## 1. Introduction


### 1.1 Difficulties of Approach:



Even recognizing some early modern writings on the emotions for what
they are is no easy task. In part, this is due to diverging and
rapidly changing vocabularies for talking about the emotions.
Seventeenth century philosophers favored talk of
'passion', 'affect,' and
'affection,' while their eighteenth century counterparts
made increasing use of 'sentiment.' None of these terms
(or their French and Latin cognates) carried the meaning they now do
or that 'emotion' has come to bear (which had the sense of
physical motion or agitation as much as psychological well into the
nineteenth century). It is also easy to overlook the role early modern
philosophy gives to 'calm' emotions, if we concentrate on
the current notion of passions as violent, turbulent and overwhelming.
In general, early modern philosophers tended to prefer their emotions
calm, but took turbulence to mark only certain kinds of passions.
Another difficulty arises from the seemingly ambivalent nature early
modern philosophers granted to the emotions. 'Passion,' in
particular, is connected with a kind of receptivity, but how the
passions are receptive and what they are receptive to tend to cross
over various comfortable divisions taken to mark early modern
philosophy: mind and body; perception and will; reason, judgment and
desire; occurrent consciousness and dispositions or character;
representations and presentations; private and social; nature and
convention; and even what is internal and what external to
subjectivity.


### 1.2 Philosophical Background



Early modern discussions of the emotions are deeply indebted to
earlier sources. Aristotle was particularly important (much more so
than Plato), influencing early modern theories both directly and
through Stoic, medical, Ciceronian, and Scholastic approaches
(especially that of Aquinas). Stoicism, likewise, was transmitted both
from Latin authors and from the neo-Stoic revival of the
16th century (represented, e.g., by Justus Lipsius, and in
some moods, Montaigne). As in other areas of philosophy, however,
those sources met a mixed reception. Aristotle's classification of the
faculties of the soul and his location of the emotions among the
appetites of the sensitive part remained commonplaces, as did
Aquinas's further distinction between the irascible and concupiscible
passions. But starting with Descartes, some of the most famous early
modern philosophers soundly rejected these and other points.
Similarly, even those thinkers who seem to owe the most to Stoicism
(e.g., Descartes and Spinoza) explicitly criticized certain of its
doctrines, including the view that the passions are erroneous
judgments. Different sorts of criticism proceeded from thinkers such
as Pascal and Malebranche who borrowed from Augustine a sense of human
insufficiency for virtue and happiness that put them at odds with
Stoic, Skeptical and Epicurean ideals of the autonomous life of the
sage. And many aspects of the systematic treatments of Aquinas and
later Scholastic authors were both maintained and attacked, often by
the same authors.



Other ancient sources were also important, even when they were subject
to less discussion or criticism. The theory of the humors and animal
spirits of the Hippocratic and Galenist medical traditions offered
much of the basic vocabulary for early modern discussions of the
physiology of the emotions. Rhetorical works, such as those by
Aristotle and Cicero, provided a great deal of material for
taxonomizing and manipulating the emotions. (Indeed, some of the
distinctive early modern practice of generating long lists of
emotions, as well as many of the forms of classification, can be
traced to these sources.) Popular treatises, such as those by Juan
Luis Vives, received a number of mentions. Less obvious, but still
influential were the discussions of particular emotions in Renaissance
works, such as the treatment of love and melancholy by the Florentine
humanists, or that of "glory" [*gloria*] by
Machiavelli and Montaigne. These sources overlap in ways that are not
always consistent and can be difficult to trace: for instance, we find
Spinoza probably paraphrasing a passage from Montaigne (E III Def of
the Affects XLIV), where Montaigne criticizes Cicero's ambitions for
"glory" by directly quoting the Latin author (Montaigne,
1958, 187) - all without anything like citation of sources.



The very vocabulary available to early modern theorists is marked by
their historical legacy. The terms 'passion,'
'perturbation,' and 'affect' are all rooted in
choices made by Latin authors such as Augustine, Cicero and Seneca for
translating the Greek *pathos* used by Aristotle. In contrast,
'sentiment,' which came to be used with increasing
frequency by eighteenth century British and French authors, seems
distinctively modern. Debates about whether to classify emotions among
appetites, judgments, or volitions originated in the models of
Aristotle, the Stoics and Augustine, while Descartes inaugurated the
trend of counting them among perceptions. Early modern associations
between the emotions and the body also owed an enormous amount to
ancient and medieval sources, as did views connecting emotions with
motives for action. Such connections often underlay the long-running
debate inherited by the early moderns about the epistemic,
eudaimonistic and ethical value of the emotions, a central issue of
which is the degree to which we can manage and control our emotions.
Although the assessments of pre-modern theorists varied enormously,
there was a generally positive view of pleasurable emotions. This
evaluation was shared by many seventeenth and eighteenth-century
philosophers, who often played up the holistic functionality of such
emotions. At the same time, the early moderns seem to have inherited a
strong sense of the value of various forms of emotional tranquility
- something worth bearing in mind for understanding the changing
uses of 'passion.'


