Passion

PASSION. - In ordinary language it indicates the impetuous force of an inclination toward a determinate object that manifests itself in the form of attraction or repulsion. In philosophical usage the term p. has an extremely broad use and indicates in general the state of a "subject" that finds itself under the influence of some extrinsic principle.

I. NOTION

In its fundamental meaning p. (πάθος) is "receiving" in general. It is therefore the effect that the action of an extrinsic agent exercises on a subject: in this sense p. indicates the actuality that stands at the term of the action as its correlative and constitutes the predicament p. (Aristotle, Cat., 4, 2 a 4; Met., V, 21, 1022 b 15-21). Considered in themselves, p. are qualities that cause alteration in the subject, such as white and black, hot and cold, sweet and bitter and the like: this is p. in the physical predicamental sphere and constitutes a subspecies or subordinate genus of "quality" (v.) and involves gradations of more and less according to the virtuality of the agent and the receptive capacity of the subject: St. Thomas calls it passio naturae, that is, physical p. (In IV Sent., Dist. 44, q. 3, q. 1, a. 3).

But both Aristotle and St. Thomas consider p. in an even broader sense, as the pure positive receiving of a perfection and of an act on the part of what is in potency, as happens in the operations of the senses and of the intellect itself (possible). This p. (passio perfectiva) is therefore accomplished without corruption or alteration but signifies straightforward "increase," acquisition and "preservation" of what is in potency on the part of what is in act (... σωτηρία μάλιστα τοῦ δυνάμει ὄντος; Aristotle, De an., II, 5, 417 b 3). In this sense sensations are called p. because they are caused in the sense by the sensibles (Met., IV, 5, 1010 b 33). The phantasm that receives and gathers the objects of the external senses is also called p. (De mem. et rem., 450 a 12), and likewise the act of the imagination (De an., III, 3, 427 b 18). Still within the sphere of the generic meaning, p. is said of the "property" of something in general, or any intrinsic determination of its essence: for numbers, being even or odd, and, for example, in animals being male or female and the organic and functional modifications to which living beings are periodically subject (Hist. anim., VII, 17, 600 b 29). And therefore also in a logical sense p. is said of that determination which derives necessarily from the essence, such as risibility or sociality for man, and it is called p. proper (πάθος ἴδιον, π. οἰκεῖον, π. καθ' αὑτό). But in an even broader sense p. is said of any modification or actualization that a certain "subject" (ὑποκείμενον) may undergo, qualities, attributes, dispositions of every kind.

In a rigorous sense p. indicates alteration or change according to quality (ἀλλοίωσις), whether in the physical-corporeal order or, and especially, in the psychic one, and then it is properly called passio animi vel animae. The p. of the organic body are all that harms it in its vital functions, such as hunger, thirst, indispositions and diseases, or what modifies it intrinsically, such as the four humors that characterize the principal constitutions of man (De part. anim., III, 4, 667 b 12; Hist. anim., VI, 14, 544 b 22). The p. of the soul, or p. in the rigorous sense, are the motions of consciousness and indicate the attitudes of attraction and repulsion that the subject experiences toward the objects of appetite. Thus Aristotle speaks of three p. existing in the soul: desire, anger and fear (Rhetor., II, 6, 1385 b 34), followed by confidence, envy, joy, friendship, hatred, zeal, mercy and in general all that can cause joy or sorrow (Ethic. Nic., II, 4, 1105 b 20). St. Thomas, referring to St. Augustine, specifies the tendential character of p.: "Augustine affirms in Book IX of the De civitate Dei (ch. 4) that the movements of the soul, called by the Greeks πάθος, some among the Latins, such as Cicero, call perturbaciones, others affectiones or affectus, others finally more expressively, as in Greek, passiones. It is clear therefore that the p. of the soul are nothing other than affections. And since affections belong more to the affective part than to the apprehensive, the p. belong more to the appetitive sphere than to the cognitive" (Sum. Theol., 1a-2ae, q. 22, a. 2). In p. thus understood, the characteristic element is the commotion or bodily perturbation (transmutatio corporalis), especially in the circulatory function, for example, in anger which "warms the blood around the heart" (John Damascene, De fide orthodoxa, I, II, ch. 16: PG 94, 932). Hence the definition of p., again taken from the Damascene: "Passio est motus appetitivae virtutis sensibilis in imaginatione boni vel mali" (op. cit., ch. 22: PG 94, 941, cited in Sum. Theol., 1a-2ae, q. 22, a. 3 sed contra). In this sense, in the higher part of the soul, in the angels and in God, one cannot properly speak of p. except by metaphor and analogy (ibid., a. 2 ad 1 and 3 ad 3).

