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© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2007, Unit 6, Th e Village, 101 Amies Street, London SW11 2JW

[Expositions 1.1 (2007) 053–070] Expositions (print) ISSN 1747-5368 
doi:10.1558/expo.v1i1.53 Expositions (online) ISSN 1747-5376 

Question: Are Human Beings Ultimately Aff ective?

EVA BRANN

St. John’s College, Annapolis

Th is paper considers arguments for fi nding human beings to be centrally 
rational or basically aff ective. Th e former view, initiated by the predomi-
nant philosophers of antiquity, prevailed in the West until Spinoza and 
(among those after him) Heidegger made aff ectivity primary. Th e thesis is 
that this choice is not primarily psychological but ontological and that the 
question must be pursued metaphysically.

I. Th e psychic hierarchy

Th e question of the title is asked, in various ways, over and over in the 
philosophical and psychological tradition of the West. Or better, it is 
answered in various ways, often without being asked. It is inherent in 
the dominant model of the human soul of the Platonic-Aristotelian 
mainstream, a soul that has two chief parts, one of which is a-rational 
[alogon] while the other has reason [logon echon], as Aristotle says in 
the Nicomachean Ethics (1102 a 29).1 Both parts are subdivided in vari-
ous ways that I will return to later, but the aff ects, or the passions, are 
always located in the a-rational part. “A-rational,” reasonless, does not 
mean “irrational,” unreasonable; only reasonable beings can be unrea-
sonable, for only they can contravene their reason. Moreover, the a-ra-
tional part of the soul is regarded as having, in turn, parts amenable to 
reason, though not actively rational. Hence arises the question whether 
the passions are ultimately obedient, recalcitrant, or just indiff erent to 
reason. And if they are in some mode or degree fi nally ungovernable 
by reason, then the question is whether they are so as mere, brute, in-
defeasible facts of our psychic constitution regarded as insuperably and 
ultimately non- or a-rational, or as evidence of a defi cient or perverted 
rationality, or perhaps even as testimony to our ultimate, healthily in-

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suppressible aff ectivity.  
Th e Western tradition is quite routinely termed “rationalist.” If, how-

ever, the question proposed, “Are human beings ultimately aff ective?” 
is sometimes answered positively from within that tradition, we should 
perhaps reconsider that label.

I will begin with three preliminary observations about the early clas-
sical psychology, where by psychology, a word apparently not used by 
the Greeks and rare in English before the nineteenth century, I mean 
the theoretical soul-framework of human beings, the “account” [logos] 
of their psychic economy.

First, the account that assigns to the human soul two—subdividable 
—major parts is very persistent. It extends into modern theory; for 
instance, it appears in Freud’s elaborately worked out “topography” 
of the soul, which has broadly two locations, or systems, the Uncon-
scious and the Conscious. Very interesting questions, to be considered 
a little later, arise in modernity—as in antiquity—about a third mid-
dle division, its subordination and function. So also in contemporary 
neurophysiology a division between the feelings, including emotion, 
and “higher order” cognition is an assumed working hypothesis, to be 
confi rmed or modifi ed. 

Th ese variously elaborated theories seem to rest on our ever-repeated 
experiences of an original opposition of psychic events. Th ere is the 
physical sense that feelings take place in the heart or at the skin; think-
ing seems to exercise the head or brain. Th ere is the experience that 
what my reason commands, another self resists: “For what I would, 
that do I not; but what I hate, that do I” (Rom. 7.15). And, more 
particularly, there is the sense that it is the body which is the locus of a 
passive opposition: “Th e spirit indeed is willing, but the fl esh is weak” 
(Matt. 26.41).

Indeed, and this is the second observation, the lower part of the soul 
is usually thought of as more involved in the body. Th e body in time, 
as the receptor and conduit of the senses, is thought of as itself passive 
and as a source of passions in the soul, as well as a recalcitrant resister 
—resistant not by reason of activity but of passivity—to the legiti-
mate commands of the soul’s reasoning part. Th e soul’s vulnerability to 

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passion, its capacity for suff ering, is expressed in the root meaning of 
pa/qoj, the Greek word for “passion.” Its aff ectivity is, in this scheme, 
thought of as proportionate to its nearness to the body, its never quite 
perspicuous involvement with the fl esh and its aff ections. 

