Abstract

This "philosophy of the passions" is intended as a radically new understanding of the nature of human emotions and as such as the only realistic philosophy of life. It is an attack on "the Myth of the Passions," the traditional Western view of emotional phenomena, according to which emotions are held to be beastly residues in our being and naturally opposed to the calm, divine objectivity of reason. This new "theory of the passions—with an almost exclusive emphasis on the emotions" represents the defence of a "rational Romanticism," the thesis that the emotions are judgments constitutive of our world and of the meaning of life, not blind or irrational forces, and that it is reason, rather, which "requires the anchorage and earthy wisdom of the passions".