The p. are therefore divided according to the two kinds of appetitive tendencies. In the "concupiscible appetite" the good is considered either absent, or future or present, and thus there is love, desire or joy; with respect to evil, on the other hand, there is respectively hatred, flight or sadness. The "irascible appetite," which has arduous good as its object, contains instead only five p.: with respect to the good not yet obtained but attainable there is hope, or if it is considered unattainable, despair. With respect to evil not yet imminent there are fear and confidence, and when evil is already imminent there is anger, which remains alone in its kind since meekness (πρᾳότης) for Aristotle is a defect and not the opposite of anger (Rhetor., 1125 b 28). In all, therefore, there are eleven p. according to which the entire affective behavior of the sensible sphere is carried out (cf. Sum. Theol., 1a-2ae, q. 23, aa. 1-4). One can therefore understand that p., if it has a first moment of passivity of the subject with respect to something extrinsic, then expresses the active behavior of the subject toward good and evil in their effective reality (cf. ibid., q. 22, a. 2 ad 2).

II. MORALITY OF THE PASSION

As long as they are considered as movements of the sensitive appetitive tendencies and operate without any influence of reason, the passions lie outside morality: in early infancy, in the demented and in certain more serious categories of constitutional defectives (invincible manias for suicide, for homicide, for alcoholism, for erotic excesses, for kleptomania, etc.). But in the man who has reached the normal development of reason and maintains the exercise of freedom in the unity of consciousness, the passions come to find themselves under the guidance and dominion of reason and become good or bad and therefore a subject of virtue and vice, of merit and guilt, according as they conform to reason or oppose it (cf. Sum. Theol., 1a-2ae, q. 56, a. 4 and ad 1; ibid., q. 24, 1 which refers back to Aristotle, Ethic. Nic., I, 13, 1103 b 13; see also II, 4, 1105 b 32).

Reason exercises its influence on the passions by subjecting them to its rule of maintaining the "golden mean" (τὸ μέσον, μεσότης) against the extremes, by excess and by defect, and it is this medium rationis that makes it possible to define moral virtue (Ethic. Nic., II, 6, 1106 b 14 ff.; see also ibid., 9, 1109 a 19 ff.). Far therefore from being intrinsically evil and immoral, the passions have become valid stimuli and supports of virtue and are indispensable if man is to face the risks and dangers encountered in striving for excellent works and for virtue. The sudden passion that impels one to act (the passio antecedens) diminishes freedom and can take it away entirely when it is so vehement as to obscure reason itself (Sum. Theol., 1a-2ae, q. 24, a. 3 and ad 1). In Protestant theology, on the other hand, passion is essentially the inclination of corrupted nature to error and to unregulated desires (cf. R. Rothe, Theol. Ethik, III, § 493, Wittenberg 1870, p. 63).

III. PSYCHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY

The predominance of modern philosophy, oriented predominantly toward the structures of subjectivity, on the one hand, and on the other the development of the experimental sciences, which tend toward knowledge of the laws and behaviors of individual processes (physical, biological, psychological, social...), have completely renewed the study of the p. From the physico-ethical and ontological-ethical plane on which the conceptions of antiquity and the Middle Ages moved, modern psychology has passed to a physiological-phenomenological or analytical consideration.

The p. have a direct repercussion on the physiological behavior of the organism, as emerges both from immediate experience and from scientific investigation: acceleration or slowing of the heart rate, peripheral vasoconstriction, modification of respiratory movements, hyperglobulia, hyperglycemia or glycosuria, changes in the diameter of the pupil, etc. Recent experimental investigations due especially to Cannon (1925) and continued by Watson's behaviorist school have confirmed the physiological substrate of the behavior of the p. When the emotions reach a certain degree of intensity (anger, indignation, strong fear...), the secretions and contractions of the smooth muscles of the stomach can be completely blocked and digestion halted. Blood analysis shows the presence of an excess of sugar which makes possible, through the regulating action of adrenaline, the increase of the organism's necessary energies of defense and offense: thus, according to Cannon, what under normal conditions requires an hour or more of work, adrenaline can accomplish in five minutes or even less (cf. J. B. Watson, Psychology from the standpoint of the behaviorist, Philadelphia-London 1929, p. 250 ff.). However, when the secretion exceeds a certain maximum limit, the effect is the disorganization and complete ataxia of conduct; in man the higher processes, e.g., imagination and will, can indirectly influence, moderating the p. within the same physiological mechanism, and it is probably in this way that the Yoga method operates.

