By Alisha MacIsaac

Passion  Hume is one of the main philosophers who focuses on the contradiction between passion and reason  Hume believes “The Will” is the impression (emotion, passion) we feel when we carry out an action  Passions are impressions not ideas  Impressions act on the senses to make us feel things like hunger or pleasure or pain  The mind makes a copy that remains after the original impression stops which is called an idea  When these ideas appear again we associate them with desires and passions and feelings  Direct Passions  Desire, aversion, hope, fear, grief, joy  Instincts such as bodily appetites and desires which have an unknown cause  Arise from the desire to avoid pain and gain pleasure  Indirect Passions  Pride, shame, love, hate  Generated in a more complex way but still involve the thoughts of pain or pleasure  Intentional actions are caused by indirect passions

Reason  Hume, unlike many philosophers believe that passions control reason not the other way around  For example how Plato believed in the chariot theory, where human nature was a chariot and passion and physical appetite were the horses and reason was the rider that kept them in line  He believes that reason provides information but that alone it cannot lead to action  Pursues knowledge of abstract things in order to meet the central desires of pain vs. pleasure  Two main justifications of why reason is a “slave to the passions’”  Demonstrative reasoning, which is the process of comparing ideas and finding similarities and differences, is never the direct cause of actions. It only deals with ideas, not reality. Reason is only useful when we need the information we gather from reason to make informed inferences about cause and effect situations.  It plays a role in what we do but it does not decide anything on it’s own, whereas passion has the ability to make decisions, such as instincts, on its own. Overall we want to seek pleasure and avoid pain, and we use probable reasoning to find the causes of the things that will accomplish that for us. Therefore our impulses to act do not come from reason but they are directed from it  If reason were to resist passion it would have to have an equal effect on the will by influencing actions, which it does not. Because of this reason cannot resist any of the impulses of passion. With this idea Hume suggests that the thing that controls our direct passions is also passion, but it so calm that we confuse it with reason

Spirituality  Philosopher Soren Kierkegaard contradicts Hume as well as several other philosophers with his belief in spirituality  His belief that God interprets god and evil and that faith in God is the only way to become a true “self”  He states that faith is individual subjective passion and that it is your main goal in life to establish and continuously renew that faith, but by believing that God has set divine rule for man he questions reason  One thing Kierkegaard talks about that is most important it the “leap of faith”. He says in order to accept God and faith we must extend our reasoning to allow for not only the realistically possible but to the absurd.

An Opposing Opinion on Reason, Passion and Spirituality  Descartes was another philosopher who looked into the effects of reason and spirituality on the passions  He believes that people who are slaves to their emotions will experience sadness, grief, fear, anxiety ect. Which do not coincide with the idea of “perfect happiness”  Common Souls give in to their passions and are either happy or unhappy depending on the passion they fold to  Greater Souls can control their strongest emotions and passions and use reason to guide them towards perfect happiness  Much like Hume, Descartes believes that our main goal is to achieve happiness or pleasure, and avoid pain  Believes that virtue is the supreme good and you cannot practice this with emotion, you must use reason and that the true meaning of reason is to “examine and consider without passion the value of all perfections, both of the body and the soul, which can be acquired by our conduct”  In regards to spirituality, Descartes had gotten most of his original opinions on passion and reason comes from ancient philosophers like Seneca, but on further analysis he states that it would have been more beneficial for this concept to be studied by a philosopher “unenlightened by faith, with only natural reason to guide him”