Geometry of Passions

 

 IA image generated by Gabriel Ganiarov

Geometry of Passions 

Eternal dilemma object of Byzantine discussions, passion was understood for many centuries as alienating, as a dissociating factor of mental equity, eternal usufructuary of reason to the detriment of good judgment, the philosophical discourse of antiquity held the doctrine that passions uncontrolled sound judgment, that the person under their influence exceeded the natural limits determined by equity, and because of this, the individual was supposed to have a daemon, a spirit that disrupted his soul, leading him to perdition.

 

In modernity, it has been understood the intimate dichotomy between reason and passion that arises in man and directs his actions, being that emotions are products of passion in its purest state, they are not excluded or avoided, rather, they form a framework where it is appreciated in certain circumstances and time, the rule of reason in the individual, his circumstances, his decisions. 

Passion was exacerbated during Romanticism even above reason, as the end and destiny of man's supreme actions, with abstract ideals as ways of affirming vitality and thus possessing the signifiers of one's own transcendence and achieving the ends of one's own self-consciousness. The grandiosity, the exaggeration in sublimating reason to give meaning to feeling, led humanity in this epoch to a true renaissance of the spirit instead of the preceding rationalist posture. Modernity, the contemporary age, has moved away from this position, leaving aside the sentimental in favor of a pragmatism clearly inspired by a postponement of inner reflection, to indulge in easily attainable goals and desires, which can be fulfilled immediately in a materialism without questioning or remorse. 

We suffer a distortion as a result of this automatic material reward, Western society has discarded the old philosophical models, and religious doctrines and we have arrived to the postponement, to a lack of aspirations where disenchantment stands as the panacea. And it is not a gnoseological position provided with deep reflection, rather it is the future projection of the search for satisfaction, where the spiritual values simply fell into disuse. The primordial thing is centered in the commercial, in the profit motive, and in the political, in the holding of power and its derivatives, fame and related, the desires of the present are centered as unattainable and their search implies a certain renunciation to happiness and inner peace to be able to mask that detachment of things to the soul, so necessary to be able to grow and develop as full beings. 

Remo Bodei's dissertation is undertaken by analyzing Baruch de Espinoza, who starts from a geometrical premise as a critique of the absolute and of faith, situating them as a political means to channel and tame, and discarding their real nature and their effects on man, He maintains that desire is man's main motivation and that the absolutism of power and the constriction of the church seek to relegate the passions to prevent the individual from his own freedom, relegating the passions to a state of clandestinity of conscience, and thus generating feelings of guilt that make the individual easy prey to manipulation. 

Espinoza's legacy lies in his original acceptance of passions as something positive if they can be managed, in a reflection aimed at understanding the origin of the passions to be able to understand them. However, one can appreciate in his thought the certainty that the repression of individuality is a fact, with the artifice of ethics and morality wielded from the power, making individuals a kind of chromatic uniformity of thought, stripping them of individuality. 

It will be during the French Revolution when these power structures will crack and give way to a fusion of power and feeling that will advocate the realization of the individual through the rationalization of passions, eliminating the obstacles that prevent the flowering of passion. This path traced by force will make Western thought open the way to the search for the identity of the human being, where being and living for oneself is the supreme goal, where the classical tradition is the driving force in the search for the common and individual good, and where the exploration of the mind advocated by Freud, Marx, Adler and Levi Strauss are the daughters of that search. 

All our currents of thought have as their north the search for happiness. Its achievement, according to Espinoza, is not marked by virtue, this is its direct consequence and not the other way around.

The achievement of the satisfaction of desires is conditioned by restraining the less satisfactory ones, establishing an ethically elevated hierarchy in order to enjoy that which satisfies us the most. The greatest happiness will always lie in wisdom, the old principle upheld by Plato. Bodei rightly chooses to call his study the geometry of the passions, making a subtle distinction between the passions and reason. For him, passions are equivalent, condensed and symbolic, they express the vastness and complexity of action, while reason uses stratification, it distinguishes, analyzes and distributes and allows the spontaneity of the emergence of passions to have a dike, outlined in traditions, in the form as a natural product that is forged by the individual, in the symbolism they enclose and at the same time they are the product of temporality and social interaction.