And third, this mainstream psychology represents the appropriation 
of the soul by the philosophers in this respect, that the part in which 
the passions are located is named as a privative of the rational part: 
without reason [a-logon] versus having reason [logon echon]. Th ere are 
various ways to account for the priority of lo/goj (reason and its ar-
ticulate speech) in the traditional psychologies:

1. Whatever is refl ected upon and expressed is ipso facto in the me-
dium of rational speech, which is therefore inevitably the domi-
nant capacity; whoever thinks about anything is, willy-nilly, 
fi rst and last, in the apprehensive rather than the aff ective mode 
—doing rather than done to. Th us the primacy of reason in a 
psychology is simply inherent in the fact that it is a lo/goj, an 
account. Th ose who like to give verbal accounts will think that 
reason is to be in charge just by reason of their métier. It will be 
a professional preference—or deformation. 

2.  Another cause for according reason a higher position might be 
a judgment that disciplined action, which is to say vigorous ful-
fi llment of one’s capacities, is superior to supine receptivity, to 
being mere formable material, the subject of infl uences, be they 
of the external or internal senses—that to be moved is less fi ne 
that to move oneself.

3.  Again, it might be that, just as experience at any age shows that 
the soul or consciousness is often at odds with itself, so experi-
ence in maturity teaches that if the eff ortfully analytic—I am 
tempted to use the term “digestive”—rational part is at work 
and ultimately in charge, the passions are transubstantiated into 
fuel for human activity and well-being. Here this psychology 
becomes an ethics—the ethics of reason as the guide to human 
good and goodness.

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56 Question: Are Human Beings Ultimately Aff ective?

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Th e chief proponent of this identity known to us and the fi rst full-
fl edged psychologist in the sense given above is Plato’s Socrates, speak-
ing in the dialogue Republic, where he gives the psycho-ontological 
rationale for his notorious claim that to know and to be good are the 
same. Th is position can fairly be said to establish a tradition, already 
expressed more aphoristically among the Presocratics, of aggression by 
reason toward the aff ects and their poetic expression. When Socrates 
introduces his no-quarter-given critique of emotive poetry by referring 
to “that ancient diff erence between philosophy and poetry” (Republic 
607b), he must surely have puzzled Homer in Hades sorely, for the 
bard had sung of no such battle; moreover, he must have driven Aris-
tophanes in Athens to a sarcastic pursing of the month, since the comic 
poet thought—witness the Clouds—that philosophers, a tribe to him 
indistinguishable from sophists, were a nasty novelty. However, when 
Socrates says “ancient” [palaia], he probably means it fi guratively for 
“fundamental,” “close to the human roots.” Th us, ever since, in the 
main tradition, reason has been prosecutorial toward the passions in 
life and in literature, while they have been mutely persistent.  

But, of course, the tradition being essentially dialectical, the priva-
tion of rationality, the “a-rational” part of the soul, is upheld from time 
to time in a positive mode—a fancy way of saying that the opposition 
mounts a deliberate defense of the passions as more basic to human 
nature than reason. I know of no such explicit initiative in antiquity. 
Homer and the tragedians, Socrates’ antagonists (albeit well-loved and 
well-known by him), don’t argue back; they simply, as I said, exist and 
persist. But in modern times such reaction sometimes takes the form 
of dry realism, as when Hume says, famously, in the Treatise of Human 
Nature, “Reason is, and ought to be the slave of the passions, and can 
never pretend to any other offi  ce than to serve and obey them” (Hume 
1960, 2.3.3). At other times it appears as romanticism, the philosophi-
cally knowledgeable revolt of the poets in behalf of the emotion-infused 
imagination. Th us Shelley, in his “Defense of Poetry,” which ends with 
the announcement that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of 
the world,” claims in the beginning that “reason is to imagination as 
the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow 

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to the substance,” and that “poetry is connate with the origin of man.” 
As “Romantic reaction” is a descriptive term for the particular roman-
tic movement (c. 1780–1850) that followed the enlightenment of the 
philosophes and the formalism of Classical artists, so, in general the vin-
dication of emotion seems to be a reactive in the life of ideas—while 
in the life of people the reverse takes place: Th e aff ective life is given; 
rationality is imposed.

