ABSTRACT
The discussion of ‘the Passions’ was not new in the prose writings of the eighteenth century. By the publication of David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, describing sentiment, in 1740, the conversation about feeling was centuries old. The prominent dialogue about the passions in the early modern period was concerned with how to control them. By the early eighteenth century, the passions were understood as something to identify and then regulate or harness, and many philosophers of the passions, following the classical Socratic and Stoic traditions, were particularly focused on how reason should subdue the passions. Even the Aristotelian understanding of the passions, that they were beneficial and desired, was concerned with shaping the passions through reason for the benefit of the social order. Passion and reason have thus come to be understood as a binary opposition and as hierarchical: passion is undesirable, reason is advantageous. Yet there was an alternative point of view, one whose importance to the modern ordering of reason and passion has been too frequently overlooked. There were philosophers who praised the passions and argued that they could best be shaped by other passions. In fact, this alternative point of view existed in both philosophical and popular conversations in the eighteenth century, and it was instrumental to the emergence of theories of emotion and of genres for expressing and representing the theory of balancing the passions.
