Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy

Our estimations of power are thus an aspect of our own endeavour; to secure our own contentment, we evaluate the power other people have in relation to our own, and come to learn that as well as knowledge or physical strength, wealth, authority, and friendship are forms of power. To recognize that another person possesses more power than one does oneself is, Thomas Hobbes tells us, to honour them. “To honour a man (inwardly in the mind)’, he claims in *The Elements of Law*, “is to conceive or acknowledge that that man hath the odds or excess of power above him that contendeth or compareth himself.” Moreover, the fact that a person is perceived to be worthy of honour often serves to sustain their power. To take a comparatively crude example, a poor man’s recognition that a rich one can ruin him may prompt the first to take care not to offend the second, thereby sustaining the latter’s security. But Hobbes also has in mind here, as chapter to of *Leviathan* attests, the more insinuating patterns of recognition that surround the notion of esteem and make us intensely responsive to the implications of many kinds of power? Because the recognition that other people honour us upholds whatever power we have, we experience it as pleasurable. And ‘in the pleasure men have, or displeasure from the signs of honour or dishonour done to them, consisteth the nature of the passions in particular’. Our susceptibility to passion is, then, a susceptibility to honour which is itself a manifestation of a susceptibility to power. This is in turn the conscious aspect of endeavour, our overriding disposition to preserve ourselves. (Passion and Action, 132)

According to Hobbes’s account, passions are manifestations of an underlying striving for power, and dispose us to act in such a way as to promote it and resist its loss. They are thoughts; but etymologically, at least, they carry connotations of motion. The words ‘appetite’ and ‘aversion’, Hobbes points out, ‘we have from the Latins; and they both of them signify the motions, the one of approaching the other of retiring’. The motions in question cannot, however, be “metaphorical’-there is no question of interpreting them as Malebranche does, for example, as inclinations of the mind. They must therefore be physical, and Hobbes consequently goes on to identify passions, our endeavours toward or away from objects, as ‘the small beginnings of motion, within the body of man, before they appear in walking, speaking, striking and other visible actions’.” Passions are therefore thoughts which issue in action, but it remains to see what other characteristics they have, and particularly how they fit the conventional distinction between perceptions and volitions.

Passions, then, incorporate some of the features that other philosophers attribute to perceptions and some that they reserve for volitions. Like perceptions, they are ideas that represent things as good or bad for us; but like volitions they are appetitive and can move us to action. Whereas Descartes argues that two components perception and a volition-precede action, Hobbes obliterates the distinction around which this view is organized. Our passions are not representations, waiting to have their truth or falsity affirmed; instead they are already conceptions of how things are, and are thus already affirmations.

We are looking for a notion of substance both conceptually and ontologically self-sufficient, which can serve as the intelligible explanatory basis of nature. As Spinoza puts it, ‘By substance I understand what is in itself and is conceived through itself, i.e., that whose concept does not require the concept of another thing, from which it must be formed.