Finally the reestablishment of the emotions is a more recent initiative 
in “emotion studies.” It appears as a “New Romanticism,” an attempt 
“to return the passions to their central and defi ning role in our lives 
that they have so long and persistently been denied, to limit the pre-
tensions of ‘objectivity’ and self-demeaning reason which have exclu-
sively ruled Western philosophy, religion, and science since the days of 
Socrates,” and to do this, curiously enough, by showing that the emo-
tions “have a ‘logic’ of their own.” Th ese quotations are taken from the 
preface to Robert C. Solomon’s infl uential book, Th e Passions (1976, 
xvi, 14). Since then, neuroscience in particular has turned to the long-
neglected study of emotions. Th e brain mechanisms subserving the 
emotions are apparently all subcortical, which means they are evolu-
tionarily older than the “higher,” that is, more recent, brain functions 
and correspondingly more basic to survival. Some of these fi ndings are 
set out for lay readers in Antonio Damasio’s Th e Feeling of What Hap-
pens (1999).

II. Th e terms of the question

To shape a question about the siting of aff ects in the psychic economy 
is curiously diffi  cult. I have chosen to ask whether they are ultimate, 
from a sense that something about their primacy or fi nality is worth 
fi nding out, but without quite knowing what I am looking for.

For example, an answer that is not satisfying is the evolutionary one: 
Ultimately, that is to say, fi rst in our species’ development, long before 
we became animals having reason, our ancestors were animals having 
emotions. Th e emotionality of animals, particularly of the primates that 
do not have fully developed verbal rationality is currently undoubted 
by evolutionists and animal ethnologists; it was certainly Darwin’s nec-

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58 Question: Are Human Beings Ultimately Aff ective?

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essary central assumption in his recently revived book Th e Expression of 
the Emotions in Man and Animals (1998 [1872], Ch. 1).

Yet temporal priority cannot simply determine present hierarchy; 
how a species evolved cannot defi nitively tell what an individual really 
is. Th us, in the case of the emotions, to say that they are subserved 
by a primitive brain structure does not necessarily imply that they are 
primary in our psychic constitution or that they ought to be given 
primacy in our conduct of life. In fact, it might be taken to mean the 
opposite: “primitive” is not necessarily an honorifi c.

If biological primitiveness, that is, our evolutionary past, doesn’t fi ll 
the bill, perhaps the inquiry should turn to the possible primacy of the 
passions in the present human condition. Should we rehabilitate the 
passions from being the privation, the a-logical aspect of our human 
being, and accord them the honor of fi rstness in our evolved human-
ity? Th at seems to be something we would want to think out, since 
it aff ects fi rst our self-management and then, as an immediate con-
sequence, our conduct toward others. But even attention to the Stoic 
preoccupation with that issue as well as a lot of reading of the romantic 
rebels convinces me that it is a question satisfactorily answerable only 
on the basis of an even prior problem. Is our aff ectivity ultimate in the 
sense of being irreducible—irreducible to, that is radically independ-
ent of, our rational being?

