P.M.S. Hacker - The Passions: A Study of Human Nature

1. Chapter 01
2. Chapter 04
3. Chapter 06
4. Chapter 08
5. Chapter 10
6. Chapter 11

1. Chapter 01
2. Chapter 02
3. Chapter 04
4. Chapter 05
5. Chapter 06
6. Chapter 07
7. Chapter 08
8. Chapter 09
9. Chapter 10
10. Chapter 11
11. Chapter 12

P. M. S. Hacker

Fellow of St Johns College Oxford

This edition first published 2018
2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

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Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data

Names: Hacker, P. M. S. (Peter Michael Stephan), author.
Title: The passions : a study of human nature / by P. M. S. Hacker.
Description: Hoboken, NJ : John Wiley & Sons, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2017030690 (print) | LCCN 2017036805 (ebook) | ISBN 9781118954744 (epub) | ISBN 9781118952436 (pdf) | ISBN 9781118951873 (cloth) | ISBN 9781119440468 (pbk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Emotions (Philosophy) | Philosophical anthropology.
Classification: LCC B815 (ebook) | LCC B815 .H33 2017 (print) | DDC 128/.37dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017030690

Cover design by Wiley

For

Robert and Betsy Feinberg

The subject of the human passions has excited the imagination and attracted the attention of philosophers since the preSocratics. That is hardly surprising, given the role that emotions play in our lives. We are all subject to joy and delight, to anger and fear, to sadness and grief. That is an intrinsic part of the human condition for we are purposive, selfconscious, goalseeking creatures and can recognize what frustrates or facilitates our purposes, and can respond affectively to and reflect upon the achievement of our goals and the maintenance or loss of what we value. We are mammals whose offspring require years to achieve biological maturity, and we are by nature social creatures with an innate capacity for bonding. So we are given to love, loyalty, and affection, and hence also subject to grief and sorrow. We express our emotions in what we do, how we act, and what we say, and we recognize the passions of our fellow human beings in their verbal expressions and behavioural manifestations of emotion. Having a natural propensity to sympathy and empathy, we can share our emotions with others and respond sympathetically to their feelings. Any study of human nature has to investigate the passions, to elucidate our concepts of emotions, and to describe our rich affective vocabulary. For the passions and emotions, collectively and severally, present manifold conceptual problems and provide fertile terrain for conceptual confusion among both philosophers and psychologists. Our problems are not merely intellectual. Human beings are often guided by their emotions, sometimes for good and sometimes for ill. They may be masters of their emotions or in bondage to them. Clarity about the concepts of the emotions is not only a contribution to the better understanding of human nature; it also facilitates deeper reflection upon our lives and the emotions that beset us. Accordingly this book is not aimed solely at philosophers, who are concerned with the conceptual problems examined here. It is also aimed at psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists, whose conceptual confusions and unclarities are subjected to detailed analysis here. And it is equally aimed at educated readers, who are interested in understanding the nature of the emotions, and in attaining a clearer understanding of the place of emotion in their own lives.

The emotions have an immediate and patent connection with (or with what is thought to be) the beneficial and the detrimental. For we fear and seek to avoid what we perceive as harmful to us or to those whom we cherish. We feel trepidation and anxiety, or anger, at the prospect of anything that threatens our welfare and endangers the good of those to whom we are attached. So the emotions are also perspicuously connected with what is, or is thought to be, good and bad. Our emotional pronenesses and liabilities are partly constitutive of our temperament and personality. Our ability to control our emotions, to keep their manifestations and their motivating force within the bounds of reason, is constitutive of our character as moral agents. So the investigation of the emotions is a fruitful prolegomenon to the philosophical study of morality. It provides a point of access to the elucidation of right and wrong, good and evil, virtue and vice, that skirts the morass of deontological and consequentialist approaches to ethics without neglecting the roles of duties and obligations, or the role of the consequences of our actions in our practical reasoning. Unlike deontology and consequentialism, such an approach highlights the contextbound and ideographic character of much normal moral experience and decision without obscuring the role of principle in the lives of people of integrity. So this book paves the way for a subsequent investigation into axiology and morality.