In the affective or tendential sphere a distinction is made between tendencies, emotions, sentiments, and p.; tendencies or inclinations are the innate elements, the endogenous stimuli, so to speak, of the affective and operative sphere; sentiments are the inclinations in their actualization; emotions represent the acute states of the sentiments themselves, while the p. are generally understood as the attitudes, good or perverse, by now established and constitutive of the individual personality. Nevertheless, in the ordinary language of psychology, p. means conduct that is unregulated, in contrast to reason (e.g., the p. for gambling, for drinking, for sensual pleasure, etc.), and thus one speaks of "passional characters" when the subject's behavior follows the impulse of the p. It is the p., then, that confers a certain unity and structure on the life of the individual by virtue of the "resistances" that come from the remaining healthy forces which seek to hinder the dissolving action of the p. and reestablish a certain order in it. In this sense the p. figures as a "deviation" (déreglement) of the primitive sentiments and can be defined as a "flight to the control of automatism over the regulations of sentiment" which reason presides over (M. Pradines, Traité de psychologie générale, II, Paris 1948, p. 337). The principal p., in the modern classification, are indicated preferably in the excesses of intemperance, eating and drinking, lust and greed for wealth (cf. Pradines, op. cit., p. 317 ff.): yet those psychologists of a determinist tendency err when they affirm that the p. as such lies outside the sphere of morality, so that the man who acts out of p. would have to be called entirely irresponsible.

The first English associationists (Adam Smith) reduce the p. to forms of sympathy and antipathy which would be derived from processes of imitation, reproduction and affective projection: according to Hume all the p. arise from "impressions" or pleasant and unpleasant sensations variously combined according to the laws of association in the imagination (cf. A dissertation on the passions, in Essays and treatises, II, London 1788, p. 168 ff.). The supporters of evolution (Darwin, Spencer) trace the origin of the p. to the development of the social instinct in the species. Psychoanalysis (v.) interprets the p. and all the attitudes of life - including religion and morality - as a proliferation of the undifferentiated sexual instinct that Freud called libido. Max Scheler admits that every sphere of existence (vegetative, sensitive, intellectual and volitional) has its own energy, but in such a way that interferences and influences of one upon another are possible: the essence, then, of love - understood as p. in its pure state - is indicated in "a movement in which every individual and concrete object, capable of values, reaches the highest values compatible with its nature and its ideal determination" (M. Scheler, Wesen und Formen der Sympathie, 5th ed., Frankfurt am Main 1948, p. 174). The p. of hatred, on the other hand, has an opposite "movement," not in the sense that it is purely destructive, but insofar as it turns toward lower values and fixes itself in them in order to oppose them to higher values.

But an exhaustive and unitary explanation of the p. modern psychology has still not given, because of the arduous interweaving of the problems that the p. displays in the formation of consciousness and personality (v.). Its merit lies above all in the analytical and phenomenological investigation of the various p., in the accurate distinctions unknown to ancient psychology and in the appropriate classifications (cf. D. Lagasche, Les sentiments complexes de l'amour et de la haine, in G. Dumas, Nouveau traité de psychologie, VI, III, Paris 1939, p. 115 ff.).