Should readers think this is a curiously unlikely perplexity, I must 
remind them that what was the most widespread, inclusive, long-last-
ing and modernity-anticipating movement of antiquity, Stoicism, held 
just the opposite opinion: that the passions in fact ultimately come 
under lo/goj, that they are le/kta (utterances), as they said, namely 
propositions. Th us they held that the passions were judgments, albeit 
mistaken ones: the appraisal of an event or circumstance as mattering 
when it doesn’t. Th is view turns out to be extremely sophisticated, al-
though it is reductively physicalist. To reduce a complex story to a few 
words, the mainstream Stoics think that some external incidents cause 
a kind of upset or upheaval, a blip of turbulence in the wave-like me-
dium [pneuma] that organizes and animates bodies and is the network 
of rationality carrying information to and decisions from a command 

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center [hegemonikon] located in the heart.2 If this upset is accepted, 
that is, allowed to resonate undamped, a passion state takes place. Ne-
ostoicism, the claim that emotions are ultimately rational appraisals of 
our particular condition, is a current movement; its chief proponent is 
Martha Nussbaum in Upheavals of Th ought (2001). 

Stoic theory then gives a clear answer to the question of the ultimacy 
of aff ectivity. It is not basic: propositional rationality is. It is not clear 
to me that either the old or the new Stoics succeed in this rationalist 
reduction. Somewhere a moment of pure disturbance, what the Old 
Stoics themselves called a pre-passion [propatheia], steps in. But even 
if, or especially if, this diffi  culty is set aside, there remains something 
counterintuitive in the Stoic position. It seems to reduce to one side, 
that of a fi nal rationality, our (or at least my) sense that human feeling 
is indeed indefeasibly suff used by thought—and the converse. 

An opposite alternative is the claim that human beings are ultimately 
aff ective. Th e great—and somewhat abstruse—proponent of this po-
sition is Spinoza. Th e diff erence between him and the “romantics” is 
that, in the Ethics (1843 [1675]), he sites the ultimacy of the aff ec-
tive human mind in a daring metaphysics. Again, abbreviating uncon-
scionably: God and nature are identical, and human beings are one of 
God’s ways of being, his “modes.” Human beings are desire; “Desire 
[an aff ect] is the very essence of man…” (Part III, “Defi nitions of the 
Aff ects,” no. 1). It is the conscious appetite for remaining in being, for 
active, productive persistence, and in this it is indeed a way of being 
God, who is nature in all its drive toward self-maintenance. Th erefore, 
aff ect (Spinoza’s term: aff ectus) is absolutely ultimate. But it is not pas-
sive; the aff ects turn into passions when inadequately comprehended. 
For Spinoza “inadequate” means “unclear and non-comprehensive.” 
Th us passions are turned into actions through being adequately, that 
is clearly and comprehensively understood. Th erefore, virtue is knowl-
edge, and the Ethics is a guide to adequate knowledge. Yet even pas-
sions comprehended and so turned into virtues are fi rst and last aff ects. 
It is no wonder that Spinoza was highly regarded by the Romantics. 

My opening question was about the standing of aff ect in the human 
constitution. So, then, what is meant by “aff ect”?

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60 Question: Are Human Beings Ultimately Aff ective?

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Aff ectus for Spinzoa (usually rendered “emotion”) is an aff ectio (usu-
ally rendered “modifi cation”) of the body as it is represented in the 
mind (Ethics, Part III, defi nition 3). It is the idea of an impingement, 
external or internal, that increases or diminishes the body’s power. Th us 
the aff ections are “doings to” [ad-facere] the body and the aff ects are 
“done to” us. So they are in the fi rst instance, that is, until mastered by 
the mind, passivities or passions. Eventually, in the eighteenth century, 
the aff ects came to be generally called “emotions,” “out-movings” or 
displacements of the soul. Th e term recognizes the fact that aff ects are 
experienced as—or rather that they are the experience of—some sort 
of turbulence, which usually, though not exclusively, originates in an 
external aff ection of the senses and resonates in an internal sensibility. 
Moreover, though Spinoza’s metaphysical theory of the fundamental 
aff ectivity of all Being can scarcely be mainstreamed, there is some-
thing that rings very true to human experience in the basic notion of 
emotion as being defi nable as a sense of expansion or contraction, of 
the well-being or dis-ease of consciousness. To me the deepest diffi  cul-
ty in getting hold of aff ect, feeling, passion, emotion, sentiment—the 
heap of terms gathering together the whole gamut of connotations 
—is to understand how being in the passive mode can be experienced 
as vigorously animating us and as being the voucher for our being 
alive. I believe that Spinoza was preoccupied with this very problem in 
looking for a way to turn passive aff ect active and thereby passion into 
virtue, in the primary Latin sense of virtus: effi  cacy, power. 

