Passion (thing)

While the the early division of passions into four categories is found first in Plato, the Stoic Cicero was the first to develop a full theory of the passions in his Tusculan Disputations.

The four passions are:

• Joy (laetitia)
• Grief (aegritudo)
• Desire (cupiditas or libido), and
• Fear (metus)

Joy and desire are coded as good, and grief and fear as the result of evil. Joy and grief are immediate, and impinge on the actual presence of the catalyst. Desire and fear arise in anticipation of a future circumstance (albeit often not too far into the future).

Cicero's articulation was widely accepted and endorsed from up to the middle ages, when Thomas Aquinas suggested an even simpler schema. Aquinas divided passions under two rubrics: the concupiscible and irascible "appetites of the soul". Concupiscible passions are those which are readily satisfied. Irascible passions are related to more difficult to obtain objects. Further, the quality of the passion will be affected by the "goodness" or "badness" of the object of desire.

In this schema there are eleven primitive passions which can be experienced, grouped by the quality of the object of desire and its relative attainability. The good and the bad are also seen to be correlates of each other under the single rubrics of concupiscible and irascible:

Concupiscible (Good)

Concupiscible (Bad)

Irascible (Good)

Irascible (Bad)

Anger is the only emotion without a mirror on the other side of the coin; for Aquinas, the opposite of anger was not another emotion but its absence, or non-anger.