Aristotle on the Metaphysical Status of "Pathe"

Author(s): Amélie Oksenberg Rorty

Reviewed work(s):
Source: The Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 37, No. 3 (Mar., 1984), pp. 521-546
Published by: Philosophy Education Society Inc.
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 ARISTOTLE ON THE METAPHYSICAL STATUS
OF PATHE
AM?LIE OKSENBERG RORTY

v>iONTEMPORARY discussions of the passions are often puzzlingly

pulled in what appear to be opposing directions. We sometimes
hold people responsible for their emotions and the actions they
perform from them. Yet abnormal behavior is often explained and
excused by the person "suffering" an emotional condition. We treat
emotions as interruptions or deflections of normal behavior, and
yet also consider a person pathological if he fails to act or react
from a standard range of emotions. Sometimes emotions are clas
sified as a species of evaluative judgments whose analysis will be

given in an adequate theory of cognition. But sometimes the cog

nitive or intentional character of an emotion is treated as dependent

on, and ultimately explained by, a physical condition. These con

flicting intuitions about the emotions are not easily reconciled: we

cannot, for example, construct a tidy taxonomy of emotions, sorting

out varieties that are cognitively from those that are primarily
physically identifiable, or distinguish those that are strongly as
sociated with "normal" motivational processes from those that are
invasive interruptions.
To put it bluntly, current philosophical debates about the pas
sions and emotions seem to stand even further away from the phe
nomena they are meant to illuminate than
philosophical discussions
normally do. We seem to be engaged in ill-formed and unresolvable
polemical debates. What is even more puzzling is that the very

questions we address seem, on the face of it, bizarre and factious,

guaranteed to generate arbitrary and factitious discussions. Offi
cially we are preoccupied with determining whether emotions can
be evaluated for their rationality; or whether they are voluntary;
or whether they can be "reduced" to cognitions; or whether they
are interruptions of behavior that is normally purposeful. But in
fact we know better: when we are really thinking, rather than mak

Review of Metaphysics 38 (March 1984): 521-546. Copyright ? 1984 by the Review of

Metaphysics
 522 AM?LIE OKSENBERG RORTY

ing pronouncements, we know that we evaluate the appropriateness

of emotions by criteria that are much richer than those of logical

consistency: we are interested in determining whether they are

inadequate orexcessive, crude or subtle; whether they are har

moniously balanced with one

another; whether we admire the char
acter traits they reveal and the motives that usually accompany
them. And when we are careful, we usually also distinguish pas
sions, emotions, affects, sentiments.
The unusual disarray of the subject comes, I believe, from the
historical innocence of most philosophical analyses of the emotions.
Emotions do not form a natural class of psychological states. Quite
distinctive conditions have been added to the class at different pe
riods, for quite distinctive philosophic reasons. To understand the
rationale of the questions that philosophers and psychologists raise,
to locate the sources of their opposing intuitions, it is necessary to
trace the history of the discussions of pathe, passiones, affectus,
?motions, sentiments, affekte. While contemporary discussions of
the passions have abandoned the Aristotelian metaphysical setting
in which pathe were introduced, they have retained the distinctions
and preoccupations which were embedded in that metaphysical set

ting. The metaphysics is gone; but since its distinctions defined

the phenomena, the
questions that stem from those distinctions
remain. Even though our class of emotions differs markedly from
Aristotle's class of pathe, our conceptions of the emotions and the

questions central to their analysis are still profoundly influenced

by Aristotle's discussion. It is because this inheritance is not un

derstood?because our preoccupations have been deracinated?that
our discussions of the passions and emotions has such an odd air
of chimaeral construction.

Because the story really begins with Aristotle, it is helpful to

locate the origins of contemporary questions within the framework
of his questions and preoccupations, and his account of species def

inition, of the varieties of change and motion, his analysis of psy

chological and intellectual activity. While Aristotle's discussions

of pathe as psychological states appear within the setting of larger

metaphysical concerns, the analysis of pathe was by no means his

central preoccupation. With the exception of the discussion of pathe
ARISTOTLE ON THE STATUS OF PATHE 523
in the Nicomachean Ethics and the Rhetoric, Aristotle's views on

pathe were largely formed as byproducts of his major metaphysical

doctrines. Like nearly all terms that Aristotle inherited, trans
formed and located within the frame of a technical philosophic
vocabulary, pathos has its origins in relatively diffuse common usage.
In general, it means: an experience or event that befalls a person,

something he passively undergoes, usually by accident, in contrast

to something he actively does ("opp. to drama, poiema, praxis, er

gon*9).1 Pathe came more specifically to refer to sufferings, mis

fortunes, or harmful experiences such as attacks of illness or disease.
Because pathe were not central to his primary concerns, Ar
istotle did not follow his usual dialectical practice: he did not list
the various definitions embedded in common usage and in the works
of his philosophic predecessors, as a preliminary to his own con
structive and reconciliatory analysis. By and large, the discussions
of pathos that are scattered throughout the Aristotelian corpus do
not rest on a focused definition. Yet virtually all of Aristotle's
canonic metaphysical doctrines and distinctions inform those dis
cussions of pathe: (1) The definition of a species identifies the es
sential potentialities whose actualization and exercise are the ergon,
the basic activities and actions that constitute the natural functions
of the members of that species. (By contrast, then, pathe are tem
porary conditions that accidentally happen to a thing.) (2) The
definition of a species identifies its phusis, its natural internal prin
ciples of motion that do not themselves require an external cause.

(By contrast, pathe are standardly exogenous. Even if their im

mediate cause is an organic condition, that an
condition is not
expression of the organism's natural internal principles of motion.)
(3) There is a physical as well as a grammatical distinction between
activity and passivity and between the agent and the patient of
change. (In this context, pathe are passive conditions, even when
the passive condition involves motion [hi?eseis].) (4) The allocation
of responsibility requires distinguishing nonvoluntary, involuntary,
voluntary and deliberate action. (While pathe are not themselves

normally voluntary, a person who is capable of forming active ra

1
Cf. the entry under pathos in Liddell and Scott, Greek-English Lexicon,
(New York: 1883). Because translations are neither consistent nor uniform,
and because their connotations are significantly distinct from the Greek,
I have adopted the (plodding) practise of giving transliterations of
Greek terms.
524 AM?LIE OKSENBERG RORTY

tional dispositions (hexeis) concerning pathe can be held responsible

for his pathe.)
Iwant to sort out these various uses, to reconstruct the rationale
of Aristotle's shifting emphases on the various strands in pathos.
The term remains equivocal, but there is a rationale for the varying

emphases pathos receives in different contexts. The account of pa

thos that emerges in the Ethics and the Rhetoric is well grounded
in nonintentional contexts, in the discussions of pathos that appear
in the Categories, the Metaphysics, the Physics, the biological works,
and in De Anima.
Athing's essential nature defines its active functions (ergo),
the natural endogenous activities of the thing that do not require
an external cause to generate them. By contrast, pathe are char
acterised as accidental in contrast to essential, exogenous in contrast
to endogenous, temporary conditions in contrast to long standing