### 1.3 Ancient, Medieval and Renaissance Theories of the Emotions [Supplementary document]



For a more detailed discussion on the philosophical background as it
was received by early modern philosophers, see the supplement on



> 
> Ancient, Medieval and Renaissance Theories of the Emotions
> 


## 2. The Context of Early Modern Theories of the Passions


### 2.1 Changing Vocabulary



Pretty much every philosopher of the early modern period developed
distinctive terms of art for discussing the emotions. Still, some
vocabulary was general currency. The most common term for describing
the emotions in the seventeenth century was undoubtedly
'passion,' perhaps because of the influence of Descartes's
*Passions of the Soul* (1649), perhaps because of a general
tendency to see the emotions as receptive, passive states. It was not
the only term used: 'affect' and 'sentiment'
also appeared, as did 'perturbation,' and
'emotion,' although these were not usually terms of art,
and 'emotion' usually meant little more than
'motion.' The choice of terminology often marked
intellectual allegiances: Descartes saw himself as introducing a new
theory, in which "passions" are a species of perception,
while Spinoza's "affects" signaled his debt to Stoic
ethics, as well as distinctive features of his metaphysics. In his
*Pensees* (1670), Pascal introduced
"feelings" or "sentiments"
[*sentiments*], sometimes contrasting them with the corrupted
passions and marking his neo-Augustinian understanding of love (see
*Pensees* 680, 531).



'Sentiment' was a particularly popular term in British
philosophy of the eighteenth century, as was 'affection.'
These terms were sometimes used interchangeably with and sometimes in
contrast to 'passions.' In the latter case,
'sentiments' or 'affections' specified calm
emotions, perhaps tempered by reflection or refined in some other way;
whereas, 'passion' indicated a raw, uncorrected emotion,
which may be 'violent' in the sense of either agitating
us, or being unresponsive to reason. Bernard Mandeville, for instance,
spoke of humans as "a compound of passions" in his
*Fable of the Bees* (1714), emphasizing that our emotions are
disorganized, fleeting and not subject to correction. Hutcheson, in
contrast, distinguished passions from 'affections' in his
*Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and
Affections* (1728), on the grounds that the former are confused
and "violent," while the latter are calm and typically
benevolent. Famously, Hume applied 'sentiment' to the
class of refined and reflective emotions that are the basis for our
moral and aesthetic judgments. In doing so, he may have followed the
practice of the Abbe Dubos in his 1719 *Critical Reflections
on Poetry and on Painting*  [*Reflexions critiques sur
la poesie et sur la peinture*]. There Dubos argued that we do
not judge artworks through applications of reason, but by a kind of
internal "sense" [*sentiment interieur*] comparable
to (literal) taste, and which "is commonly called
sentiment" [*le sentiment*] (Vol. 2, sec. 22, 306-313; see
Jones 1982, 97). Still, Dubos's use of the term was casual and
often ambiguous, and Hume likewise introduced 'sentiment'
in Book III of his *Treatise of Human Nature* (1739-40) with
little explanation. Nonetheless, the term entered into philosophical
parlance, such that two decades later, Smith titled his major work
*The Theory of the Moral Sentiments* (1759). Indeed, the
contrast between passion and sentiment was not confined to philosophy.
Sarah Fielding's novel *The Adventures of David Simple*, first
published in 1744 and wildly popular in its day, frequently used
"passions" to describe forceful, idiosyncratic emotions
and desires, particularly those that mark the personality of a
character, while reserving "sentiment" for calmer, shared
affects and judgments. By 1762, Henry Home, Lord Kames, termed
"every thought prompted by a passion" a
"sentiment" (*Elements of Criticism* I, chap.
xvi).



The developments in vocabulary took place against a background of
shared associations and assumptions about the emotions. Emotions were
commonly connected with passivity, and what lay outside of our direct
control, features often emphasized by using the term
'passion.' They were also associated with various forms of
perception, even as they were sometimes granted an intentional and
judgment-like structure - for which the double sense of
'sentiment' as felt response and as opinion was
particularly apt. Emotions were also often characterized through
feelings of either pleasure or pain. At the same time, emotions were
typically assumed to have directions (to causes of pleasure, or from
causes of pain) and to provide motives for action. Given this cluster,
philosophers often emphasized one or another of the features
associated with the emotions. Although no philosophical questions were
settled by word choice alone, the preferred vocabulary can reveal much
about the choice of emphasis.



