The Vehement Passions (ebook)

Argumento de The Vehement Passions (ebook)

Breaking off the ordinary flow of experience, the passions create a state of exception. In their suddenness and intensity, they map a personal world, fix and qualify our attention, and impel our actions. Outraged anger drives us to write laws that will later be enforced by impersonal justice. Intense grief at the death of someone in our life discloses the contours of that life to us. Wonder spurs scientific inquiry.

The strong current of Western thought that idealizes a dispassionate world has ostracized the passions as quaint, even dangerous. Intense states have come to be seen as symptoms of pathology. A fondness for irony along with our civic ideal of tolerance lead us to prefer the diluted emotional life of feelings and moods. Demonstrating enormous intellectual originality and generosity, Philip Fisher meditates on whether this victory is permanent-and how it might diminish us.

From Aristotle to Hume to contemporary biology, Fisher finds evidence that the passions have defined a core of human nature no less important than reason or desire. Traversing the Iliad, King Lear, Moby Dick, and other great works, he discerns the properties of the high-spirited states we call the passions. Are vehement states compatible with a culture that values private, selectively shared experiences? How do passions differ from emotions? Does anger have an opposite? Do the passions give scale, shape, and significance to our experience of time? Is a person incapable of anger more dangerous than someone who is irascible?

In reintroducing us to our own vehemence, Fisher reminds us that it is only through our strongest passions that we feel the contours of injustice, mortality, loss, and knowledge. It is only through our personal worlds that we can know the world.

"Philip Fisher's new book . . . makes a daring case for the continued relevance of pre-Christian ideas about the passions. His argument is that we underestimate the positive potential of the 'vehement passions' long understood only as forces that must be suppressed or redirected if we are to develop healthy minds in a benevolent world."--David Simpson, London Review of Books

"I revelled in the new book by the brilliant American critic Philip Fisher, The Vehement Passions, which is about nothing less than what the title promises: thoroughness, rashness, fear, anger, grief, and more."--Susan Sontag, Times Literary Supplement

"A stimulating and provocative book, whose strength lies precisely in the compact selectivity with which it argues its case for the vehement passions."--John Higgins, The Times Higher Education Supplement

"Philip Fisher has written a revisionary history of startling boldness, rereading the authorities in novel and penetrating ways. His conclusions have relevance to the inner lives of us all."--J. M. Coetzee, author of The Lives of Animals

"This is really a quite extraordinary work, an attempt to reclaim for modern use a vocabulary we gave up two centuries (or more) ago, and more importantly, to reclaim or re-recognize the intense energies that go with that vocabulary--still present and alive. Fisher's whole project is enormously compelling. Its scope and force are unmistakable, and will provoke important discussions."--Michael Wood, Princeton University0ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix
INTRODUCTION 1
ONE: Passions,Strong Emotions, Vehement Occasions 12
TWO: Paths among the Passions 28
THREE: Thoroughness 40
FOUR: Privacy,Radical Singularity 53
FIVE: Time 71
SIX: Rashness 93
SEVEN: Mutual Fear 109
EIGHT: The Aesthetics of Fear 132
NINE: The Radius of the Will 157
TEN: Anger and Diminution 171
ELEVEN: Grief 199
TWELVE: Spiritedness 227
CONCLUSION 246
NOTES 253
AUTHOR INDEX 263
INDEX OF TERMS 266