So now, with some meaning accrued, are we ultimately aff ective? 
Stoics defi ne us as animals having reason who assent to propositions 
evaluating their physical turbulences; Spinoza understands us as beings 
whose essence is desire, the longing to persist productively. Th e main-
stream opinion is that we are animals with ultimately split natures. We 
are schizophrenic at root: passionate and thoughtful, emotional and 
rational, passively aff ected, actively controlling. It is within this dual 
nature that my question arises most clearly and that the answer is of 
the greatest consequence.

III. Th e psychic constitution
Th e thought that of the two roots of our nature neither one is ulti-

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mately reducible to the other is not the same as the notion of their 
mutual interaction or suff usion. No single word displays this truth bet-
ter than the name of reason’s—as the Germans say—“ownmost” activ-
ity: philosophy. For that word combines a passion term and a thought 
term: philos, “loving friend” and sophia, “skilled wisdom.” So from its 
fi rst use by Heracleitus, who together with his accomplice-adversary 
Parmenides, co-founded the enterprise so named and started it on its 
dialectical way, philosophy was understood as passionate to the core: 
the longing for genuine Being and the desire to capture it in words.

As thought is moved by aff ect so, conversely, human feeling, the pas-
sive yet vital movement of the soul, is shot through with reason, at least 
in human beings. Th at fact shows itself above all in the most apparent 
structure of the emotions, their “intentionality.” In its modern use this 
term refers to the directedness or “aboutness” of acts of consciousness: 
We think this or that and of or about this and that. Emotions too seem 
to be intentional: We love or hate this and that, are in fear of or feel 
bold about this and that. It is this feature of emotions that we express 
quite easily. Getting the “feel” of the feeling is much harder. Moreover, 
the Stoics say that every emotion is a proposition misguidedly assented 
to. We claim, wrongly: “I am afraid of losing my child—and so I ought 
to be.” Th e Stoics, in contrast, actually argue that grief for a lost child 
is a mistake. Whether or not that is really all such an emotion is—a 
very counterintuitive claim—it surely is part of most feeling that we 
are positively or negatively inclined to it. For example, Goethe’s Faust 
makes his salvation or damnation depend on his ability to reject present 
contentment. May I perish, he says, “Were I to say to just one moment 
/ Oh, stay awhile, thou art so fair” (Goethe 1949, Part 1, 1702). And 
so it is with all emotions. We receive or reject them by a mental mo-
tion of assent which appears to be separable from the pleasure or pain 
attendant on the emotion.

Furthermore, the emotions have a taxonomy, an ordered interrela-
tion, about which there is, to be sure, no agreement, for writers about 
the emotions are fertile in personal schemes. Nevertheless, such order-
ing would not be feasible if the aff ects were not amenable to rational 
analysis.

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But the most interesting application of reason to emotion, the thorni-
est theoretically and most consequence-laden practically, is that of con-
trol and rectifi cation. Both Plato and Aristotle think that parts of the 
a-rational soul are amenable to reason, though not as actively reasoning 
but rather as accepting reason’s rule. Aristotle says in the Nicomachean 
Ethics:

But perhaps nonetheless there is in the soul something that must be 
regarded as besides reason that opposes and goes counter to it…But 
this also seems to have a part in reason…for it obeys the rule of rea-
son… (1102 b).

