The Rhetoric of the Passions

In the Advancement of Learning, Francis Bacon complains that there was no adequate science of the passions: in the place where the passions should be discussed—ethics—they were generally handled only in summary or inadequate ways; the most extensive and particularized accounts of the passions belong to poetry and history as they are informed by rhetoric; but neither poetry, history, nor rhetoric turned their observations into the basis of systematic investigations. This chapter describes the rhetoric of the passions, tracing it to works by Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian, textbooks like the progymnasmata—basic exercises in rhetoric—and early modern literary theory. The chapter argues that the heart of this rhetoric of the passions lies in an account of narrative as an instrument of the knowledge of the passions in their particularity, producing what Bacon calls “active and ample descriptions and observations.” The chapter uses that rhetoric of the passions as a lens for interpreting the early modern treatises on the passions as well as Montaigne’s essays. Finally, it reads Milton’s Paradise Lost as a serious confrontation with narrative as an instrument of the knowledge of the passions. Milton forges his poetry into an instrument for investigating minute fluctuations of affective experience as they drive conversational exchanges; but he also raises questions about the implications of that narrative mode of understanding for his theological principles of absolute freedom and responsibility.

The Accidents of the Soul

“The Accidents of the Soul” asks which disciplines were seen to provide a knowledge of the passions in the early modern period, and how that map of the disciplines changed over time. It opens by noting the relatively minor position the passions held in a received philosophical “science of the soul,” itself divided between physics and metaphysics. As “accidents of the soul”—that is, contingent qualitative alterations in the soul—the passions lay at the margins of philosophical knowledge: they were seen as subject to too much particularity and contingency to belong to what one author called “certaine science.” They belonged instead to the “low” sciences, the practical sciences, fields that study human actions and that therefore were seen to produce a merely probable knowledge of particulars: fields like rhetoric, politics, poetics, ethics. The passions also belonged to medicine insofar as diagnostic medicine was understood as an art: in medicine, “accidents” are symptoms and the phrase “accidents of the soul” belongs to medical discourse insofar as it takes account of the particularities of the passions as part of a regimen of health. The chapter situates the seventeenth-century treatises on the passions in relation to various kinds of discourse on the passions all seen as promoting forms of probable knowledge on the model of medical diagnostics: physiology and “characterology,” most notably. It ends with a reading of Shakespeare’s Othello as a text that probes the limits—and the dangers—of this probable knowledge of the passions.

Introduction

This chapter describes the largest historical, theoretical, and methodological claims of Passion’s Fictions: that in the early modern period a rhetoric of the passions destabilized a received faculty psychology, only to be itself absorbed into new natural histories of the passions; that the concept of passion in the early modern period was crucially shaped by rhetoric, with its account of passion as a situated, worlded, object-oriented mode of cognition; that the rhetoric of the passions centered on an account of narrative as a mode of the knowledge of the passions in their world-bound particularity; that rhetoric also shaped emerging forms of literary production, from Shakespeare’s drama to the rise of the novel; and that literary studies needs to attend to the active role of its own material in the history of the psychology of the passions. The chapter also situates the arguments made in Passion’s Fictions with respect to a series of related areas of inquiry: the history of emotion; affect theory; cognitive cultural studies; the history of philosophy; and the history of science. Overall, it aims to show the intimate links between literature and the sciences of soul and mind through the whole period from 1500 to 1800, and it makes the case that literary history is a crucial territory for investigating changing ways of thinking about the passions, not just in the rarefied space of philosophical and scientific debate but also in broader areas of discourse and culture.

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.

The Art of Moving

“The Art of Moving” turns to an eighteenth-century culture of the sentiments, traditionally seen in strong contrast to a Renaissance culture of the passions. I argue instead that, from the standpoint of rhetoric, the discourses on affectivity from 1500 to 1800 constitute parts of a single, unfolding process. The chapter traces the influence of rhetoric on Shaftesbury, Hume, and Smith, arguing that empiricist models of the mind are built on a rhetorical concern with vivid, forceful, and passionate imagery, and that such models effectively introject a rhetorical scene into the mind. The chapter then turns to Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa—traditionally the exemplary instance of a new, “psychological” fiction—in order to argue that the novel’s psychology is in fact an externalist, rhetorical one that resists any clear distinction between character-driven and plot-driven fictions. Richardson’s novel opens up a series of concerns that reach deep into the material of both this chapter and the previous one: about post-Hobbesian accounts of the will as determined by passions; about circumstantial narrative as a means of not just representing but also exploiting that determination; about empiricism collapsing into a Gorgian rhetoric in which the very effort to promote an ethics of natural sentiment introduces a quasi-mechanistic model of the human being. In its final pages, the chapter turns to Smith’s lectures on rhetoric and Giambattista Vico’s New Science to argue that, between 1600 and 1800, literary history was becoming legible as the material of a cultural history of the passions.

Passion’s Fictions

The final chapter consolidates the implications of the foregoing argument for the interpretation of early modern literature, in part by returning to the start of the story, in Shakespeare; but it approaches Shakespeare by way of an eighteenth-century phenomenon: the rise of works of “character criticism” represented for example by William Richardson’s essays. Eighteenth-century character criticism has long been seen as a new way of reading Shakespeare, even the intrusion of something foreign to Shakespeare’s plays. The word for that foreign element is often “psychology,” especially as allied to reading practices associated with the novel. This chapter argues that the real roots of character criticism lie in much older theories of the passions. The psychology at work is not nearly as new as has been claimed, as can be seen by contrasting Richardson’s essays with one of the books he cites: Edmund Burke’s treatise on the sublime and beautiful. The chapter then circles back to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, arguing that Shakespeare’s plays already contain the elements of a psychology: an externalist psychology grounded in rhetoric and its account of the circumstantial mimesis of actions as an instrument of the knowledge of the passions. Shakespeare’s plays could become the material for a science of the passions because in some sense they already were: instances of a circumstantial knowledge of the passions produced according to principles first theorized by rhetoric, which themselves shaped the new sciences of the mind that developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The Springs of the Soul

This chapter turns to the place of the passions in the “new philosophies” of the mid- to late-seventeenth century, which aimed to bring them into the purview of a true “certaine science.” In the process, they changed the concept of passion, turning it from a motion of the sensitive soul with associated but secondary effects in the body to a more centrally physiological movement: a motion of the spirits, themselves understood in increasingly materialist terms; or even a “spring” of the soul: a physical movement in the body that causes effects in the soul. The chapter demonstrates the impact of this shift in the concept of passion on late-seventeenth-century rhetoric. But it also argues that rhetoric continued to shape new forms of philosophical discourse on the passions, albeit in hidden or even disavowed ways. It traces the influence of rhetoric through major philosophical texts by Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, Malebranche, and Locke. In its final pages it turns to two novels, Marie-Madeleine de Lafayette’s Princesse de Clèves and Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess, to show how they fuse concepts of passion shaped by the new physiologies with an updated version of a circumstantial knowledge of the passions that had once belonged to rhetoric but that by the late seventeenth century was also guiding the production of new forms of long prose fiction.