Status of emotions

In The Passions of the Soul, the passions are motions of the soul caused by the body's spirits: they are neither to be suppressed nor blindly followed, but governed by reason and a firm will. Mastery lies in an enlightened use of judgment, which leans toward intellectualism without denying the worth of well-ordered passions.

The Passions of the Soul, arts. 27-50 and 211-212

Since the affects follow from natural necessity like everything else, blaming them is futile: Spinoza proposes to treat them as if it were a question of lines and planes. His therapeutic argument is precise: a passion is a confused idea, hence a passivity; forming a clear idea of it turns it into an action, so that to understand an affect is already to free oneself from it, not to repress it.

Ethics, III, preface (studying the affects geometrically) · Ethics, V, prop. 3 (an affect of which we form a clear idea ceases to be a passion)

Platonism is intellectualist (the doctrine that subordinates the passions to reason and makes knowledge the condition of acting well): in the image of the winged chariot, a figure of the tripartite soul, reason is the charioteer who must guide and master the two horses, spirit and appetite. The passions are not evil in themselves, but they have worth only when disciplined and subjected to the rule of reason.

Plato, Phaedrus, 246a-254e, the winged chariot · Plato, Republic, book IV, 439d-441c

The whole Leibnizian edifice makes reason the principle of true knowledge and conduct: confused petites perceptions and the passions must be clarified by the understanding, and even love is defined as the pleasure taken in another's perfection, a judgment rather than pure feeling. The leaning is intellectualist, sentiment remaining subordinate to the clarity of ideas.

New Essays, preface and II, 1 (the petites perceptions) · Codex juris gentium, preface (love as pleasure taken in another's perfection)

The passions belong to the compound of soul and body, not to the higher self, which stays unaffected by them: the soul truly itself is not moved, and only its lower part, turned toward the body, suffers. Plotinus therefore holds emotions to be disturbances to be mastered by conversion toward the intelligible, in the intellectualist line, even if his interest bears less on their psychological analysis than on the means of escaping them.

Enneads, I, 1, 7-9 · Enneads, III, 6 (On the Impassibility of the Incorporeal)

The passions stem from confused ideas and must be mastered by the understanding: Descartes offers a mechanical analysis and an art of governing them through knowledge, and Spinoza holds that an emotion ceases to be a passion as soon as we form a clear and distinct idea of it. Correcting affect by reason draws the school toward a moral intellectualism.

Descartes, The Passions of the Soul · Spinoza, Ethics, V, proposition 3

For Nāgārjuna, afflictive affects rest on an intellectual mistake: believing that things have an inherent existence and clinging to it. It is therefore right understanding, the seeing of emptiness (śūnyatā), that undoes the disturbing emotion at its root. Transformation proceeds through knowledge, which aligns with a therapeutic intellectualism, without denying the role of meditative practice.

Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way), ch. XXIII (the examination of errors and mental defilements)

Disturbance, for Pyrrho, arises from the opinion that a thing is good or bad: remove the judgment, and the emotion that depended on it falls away. This is an intellectualism of the passions, shared with the Stoics, but he pushes it further than they do, since he withdraws not only false judgments but the very act of judging things. One nuance holds him back from the extreme: tradition grants that the sage still suffers in the body, from cold or pain, affections no suspension abolishes. Diogenes Laertius indeed reports that Pyrrho, caught one day fleeing a dog, admitted it is hard to strip the human being away entirely.

Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers, IX, 66-68

Liberation is reached through knowledge (jñāna), not through emotion or devotion alone: it is ignorance, an error of the intellect, that enslaves, and a right knowing that frees. The preparatory discipline includes tranquillity (śama) and mastery of the passions, which trouble the discernment between the real and the apparent. Affect is thus neither the access route to truth nor the spring of liberation, which leans toward an intellectualism, without emotions being denied at the empirical level.

Commentary on the Brahma Sūtras, I.1.1 · Upadeśasāhasrī

Since bondage rests on a cognitive error, avidyā (ignorance), it is knowledge, not the cultivation of feeling, that transforms the subject. Emotions and attachment are effects of the false identification with body and mind, which discrimination (viveka) between the real and the apparent comes to correct. The lever of liberation is intellectual, which inclines toward intellectualism.

Śaṅkara (attributed), Vivekacūḍāmaṇi · Śaṅkara, Commentary on the Brahma-Sūtras (Brahma-Sūtra-Bhāṣya)

The ultimate root of suffering and afflictive emotions is ignorance (avidyā), the misapprehension of the impermanent, selfless nature of reality. Greed, hatred, and delusion dissolve through right view and penetrating understanding: it is by knowledge that affect is transformed, which aligns Buddhism with a therapeutic intellectualism, tempered by the central role of meditative practice.

Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta (the sermon at Benares) · Dhammapada, ch. XX (The Path)

Bentham distrusts moral sentiments set up as rules: the principle of sympathy and antipathy approves or condemns at the whim of feeling, without giving a reason, and often masks prejudice. To affective spontaneity he opposes the felicific calculus, a reflective, quasi-arithmetic procedure for weighing pleasures and pains. Morality thus rests on methodical reasoning rather than on emotion.

An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ch. II (the principle of sympathy and antipathy)

The ultimate root of suffering and afflictive emotions is ignorance (avidyā), the misapprehension of the impermanent, selfless nature of reality. The three poisons, greed, hatred, and delusion, dissolve through right view and penetrating understanding: it is by knowledge that affect is transformed, which gives the teaching an intellectualist leaning, tempered by the central role of meditative practice and the cultivation of the heart (mettā).

Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, Saṃyutta Nikāya 56.11 (ignorance and right view) · Dhammapada, ch. XX (The Path)

The passions that gnaw at the soul, dread of the underworld, thirst for honours, the fury of love, arise from false opinions about the nature of things: it is therefore knowledge, not exhortation, that calms them. This terror of the mind, this darkness, can be dispelled neither by the sun nor by daylight, but only by the aspect and the law of nature. The therapy proceeds through the light of physical knowledge, which marks a clear intellectualist leaning, attested too by the famous demystifying analysis of erotic passion in book IV.

On the Nature of Things, II, 55-61 and III, 87-93 (terror dispelled by the law of nature) · On the Nature of Things, IV, 1058-1287 (the analysis of erotic passion)

Sextus shares with the Stoics the idea that disturbance arises from a judgment, the opinion that a thing is good or bad by nature, and that withdrawing that judgment brings calm. This is an intellectualism of the passions: the cure runs through the suspension of opinion. But he parts from them on one decisive point: he does not suppress all feeling, granting that the skeptic still suffers cold or thirst, "forced" affections that no suspension abolishes. Hence a clearly intellectualist position, held back from the extreme by this share of irreducible affect.

Outlines of Pyrrhonism, I, 25-30 · Outlines of Pyrrhonism, III, 235-238

The troubles of the soul, above all the fears of the gods and of death, arise from false opinions about nature: it is therefore exact knowledge of physics that cures anxiety. Empty is the word of the philosopher that heals no human suffering: the therapy of the passions proceeds through reasoning and an understanding of the limits of desire, which marks an intellectualist leaning.

Letter to Herodotus, 81-82 (physics frees us from fears) · Vatican Sayings, 54 (philosophy as medicine of the soul)

The sage is not unfeeling but does not let himself be "wounded within" by his affects: emotions pass through him like the seasons, with no clinging and no feeding of them. Disturbance arises from the judgment that posits an event as a loss, and it dissolves when one stops sorting the real into gains and losses, as Zhuangzi stops weeping for his wife. The leaning is toward mastery of the passions, but by dissolving distinctions rather than by a rational government in the Stoic manner, which keeps it short of a clear-cut intellectualism.

Zhuangzi, ch. 5 (not to be wounded within) · Zhuangzi, ch. 18 (Perfect Happiness)

Mental disturbances stem from false opinions, above all the fear of the gods and of death: it is by correcting judgment, through the study of nature, that one attains ataraxia. Epicureanism thus leans toward intellectualism, yet without the Stoic eradication of the passions, since it grants a positive place to natural affects, such as friendship (philia).

Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus, 128-132 · Epicurus, Principal Doctrines, XXVII

Zhuangzi cultivates an equanimity that is not the refusal of feeling but the refusal of being enslaved to it: understanding that all is ceaseless transformation calms disturbance. The sage lets neither gain nor loss, neither joy nor grief disturb his inner peace; he welcomes events as the natural course of things, without clinging to them.

Zhuangzi, ch. 5 (The Sign of Virtue Complete) · Zhuangzi, ch. 6 (The Great and Venerable Teacher)

The sage cultivates calm and an empty heart, and one finds "heaven and earth are not benevolent," an image of serenity without sentimentality. Emotional disturbance arises from attachment and desire, that is, from a wrong relation to the course of things, and dissolves in quietude. The leaning is toward mastery of the affects, but without the Stoic intellectualism of a judging reason: rather an appeasement through return to the natural.

