right emotions. Aristotle had argued that the temperate person takes pleasure in moderation; Kant replies that this pleasure is morally irrelevant. What matters is that the person does what duty requires because duty requires it. The emotions may accompany moral action, and Kant has no objection to this, but they must not be its ground. This creates a portrait of the moral agent that many have found austere to the point of inhumanity: a person who does right with clenched teeth, as it were, driven by the cold voice of reason rather than by warmth of heart.

The question of whether moral worth requires that feeling be excluded or merely that it not be the determining ground of action is one on which later writers have differed. Freud will question the possibility of the Kantian ideal at a more fundamental level, suggesting that the drives excluded from moral consciousness do not disappear but are redirected into forms that exact a psychological cost. The relation between duty and inclination in the moral life is treated more fully under the ideas of Duty and Virtue and Vice.

The philosophical tradition from Plato to Kant had asked whether reason should govern the passions and what role emotion should play in the moral life. James addresses a different question: what is an emotion, considered as a psychological fact? His answer, published in 1884 and elaborated in the Principles of Psychology, inverts common assumption. We do not cry because we are sad; we are sad because we cry. We do not tremble because we are afraid; we are afraid because we tremble. The emotion is the feeling of the bodily changes that follow directly upon the perception of an exciting fact. Remove the bodily sensations, and nothing remains that deserves the name of emotion.

The argument is empirical. James asks the reader to imagine experiencing rage without a flushed face, clenched fists, rapid breathing, or any other bodily sensation. What remains is a cold intellectual judgment that a situation calls for anger, but not anger itself. The emotion just is the set of felt bodily changes. This "James-Lange theory" (Carl Lange independently proposed a similar view) breaks with every previous account. For Aristotle, emotions involved judgments; for Descartes, they were perceptions caused by the body in the soul; for Spinoza, they were confused ideas. For James, they are perceptions of the body by the mind, nothing more and nothing less. The cognitive content that philosophers had emphasized is secondary, a label applied after the bodily feeling has already occurred.

The implications extend well beyond academic psychology. If emotions are bodily feelings, then the way to change one's emotional life is not through rational argument or moral exhortation but through changing one's bodily habits. James draws the practical conclusion explicitly: if you wish to be cheerful, act as if you were cheerful; the bodily posture will produce the corresponding feeling. This makes emotional life a matter of physiology and habit rather than of rational governance or moral discipline. It does not settle the ethical question of which emotions are appropriate, but it transforms the practical question of how to cultivate them. The ancients prescribed philosophy; James prescribes exercise, posture, and the deliberate adoption of expressive behavior.

Freud will move beyond James's focus on felt bodily sensation to explore the emotional life that operates below the threshold of consciousness. James's account, by treating emotion as a natural and bodily phenomenon continuous with physiology, changes the question for subsequent investigators from one about the proper governance of the passions to one about their biological and neurological basis. The relation of emotion to sensation and to the body's organic processes is further considered under the ideas of Sense and Life and Death.

From Plato through William James, the debate on emotion had proceeded on the assumption, largely unexamined, that the feelings available to consciousness are the feelings that principally matter. Freud calls this assumption into question. The most powerful emotional forces in human life are, on his account, precisely those that are not available to consciousness. The affects one experiences, the anxieties, attractions, rages, and sorrows that seem to arise spontaneously, are often derivatives of instinctual drives that have been repressed, transformed, and redirected by mechanisms operating below awareness. The emotion a person feels is frequently not what it appears to be, either in its nature or in its origins.

The Ego and the Id maps the terrain. The id is the reservoir of instinctual energy, governed by the pleasure principle, seeking immediate discharge. The ego mediates between the id's demands and the constraints of external reality. The superego, internalized from parental and social authority, imposes moral demands that generate guilt and anxiety. Affects circulate among these three agencies in complex ways. Anxiety, for Freud, is not simply fear of an external danger; it is the ego's signal that a repressed drive is threatening to break through into consciousness. Guilt is not simply the recognition of wrongdoing; it is the superego's punishment of desires that the ego has not successfully suppressed. The emotional life that we experience as transparent to ourselves is in fact the visible surface of a subterranean economy of drives.

Civilization and Its Discontents extends the analysis to culture. Civilization requires the renunciation of instinctual gratification, particularly of aggression and sexuality. The energy of the renounced drives does not disappear; it is redirected into the superego, which turns the aggression inward as guilt. The more civilized the person, the more burdened by guilt, because civilization demands ever greater renunciation. This means that the emotional cost of moral life is far higher than any previous thinker had recognized. Plato assumed that the well-ordered soul would be at peace. Kant assumed that the person who acts from duty would feel respect for the moral law. Freud argues that the person who successfully represses his drives pays for it in neurosis, anxiety, and a diffuse unhappiness that no amount of rational insight can fully dispel.

Freud's account introduces into the discussion of emotion a dimension that his predecessors had not systematically explored: the unconscious. The question of whether we have reliable access to our own passions, and whether the distinction between reason and emotion is as clear as the tradition had assumed, is one that subsequent accounts of both psychology and morality have had to address. The broader question of what the unconscious is and how it shapes human life is considered more fully under the ideas of Mind and Sin.