dispositions, as reactive modifications or happenings-to in contrast

to active doings and makings, passive instead of active. When a

pathos involves a deflection or deviation fromthe thing's own natural

movement and activity, the change or condition is usually for the
worse. Aristotle's discussion of pathos in intentional contexts is a
direct application of the general doctrine developed in his other
works. He distinguishes actions that follow from a person's logos
formed ends from pathe-reactions that fortuitously occur primarily

through external intervention. Though thinking is a human activity

(indeed it is the human activity), a person's thoughts and the re
actions that follow from them are pathe if they have been externally

manipulated by a rhetorician or poet, rather than formed by the

person's own essential activity as a thinking agent. Even if the

thoughts are true and the reactions are appropriate, manipulated

thought is pathological, parasitically called thought only by courtesy.
Following Aristotle, let us distinguish: (1) passive or affective
qualities (pathetikai poiotetes) as varieties of the category of quality
(9a28-9b28); (2) pathe that are predicated of a thing as if they were
its qualities but which, being readily changed, are not strictly
speaking among its qualities (poiotetes) (9b28-10all); (3) paschein
as a category paired with poiein, being affected or undergoing rather
than initiating change, reacting rather than acting (llbl-llbl8);
(4) the patient and the agent of change (202a22-202b29); (5) the
pathe of living organisms, especially as they passively undergo
changes that are also realizations of their essential potentialities
(326b29-327a28); (6) the receptivity of the various sense organs in
ARISTOTLE ON THE STATUS OF PATHE 525

the activity of perception (aisthesis) and the relation between the

passive rational intellect (pathetikos nous) and the active intellect

(nous paietikos) (429al0-429bl0, 430al4-25, 431al-431b20); (7) the

pathe evoked and directed by rhetoricians and poets (1378a25
1388b30); (8) the pathe of the virtuous person, who has active dis
positions (hexeis) of appropriate actions (praxeis) and pathe
(1106b36-1107a6, 1109a30ff.).
We can do no better than to begin by quoting the definition of
pathos given inMetaphysics (1022bff.):

"Affection" means: (a) In one sense, a quality in virtue of which

alteration is possible, e.g., whiteness and blackness, sweetness and
bitterness, heaviness and lightness, etc. (b) The actualizations of
these qualities, i.e., the alterations already realized, (c) More par
ticularly, hurtful alterations and motions, and hurts which cause
suffering, (d) Extreme cases of misfortune and suffering are called
"affections."

HaOo? \ 7 Tat eva ixep rp?irop TTOLOT^^Kad' rjp aXXoiopadai epb'extTai,

to XevKOPKal to fieXap, Kal yXvKV koll
OLOP iriKpop, Kai ?apvryC Kai kov^'ott^?,
Kai oaa aXXa roiavra. epa be ae tovtup ep'epyeiai kolI aXXoL aei? rfbrj.
?aXXop ai ?Xa?epal
eri TOVTWP aXXoiwaeiC Kal Kiprjaei?, Kal iiaXiGTa ai
en tol tup ovp,<f>op p Kal Xvirrip p ir?Br) XeyeTai.
XvK?)pal ?Xa?ai. ?xeyedrj

(1) This general metaphysical doctrine sets the context for the
varieties of uses distinguished in the Categories. Having distin

guished affective or passive qualities from other qualities (active

dispositions [hexeis] and dispositions [diatheseis], capacities [du
nameis], shapes [schemata] and figures [morphai]), Aristotle remarks
that passive qualities?for example cold and sweetness?are not

strictly speaking modifications of substances;

path they are called
etikai because they cause a change in us. Sweetness does not modify

honey; it affects the sense of taste. Cold does not affect snow, it
affects the sense of touch (9a36-9b9).
Passive qualities proper are qualities which have been produced
by a pathos; they are modifications, ways a thing has been affected.
But this characterisation presupposes a distinction between essential

species-defined properties and those it acquires accidentally, changes

produced by external intervention. A passive quality is produced

by a change that does not arise from the thing's own nature, by its
activities and actions.
Like other qualities, passive qualities can be dispositional: they
can even be dispositions to react in specific ways, dispositions to
be affected by specific sorts of pathe. For instance a person who
526 AM?LIE OKSENBERG RORTY

suffered severe burns (pathe) in childhood might acquire an unusual

susceptibility to sunburn as one of his affective qualities. Someone
who suffered a trauma (a pathos) that left him irascible has acquired
a passive quality, a susceptibility to the pathos, wrath. But although
all such passive qualities result from pathe, they are not all sus
ceptibilities to be affected.
Passive qualities need not be static: changeability?the quality
of having vacillating and
changeable moods?might have been ac

quired as a passive quality. They can be dispositions to motion or

change (kineseis). In principle, it might be possible for some passive

qualities coincidentally to express the thing's activities and functions

(energeiai and erga). Because walking is one of the natural activities

of an animal, the actualization of a species-defined potentiality,
walking is an activity expressing a natural animal function (ergon).
Yet if an animal's walk is affected by an accident?if a squirrel

limps because his leg was broken in a fall (a pathos)?then his

limping walk is an activity (energeia) insofar as it is the expression
of a species-defined activity; but his limping walk is a pathos arising
from a passive quality.
(2) Pathe proper are not qualities (poiotetes): they are relatively
impermanent alterations in a thing, whose causal explanation usu

ally lies primarily outside its nature (9b28-10all). Although its

constitutional structure sometimes determines a thing's suscepti
bility to particular passions, and is sometimes significant in ex

plaining the direction of a passion and the actions that character

istically follow from it, the primary explanation of the occurrence

of a pathos is standardly an external cause. The color of a man's
skin when he blushes or is sunburned is a pathos rather than a

quality, even though his qualities might dispose him to blush about
some things rather than others (praise rather than insults) or to
suffer sunburn in one way rather than another (in splotches rather
than evenly). In such
cases, praise is the cause rather than the
occasion for hisblushing and exposure to the sun the cause rather
than the occasion for his burning. He would not have turned red
without these interventions, and he'll return to his normal color in
due course. Unlike defining
centrally essential properties, and unlike
many central qualities, pathe do not form dispositions; nor do they
provide or seek out the occasions that elicit them.

(3) Being affected (paschein) and doing (poiein) are indepen

dently listed among the categories. Like most passive qualities,
ARISTOTLE ON THE STATUS OF PATHE 527

they are attributable in contraries and admit of degrees (llbl-15).

