The Vehement Passions

Philip Fisher

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780691115726, 9780691069968
• eBook ISBN: 9781400824892
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

Breaking off the ordinary flow of experience, the passions create a state of exception. In their suddenness and intensity, they map a personal world, fix and qualify our attention, and impel our actions. Outraged anger drives us to write laws that will later be enforced by impersonal justice. Intense grief at the death of someone in our life discloses the contours of that life to us. Wonder spurs scientific inquiry.


The strong current of Western thought that idealizes a dispassionate world has ostracized the passions as quaint, even dangerous. Intense states have come to be seen as symptoms of pathology. A fondness for irony along with our civic ideal of tolerance lead us to prefer the diluted emotional life of feelings and moods. Demonstrating enormous intellectual originality and generosity, Philip Fisher meditates on whether this victory is permanent-and how it might diminish us.


From Aristotle to Hume to contemporary biology, Fisher finds evidence that the passions have defined a core of human nature no less important than reason or desire. Traversing the Iliad, King Lear, Moby Dick, and other great works, he discerns the properties of the high-spirited states we call the passions. Are vehement states compatible with a culture that values private, selectively shared experiences? How do passions differ from emotions? Does anger have an opposite? Do the passions give scale, shape, and significance to our experience of time? Is a person incapable of anger more dangerous than someone who is irascible?


In reintroducing us to our own vehemence, Fisher reminds us that it is only through our strongest passions that we feel the contours of injustice, mortality, loss, and knowledge. It is only through our personal worlds that we can know the world.

N O T E S

INTRODUCTION

1. René Descartes, Oeuvres philosophiques (Paris: Garnier, 1967), 3:1009–10.

2. Webster’s New International Dictionary, 3d ed., s.v. “pathology.”

3. Cicero, De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum , 2d ed., trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931), 3.10.35.

4. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987). See pt. 2, secs. 3, 7, 12, 17, 19–22.

ONE Passions, Strong Emotions,

Vehement occasions

1. Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 69.

2. William James, Collected Essays and Reviews, ed. Ralph Barton Perry (New York: Russell and Russell, 1969), 244–45.

3. See, for example, Antonio R. Demasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1994), esp. chap. 7, “Emotions and Feelings” (127–64). For more on the role of fear in brain-emotion research see J. S. Morris et al., “A Differential Neural Response in the Human Amygdala to Fearful and Happy Facial Expressions,” Nature 383 (1996): 812–15. See also Sophie K. Scott et al., “Impaired Auditory Recognition of Fear and Anger following Bilateral Amygdala Lesions,” Nature 385 (1997): 245–57.

4. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1950), 43.

5. Plato, Republic, trans. G.M.A. Grube (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1974), 9.590.

6. Cicero, De Finibus 3.10.35.

7. See A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley, Translations of the Principal Sources with Philosophical Commentary, vo l. 1 of The Hellenistic Philosophers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 411.

8. Plato, Republic, Loeb Classical Library, 4.439E.

9. See Peter L. Bernstein, Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1996), 227.

10. David Hume, “Of the Direct Passions,” sec. IX in A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. Ernest C. Mossner (Baltimore: Penguin, 1969). Here Hume concludes, “Thus we still find, that whatever causes any fluctuation or mixture of passions, with any degree of uneasiness, always produces fear, or at least a passion so like it, that they are scarcely to be distinguish’d” (494).

11. Darwin, Expression of the Emotions, 306.

12. Ibid., 280.

13. Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Victor Lyle Dowdell, ed. Hans H. Rudnick (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978), 156.

14. Hobbes, Leviathan, 43–50.

15. “The Emotions are all those feelings that so change men as to effect their judgments, and that are also at tended by pain or pleasure. Such are anger, pity, fear and the like, with their opposites.” Aristotle, Rhetoric 2.1.1378a20–25, in Rhetoric and Poetics, trans. W. Rhys Roberts and Ingram By water (New York: Modern Library, 1954). Unless noted otherwise, further references to Rhetoric and to Poetics are tot his edition.

16. See, for example, Joseph E. LeDoux, “Emotion, Memory and the Brain,” Scientific American, June 1994, 32–39.

17. Algirdas Julien Greimas and Jacques Fontanille, The Semiotics of Passions: From States of Affairs to States of Feeling, trans. Paul Perron and Frank Collins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).

18. Ronald de Sousa, The Rationality of Emotion (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 110.

19. ...

Table of contents

• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• One Passions, Strong Emotions, Vehement Occasions
• Two Paths among the Passions
• Three Thoroughness
• Four Privacy, Radical Singularity
• Five Time
• Six Rashness
• Seven Mutual Fear
• Eight The Aesthetics of Fear
• Nine The Radius of the Will
• Ten Anger and Diminution
• Eleven Grief
• Twelve Spiritedness
• Conclusion
• Notes