Still, it is worth bearing in mind that the available vocabulary may
not fully capture what we now think of as emotion, affect, or mood.
Whether called 'passion,' 'affect' or
'sentiment,' emotions were usually conceived as having
objects, which could be understood causally or intentionally (or
both). Kames's conception of an emotion "in its nature
quiescent, and merely a passive feeling, [such that it] must have a
cause; but cannot be said properly speaking, to have an object"
was unusual and prompted him to introduce an innovative distinction
between 'emotion' and 'passion' (*Elements
of Criticism* I, chap. ii). Sometimes the preferred terminology
didn't even capture the range of affective states recognized by early
modern philosophers. Descartes, for instance, wrote of
"internal" or "intellectual" emotions, which
are not passions proper, but certainly have affective components, as
well as being causally intertwined with the true passions. Spinoza
distinguished "affects" from various emotions and moods
that for him indicated "strength of mind," while reserving
a special status for "blessedness" [*beatitudo*]. On
the other hand, 'passion' didn't even begin to get its
contemporary flavor of violent, often sexually-charged emotions until
the middle of the eighteenth century (at the earliest), and so what
counted as a passion can sometimes come as a surprise. Hobbes included
"competition" and "glory" among his passions,
and many favorite early modern passions are quite placid, such as
'wonder,' or 'the love of truth.' There was
also a whole special vocabulary for affective states that were
recognized by various medical traditions, ranging from
'splenetic humour' to general
'melancholy.'


### 2.2 Taxonomies



Seventeenth-century accounts are rife with long inventories of
emotions, although the list-making urge seems to have dampened a bit
by the eighteenth century, with many fewer authors pretending to
exhaustive catalogues. Compared to his contemporaries, Descartes looks
temperate with a docket of a mere six simple passions, although he
also constructed a host of complex ones out of these six. Hobbes
offered a list of about thirty in the *Leviathan* (1651), and
more than twenty-five in The *Elements of Law* (ms. 1640). The
head count for Spinoza is a bit trickier to determine, but the third
book of his *Ethics* (ms. 1675) defines at least forty affects.
Locke's short discussion in Book II, chap. XX of the *Essay
Concerning Human Understanding* (1690) treats eleven; whereas
Hume's *Treatise* and "Dissertation on the Passions"
(1757) described about ten broad passions, as well as numerous
sub-species and adjuncts, even before turning to the moral or
aesthetic sentiments. This tendency is not simply found among the
great early modern systems-builders. In the seventeenth century in
particular, just about everybody (and their maiden aunt and bachelor
uncle) seems to have joined in the hunt for new and distinctive lists
of emotions. For instance, large portions of Thomas Wright's *The
Passions of the Mind In General* (1604) and Nicholas Coeffeteau's
*Tableau des passions humaines, de leurs causes et leurs
effets* (ms. 1621) are devoted to such lists. A short play of
1630, *Pathomachia; or the Battel of Affections*, even makes
proper taxonomy the motor of what little drama it possesses.



The proliferation of lists can be at least partly explained by the
proliferation of schemes of classification. Again, the attention to
principles of classification is most marked in the seventeenth-century
theorists, in part because of the taxonomic connections they saw
between the treatment of the passions and their scientific ambitions
in other areas, and in part because of the attacks launched against
the systems of previous, e.g., scholastic, thinkers. Descartes, for
instance, singled out Aquinas's division of the passions into the
concupiscible and irascible for express and explicit criticism. But
making his case required constructing an alternative classification
more in accord with his reformist account of the soul and its
faculties. Despite the efforts of those on the cutting edge of passion
theory, however, the Aquinian distinction remained a commonplace bit
of early modern folk psychology, as we can see in Wright, Burton, and
even Henry More. Then too, many early modern authors borrowed, and
borrowed heavily, from Stoic and Thomist classifications. Hobbes and
Locke, for instance, both drew from Aquinas's enumeration of eleven
passions, as did Jacques Bossuet in *Traite de la
connaissance de Dieu et de soi-meme* (ms. after 1670; see
Gardiner 1970, 205).



Many time-honored principles of classification clearly decreased in
importance during the early modern period. In particular, the
possibility of psychic conflict, especially that which could generate
competing motives for action, had been a common device in ancient and
medieval theories for distinguishing among passions, kinds of
passions, and faculties of the soul in general. This principle played
some role for Descartes in distinguishing between movements coming
from the body and those originating in the soul, and it was deployed
sporadically by other theorists. But the practice died out over the
course of the two centuries, as theorists came to recognize the
possibility that a single, or similar, emotional source might produce
conflicting motions or tendencies, both in the individual and across
societies. Indeed, some emotions were characterized exactly by such
conflict or turbulence. Descartes's description of regret is one such
example. A somewhat happier case is the emotions generated by tragedy,
as explained by philosophers from Malebranche to Hume.



Perhaps the most basic division in play is evaluative, i.e., whether
the emotion is good or bad. This was hardly an innovation. But early
modern philosophers came to understand that division in two different
ways - either an emotion is directed at good or evil as an
object, or the emotion itself is affectively good or bad, pleasurable
or painful. Many distinctively modern theories subsumed the former
under the latter: both the naturalistic theories of Hobbes and
Spinoza, on the one hand, and the moral sense theories of Hutcheson
and Hume, on the other, held that we project the value of the object
from the affective quality of the emotion, although Hume allows for
complications in how we experience the valences of a passion as
belonging to self or other, using such mechanisms as sympathy and
comparison. Some authors also identified neutral emotions:
'wonder' is a common example, deriving largely from
Descartes, although anticipated in Sir Kenelme Digby's *Two
Treatises* (1644).