In that initial introduction, all crucial issues concerning the relation
between being affected and doing are left open. Must each doing
be paired with a patient's being affected, or might there be some

doings that do not involve acting-upon-something? Is that which

acts also changed by its acting, affected by its having acted? Is

every pathos the result of a thing's having-been-affected? Must the

patient and agent of every change be distinct? Can a pathos nev

ertheless also be an action or activity?
instance, For
might the
healing of a body be an action arising from the body's natural
activities as well as being a pathos produced by the physician's
activity? If there are degrees of pathe (as for instance, a person
can be more or less heated, more or less angry), can a particular

change be more or less passive, more or less active?

(4) Aristotle addresses some of these questions in the Physics

(202a21ff.). There is nothing paradoxical, he says, in the actuali

zation of a potentiality of one thing, being effectively produced by
the activity of another. So in one sense, the pupil is passive to the

activity of the teacher, even though learning actualizes the pupil's

potentiality. Being-affected and doing can coincide extensionally

(as "the road from Thebes to Athens is the same as the road from
Athens to Thebes" [202bl3-14]) though not definitionally. When it
falls under a number of distinct descriptions, a particular motion
or change can be simultaneously located in several distinct ex

planatory schemes. Though a real pupil is set by nature to learn,

and the teacher serves as the occasion rather than the cause of his

learning, a particular deviant case of learning can also be a pathos.

If what the teacher teaches is strange or false, there is a sense in
which the pupil's learning that (for example) the-heavenly-bodies
are - - - - - - - - -
held together by very fine wires whose vibration pro
duce-the-music-of-the-spheres is a pathos, even though learning is,
of course, characteristically an action.
Aristotle is not interested in explaining the occurrence of par
ticular pathe, but rather in explaining why certain sorts of things
are susceptible to certain sorts of pathe. Certain motions?a stone's

rolling downhill or a dead leaf falling?are natural motions, fol

lowing from the thing's natural functions, from the structure and
constitution of stone and leaf. Other things being equal, such mo
tions would occur unless they were prevented. Even when a sudden
 528 AM?LIE OKSENBERG RORTY

autumnal wind is the occasion of the leaf falling, that particular

wind was not required for the leaf to fall, though its falling this
way rather than that is primarily explained by which way the wind
blew. If a spring wind bends the young leaf this way or that, if
heavy bird-droppings bend
it, those particular motions of the leaf
have their primary explanation in just these particular contingent
events, though the leaf's natural structure stands in the background
as part of the explanation of the leaf's reaction to the spring wind
and the bird droppings. The particular motions of a leaf in the
early spring can be both a reaction to a spring wind blowing upwards
and also a small motion in its own growth. Its motion-as-a-j9a?/?os
affected-by-the-spring-wind is extensionally but not intensionally
identical with its motion-as-an-action-of-its-growing.
Similarly, because animals reproduce in specific (that is, species
defined) ways, the reproductive forms of sexual activity are not the

passions but the actions of the animal. Because animals are nat
urally disposed to engage in sexual activity when the appropriate
occasion arises, the objects that attract them are the occasions
rather than the causes of their sexual responses. But alterations
in the reproductive forms of sexual
activity?a man attempting
intercourse with an orchid or a dog with a hog?would be pathe.
Running and leaping are among a deer's natural activities; but
when a grazing deer leaps in fear of a falling autumn leaf, his
fearful motion is a pathos. No doubt some deer are more consti
tutionally disposed to fearful flight than others, and certainly some
fearful flights (those occasioned by a forest fire) are closer to species
defined activity than others (those occasioned by the fall of autumn
leaves). Still, for any occasion, a deer's fearful flight is more or
less an action, more or less a pathos, depending on the extent to
which its primary causal explanation is fixed by its nature.
In cases of this sort, the primary identification of a change as
an action or as a pathos depends on its linked connections to the
function of the species, to its definition and constitution. For that
reason it is possible to speak presumptively of the actions of a stone
falling, a deer running or a pupil's learning in contrast to the pathe
of a stone being thrown upward, a deer fearing an autumn leaf, or
a pupil learning a falsehood. But changes that are typically or

specifically characterised as actions or as passions can, on specific

occasions, have complex deviant aetiologies. An alteration that is

normally an action might in an atypical deviant case also be properly

ARISTOTLE ON THE STATUS OF PATHE 529

described as a pathos. What is typical of a species need not be

statistically most frequent.

We can now see why pathe are often, though certainly not

necessarily, misfortunes. Because pathe are standardly externally

caused accidental modifications, because they are ways the thing
is affected rather than ways it naturally acts, they would normally
be either neutral or harmful to the thing's flourishing. Of course
a pathos can be beneficial, but both its occurrence and utility are
accidental. Some pathe?exhileration at sudden accidental good
fortune?might not only arise from something conducive to one's

thriving, but further enhance that thriving. Other pathe?like

blushing or tanning?are neutral to flourishing. But because en

gaing in species-defined activities is what is good for a thing, and

because engaging in those activities smoothly, easily and well is
the thing's excellence and virtue, pathe that involve a deflection or

interruption of normal activities are misfortunes, especially when

they also produce modifications that causally ramify to endanger
the thing's developing and exercising its central potentialities. Not
only would such pathe interfere with normal activity: they might
prevent it. But it is just in this that harm consists.
(5) The discussion of the issues raised by the pairing of doing
and being affected is continued in De Generatione et Corruptione

(322blff. and 324b25-326a28). Must the agent and the patient of

physical change be in direct contact with one another? Must they
have the same sort of matter? Can an agent act ona patient
without itself being moved in doing so? Must all agency be cor
relative to some passivity? Much is at stake in the answers to
these questions. It is crucial to Aristotle's metaphysics that at
least some action and activity?the development and exercise of a
thing's natural potentialities?need not require external causal in
tervention. It is also important that at least some agency?the
actions and activities of the unmoved mover?need not be action

upon-a-patient. Even actions

produce that
correlated pathe do not
require reciprocal contact between the agent and the patient. The
man who grieves us "touches" us, but we do not necessarily thereby
touch him, and the poet's tragedies affect us without our affecting
him or them (323a28-34).
Aristotle distinguishes the original cause of a change from its
last immediate cause, and the first mediating reaction from the
final pathos. The physician who cures the patient need not be af
530 AM?LIE OKSENBERG RORTY

fected by his activity; but both the medication and the digestive
tract are affected by their activity in effecting a cure. "When the
agent and the patient do not have the same matter, the agent can
act without itself affected . . . but when
being they do have the
same matter, the food in acting is itself acted upon in some way"
(324a30-324b4).
(6) In De Anima, Aristotle raises a range of questions con

cerning the passions of the soul: Are all pathe of the soul really
pathe of the complex body and soul, or can the soul sometimes react
without there being a corresponding bodily reaction? Is the mind
modified by what it learns? Does it reactively receive what it knows?
Is the soul active or passive in sensing? Are the various sense

organs affected and changed by the objects which act upon them?
Because he treats each sense organ, the common sense and the

imagination independently, Aristotle's answer is long and complex.