Dao De Jing, ch. 5 and 16

Against Socratic intellectualism, Aristotelianism grants the passions a properly ethical role: to feel fear, anger or pity when one ought, toward whom one ought and as one ought is itself virtue. Well-trained emotions carry a cognitive dimension and accompany sound judgement, without grounding it on their own: the position is moderate, leaning slightly toward judgement.

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, II, 5-6 · Aristotle, Rhetoric, II, 1-11

Trained by his father in the cult of analysis and reasoning, Mill realises after his crisis that intellect alone withers: one must also cultivate the feelings and sensibility, which poetry and art nourish. Without denying reason's primacy in knowledge, he gives the emotions their due as an irreducible part of a good life, hence a near-central position.

Autobiography, ch. 5 (the cultivation of the feelings and the debt to Wordsworth)

His psychology of drives makes affects the real source of thoughts and values: conscious reason is only a late surface of the play of instincts. The position is inferred from this repeated principle rather than from a frontal thesis on the status of emotions.

Beyond Good and Evil, §3 and §187 · The Gay Science, §333

Moral sentimentalism is here chiefly Hume's work: it is passion, not understanding, that moves us to act and grounds moral distinctions, which rest on a sentiment of approval or blame. This leaning, already foreshadowed by British moral-sense philosophy, is typical of the school without being shared identically by Locke.

Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, II, 3, 3 and III, 1

Affects are not mere disturbances to be mastered by reason: anguish, nausea, and despair are disclosive moods that reveal the human condition, its freedom and its contingency. Kierkegaard's anxiety before the possible and Sartre's anguish before freedom grant access to a truth that intellectual analysis alone would miss.

Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety · Being and Nothingness

Against Socratic intellectualism, Aristotle grants the passions a properly ethical role: trained to the mean, fear, anger or pity felt when one ought and toward whom one ought belong to virtue, and character is formed by habituation as much as by reason. The leaning toward sentimentalism stays moderate, reason keeping the lead.

Nicomachean Ethics, II.6 (1106b); II.3

Against reducing affects to merely subjective, irrational states, the phenomenological tradition grants them a cognitive reach: moods open a distinctive access to the world. Heidegger makes attunement (Stimmung) a fundamental mode through which Dasein finds itself always already disclosed to its world, anxiety revealing its very being; Sartre analyzes emotion as a meaningful way of apprehending the world, not a mere disturbance. Affect is thus held to be disclosive, without thereby making feeling the foundation of morality.

Heidegger, Being and Time (1927), §29-30 · Sartre, Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions (1939)

His conduct is never governed by rational deliberation but by bodily states: fatigue at the funeral, the sun and heat that overwhelm his conduct on the beach. He reports his affects without mastering or judging them, yet he grants them no moral truth either: a de facto, sensory sentimentalism, never claimed as a doctrine.

Part I, chapter 6: the beach scene, under the sway of the sun · Part I, chapter 1: the vigil and the funeral, dominated by fatigue and heat

Against the Stoic ideal of extinguishing the passions, Thomas grants them a properly moral value: integrated into virtue and ordered by reason, compassion, fear or just anger perfect the good act instead of disturbing it. The virtuous person is not the impassive one but the one whose affects follow right judgment, which leans moderately toward a rehabilitation of the emotions without giving up the primacy of reason.

Summa Theologiae, Ia-IIae, q. 24 (the goodness of the passions)

Confucian morality does not repress feelings but cultivates and orders them: sincere mourning matters more than strict observance, and it is lived affection, love of one's parents, that grounds xiao (filial piety). The li 禮 (rites) give emotions a fitting form rather than erasing them, hence a moderate sentimentalist leaning, tempered by the demand for discernment.

Analects, III, 4 (in mourning, real grief is better than strict observance) · Analects, XVII, 21 (the three-year mourning and the affection owed to parents)

Montaigne admires Stoic constancy without holding himself bound to it: to claim to root out the passions is, in the ordinary man, a playacting ill-suited to our nature. Better to know one's emotions, to accompany and temper them than to deny them, and he readily portrays himself angry, fearful or troubled, without shame. A supple regulation rather than a mastery, which gives the affects their place as companions of the human condition.

Essays, II, 11, "Of Cruelty" and III, 10, "Of Husbanding Your Will"

In his Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions, Sartre takes emotion to be a meaningful conduct, not a mere undergone disturbance: it is a magical transformation of the world by which consciousness, unable to act really on a situation, metamorphoses it to make it bearable. Emotion thus belongs to intentionality and meaning rather than to pure intellectualizable mechanism; but since it remains a second-order conduct, degraded relative to lucid action, the sentimentalist leaning stays moderate.

Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions (1939)