Some philosophers singled out a particular passion, or group of
passions, to head off their taxonomies. In rather different ways, that
was the role of wonder for Descartes, and of glory for Hobbes (see
Schmitter 2017). Malebranche took there to be an irreducible element
of love in every passion. Mary Astell, in turn, called love of God
"the leading and Master Passion" (*Letters Concerning
the Love of God*, Letter VII). An even more common organizing
device was to divide the passions into simple and complex. Not only
did this impose a manageable order on the many recognized passions, it
allowed explanation to be focused on the simplest cases, with the
expectation that other emotions would fall into line, either as
compounds, offspring, or species of the simples. The simple passions
themselves were organized into contrasting groups, based on their
evaluative character. Schemes of this kind can be found in Descartes,
Malebranche, Spinoza, Thomas Wright, and to a lesser extent, Hume.



Many other forms of classification were tied closely to the particular
interests of individual authors. This is particularly the case with
those eighteenth-century British authors who argued against Hobbes (as
they understood him) and Mandeville that the very possibility of
morality requires that we be capable of genuinely benevolent emotions.
For this reason, distinctions between self-directed and other-directed
emotions and between anti-social and sociable emotions were a common
point of organization and contention. Similar concerns also generated
a distinction between idiosyncratic affects and emotions that could be
cultivated to be broadly shared; in particular, emotions were often
divided into the raw and immediate and those that involve an element
of reflection. This distinction lent itself also to those philosophers
concerned with the historical and social development of humans, as
evident in many works of Rousseau. For instance, the *Discourse on
the Origin of Inequality* (1755) presents a kind of natural
history tracing the genesis of many emotions through changes in social
structure; works such as *Emile* (1762), *La Nouvelle
Heloise* (1761), and the *Confessions* (1782) treat the
affective maturation and socialization of individuals, as well as the
management and effects of the emotions. But for all his genealogical
concerns, Rousseau, and indeed many other eighteenth-century authors,
showed a good deal less interest in taxonomizing the emotions
according to principled systems than did their predecessors.


### 2.3 Philosophical Issues in Theories of the Emotions



Few areas of early modern philosophy remained untouched by at least
some theory of the emotions. What follows is simply a cursory overview
of some issues of general interest. But since early modern
understandings of the emotions often made unexpected connections
between diverse areas of philosophy, we may find that investigation
reshapes our map of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy.
Certainly, the understanding of the emotions produced in one area of
philosophy was not isolated from their treatment in other areas.



That is true of how the emotions figured in much of
seventeenth-century metaphysics. Locating the emotions within their
distinctive ontologies was an important, but sometimes challenging
task for philosophers such as Descartes, Malebranche, and Spinoza. In
doing so, they often tapped a broad metaphysical distinction between
the active and the passive, which sometimes supported, and sometimes
undermined those ontologies (see James 1997). The emotions also inform
various approaches to the relation between mind and body, whether
Descartes's dualism, Hobbes's materialism, Spinoza's parallelism, or
those of philosophers who refused to take a stand on the issue.
Indeed, attempts to accommodate the emotions sometimes led to novel
and intricate pictures of the relations between soul and body: Walter
Charleton's *Natural History of the Passions* (1674,
2nd ed., 1701), for instance, posits two souls, one that is
rational and immaterial and one that is sensitive and extended,
mediating between the rational soul and the body. The emotions were
also important in accounts of personal identity, whether that is
understood ontologically in the cases of Descartes and Spinoza, or
psychologically in the case of Hume.



Theories of the emotions played a role - often a pivotal one
- in the important early modern debates about causation and the
proper forms of explanation. As part of their embrace of the new
science, many seventeenth century philosophers considered the emotions
to be susceptible, at least in part, to mechanical explanation.
Although Descartes offered a teleological defense of our propensities
to experience emotions, his account of their physiological
underpinnings is mechanistic. Malebranche too considered the functions
of the emotions and the way in which that functioning has been
corrupted, but emphasized that the emotions are communicated through
strictly mechanical operations. Hobbes and Spinoza went yet further,
rejecting any talk of final causation in order to treat the behavior
of the emotions as completely continuous with bodily movements, and
indeed reducing the appearance of goal-driven behavior to the motions
of the passions. In contrast, Shaftesbury criticized Locke and
Descartes for failing to appreciate the natural teleology of our
emotional constitution, and dismissed all physiological accounts as
beside the point. Many other British philosophers showed less interest
in the metaphysics of explanation and more in defending an empiricist
account of the origins of our ideas. But the rejection of innate ideas
often drove them to focus explanations of the emotions on the
hydraulics by which pains and pleasures push our ideas. This
naturalistic approach was particularly marked in eighteenth-century
associationist psychology, often hand in hand with
'Newtonian' ambitions to produce a "science of
man:" examples include Hume's *Treatise of Human Nature*
(1739-40), and such lesser-known works as David Hartley's
*Observations on Man, his Frame, his Duty, and his
Expectations* (1749) and an anonymous tract of 1741, *An
Enquiry into the Origin of Human Appetites and Affections, Showing How
Each Arises from Association: for the use of young gentlemen at the
universities* (cited in Gardiner 1970, 221), as well as in the
works of Condillac.