But his answer is the same in each case. Aisthesis (perceiving
generally) is central among the activities of living animals. Since

seeing is a species-defined animal activity, a person is active rather

than passive in perception, even though the details of what is seen
are determined by the details of the object perceived.
As common opinion would have it, perception consists in ki
n?sthai and paschein, in being moved and acted upon (416b32-5).
But since perception is the actualization of a natural potentiality,
since it is an activity, the same event?a particular instance of

perception?simultaneously involves being moved and affected and

acting (paschein, kin?sthai and energein) (417al5-16). Although

seeing is an activity that involves a change (alloiosis tis) of the eye,
it is primarily the actualization of a potentiality: the sense organ
is not passively affected by such a change (ou gar paschei oudy al

loioutai). The material eye-stuff is "changed," perfected and ac

tualized as a sense organ, in the act of seeing. The actualization
of a potentiality can also be described as passive in another, though
secondary explanatory scheme, as involving some passive change:
the flesh of the eye has been struck (9a28-9b28). But it ismisleading
to treat such change as paradigmatic or to classify it as a pathos:
it is after all the fullest realization of the eye's essential potentiality.
There is a sense in which a person is changed by becoming wise,
but that does not make his wisdom a pathos; the wise man has
actualized his form, rather than been transformed.

Similarly, the mind is always active in thinking, and it is only

ARISTOTLE ON THE STATUS OF PATHE 531

in a derivative and misleading sense that it might be said to be

changed by its thought. For the soul as pure intellect, the contrast
between being affected (paschein) and doing (poiein) becomes the
contrast between the mind as potentially and the mind as actually
identical with
its objects. The mind coming to think some particular
thought?coming to realize the definition of humanity?is an ac
tualization of one of its potentialities, an action rather than a pathos.
The "objects" of thought stand in a formal rather than an efficient
or material relation to the mind's thinking-those-thoughts. They
do not "strike" the mind: rather they are that on which it is actively
engaged, the particular forms in which or through which the mind's

activity is realized.2

(7) The psychological passions of human beings are identified

both by their physical and by their cognitive intentional conditions
(403a25-403bl0). Anger is physically characterised as the boiling
of blood around the heart and
cognitively characterised as an orexis
meta lupes, a, painful reaching for revenge, with the pleasurable

hope of returning pain for pain when one has suffered an unjus
tifiable intentional insult (1378a31ff.). The analysis of the physical
component of anger requires the
cooperation of the physikos; but
even the phusikos concerned with the analysis of anger characterises
his subject both materially and formally: the heart boiling in anger.
The fullest analysis of anger is given by the dialectician concerned
with rhetoric, poetics and ethics, which, along with politics, are the
domains of practical intelligence.
When we are concerned with changes in general, taking changes
of physical objects as paradigmatic, the contrast between poiein
(doing) and paschein (undergoing) is sufficient. But when the
changes in question involve intentional action, when they are

changes-brought-about-through-a-description, the general class of

doing (poiesis) is refined and subdivided into two classes: (1) praxis,
the class of actions-tout-court, that require virtue (arete) to be

performed well and (2) making or producing (poiesis) narrowly

speaking, the class of makings-of-an-end-product, shaped by craft
(techne). Making pots, building houses, and writing tragedies are
star examples of making or producing, while taking part in political
life and arranging the economy of domestic affairs are actions.

2
Cf. "The Place of Contemplation in Aristotle's Ethics," Essays on
Aristotle's Ethics, ed. A. O. Rorty, (University of California Press, 1980).
532 AM?LIE OKSENBERG RORTY

Standardly, the work of craftsmen by an end external

is defined to
the products that they make. So, for instance, a potter makes pots
for holding liquids, or grains, etc. His craft is evaluated by his
pots and his pots are evaluated by their success in performing the
functions for which they were made. Similarly, both the tragedian
and the rhetorician are judged by their success in crafting their
products?tragedies and speeches?to serve appropriate ends, to
arouse and direct appropriate pathe.
Even the psychological pathe of barbarians, women and slaves
are intentional: they are reactions to objects under certain descrip
tions, liable to produce specific sorts of pleasures and pain. Per
ceiving and describing an object in a certain way is often sufficient
to elicit pathe that will influence action. In order to affect the
intentional component of a passion, such perceptions anddescrip
tions need not be formed by beliefs or judgments. Someone who
had been influenced to see a particular person as insolent, might
be aroused to anger without actually having been insulted or even

explicitly judging himself to have been harmed. Even perceptions

and thoughts that have been passively formed, intentional pathe,
reactions to something as a
such-and-such, under a specific de
scription (fearing a lion as dangerous, being angry at the insolence
of a neighboring polis) can be evaluated for their rationality and
appropriateness, by evaluating the rationality and appropriateness
of the description that forms their intentional component.
By Aristotle's lights, most people, particularly barbarians,
slaves and women, form their judgments, if they can be said to
have judgments at all, through They are so constituted
their pathe.
that their thoughts tend to occur to them as reactions to external
causes rather than arising from the activity of nous within them.
Such people might be more properly said?as indeed contemporary
usage suggests: "What's your reaction to the possibility of war?
How do you feel about the President's performance?"?to be reacting
or feeling rather than thinking. Easily manipulated and swayed,
such people are unsuited for citizenship because they are not fully
rational: their perceptions and thoughts passively reflect or react
to public opinion and the rhetorician's art.
In order to form, direct and control the pathe of such people,
the rhetorician needs to know how and when they become, e.g.,
angry: (1) the states and activities, the thoughts and desires that
are standardly preconditions of anger, as well as the thoughts and
ARISTOTLE ON THE STATUS OF PATHE 533

desires of a person, once he is angry; (2) the characteristic

objects
of the passion; (3) its characteristic grounds (1378a25ff.). The rhet
orician's art consists in applying this knowledge to produce specific
pathe?specific reactions?in ordinary people. For instance, the
rhetorician knows how to rouse ordinary Athenians to revenge,
because he knows just how to make them angry by portraying a

polis as having intentionally and unjustifiably attacked the honor

of Athens. Once suspicion is aroused, judgments about foreign
policy can be influenced by fear rather than by rational judgment:
a populace can be manipulated to perceive a neighboring polis as

dangerous even when there are no grounds for supposing it has

belligerent intentions.
Pathe can be distinguished by their psychological origins.
For instance, Aristotle differentiates: (1) the anger of an irascible
man who by constitution and character would have been unable to

foresee, avoid or control his reactions; (2) the anger of an irascible

man who by constitution and character could have avoided becoming
irascible and who can his anger;
control (3) the reactive (that is,
nonirascible pathos) anger of an ordinary nonvirtuous person whose
reactions do not lie within his control; (4) the anger of a man of

