Emotions from Plato to the Renaissance

Abstract

The philosophical analysis of emotion was introduced by Plato and developed further by Aristotle, who distinguished between various constitutive elements of occurrent emotions (evaluative thought, feeling, behavioural suggestion, and bodily change). While Plato stressed the controlling and mastering of emotions, Aristotle had a more positive view of them. According to him, learning to feel emotions well is part of acquiring the virtues of character which are essential for a good life. Abandoning the assumption of a separate emotional part of the soul, the Stoics argued that all human actions can be explained in terms of the operations of one rational soul. They regarded emotions as mistaken judgements. The Stoic therapy aimed at freedom from the emotions (apatheia). In later ancient schools, the aim of the therapy was the control and moderation of emotions (metriopatheia) rather than their extirpation. While the ideal of apathetic divinization influenced monastic spirituality, the rhetoric of metriopatheia became more dominant among early Christian theologians, including Augustine. The Stoic doctrine of spontaneous ‘first movements’ was incorporated into discussions of sin and intentionality.

Early medieval psychology of emotions was essentially based on ancient sources. The new medieval developments included the use of Avicenna’s faculty psychology, the medical theories of the movements of the natural heat and vital spirits, thirteenth-century taxonomies, such as that of Thomas Aquinas, and late medieval re-evaluation of the sharp divide between the emotions and the will, a particularly influential instance of which was Duns Scotus’s theory of the passions of the will. Despite an increasing variance of opinions, Renaissance theories of emotions did not deviate from traditional ideas concerning their cognitivity, passivity, and controllability. Sensory emotions were treated as psychosomatic phenomena, and the medical theory of the humours and spirits was considered relevant in this context. While scholastic authors defended Aquinas’s taxonomy of eleven emotions, many were interested in Scotus’s theory of the passions of the will. Justus Lipsius’s defense of the Stoic ideal of freedom from emotions was a significant contribution to Neo-Stoicism.