IV. HISTORICAL OUTLINE

In the speculation of the pre-Socratics the "physical" content and nature of passion is asserted, and it is therefore reserved to the lower life and opposed to reason and virtue: for Empedocles (v.) love and hate are raised to the principle of cosmic becoming. Democritus (v.) himself affirms that wisdom frees the soul from passion (σφῆν ψυχὴν παθῶν ἀφρίεσται: Diels-Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, II, 5th ed., Berlin 1935, fr. B 31, p. 152,3; cf. fr. A I, p. 84, 22). Among the tragedians the conflict between passion (ἔρως) and the opposing virtue of chastity willed by reason (συφροσύνη) comes to the fore; in Euripides' Hippolytus love is the primordial, irrational and amoral creative element, beautiful and terrible, sweet and painful in its manifestations, and is represented by Cyprian Venus, while virtue is symbolized in chaste Diana or Artemis; yet even here the good for man is envisaged as a "temperament" between passion and reason in the sense of a mutual integration of partial goods with the predominance of the better good (cf. W. Ch. Greene, Moira, Fate, Good and Evil in greek thought, Cambridge, Mass. 1944, p. 180 f.). In Plato's analogy of the chariot to which two horses are yoked, the one excellent and generous, the other perverse and filthy, the moral aspect of the passions is emphasized, which will have its complete theory in Aristotelian ethics. In the ancient Stoic conception (e.g., Zeno) passion is a motion of contraction or dilation of the soul and precisely of the "vital spirit" (πνεῦμα) which has its seat in the heart (Stoicorum veterum fragmenta, ed. H. von Arnim, I, Leipzig 1905, p. 51, 28); it is voluntary and follows upon a false opinion (δάξα) and is therefore a vain, sudden, irrational impulse, disobedient to reason (ὁμοι πλεονάζουσα, ἄλογος, ἀπειθῆς λόγῳ), a "movement against nature" (αἰνίησις παρὰ φύσιν: loc. cit., pp. 50, 21 ff.; 93,5). The passions are therefore "diseases of the soul" and are reduced to pleasures and pains, while the sage instead of the πάθη has the will (βούλησις) opposed to desire (ἐπιθυμία), joy (γαρά) opposed to pleasure (ἡδονή) and foresight (εὐλάβεια) opposed to fear (φόβος). Epicurus (v.), in his polemic against the Stoic conception, returned to the Aristotelian principle that the passions do not disaccord with the sage who knows how to moderate them in order to make possible a greater enjoyment of pleasure: the subject of physical pleasure and pain (ἀληγηδόν) is the flesh (σάρξ), of moral pleasure and pain or displeasure (λόπη) is the soul or rather the psychic sphere (διάνοια; C. Diano, Epicuri ethica, Florence 1946, p. 121). The accusation of hedonism (v.) and egoism that has been made against the Epicurean doctrine of the passions is contradicted by recent scholars; Epicurus assigns the summit of human life to the cult of friendship and "the sage will give, if need be, his life for a friend" (Diog. Laertius, X, 121; cf. R. Mondolfo, La coscienza morale in Epicuro, in Problemi del pensiero antico, Bologna 1936, p. 189 ff.). While the Middle Ages drew from Plato and Aristotle and from the Stoics themselves through the mediation of Cicero and the Fathers, the humanism of Petrarch and Valla and the Renaissance down to Bruno (v.) and Gassendi (v.) attempt to take up again and rehabilitate the Epicurean doctrine, according to the thesis of Saitta (Il pensiero italiano nell'Umanesimo e nel Rinascimento, Bologna 1949, I, pp. 180 ff. and 232 ff.): yet both Valla and later Gassendi had no intention whatever of opposing Christian morality and therefore gave to that rehabilitation a meaning and a content different from that of the thesis in question. In modern thought Descartes deserves particular mention for his Traité des passions (written around 1646), whose originality concerns more certain particular analyses than the general principles, in which he does no more than reproduce the traditional conception of St. Thomas: the most notable difference is the division into simples et primitives passions (admiration, love, hate, joy and sadness) and particulières passions which are derived and subspecies of the former, as M. Meier has clearly demonstrated (Die Lehre des Thomas von Aquino «De passionibus animae» in quellenanalytischer Darstellung, in Beiträge Baeumker, XI, II, Münster i. W. 1912, pp. x-xiv). In Descartes' wake moves the doctrine of the passions of A. Geulincx (v.) in the posthumous Ethica (Amsterdam 1696) and likewise Leibniz (v.) in the opuscule De affectibus of 1679 (ed. Giua, Textes inédits de Leibniz, Paris 1948, I, p. 512 ff. and passim). Spinoza returns decisively to the Stoic conception and calls actiones the inclinations (cupiditates) which the mind dominates with adequate ideas, and passiones when the impulse comes rather from things than from the mind, so that the latter cannot perfectly dominate them (Ethica, part 4, prop. 73: appendix c. 2). In the subsequent course of modern philosophy the philosophical consideration of the passions steadily declined while the psychological and phenomenological one gained prominence; idealism (v.) has eliminated the passions from the life of consciousness because they represent the empirical I, while existentialism (v.) has undertaken in various ways to give a foundation and transcendental deduction of them in function of existence, which is freedom in act.

Cornelio Fabro