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Passion (from the Ancient Greek verb πάσχω (paskho) meaning to suffer) is a term applied to a very strong feeling about a person or thing. Passion is an intense emotion compelling feeling, enthusiasm, or desire for something.
The term is also often applied to a lively or eager interest in or admiration for a proposal, cause, or activity or love - to a feeling of unusual excitement, enthusiasm or compelling emotion, a positive affinity or love, towards a subject, idea, person, or object. 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.
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'A sense of self-mastery...has been praised as a virtue since Plato's day'; but nonetheless it is a fact of everyday life that 'passions overwhelm reason time and again. This given of human nature arises from the basic architecture of mental life...the basic neural circuitry of emotion'.[1] Looking at a typical mental conflict, Plato considered that ' the forbidding principle is derived from reason, and that which bids and attracts proceeds from passion...the irrational or appetitive';[2] and he saw the role of education as using 'the united influence of music and gymnastic [to] bring them into accord, nerving and sustaining the reason with noble words and lessons, and moderating and soothing and civilizing the wildness of passion by harmony and rhythm.[3]
In his wake, Stoics like Epitectus emphasised 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'.[4] 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',[5] or Erasmus's lament that 'Jupiter has bestowed far more passion than reason - you could calculate the ratio as 24 to one'.[6] 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'.[7]
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'.[8]
Antonio Damasio studied what ensued when something 'severed ties between the lower centres of the emotional brain...and the thinking abilities of the neocortex'.[9] 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';[10] was led to 'the counter-intuitive position that feelings are typically indispensable for rational decisions'.[11] 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'.[12]
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'.[13] 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'[14] in a marital context.
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"'.[15] His contemporary, Sigmund Freud, argued for a continuity (not a contrast) between the two, physical and intellectual; commended the way 'Leonardo had energetically sublimated his sexual passions into the passion for independent scientific research'.[16]
In Margaret Drabble's The Realms of Gold, the hero flies hundreds of miles to reunite with the heroine, only to miss her by 24 hours - leaving the onlookers 'wondering what grand passion could have brought him so far...a quixotic look about him, a look of harassed desperation'.[17] When the couple do finally reunite, however, the heroine is less than impressed. '"If you ask me, it was a very childish gesture. You're not twenty-one now, you know". "No, I know. It was my last fling"'.[18]
In Alberto Moravia's 1934, the revolutionary double-agent, faced with the girl he is betraying, 'was seized by violent desire...he never took his eyes off my bosom...I believe those two dark spots at the end of my breasts were enough to make him forget tsarism, revolution, political faith, ideology, and betrayal'.[19]
René Descartes, Passions of the Soul in J. Cottingham et al. eds., The Philosophical Writings of Descartes Vol I (Cambridge 1985)