practical wisdom (phronimos) with virtuous active dispositions

(hexeis) concerning anger. Since the full descriptions of actions
include some sketch of their aetiology, the descriptive identification
of characterological anger differs anger, even
from that of reactive
when they have the same occasions, physiology and consequences.
The distinctive aetiology of these various types of anger affects the
ways they form a person's actions. The immediate cause and object
of the anger of an irascible person serves as the occasion, rather
than the cause of his condition. If he were not angry about this,
he would be angry about something else. Because his anger is
neither temporary nor
exogenous, it might seem that it is strictly

speaking a quality rather than a passion. But the classification of

classes of psychological conditions?anger, thought, desire, percep
tion?follows their typical aetiology. The anger of an irascible man
is physiologically and behaviorally identical with that of a man
who suffers the occasional bout of provoked anger; and, in any case,
irascibility is itself typically a passive quality, a disposition that a
person has accidentally acquired as a result of a pathos.
While the rhetorician needs to understand the psychology of
his audience in order to connect their particular fears and hopes
534 AM?LIE OKSENBERG RORTY

with the structures of the pathe he wishes to arouse, he is only

incidentally concerned with truth or knowledge, just as they might

affect his persuasiveness. By contrast, the tragedian effects a ca
tharsis of pity and fear by constructing dramas that teach and

please by truthfully representing universal conditions. Because

such dramas affect all men, the tragedian need not attend the psy

chological differences of his audience. Aristotle's analyses of rhet

oric and tragedy present technical recommendations for the suc
cessful practise of those crafts: he outlines the forms of various

types of speeches, the structure of

tragic plots character
and the
of tragic heroes. But ultimately both the tragedian and the rhetori
cian should be guided by the man of practical wisdom (phronimos)
and by the statesman (politikos); it is they who should determine
which pathe should be aroused in the
populace.
(8) And now, finally, we come to the issues that have affected
recent discussions of the passions: Aristotle's view that a person?
or at any rate, some sorts of persons?can be blamed or praised,
as well as pitied or pardoned, for dispositions concerning the pas

sions, because such dispositions can fall within the domain of the

voluntary (1109a30ff.).
Initially, it is difficult to see how Aristotle can systematically
connect the account of pathos that has its roots in the Categories
and Metaphysics with that which develops from his psychology.
There are two quite distinct inheritances he wants to preserve.
While he can preserve both without strain, this falls shortof uniting
the two accounts.3 On the common understanding of pathe, there
are a set of psychological states that are the star cases, the starting

point of any analysis of psychological pathe. It is this strand in

Aristotle's account that stands behind his list of examples of pathe:

appetite or desire (epithumia) and anger (orge), fear (phobos), con

fidence (thrasos), envy (phthnos), joy (charas), friendliness (philia),
hatred (misos), longing (pothon), emulation (zelon), pity (eleos) and
"in general such things as are associated with pleasure and pain"
(1105b20ff.). Such conditions are manifestly intentional: perthe
son's reaction is conditioned by his descriptions or perceptions of
his situation. It might therefore seem that they could not happen

3
I am grateful to Charles Kahn for stressing the connection between
pathos and thumos, and for pressing for an account of the relation between
pathos and orexis.
ARISTOTLE ON THE STATUS OF PATHE 535
to a person as exogenous modifications. While it appears to conform
to common opinion, the inclusion of eputhumiai?appetites with
the force of immediate needs, in contrast to thoughtful desires (bou
leseis)?in the list of pathe seems particularly puzzling for Aristotle's

general view that pathe are accidental and exogenous. Nous and
orexis are theorigins of motion and action. A person's proper mo

tives, particularly those that derive from basic needs, would hardly
seem accidental: they might well be prime candidates for being
endogenous. Since thumos and appetites (epithumiai) are, along
with thoughtful desires (bouleseis), forms of motivation (orexis), it
might seem that they could not possibly be pathe. How can Aristotle
reconcile his acceptance of psychological pathe as including inten

tionally defined thumetic and epithumetic conditions, with his anal

ysis of pathe as exogenous and accidental and with his definition

of virtue as an active disposition concerning pathe and actions

(praxeis), falling within the domain of choice (prohairesis)'!

When Aristotle defines virtue, he must, he says, first determine
whether it is a power or a capacity (dunamis); or an affection or
modification (pathos); or a disposition (hexis) (1105bl9ff.). The dis
cussion of quality and pathos in the Categories clearly stands behind
this apparently arbitrary division of the subject. The list of pathe
should make it clear that virtue is not a pathos. For one thing, we
are praised for virtue, but not for pathe as such. For another, a

person's virtue is his excellence, and a person's arete cannot as such

be harmful: but pathe may be harmful. Virtue (arete) is that sort
of active disposition (hexis) which sets a person to act or react in
a mean, in situations involving choice (prohairesis), following reason

(logos) as the person of practical wisdom (phronimos) does, in matters

concerning pathe and actions. To say that virtue is an active dis

position concerning matters of choice is to say that the virtuous

locate their actions and desires within the system of their ends,
determining actions either through deliberation,
directly, or more

by seeing their situations as definedgeneral ends.

by their
These
ends form the character and the dispositions of the man of practical
wisdom: they set the ways he sees things. His actions are voluntary
because they are formed by his beliefs and desires, by what he
knows and wants; more significantly, they are also deliberate, in
that his desires are themselves formed by his ends and his character.
In what sense can a person's active dispositions concerning
pathe fall within the domain of choice, in what sense might a person
536 AM?LIE OKSENBERG RORTY

be praised or blamed for what he does from pathe! One might

think that if anything is excluded from the domain of responsibility,
pathe would be: how could they be affected by deliberation, let alone
by deliberation concerning what reason requires? But the repertoire
of a person's passions can be set by his dispositions and habits.
Some of these?passive qualities?might normally be thought to
fall outside the scope of virtue because they arise from pathe, ex

ternally by accident. But even passive qualities could be voluntary,

when they arise from habits and dispositions which a person can

develop, redirect or control.

