Ancient Greek
Euripides
480–406 BC
“Yea, I know to what bad things I go, but louder than all thought doth cry Anger, which maketh man's worst misery.”
Euripides was an Athenian tragic poet of the fifth century BC whose plays put extreme passion on stage without explaining it away. In , the heroine knows the better course and still chooses the worse under the force of wrath. The chorus and the audience watch reason lose to thumos. He stages the problem. Later moral psychology returns to that scene when it asks how an agent can act against clear knowledge of the good. The philosophers then try to analyze what he has already shown.
In the Conversation
3 of the Great Ideas
Ethics
Love
The passion of love is capable of a total and exclusive fixation upon the beloved, and when that fixation is betrayed, the same passion turns without interval into hatred of an equal intensity, so that love and its opposite are not two different affections but one and the same, differently directed.
Emotion
The passions can carry a deliberate agent, in full possession of her judgment concerning what is better, to do what she knows to be worse, so that the ancient picture of reason directing the emotions is replaced by one in which reason is overheard by a stronger voice and acts as witness to its own defeat.