Passion’s Intentions

“Passion’s Intentions” provides a broad account of the concept of passion as the early modern period received it from various ancient and medieval sources. It starts with the rise of “treatises on the passions” in the seventeenth century, showing to what extent those books represent a new phenomenon but also anchoring their understanding of passion in a received “science of the soul”: a faculty psychology drawn largely from Aristotle, the Stoics, Augustine, and Aquinas. The chapter also connects that concept of passion to passages from the poetry of Edmund Spenser and John Donne and the plays of Shakespeare. But its primary aim is to emphasize the object-oriented, “intentional” nature of passion as the early modern period understood it: passion is directed at the world of things; it is intimately connected to the way those things appear to us, in what scholastic psychology called “intentions.” This also means that passion is not a purely internal state: while it is anchored in a structure of mental representations, it is also oriented to the world, shaped by situations, and must be understood with reference to those situations. As circumstanced encounters with qualitatively particular objects, the passions were seen to be infinite: knowledge of the passions comes from the outside in, through an immersive, open-ended, narrative understanding of particular lived situations. The chapter ends by briefly sketching how narrative, theorized by rhetoric as a mode of the knowledge of particulars, came to be seen as a crucial instrument of the knowledge of the passions.