What sorts of dispositions affect a person's pathe'! And how
can such dispositions be voluntary?
(1) There are dispositions to have certain sorts of passions: for
instance someone might indulge and develop a tendency to irasci

bility, thinking it helps him get his way among the timid. Or he
might indulge a tendency to suffer mooncalf love, thinking it makes
him more interesting.
(2) There are dispositions to react to certain sorts of objects:
for instance a person might allow himself to hate bores but not
boors, or to fear incompetent people rogues. but not

(3) There are dispositions to express particular passions with

certain specific sorts of behavior: for instance a person might attempt
to overcome a tendency to flee when angry or to become sarcastic
when bored.
How do these dispositions fall within the domain of choice and
in what sense can they be determined by reason? Standardly pas
sions that fall within the scope of virtue or vice aredispositions to
react to objects as having the properties which produce a particular
sort of pleasure or pain. The pleasurable or painful aspects of some

objects and activities is very strongly fixed by our natures and

constitutions: it is difficult to mistake the pain of a severe wound
or the pleasure of drinking sweet cool water when one is parched

thirsty. But even basic epithumetically defined pleasures and pains

have refinements that would, and should affect a person's pathe.
A soldier might learn to react differently to severe wounds under
combat, when it is important for him to attend to the battle rather
than to fear the consequences of his wound. Similarly, a parched

thirsty person attending the funeral of a friend should be disposed

to modify his reactions to the pleasures of drinking. Even an iras
cible person might be able to learn to check the pleasures of vengeful
ARISTOTLE ON THE STATUS OF PATHE 537

anger when it is inappropriately directed to innocent and vulnerable

people who could be unjustly injured. Dispositions that affect the
ways a person sees or interprets his situations will affect his pathe.4
Such dispositions can be voluntary when their exercise and even
their development is predictable or controllable. An irascible person
who can forsee and avoid the occasions which will predictably arouse

him, or who can control or deflect his anger by turning his attention

elsewhere, might be responsible for his pathe and the actions that
follow from them.
Of course only those capable of virtue and vice can be responsible
in this way. The virtuous person is, by definition, disposed to have

appropriate?and appropriately understood?pleasures and pains.

He is disposed to be pained, frustrated and angry when, and to the
degree that the occasion requires, not taking umbrage at the slightest

joke nor failing to react when he has been harmed by an insult.

Such a person has not
acquired justa few good habits by accident:
he is capable of modifying his reactions by reflecting on his general
ends. Of course the virtuous man also suffers involuntary passions:
but his virtue, in regard to such passions, lies in his habits concerning
his pathe, the ways that having them further affect his actions.
Even the courageous man fears terrible mortal dangers: his courage
does not consist in his never fearing anything, but in his fearing
the right things in the right way at the right time for the right
reasons (1115bl7-23). Because the dispositions and habits of the
man of practical wisdom are rational, he
is capable of acting or

refraining from acting on them according to his judgment. This

does not mean that he must deliberate about everything that he
does: it only means that his actions are moderated and modifiable

by thought, formed by habits shaped by rational ends. It is for

these reasons that Aristotle characterises each of the virtues as a

disposition to typical actions and reactions: so, for instance, courage

is a disposition regarding fear; moderation (sophrosune) is a dis

position regarding pleasures; the virtue of generosity is a set of

dispositions regarding distributing wealth, and so on.

4 on Learning
Cf. Myles Burnyeat, "Aristotle to Be Good," and L. A.
Kosman "Being Properly Affected: Virtues and Feelings in Aristotle's
Ethics" Essays on Aristotle's Ethics, loc. cit. See also William Fortenbaugh,
Aristotle on Emotion (London: Duckworth, 1975); and my "The Place of
Pleasure in Aristotle's Ethics," Mind 83 (1974) and "Akratic Believers,"
American Philosophical Quarterly 20:2 (1983).
538 AM?LIE OKSENBERG RORTY

Although Aristotle does not explicitly develop this point, there

is a relation between the virtuous person's dispositions concerning
his pathe and at least some of his dispositions concerning his actions.
Because dispositions to act from one's ends do not always involve

explicit deliberation, because deliberation is sometimes implicit in

the way the person gauges and interprets his situation, a person's

pathe?his reactions to untoward or unexpected external events?

will often set the direction of his actions. It is therefore crucial
for virtue that a person's affective qualities (pathetikai poiotetes)
conform to, rather than conflict with, his ends. For instance, if a
traumatic experience forms a passive quality that makes a person
of practical wisdom unusually susceptible to fear, he should be able
to develop an especially strong set of countervailing courageous
habits. Similarly, a person who suffered the sorts of early
depri
vations that tend to make people greedy must be particularly alert
to developing strong dispositions for moderation. We can now see

why some appetites (epithumiai) might be passions, passions for

something seen under a certain description as pleasurable or painful.

Even when an appetite reflects a proper need, it can be modified by
chance external intervention. Although thirst is normally an ep

ithumia, abnormal thirsts?the thirst of a diseased person allergic

to liquid or that of a person who has just won a peanut-eating

competition?can be pathe. Even such pathe the can fall within

scope of the voluntary, if the person could have avoided developing
his susceptibilities, or if having them, he is able to avoid the occasions
that elicit them. Although someone might be in the throes of a

pathos, he might be responsible for being in that condition, because

he could have avoided becoming the sort of person who predictably
reacts as he does. Or he might be responsible for getting himself
into a situation where, predictably, he reacts as he does, someone

might consider it better to suffer the discomforts of an allergic

reaction rather than the effects of dehydration. He need not be
dominated by his passion so powerfully that he cannot consider
what it is best for him to do, and do it.
There a simpler
is also explanation of the classification of ap

petites and some

thumetic conditions as pathe, besides the fact that
such a classification is part of Aristotle's inheritance on the subject.
Even when the immediate occasion of an epithumia is an endogenous

organic condition, the experience of a want, a lack or a need is not

part of an animal's essential definition. Searching for nourishment

is a species-defined activity. But being hungry or thirsty are not
ARISTOTLE ON THE STATUS OF PATHE 539

essential to an animal's activities in nourishing itself. Though or

exeis are endogenous sources of animal and epithumia
motion, is a
of orexis, still the experience of a particular epithumia as
species
a want or lack, is something that happens to an organism, something
that it suffers because of the absence of an appropriate object, or

because it has not

actively nourished itself. Similarly, even though

the active expression of thumos seems a star example of endogenous

cases of anger or pride can be experienced as
activity, particular
overcoming or happening to a person, modifying or redirecting his
characteristic activity.
In assigning moral and legal responsibility, it is necessary to
determine whether the appetite that led to a particular action is a

pathos, and whether the relevant dispositions could have been con
trolled. If a person could have avoided acting from a particular

pathos or have avoided being affected by it, he can be responsible

for the actions that he performed from that pathos, even if it is the
sort of passion that (like rage or extreme fear) is not normally
controllable. It is also sometimes appropriate to determine whether
a passion is rational, whether the intentional description that fixes
a person's focus on particular pleasures and pains is both true and
reasonable. (Did the person who fears elephants come to fear them
in a reasonable way rather than, say, because he had a nightmare
about elephants? Is it in fact true that elephants are dangerous?)
A pathos might have been reasonably formed, though it eventually
emerges that the relevant beliefs were false.
The virtuous person is by no means without pathe: on the con

trary he has, in Aristotle's characteristically informative formula,

the right passions in the right way at the right time for the right
ends; and we might add, filling in another detail on his behalf, under
the right description. The virtuous person is not only disposed to
react properly, but is also disposed to take his pleasures and pains
in the right way at the right aspect of the right thing.

