Passion

Passion is a concept that has been used in philosophy. It is different from the current popular connotations of passion which is associated with notions of romance and which is generally seen as a positive and good emotion. The philosophical notion, in contrast, is identified with an innate or biologically driven emotional states such as anger, greed, lust or the other deadly sins. In the philosophical sense, passions can lead to social or spiritual ills, such as punishment from God in Abrahamic faiths, the brutal state of nature presented by Hobbes, the recurrence of karma in dharmic faith. The passions are often used as foils to advocate the pursuit of virtue, the use of reason, dedication to the principles of a faith or other idealistic principles. Different philosophies approach the passions in a number of ways, from the full indulgence of hedonism and nihilism to the forms of moderation found in philosophies like Epicureanism and many conventional religions to the strict abnegation or rejection espoused by Stoicism, Cynicism, and many types of religious monasticism, especially in certain forms of Buddhism, Gnosticism and Jainism.

The subject of the passions has always haunted Western philosophy and, more often than not, aroused harsh judgments. For the passions represent a force of excess and lawlessness in humanity that produces troubling, confusing paradoxes, according to Michel Meyer, who has traced the complex history of philosophic conceptions of the passions by setting forth and contrasting their description in the work of such thinkers as Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Spinoza, Descartes, Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, and Freud. The great ruptures that led to passion's condemnation as sin, and to romantic exultation as the truth of existence, are registered and the logic governing them explicated by Meyer, revealing a crucial dilemma: Does passion torture people because it blinds them, or, on the contrary, does it permit them to apprehend who and what we really are?

The seventeenth century Dutch philosopher Spinoza contrasted action with passion, as well as the state of being active with the state of being passive. A passion, in his view, happened when external events affect us partially such that we have confused ideas about these events and their causes. A passive state is when we experience an emotion which Spinoza regarded as a "passivity of the soul."^[1] The body's power is increased or diminished. Emotions are bodily changes plus ideas about these changes which can help or hurt a human.^[1] It happens when the bodily changes we experience are caused primarily by external forces or by a mix of external and internal forces. Spinoza argued that it was much better for a person, himself or herself, to be the only adequate cause of bodily changes, and to act based on an adequate understanding of causes-and-effects with ideas of these changes logically related to each other and to reality; when this happens the person is active, and Spinoza describes the ideas as adequate. But most of the time, this doesn't happen, and Spinoza, along with Freud, saw emotions as more powerful than reason. Spinoza tried to live the life of reason which he advocated.^[2][3][4]