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.
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