As we might expect, emotions loomed large in the philosophical
psychology of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. One question
addressed by almost every philosopher was where to locate the emotions
in our psychological equipment. Following Descartes, seventeenth
century philosophers tended to subsume the emotions under perception,
although Hobbes was a bit of an exception, identifying passions with
the "small beginnings" (motives) of voluntary,
"animal" actions, while finding their origins in sense and
imagination. 'Perception' must be broadly understood,
however; what is crucial is that the emotions involve the exercise of
a receptive faculty, especially insofar as their causes lie in the
body, or more generally, outside of the receptive animal. Spinoza,
admittedly, allowed that we may be adequate causes of some of our
affects, and took all our emotions to involve judgments. But on his
view, judgments are not different in kind from perceptions, although
their epistemic status depends on whether we are active and adequate,
or merely passive, inadequate causes of our perceptions. Descartes,
too, attributed a representative structure to emotions that could look
proto-propositional. This structure, however, is independent of and
prior to the volitions of assent or denial that generate real
judgment. The emotions thus remain among the perceptions belonging to
the intellect, although they provide material for judgment.
Nonetheless, since perceptions were typically granted a complex
representational and intentional structure, most seventeenth century
authors could draw close connections between emotions and
judgments.



Eighteenth century theorists, on the other hand, often identified
emotions specifically with *sense*-perceptions. Indeed, Hutcheson
multiplied the number of our sense-faculties to accommodate the wide
variety of affects he recognizes, while DuBos spoke of the
"sixth sense" by which we evaluate poetry and painting.
Many philosophers also supposed a haptic aspect to emotions,
approaching them as a variety of feeling. Most notably, Hume
maintained that a distinctive feature of the passions and sentiments
is that they touch, or strike upon the mind more forcibly than other
perceptions.



More generally, eighteenth-century theories shift gradually from
characterizing emotions primarily by how they represent their
intentional contents to considering their qualitative phenomenology,
the special 'feel' of the emotions. Hume, for one,
stressed that our passions are "simple and uniform
impressions" with characteristic affective qualities Still, this
is at most a change in emphasis, since many did allow that emotions
typically have some kind of object. Hume, in particular, attributed a
rather complicated structure to the indirect passions that show a
"double relation of impressions and ideas." But the
atomistic tendencies of British psychology following Locke spelled
difficulty for accounts of intentional content, and many philosophers
emphasized features of our emotions that are non-intentional. Emotions
still retained important connections to judgment, however, since
judgments themselves, especially moral, aesthetic and other
evaluations, were often considered expressions of sentiment.



For all their disagreements about the nature of judgment, early modern
philosophers reached near-consensus in taking emotion to motivate our
practical and theoretical endeavors either directly or indirectly.
Because they provide, or at least shape, motives for action, the
emotions were central to investigations of our practical reasoning and
to moral philosophy. In particular, eighteenth-century spectator- and
judgment-centered moral theories gave the emotions a double role for
our moral judgments: insofar as they represent the enduring
dispositions of character expressed in actions, they are the objects
of moral evaluations; but they also generate the judgments themselves.
In a somewhat different vein, many philosophers took our emotions to
be the engine driving our theoretical reasoning: both wonder (for
Descartes) and curiosity (for Hume) perform this function. Indeed,
almost any philosopher investigating efficient causation in our
psychology found an important place for our emotions, whether Hobbes
considering our internal motions, or the associationist psychologists
of the eighteenth century.



