Katana VentraIP

Passion (emotion)

Passion (Greek πάσχω "to suffer, to be acted on"[1] and Late Latin (chiefly Christian[2]) passio "passion; suffering")[3] denotes strong and intractable or barely controllable emotion or inclination with respect to a particular person or thing. Passion can range from eager interest in, or admiration for, an idea, proposal, or cause; to enthusiastic enjoyment of an interest or activity; to strong attraction, excitement, or emotion towards a person. It is particularly used in the context of romance or sexual desire, though it generally implies a deeper or more encompassing emotion than that implied by the term lust, often incorporating ideas of ecstasy and/or suffering.

"Heat of the moment" redirects here. For other uses, see Heat of the Moment (disambiguation).

Denis Diderot (1713–1784) describes passions as


Diderot further breaks down pleasure and pain, which he sees as the guiding principles of passion, into four major categories:


Modern pop-psychologies and employers tend to favor and even encourage the expression of a "passion"; previous generations sometimes expressed more nuanced viewpoints.[5]

Emotion[edit]

The standard definition for emotion is a "Natural instinctive state of mind deriving from one's circumstances, mood, or relationships with others".[6] Emotion,[7] William James describes emotions as "corporeal reverberations such as surprise, curiosity, rapture, fear, anger, lust, greed and the like." These are all feelings that affect our mental perception. Our body is placed into this latter state, which is caused by one's mental affection. This state gives signals to our body which cause bodily expressions.


The philosopher Robert Solomon developed his own theory and definition of emotion. His view is that emotion is not a bodily state, but instead a type of judgment. "It is necessary that we choose our emotions, in much the same way that we choose our actions"[8] With regard to the relationship between emotion and our rational will, Solomon believes that people are responsible for their emotions. Emotions are rational and purposive, just as actions are. "We choose an emotion much as we choose a course of action."[9] Recent studies, also traditional studies have placed emotions to be a physiological disturbance. William James takes such consciousness of emotion to be not a choice but a physical occurrence rather than a disturbance. It is an occurrence that happens outside of our control, and our bodies are just affected by these emotions. We produce these actions based on the instinctive state that these feelings lead us towards.


This concept of emotion was derived from passion. Emotions were created as a category within passion.

In marriage[edit]

A tension or dialectic between marriage and passion can be traced back in Western society at least as far as the Middle Ages, and the emergence of the cult of courtly love. Denis de Rougemont has argued that 'since its origins in the twelfth century, passionate love was constituted in opposition to marriage'.[19] Stacey Oliker writes that while "Puritanism prepared the ground for a marital love ideology by prescribing love in marriage", only from the eighteenth century has "romantic love ideology resolved the Puritan antagonism between passion and reason"[20] in a marital context. (Note though that Saint Paul spoke of loving one's wife in Ephesians 5.)

Intellectual passions[edit]

George Bernard Shaw "insists that there are passions far more exciting than the physical ones...'intellectual passion, mathematical passion, passion for discovery and exploration: the mightiest of all passions'".[21] His contemporary, Sigmund Freud, argued for a continuity (not a contrast) between the two, physical and intellectual, and commended the way Leonardo da Vinci "had energetically sublimated his sexual passions into the passion for independent scientific research".[22]

Fictional examples[edit]

In Margaret Drabble's The Realms of Gold, the hero flies hundreds of miles to reunite with the heroine, only to miss her by 24 hours – leaving the onlookers "wondering what grand passion could have brought him so far...a quixotic look about him, a look of harassed desperation".[28] When the couple do finally reunite, however, the heroine is less than impressed. "'If you ask me, it was a very childish gesture. You're not twenty-one now, you know'. 'No, I know. It was my last fling'".[29]


In Alberto Moravia's 1934, the revolutionary double-agent, faced with the girl he is betraying, "was seized by violent desire...he never took his eyes off my bosom...I believe those two dark spots at the end of my breasts were enough to make him forget tsarism, revolution, political faith, ideology, and betrayal".[30]

Diderot's Encyclopédie

René Descartes, Passions of the Soul in J. Cottingham et al. eds., The Philosophical Writings of Descartes Vol I (Cambridge 1985)

Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor, "Passion"