11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Intellectually challenging and well versed, November 1, 2003
This review is from: The Vehement Passions (Hardcover)
Given that universities support research into whatever fields it wishes its students to learn, and that occasionally a professor takes a year at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford to summarize what he has been working on for the last ten years; it still takes a top scholar to produce a book which offers so much basic knowledge to absorb as does THE VEHEMENT PASSIONS by Philip Fisher. Few people would be able to produce a coherent consideration of our fundamental emotional states with so many references to Aristotle, Edmund Burke, Charles Darwin, Immanuel Kant, Plato, Shakespeare, Sophocles, Spinoza, and William Wordsworth. My favorite part of the author index was 21 lines devoted to H-names: Hegel, Heidegger, Albert O. Hirschman, Hobbes, Homer, and Hume. Hegel is barely mentioned, for "Hegel's famous parable of the master and the slave, a parable of fear in which, to save his life, one combatant surrenders and becomes the slave of another, constituting the other as master. With this act begins all of human culture and history." (p. 124). Modern readers might think it had far more important economic consequences, enabling the mindless rich to forget all that whenever it suited them, once things started to go smoothly enough to enable popularity to be determined by entertainment values in a society in which being fab counts for a lot more than being productive. This book is heavy with what the people who keep trying to imagine the world solely as the home of billions of shoppers don't know.
Economic considerations get an early jab in this book's consideration of how an early poem, Homer's ILIAD, shows how "leaders goad, insult, or create anger in the fighters so that something stronger than fear will block fear or make it less likely. This important feature by which the passions can be controlled by preemption has been elaborated in an extraordinary way by Albert Hirschman in his classic study of thirty years ago, THE PASSIONS AND THE INTERESTS. Political society, Hirschman observes, has a deep interest in becoming, first and foremost, an economy, because avarice is the single one of the passions that requires conditions that block out the interruptive, short-term episodes of anger, grief, falling in love, or any other disruption of the smooth unfolding of the predictable future. . . . Episodes of passion within the individual resemble the state of war or a natural disaster in public life. Normal life is suspended for a time, and the pursuit of individual and common interests is set aside. Hirschman has described how our modern political life that identifies each person or group with his, her, or their interests, rather than with passions, permits a brushing aside of the passions and their disruptive effect in social life, while ultimately honoring the one remaining passion of avarice with its link to a stable world of effort." (pp. 33-34).
Mortality plays a much larger role than comedy (and Nietzsche is not mentioned at all) in this book. Humor is reduced to being a reaction to harmless variations of the usual comic bits, far removed from our normal expectation that evil can be gleefully destroyed. "The scale that I have evoked here extends from comedy and laughter at harmless evils, evils without consequence, to evils that have consequences on a familiar scale where we feel pity, sympathy, and fear, to, finally, the shudder of terror we feel at the larger unraveling of the world in cascading consequences, unique in their severity and finality, and so disproportionate to the initial cause that the subsequent events terrify us about causality itself." (pp. 38-39). The Stoics get credit for being at the beginning of our intellectual tradition in this field. "But Stoicism was at war with the passions and viewed them as suffering rooted in false belief. The Stoics contrasted passions with actions, bending an earlier history back against itself." (p. 5). Our intimate familiarity with gothic novels and frightful movies "or any other fear-based form uses most of the inner details of the fear experience, among them suddenness, surprise, dilated experiences of time, and nearly unbearable suspense in the moments of pause before the dreaded thing at last happens." (p. 9). Consideration of the emotions that readers and spectators feel help create sophisticated expectations for "the shape of time . . . the familiar arc and pace of time within the vehement states themselves. Wonder, anger, grief, and fear reveal different ways that time is rushed, dilated, ordered, and used up. Works of art modeled on those states follow distinct recipes for the use of time." (p. 9). "Literature's reliance on moments of experience, rather than summary, generalization, or long perspectives of time, gives to vehement states an important position as one central matter for literature. This includes the fact that the duration of such states and their consequences, the time span of rage and its immediate consequences, the time span of falling in love and its immediate consequences, of grief and its immediate consequences, happens to match the particular kind of timescale on which literature operates best." (pp. 21-22).
Chapter 2, Paths among the Passions, includes an intellectual assessment. "No topic in our culture shows such persistence and self-identity even in passing through the phase of Christian theology as the account of the passions of the soul from the time of Homer, Plato, and Aristotle to the edge of modernity with Descartes, Spinoza, Hobbes, and Hume, and then continuing in the later reprise of this work in Darwin and modern scientific psychology." (pp. 32-33). By the time the book gets to Chapter 6, Rashness, "Oedipus Rex" gets to share the stage with "Romeo and Juliet" on page 95. Chapter 7, Mutual Fear, finds, "The ultimate usefulness of fear for a theory of political life increases within modernity." (p. 113). Read up on the spiritualization of this quest, if you dare.
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