As crucial bits of our psychology, the emotions are also important to
epistemology. Here, though, the position of many early modern
philosophers has often been misunderstood, especially when it is
assumed that they oppose reason to the emotions, to the detriment of
the latter. (We might call this the 'Mr. Spock' gloss on
early modern philosophy.) It is true that many philosophers held that
the emotions can sometimes lead our reasoning astray, and they offer
various epistemic techniques to minimize this cognitive interference.
Malebranche, for instance, imbedded his account of the passions in the
reforming project of *The Search After Truth* (1674-5), and
many accounts of method, e.g., Arnauld's and Nicole's *Logic, or
the Art of Thinking* (1662), or Part II of Mary Astell's
*Serious Proposal to the Ladies* (1697), included an account of
the emotions as an indispensable part of their epistemic techniques.
But none of these accounts assumed that the emotions are inevitably
disruptive to our reason, however important it may be to temper them.
Descartes particularly emphasized the functionality of our passions,
first for practical, but also for theoretical reasoning, and suggested
that proper discipline should allow us to maximize the epistemic value
of the emotions. Malebranche and Spinoza were less sanguine about our
chances of doing so, but even Malebranche maintained that the passions
are functional in several respects. Hobbes, on the other hand, mounted
a number of contrasts between passions and the "common
measure" of reason. But these seem somewhat at odds with his
claims about the operation of the passions in driving mental activity.
Here it is worth considering Spinoza's account of the relation between
reason and the affects, for it offers a kind of gloss on Hobbes. It
is, Spinoza maintained, only our passive emotions that can produce
conflict with the dictates of our reason; our active affects accord
well with reason. Hume, of course, denied that it makes any sense to
speak of a conflict between reason and passion, when he declared that
reason not only is, "but ought only to be" the slave to
the passions - a dictum that seems to apply to theoretical as
well as practical reason. Later eighteenth-century philosophers
developed the view that our reasoning faculties, and particularly our
language, are a historical development from our emotions; this seems
to have been the view of Condillac and Rousseau.



One of the most important contexts for understanding the epistemic
strengths and weaknesses attributed to the emotions lies in their
relation to the imagination. Accounts of what exactly this faculty is
changed dramatically from the seventeenth to the eighteenth centuries,
but in one way or another, the emotions were commonly understood to
interact closely with the imagination. On some views, the imagination
provides a conduit between the emotions and the body. Both pre-modern
and modern folk medicine held that experiencing strong emotions could
affect the imagination of a pregnant woman in such a way as to leave
marks on her fetus. Indeed, so close was the connection supposed to be
that simply imagining emotionally-fraught situations could mark the
development of the fetus, and there was a substantial literature of
eighteenth-century manuals instructing mothers-to-be on the proper
control of their affective states. (See Smith 2006 and Kukla 2005.)
Descartes made mention of such views, and more generally saw the
imagination as an important tool for managing the emotions: picturing
things in the imagination could have affective results, so
manipulating the imagination is an effective way of controlling our
emotions and their effects. The view taken of the interaction between
emotions and imagination changed with shifts in how the faculty of the
imagination - and the relation between mind and body in general
- were understood. Hume, for instance, considered the
imagination to be the faculty of composing, decomposing, and
associating ideas, in contrast to the impressions among which passions
were numbered. Nonetheless, there is still some role for the
imagination in producing and manipulating affects, and vice-versa. The
imagination is also a crucial mechanism in the social communication of
the passions, a topic considered by both Malebranche and Hume.



The physiology of the emotions and their implications for medicine was
another important theme in early modern philosophy. (Here too the
imagination has a role to play.) Descartes considered the emotions
central to the treatment of both mental and bodily illness. In doing
so, he joined a long and popular medical tradition treating the
emotions, including Robert Burton's *Anatomy of Melancholy*
(1621) and William Falconer's *A Dissertation on the Influence of
the Passions upon the Disorders of the Body* (1788). Burton's work
was conservative, if eclectic, in its approach to understanding the
soul and using the machinery of humours and spirits to explain emotion
and temperament. But many other writers borrowed piecemeal from the
language of humours and spirits, sometimes embedding it in new
physiological accounts, sometimes simply using it to describe various
affects. Descartes and Malebranche, for instance, spoke of the animal
spirits, but also used such new tools as Harvey's discovery of the
circulation of the blood to explain the bodily effects of
emotions.



The affective aspects of mental disorders are matters of particular
interest. Some of that interest may have been personal, since
'melancholy' was widely taken to be a special affliction
of the learned, a point that puts some of Hume's discussion of the
emotional effects of skepticism in context. 'Enthusiasm,'
particularly religious enthusiasm, also garnered a great deal of
attention, considered as a matter of excessive and contagious emotion
that could be based in bodily disorders. But since many philosophers
of the eighteenth century followed Shaftesbury in refusing to consider
the physiology of the emotions, they relegated the bodily causes,
components and effects to the attention of 'anatomists,'
rather than of philosophers. More generally, the sort of humour-driven
approach to medicine and pathology that informed many
seventeenth-century accounts of the emotions declined among eighteenth
century philosophers.



Some of the most important issues raised by the emotions in early
modern philosophy are practical, especially those concerning practical
reason, the pursuit of happiness and moral philosophy. As we have
seen, the emotions were generally tied closely to motivations for
action. They are not necessarily the only, or the immediate sources of
motivation: Descartes and Malebranche considered reason to offer
motivations of its own, as did Pascal, who also admitted yet other
sources of motivation. But many other philosophers, such as Hobbes,
Hutcheson and Hume took the emotions to be the driving source of our
practical reason. None of them, however, maintained that the emotions
were immune to training and refinement, and indeed all early modern
philosophers took it as important for both morality and happiness that
we do train our emotions. The practical philosophies offered by
Descartes, Malebranche and Spinoza are particularly concerned with the
pursuit of happiness, which they assume involves both managing and
cultivating the emotions. Both Descartes and Spinoza sought
"remedies" for the passions, which they take to be central
to what Descartes called "pursuing virtue" and Spinoza
"freedom from bondage." Spinoza criticized Descartes for
thinking that such remedy could provide complete control, but they
shared the view that remediated emotions are crucial to the good life,
conceived both eudaimonistically and morally. Malebranche considered
corrupted passions to be "inordinate" and in need of
regulation, a bit of language that Norris and Astell later picked up,
although with less emphasis on the perversion of order through
sin.



