Passion (Greek πάσχω "to suffer, to be acted on" and Late Latin (chiefly Christian) passio "passion; suffering") denotes strong and intractable or barely controllable emotion or inclination with respect to a particular person or thing. Passion can range from eager interest in, or admiration for, an idea, proposal, or cause; to enthusiastic enjoyment of an interest or activity; to strong attraction, excitement, or emotion towards a person. It is particularly used in the context of romance or sexual desire, though it generally implies a deeper or more encompassing emotion than that implied by the term lust, often incorporating ideas of ecstasy and/or suffering.
Denis Diderot (1713–1784) describes passions as "penchants, inclinations, desires and aversions carried to a certain degree of intensity, combined with an indistinct sensation of pleasure or pain, occasioned or accompanied by some irregular movement of the blood and animal spirits, are what we call passions. They can be so strong as to inhibit all practice of personal freedom, a state in which the soul is in some sense rendered passive; whence the name passions. This inclination or so-called disposition of the soul, is born of the opinion we hold that a great good or a great evil is contained in an object which in and of itself arouses passion".
Diderot further breaks down pleasure and pain, which he sees as the guiding principles of passion, into four major categories:
Pleasures and pains of the senses Pleasures of the mind or of the imagination Our perfection or our imperfection of virtues or vices Pleasures and pains in the happiness or misfortunes of others Modern pop-psychologies and employers tend to favor and even encourage the expression of a "passion"; previous generations sometimes expressed more nuanced viewpoints.
Emotion The standard definition for emotion is a "Natural instinctive state of mind deriving from one's circumstances, mood, or relationships with others". William James describes emotions as "corporeal reverberations such as surprise, curiosity, rapture, fear, anger, lust, greed and the like." These are all feelings that affect our mental perception. Our body is placed into this latter state, which is caused by one's mental affection. This state gives signals to our body which cause bodily expressions. The philosopher Robert Solomon developed his own theory and definition of emotion. His view is that emotion is not a bodily state, but instead a type of judgment. "It is necessary that we choose our emotions, in much the same way that we choose our actions" With regard to the relationship between emotion and our rational will, Solomon believes that people are responsible for their emotions. Emotions are rational and purposive, just as actions are. "We choose an emotion much as we choose a course of action." Recent studies have placed emotions to be a physiological disturbance. William James takes such consciousness of emotion to be not a choice but a physical occurrence rather than a disturbance. It is an occurrence that happens outside of our control, and our bodies are just affected by these emotions. We produce these actions based on the instinctive state that these feelings lead us towards. This concept of emotion was derived from passion. Emotions were created as a category within passion.
Reason In his wake, Stoics like Epictetus emphasized that "the most important and especially pressing field of study is that which has to do with the stronger emotions...sorrows, lamentations, envies...passions which make it impossible for us even to listen to reason". The Stoic tradition still lay behind Hamlet's plea to "Give me that man That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him In my heart's core", or Erasmus's lament that "Jupiter has bestowed far more passion than reason – you could calculate the ratio as 24 to one". It was only with the Romantic movement that a valorisation of passion over reason took hold in the Western tradition: "the more Passion there is, the better the Poetry". The recent concerns of emotional intelligence have been to find a synthesis of the two forces—something that "turns the old understanding of the tension between reason and feeling on its head: it is not that we want to do away with emotion and put reason in its place, as Erasmus had it, but instead find the intelligent balance of the two".
"Descartes' Error" Antonio Damasio studied what ensued when something "severed ties between the lower centres of the emotional brain...and the thinking abilities of the neocortex". He found that while "emotions and feelings can cause havoc in the processes of reasoning...the absence of emotion and feeling is no less damaging"; and was led to "the counter-intuitive position that feelings are typically indispensable for rational decisions". The passions, he concluded, "have a say on how the rest of the brain and cognition go about their business. Their influence is immense...[providing] a frame of reference – as opposed to Descartes' error...the Cartesian idea of a disembodied mind".
In marriage A tension or dialectic between marriage and passion can be traced back in Western society at least as far as the Middle Ages, and the emergence of the cult of courtly love. Denis de Rougemont has argued that 'since its origins in the twelfth century, passionate love was constituted in opposition to marriage'. Stacey Oliker writes that while "Puritanism prepared the ground for a marital love ideology by prescribing love in marriage", only from the eighteenth century has "romantic love ideology resolved the Puritan antagonism between passion and reason" in a marital context.
Intellectual passions George Bernard Shaw "insists that there are passions far more exciting than the physical ones...'intellectual passion, mathematical passion, passion for discovery and exploration: the mightiest of all passions'". His contemporary, Sigmund Freud, argued for a continuity (not a contrast) between the two, physical and intellectual, and commended the way Leonardo da Vinci "had energetically sublimated his sexual passions into the passion for independent scientific research".
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