II

The questions, the distinctions and the intuitions that guide

contemporary analyses of the passions were not formed solely from
materials buried in our Aristotelian heritage. To understand the

persistence of disagreements among contemporary theories of the

emotions, we need to carry the history further.

540 AM?LIE OKSENBERG RORTY

Stoics developed and transformed Aristotelian pathe into pen

siones. Emphasizing the contrast between the domain of natural
causal necessity and the domain of moral and rational self-control,
the Stoics analyze pensiones as irrational, disordered judgments
formed by impulses or forceful pulls to inappropriate action. But
since passiones are also thoughts, they are in principle corrigible,
or at any rate, corrigible by those whose constitution and condition
allows them to identify themselves with their capacity for ratio

nality, to refrain from assenting to phantasia.

Stoics
disagreed among themselves about which of the three

aspects of a passio was dominant. Chrysippus apparently identified

pathe with erroneous, ill-formed judgments, usually vacillating

opinions, easily swayed. But evidently Posidonius, thinking it par
adoxical for there to be alogos logoi, illogical thoughts, held that
pathe arose from constitutional or physical malfunctioning. But
all Stoics agreed that the sound and healthful state was one of

apatheia, a condition free of disorder and disturbance, with a stable

and rationally directed mode of action. Some Stoics held that the
wise, being properly balanced and ruled by reason (logos) rather
than by phantasia never suffer impulsive pathe. They do, however,
have benign attitudes (eupatheiai), rational affective tendencies such
as cheerfulness, friendliness, affability. Others held that the wise
and free understand pathe to be natural conditions, formed by phan
tasia in accordance with the causal order. But since the wise identify
themselves with their capacity for rationality, they detach them
selves from, rather than affirm such pathe. Insofar as rational
intervention might avert action from intrusive pathe, the wise are
not be moved by impulse.5
The Augustinian tradition is Stoic, and like the Stoic tradition,
it introduces a distinction between those sorts of pathe that disturb

5
Our sources
for the Greek Stoics are indirect: Diogenes Laertius,
Works 115; Galen, Opera Omnia, V, 404,416; De Hippocratis
VII, et Piatonis
Decretis, IV and V. For the Roman Stoics, we have Cicero, De Finibus
Bonorum et Malorum, I, 56; III, 31; Tusculanae Disputationes IV; Seneca,
De ira. My knowledge of these sources is derivative. I learned much
from A. C. Loyd's "Emotion and Decision in Stoic Psychology," The Stoics,
ed. J. M. Rist, (University of California Press, 1978), and from Michael
Frede's "Die Stoische Lehre von den Affekten der Seele," to be published
in the proceedings of the conference on Hellenistic Philosophy, held at
Bad Homberg, 1983.
ARISTOTLE ON THE STATUS OF PATHE 541

the mind and those eupatheiai that promote its proper activities.
In the Augustinian tradition, Stoic eupatheiai are transformed into
virtues. When the theological version of the passion of love is

Caritas, distinguishing the "fallen" from the of psy"saved" forms

chological conditions becomes a major theoretical, not to mention

an anguishing practical problem, particularly since the fallen and
the saved condition sometimes differ only aetiologically, without

being distinguishable phenomenologically. But Augustine merges

Stoic with strong Platonic doctrine. Because all passions are di
rected towards something perceived and desired as good, impulse
(horme) is not merely wayward and illogical. Stoic horme is trans
formed into volition (voluntas) directed by love (amor) whose true
but opaque object is the Divine Will. When they are properly un
derstood and directed by divine love, passions are active.6

Platonizing Renaissance writers retained the Augustinian ad

aptation of Eros into Love (Amor), the active energy that moves a

person towards excellence. But Love increased its objects and di

rections. The love of Glory, love of the City, love of a Lady Muse
are simultaneously passions and the very springs of action. Because
the object draws the person towards it, such conditions are classified
as passions: the object of love?the shining good?is the source of
the lover's vision and of his energy. Yet the lover's nature is per
fected and fulfilled by his love and by the active desires that love
engenders. With this transformation, Aristotle's original contrast
between internally caused actions and externally caused passions
is laid aside. The central question becomes: How are both passions
and motives related to love?the basic motivational force?and the
desires that follow it? When the passion of love is the source of
all motivation, the stage is set for asking questions about the logical
and genetic relations among the passions: the task is to analyze
the logical structure of each passion and each motive, as a form
of love.7
Hobbes transforms eros and amor into desire: desire for the
realization of the Good becomes desire for objects and actions that
promote self-preservation and self-interest. A psychological state
is physically realized in a mechanical system of matter in motion:

6
The City of God, XIV, 5ff.
7Augustine,
Cf. Andreas Capellanus, The Art of Love; Baldessare Castiglione,
The Courtier; Jean de Meun, Roman de la Rose.
542 AM?LIE OKSENBERG RORTY

it is identified by its place in a causal sequence that begins with

the body's being affected by an "external" motion, and ends with
the body's acting on the "external" world. A passion is an "internal"

psycho-physical condition directly caused by the action of an external

body. Causally associated with other "internal" states?images

and ideas, beliefs and other desires (all of them psycho-physical
states)?a passion standardly produces a desire that is the last
internal motion of an "external" action. Passions and motives are

contingently connected with the perceptions, ideas, beliefs and be

havior that distinguish and identify them as particular reactions

leading-to-particular-forms-of-desire. Since all desires are directed

to self-preservation and self-interest (and are thus associated with
the desire for power), their rationality is measured by their success
in assuring self-interest.8
Descartes defines the general class of passions (which in his
system includes sensations as well as emotion-passions) as ideas
that the mind receives through the action of the body. Passions
narrowly speaking, emotion-passions, do not
represent only in
but
dicate their causes: a particular heightened or lowered functioning
of the body. Fear, for example, characteristically indicates a danger
to the body without representing the precise cause of the danger.
Once in the mind, the passions direct the association of ideas to
form a desire (itself a passion) that inclines the will to form a
volition (volont?) that affects the body. The utility of the passions
consists in their directing the mind to form volitions on behalf of
the body's well-being. Their harm is the harm of confused ideas:
when a volition is formed by a confused idea, its malformation can

easily lead to irrational or harmful behavior. Well-formed passions,

associated with sound beliefs and volitions, can become habitudes

(descendants of hexeis), dispositions to form patterns of associated

ideas that incline the will to virtue. Descartes' contribution to the

story of the passions lies in his identifying them by their functional

roles in directing the association of ideas; his treating them as
indications of the body's thriving or failing; and his analysis of the
modes by which the passions can be corrected or redirected.9
Like Hobbes, Spinoza relativizes the distinction between actions