The pursuit of happiness was also an issue for British philosophers
such as Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, although it sometimes paled next to
their interests in moral evaluation. Shaftesbury argued vehemently
that "virtue and interest coincide," because he maintained
that happiness depends on a preponderance of pleasant affects, and the
emotions carrying moral worth are themselves pleasant. To this end, he
introduced a notion of the "economy" of the passions
(*Inquiry* 198). Yet he had to argue the point, since he did
not understand virtue primarily in terms of individual flourishing,
but within an overall economy and balance of nature. Hutcheson also
considered how the passions contribute or detract from our happiness.
And like Shaftesbury, he speaks of our search for a "just
Ballance and Oeconomy" (*Essay* 47), in which our
passions and affections are properly governed, although he takes
achieving such economy to be difficult. Hutcheson's talk of
"the government of the passions" (see *Essay* 66)
thus looks a bit different from the command that the passions in
general should be governed, a theme found in a number of sermons (see,
e.g., Ayloffe, Clarke). Instead, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson and Hume
incorporated the emotions into their efforts to explain how we make
judgments of moral worth on the basis of our moral senses. It is our
emotions that allow us to be responsive to the moral qualities we
evaluate. For this reason, they may all seem committed to a
'sentimentalist' moral philosophy. Hutcheson and Hume did
indeed oppose the moral 'rationalists,' arguing that there
is no independent quality in actions or persons to which emotions are
sensitive. But their position presupposes a very particular
understanding of the nature of our senses and of the ontological
status of the secondary qualities to which they are receptive. In
contrast, Shaftesbury often suggests both that there are moral and
aesthetic qualities intrinsic to the external world, and that we
access those qualities through our emotions. On this view, our
emotions, at least when functioning as they should, are simply our
natural equipment for picking up salient features of the world.



Early modern philosophy held a special place for the emotions in its
political and social theory (see Kahn, Saccamano & Coli, 2006).
Indeed, there was a popular early modern genre of 'how-to'
books about techniques for governing others by managing their
emotions. Likewise, a great deal of political philosophy concerned the
management of the emotions by social institutions and authorities,
with Hobbes and Mandeville being just two of the most obvious
examples. Hume picks up on the language of remedying our emotions to
discuss how practices of justice and institutions of magistracy
remediate our partial affections (see T 489). But there are also
deeper issues about what role the emotions might play in making social
order possible. Many philosophers held that the emotions facilitated
social interaction: Descartes suggested something of the sort in his
analyses of such passions as love and generosity. Malebranche was even
more clearly committed to the view, holding that the communication of
the emotions is crucial to social organization, ranking and cohesion.
Hobbes and Spinoza, in contrast, found the grounds of much
interpersonal conflict in the emotions, and even diagnosed specific
emotions as inherently disruptive to social order, e.g., glory for
Hobbes. But by the same token, there are many passions that Hobbes
stated "incline us to peace," and Spinoza allowed that
insofar as people agree in affects, they agree in nature.
Eighteenth-century philosophers tended to evaluate the social effects
of the emotions in terms of whether they were self- or other-directed,
with Shaftesbury and Hutcheson arguing against Mandeville that our
most natural emotions were other-directed. In his *Philosophical
Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful*
(1759), Edmund Burke distinguished between the passions directed at
self-preservation and those belonging to society, but spends the
lion's share of his time on the latter. The issue is somewhat more
complicated in Hume, but he does seem to take the development of our
emotions and their susceptibility to a standard of appropriateness to
be indispensable to many of the "artifices" that make
social life possible. A different twist is provided by Rousseau's
contrast between two kinds of self-directed affection, *amour de
soi* and *amour propre*, of which the former, but not the
latter seems consistent with compassion for others.



The place of the emotions in early modern aesthetic theories deserves
a separate treatment. The representation of the emotions was
considered a proper object, sometimes *the* object, of
aesthetic criticism. It was also the subject of many practical manuals
in the arts; there is, for instance, an extensive seventeenth-century
literature stemming from discussions in the French Royal Academy of
Painting and Sculpture about how to depict facial expressions and
bodily gestures in ways that would allow the deciphering of emotional
states. Here the representation of the emotions serves both narrative
and didactic purposes.



