WHY READ THOMAS AQUINAS ON THE PASSIONS?

Five of the greatest modern thinkers – Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Hume, and Rousseau – take the passions as a primary theme in their major works. This is required, it seems, by the task of developing a new mechanistic account of human nature that is compatible with the mechanism of the new science and the new politics. But to what conception of the passions are these thinkers responding? What account of the passions do the architects of modernity judge it necessary to criticize and replace? Directly or indirectly, modern thinkers are responding to the non-mechanistic, teleological conception of the passions articulated by Thomas Aquinas in Questions 22–48 of the 1a2ae of the Summa theologiae, the so-called “Treatise on the Passions.” Today we speak more frequently of “the emotions” than of the passions. But contemporary discourses about the emotions, which strongly emphasize their role as the springs of many (if not all) of our actions, descend directly from the fundamental psychological innovations of the seventeenth century (see Rosenkrantz 2005, p. 214). Consequently, Aquinas' work on the passions constitutes no small part of the background against which both early modern discussions of the passions and recent talk about the emotions must be understood.