8
Hobbes, Leviathan, I. c. 3, 6, 8, 13; De homine II, c. 11, 1 and 5; II,
c. 17, 17; VI, 2; XI-XIII.
9 on the Passions
Descartes, Treatise of the Soul.
ARISTOTLE ON THE STATUS OF PATHE 543

and passions, as a measure of the degree to which a person has

been active in the exercise of self-preservation, the extent to which
his action follows from an internal rather than an external deter
mination. A person suffers a condition as a passion solely by virtue
of his thinking of its causes as external to him. Spinoza accepts
what was implicit in the views of Descartes and Hobbes, that the
range and direction of a person's passions is exactly coordinate with
(his conception of) his boundaries, with his conception of what is
internal and what is external to himself. But Spinoza's version of
this doctrine has a Stoic twist that would be unacceptable to Hobbes.
To the extent that he identifies with those causes, to the extent
that he comes to realize that they define his nature, a person ceases
to think of himself as passively subject to them. An affection

(affectus) that a person suffers as a passion becomes an action when

it is seen to follow from his essence, the striving (conatus) whose
conscious form is desire. A change in a person's conception of
himself does not cause, but is rather correlative with a change in
his physical condition. Passions are not, as Hobbes believed, iden
tical with physical states; nor are they, as Descartes believed, caused

by physical states. Because passions are ideational expressions of

specific physical states, to speak of the intellectual and of the physical
correction of the passions is to speak of the same process under
two descriptions.10
But reactions to Hobbes came from other directions as well,

particularly from those who attempted to find independent altruistic

passions to counterbalance self-interested desire. Hume establishes
passions as motivating forces?indeed they are the motivating
forces?contingently associated with the particular sorts of ideas
that characteristically identify them. As a moral psychologist, he
concentrated on discovering the origins of those sentiments which,
like the sense of justice, spring from self-regarding passions, but
which could, in appropriate circumstances, operate independently
of the calculations of self-interest. When such attitudes are properly
formed and generalized, they can be directed, refined and modified
to serve social utility as well as individual interest. Such motives
are no longer merely passions, but refined sentiments, steady gen
eralizations that can be motivationally efficacious: they are deseen

10
Spinoza, Ethics, III.
544 AM?LIE OKSENBERG RORTY

dants of Stoic eupatheia and Cartesian habitudes: generosity and

self-respect, dispositional passions that are virtues when properly

formed.11 Rousseau and Kant faced new problems for the theory
of the passions, problems about how sentiments rooted in natural
inclinations can meet the conditions of moral and rational autonomy.
Rousseau concentrated on problems of moral education. Since he
held that the sources of corruption lie in our substituting amour

propre for amour de soi, forming our sense of our well-being by

seeing ourselves through the estimation of others, rather than
through the sense of our own active existence, he was particularly
concerned to understand the stages in the formation of sentiments
that are social in origin as well as social in direction. Rousseau

hoped to show that a citizen could retain his natural individual self
determination while engaging in cooperatively defined common en

terprises. He attempted to reconcile the development of social and

familial sentiments with the kind of rational autonomy required
to protect the individual from the inevitable corruptions of social
life.12 Although Kant's theoretical psychology differs markedly from
Rousseau's, he set himself a similar task: to show how natural
inclinations and social sentiments can be educated to conform to
the requirements of rational morality. Inclinations and sentiments
must find a proper place within a system that makes the moral,
rational will free, that is, detached from causally determined nat
uralistic motives.13
The German Romantics expanded the class of "passions" still
further: awe, angst, dread, a sense of the sublime and a sense of
the holy were added to the list.14 With them, there came a new
set of questions: what distinguishes moods from emotion? can there
be "objectless" intentional attitudes? must all emotions motivate?

11
Hume, Treatise on Human Nature, Books II and III.
12
Rousseau, Emile, Discourse on the Sciences and Arts and Discourse
on the Origin of Inquality.
13 on Ethics on friendship,
Kant, Lectures (see especially the essays
self-love, shame, the social virtues); The Metaphysical Principles of Virtue,
"The Elements of Ethics."
14
Cf. Schelling, Of Human Freedom; Schiller, Letters On the Aesthetic
Education ofMan and On the Sublime; Schlegel, On the Philosophy of Life;
Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith; Schopenhauer, Selected Essays of
Schopenhauer (London, 1951); Fichte, The Vocation of Man; Lessing, Ed
ucation of the Human Race. Despite the fact that they considered them
ARISTOTLE ON THE STATUS OF PATHE 545

We now be in a better position

should to understand the original
significance of the questions that so divide contemporary analyses
of the emotions, and to see why persistent and unresolvable con

temporary polemical debates carry an air of a chimaeral construc

tion. The terms that form those discussions derive from an Ar
istotelian tradition that was first misunderstood and then aban
doned. But the pre-analytic intuitions that
contemporary inform
accounts of the passions?as voluntary or involuntary, irrational
or rational, as primarily functional or primarily dysfunctional, as

motivating "normal" behavior or as byproducts of frustrated or

blocked purposive behavior?also reflect the complex and conflicted
succession of theories from Stoicism to Romanticism. All these
views are embedded in our common speech and common sense, as
well as in the literary works that form our understanding of our
selves.
The history of discussions of thepassions does not form a
smooth continuous history, which expands or narrows the class of

pathe by following a single line of thought.15 Sometimes the trans

formations (say from Aristotelian pathe to Stoic passiones) arise
from moral preoccupations concerning voluntary control; sometimes
the transformations (say from Renaissance amor to Hobbesian pas
sions and desires) are impelled by metaphysical and scientific preoc
cupations; sometimes the transformations (say from Hobbesian
passions and desires to Humean and Rousseauean sentiments) have
a political direction. If nothing else, this should show that pathe,
passiones, affects, emotions, and sentiments do not form a natural
class. Additions to that class were made on quite distinctive
grounds. Before we can evaluate the competing claims of current
polemical debates, before we can understand the force of their var
ious claims, we must first trace the philosophic preoccupations in
which they originated. Since Aristotle first defined and described

selves to oppose rather than to follow the Romantic tradition, Kierkegaard's

conception of dread and Heidegger's notion of angst have their sources in
this Romantic tradition. My knowledge of this tradition is fragmentary.
15
There is a rich study of pascho in G. Kittel, Theological Dictionary
of the New Testament (Michigan, 1964-1974) 5:904ff. See also Eric Auer
bach, "Gloria Passiones," Literary Language and its Public in Late Latin
Antiquity and in theMiddle Ages, trans. R. Manheim, (New York: Pantheon
Press, 1965); and the bibliography inExplaining Emotions, ed. A. 0. Rorty,
(University of California Press, 1980).
546 AMELIE OKSENBERG RORTY

the phenomena, and since his discussion remains in the background

of all subsequent analyses, an attempt to construct a theory that
encompasses and explains the heterogenous class of "emotions and

passions" would do well to begin?though not of course to end?

with a study of his contribution to the subject.16

Rutgers University

161 am grateful to Myles Burnyeat, Dorothea Frede, Charles Kahn

and Alexander Mourelatos for scholarly and constructive help.