Another commonplace of early modern aesthetics was the importance of
exciting emotions in the audience for a work of art. This is a common
theme in musical aesthetics, which borrowed heavily from rhetorical
treatises. Baroque composers developed an entire theory of affects,
and of musical figures to express those affects, for just this end.
(See the *Grove Dictionary of Music*.) Another version of this
theme appears in philosophical discussions of tragedy; since it is
assumed that the dramatic depiction of emotions excites the same
emotions in the audience, tragic drama presents a bit of a puzzle. It
seems odd that we should enjoy the experience, and even enjoy it in
proportion to the distress it invokes. Malebranche, Hutcheson and Hume
are just a few to address this puzzle by developing accounts of the
meta-pleasures afforded to us by the exercise of our emotions.



Eighteenth-century aesthetics moved away somewhat from the view that
the arts should carefully control our emotions, although the notion
that artworks both express and excite emotions remained. Particularly
interesting in this regard is the development of the concept of the
sublime. As Burke explains it, the experience of the sublime
transgresses categories of pain and pleasure and explains much of our
response to dramatic tragedy. Here it seems that aesthetic, and other
distinctive experiences can produce emotions that are *sui
generis*, a view that gives aesthetics a particular importance for
any understanding of the emotions.



Several of the most important discussions of the emotions in the early
modern period involved women, who sometimes raised specific concerns
relevant to their status as women. That is the case with Princess
Elisabeth of Bohemia, whose correspondence pushed Descartes to write
on the passions, while pursuing a lengthy discussion of the impact of
the emotions on health and reasoning and our ability to control them.
Elisabeth also seems to have inspired other writers on the emotions,
serving as the dedicatee for the *Treatise of the Passions and
Faculties of the Soul of Man* (1640) of Edward Reynolds, the
Bishop of Norwich. Both Mary Astell in *Letters Concerning the Love
of God* (1695) and Damaris Cudworth, Lady Masham, in *Discourse
Concerning the Love of God* (1696) took issue with the
Malebranchean account of love offered by John Norris, albeit to very
different degrees and from different approaches. Later in the
eighteenth century, Mary Wollstonecraft's criticisms of Rousseau
specifically addressed some of his views about emotional development
and the sexual division of labor in the sentimental education of
children. However, since some recent commentators have turned to early
modern discussions to understand how the emotions can be conceptually
gendered, we should note that many women philosophers of this period
showed no unusual interest in the emotions. It does not seem to have
been considered a special area of expertise for women.



Although early modern philosophy did not seem to associate concepts of
the emotions as such with gender, there is still a great deal of
gender-baggage to investigate. Many authors took the position that
there were important sexual differences in the disposition to feel
specific emotions. Malebranche allowed that there are many such
differences, not just between the sexes, but for different ages,
fortunes and stations in life; indeed, it is differences between
individuals' "stations in life" that do the most work for
him in explaining variations in affective susceptibilities. Other
authors laid such variations at the doorstep of bodily composition,
especially the constitution of the brain, and took the relevant
differences to be especially and intrinsically marked between the
sexes (although they could also typify class and rank). In *Les
Characteres des Passions* (1648-62), Marin Cureau de la Chambre
discussed the effects that the liquid humours in the brain could have
on emotional temperament, taking it as an explanation of why some
people (women, as well as children and drunkards) cry more readily
than others.



Some more distinctively gendered and more evaluatively loaded claims
about the emotions appeared in the eighteenth century, particularly in
aesthetic theory. Shaftesbury is a bit of a villain here, contrasting
true taste with the trivial sentiments of merely feminine taste. Some
authors even distinguished aesthetic qualities and emotions through
gendered contrasts, as when feminine beauty is opposed to the
masculine sublime (with, of course, the preference going to the
sublime). By the end of the eighteenth century, Wollstonecraft
bemoaned that women socialized to be ladies fall "more under the
influence of sentiments than passions," suggesting a gendered
division between sentiment and passion echoed in several other
passages in the work (1792, 49). But that is not a contrast found in
many earlier authors.



The emotions did, however, play a special role for some philosophers
who defended women's intellectual aptitude. Feminist philosophers such
as Francois Poulain de la Barre and Mary Astell appealed to the
emotions both to explain sexist prejudice and to make their case for
women's pursuit of philosophy. Poulain de la Barre traces misogynist
ridicule to surprise at the unfamiliar in his *On the Equality of
the Two Sexes* (1673), while his *On the Education of Ladies*(1674) illustrates how women can develop the assurance and
self-trust needed for the intellectual life. Astell posits the
cultivation of the intellect, along with the development of
"generosity" and "to be passionately in Love with Truth" (2002, 165)
as the most important means to regulate the passions. In contrast, she
often pairs "prejudices" and "irregular passions" as the obstacles for
persons generally and women in particular that her serious proposals
seek to overcome.


## 3. Individual Philosophers



Supplementary documents are available for the philosophers:


* Descartes
* Hobbes
* Malebranche
* Spinoza
* Shaftesbury
* Hutcheson
* Hume