The nature of the emotions or, rather, as they were to be known for many hundreds of years, the Passions, become an essential object of study.
The passions were assumed to exist independently, in fixed form. They waited to be activated and were experienced, as it were, passively. Their exact location was a matter of discussion—the head, the heart, the belly? The importance factor was that they could be activated.
Aristotle defines and classifies passions into ten, sometimes single, sometimes linked:
1. Anger
2. Calm
3. Friendship and enmity
4. Fear and confidence
5. Shame
6. Favor
7. Pity
8. Indignation
9. Envy
10. Jealousy
Aristotle’s descriptions of how, why and when emotions occur is extremely detailed. Each of them is examined in depth. Significantly, it is often questions of social relations that dominate, questions of status and class. In other words it is the situation that produces the emotion.
Thus, emotion only appears under certain conditions, depending on:
- the individual’s state of mind
- the object of his feeling
- the circumstances in which the feeling arises
Anger
Let focus on “Anger” as the example.
Anger is a desire, not without some pain, for overt revenge for an overt and undeserved slight on oneself or a member of one’s family.
We are always angry with some men in particular (not with Man in general), because he has done or is about to do something against ourselves or our family.
In all anger there is an element of pleasure arising from the prospect of the revenge we conceive in our imagination, as in a dream. A slight is an open display of opinion about things considered to be worthless. This can take three forms—contempt, spite, insolence.
- to show contempt is to belittle something or to look down on someone
- to spite is to thwart another man’s wishes, not for your personal gain, but for his personal loss.
- to show insolence is to do or say things to shame the victim, not because of any injury suffered, but for the pure pleasure of doing it. Those who delight in insolence imagine they do so because they are superior to the person they are insulting.
We are angry when in pain. We are angry with people who oppose us, or do not help us, or thwart our desire in some manner. If we are ill, poor, in love, at war, thirsty, or generally obsessed with a desire we cannot fulfill. We are bad-tempered and ready to get angry above all with people who show no concern for our situation.
Question: in the comment below, answer me: with what people are angry? Ie: People are angry with: those who laugh or jeer or soff at them. People are also angry with those treat them as a joke. Tell me at least in 3 situations or more with what people are angry.
Besides the examination of emotion (anger), Aristotle carries on to broader topics one of them is “Advantages of fortune.”
Advantages of Fortune
Birth
It is in the nature of noble birth to make the man who possesses it more ambitious. All men who have possessions add something to it. Good birth is the glorification of one’s ancestors. Men of high birth even despise those among their contemporaries who are as good as their own forebears since it is easier to boast of things in the distant past than of things in the present. The word high-born means being true to one’s stock, and nobility to that which still maintains their standards. In most cases, this is not what happens. The high-born are for the most part worthless, for there are good and bad harvests in the families of men as in the fruits of the earth and sometimes if the stock is good, eminent men arise for a certain time and then there is a decline.
Wealth
The characteristics that arise from wealth are plain to see. Men become arrogant, proud. Their attitude reflects the fact that they possess the good things of life. Wealth is the yardstick by which other things are judged. They are self-indulgent and extravagant; self-indulgent in the upkeep and display of their great wealth, extravagant and insolent.
They believe they have the right to command, since they believe they posses that which makes them fit to the rule. The character of a wealthy man is of a happy man devoid of sense.
There are differences between old and new money, the newly rich have all the faults of the old to a much higher degree. It is to be rich without the experience of being rich.
Power
Power has certain characteristics that are similar to wealth and some that are better. Men of power are more ambitious and manly than the rich because they are drawn to exploits which their power enables them to accomplish.
They are also more diligent, because they are always alert, obliged to attend to what concerns their power.
They are more dignified than pompous. Their rank puts them in public view and so their acts are moderate and their dignity is a kind of tempered pomp that is seemly.
Youth, Old age, middle age
Youth
The young are by their nature full of desires and they are inclined to follow their desires. In their bodily desires they are particularly subject to love, which they are powerless to control. They are inconsistent, and quickly tired. Their desires are intense but brief (for their desires are urgent, not great, and are like the hunger and thirst). They are hot-blooded, rash and follow their impulses. They are governed by their ardor. Being ambitious they will not endure disdain and they grow angry if they think they are suffering from injustice. They love recognition but victory even more. For youth desires to be supreme and victory is supreme. These are their two ambitions rather than a love of money. They have no great love of money since they have no yet experienced need. They are good-rather than ill-natured because they have not seen much evil. They are trusting because they have not often been deceived. They are optimistic because they have not suffered failure.
They live for the most part in hope, for hope embraces the future while memory refers to the past and for the young the future is long and the past is short…they are more courageous than men of another age since they are rash and hope easily. Their rashness takes away all fear. Hope gives them confidence, for no one is afraid when he is angry and hope for some gain inspires confidence. They are easily embarrassed since they cannot conceive of anything other than what is beautiful having received a conventional upbringing. They are magnanimous. They have not yet been humiliated by life. They have not experienced inescapable necessities and magnanimity means believing oneself capable of great things, and this belongs to someone who is full of hope.
In their deeds they prefer beauty to self-interest, for they live by nature rather than calculation. Calculation deals in self-interest, virtue in beauty.
More than at any other age they love their friends and companions, because they take pleasure in the common life and do not yet judge things by their own self-interest and in consequence neither do their friends. They err always by exaggeration and excessive vehemence, for they do everything to excess; they love to excess, hate to excess and so on.
They believe they know everything and are obstinate in what they say. That is the cause of their excess in everything. They commit their crimes through excess rather than wickedness. They are open to pity because they believe all men to be honest and better than they really are. They apply the yardstick of their own innocence to all men. They imagine that other people’s suffering is undeserved.
They love to laugh and to joke, for a joke is excess tempered by good upbringing.
Old Age
Old men…have characteristics that are almost entirely opposite to the young, because they have lived many years, have been derived and made mistakes on more than one occasion, because they have seen that human affairs go wrong most of the time, and so they are never affirmative, always over-cautious. They say, ‘I think’, never, ‘I know’, and always add ‘perhaps,’ ‘possibly.’ Everything is qualified. To be continued….
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