The primacy of reason

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

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)

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)

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

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)

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

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)

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