How it is possible that what is not-reason should hear reason is a 
perplexity. Th is much is clear, however: that though there is perhaps 
some mutuality, the relation is conceived asymmetrically, since it is 
reason that is to rule, and passion, of course located in the a-rational 
[alogon] part of the soul, that is to be ruled. Passion may blind-side, 
blank out, deform reason, but reason informs the feelings, which are 
after all, conceived as aff ects, passivities. Moreover, it isn’t clear that the 
aff ect that suff uses, as I said, the higher power is not perhaps specifi c 
to, even located within, that power, a conception that complicates the 
understanding of the nature of lo/goj but maintains its immunity to 
lower emotional contagion. In the Platonic Symposium, for example, 
Pausanias distinguishes between a Heavenly and a Popular Aphrodite 
(180 d), and in the Phaedrus, Socrates assigns to the soul, in the fi gure 
of a chariot whose charioteer represents reason, two horses, which rep-
resent the impulsive parts of the soul. One of these is by nature close 
to reason while the other can be subdued but only by reason becoming 
forcible (246 b). And, of course, the ancients knew all about spoiled 
reason, the quibbling tricks of a logical cunning that is in the service of 
gain and power. Th e practitioners of this manipulative reason appear 
in the Platonic dialogues as Socrates’ opponents and in Aristophantic 
comedy as Socrates himself. Th ey are the “wisdom-mongers,” the soph-
ists, as opposed to the “wisdom-seekers,” the philosophers.

Neither the interaction nor the subordination of the parts of the soul 
gives a determinate answer to the question of the ultimacy of one ele-
ment or to the prior question, whether the parts are indeed fi nally in 

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some sense autonomous.
Before the passage quoted above, Aristotle says that it scarcely mat-

ters whether the parts [moria] of the soul are real and the soul is “part-
able” [meriston] in the way that a body or any whole is, or whether 
these distinctions exist only in thought, as convexity is distinguishable 
from concavity.  According to him, all this is of no importance for dis-
tinguishing the thoughtful from the thought-less part of the soul.

Indeed, introspective experience is the guide here; a fi rst phenom-
enological description of our psychic economy has to be, and is even 
for contemporary neuroscience, experiential. For how would the brain 
scientist know what physical structure or event to look for without 
soul-like terms to guide the investigation? Th at said, however, it does 
turn out that the diff erent “parts” of the soul, above all the emotive and 
the reasonable parts, are locally, structurally, and functionally distinct: 
Very grossly, the limbic system on the border between the brain stem 
and forebrain (containing among other structures the hypothalamus 
and amygdala) is associated with emotional life, and the forebrain, in 
particular the cerebral cortex, with rational functions (see Raius 2002, 
202–38).  Brain science thus appears to give a physical warrant to talk 
about the “parts” (or later, the “faculties”) of the soul, be they taken 
an emergent epiphenomena of the brain or non-physical entities sub-
served by neurophysicological structures.  

It seems to me, therefore, that the grand fi gure which underlies Pla-
to’s Republic, assigning to the soul a constitution which, when writ 
large resembles a polity, has plausibility and usefulness. It suggests that 
we may appropriately ask: Who or what rules, serves, provides, and is 
what we ultimately are? But those questions require that the two main 
parts of the soul be somewhat more diff erentiated.

IV. Th e psychic parts

From Plato to Freud the soul or psyche has been conceived, recall, as 
double in the basic sense of having two parts, a-rational [alogon] and 
having reason [logon echon], but, on closer inspection, as having three, 
and thence, in later authors, through division or addition on to many. 
Th us a count of the sub-parts of the soul used by Th omas Aquinas in 

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64 Question: Are Human Beings Ultimately Aff ective?

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his Summa Th eologiae3 yields a dozen, even leaving out the lowest rung 
of distinctions, although even this multiplicity is fundamentally tripar-
tite. Freud, at least in his “topography” of the psyche, laid out in the 
essay “Th e Unconscious” (1915), distinguishes the Unconscious (Ucs), 
the Preconscious (Pcs), and the Conscious (Cs), again a triple.

Th us the schema that seems to underlie all psychology, whether by 
way of adoption, adaptation, or counterproposals, are the triple parti-
tions of Plato and Aristotle. Th e parts of the Platonic soul-structure, 
its “forms or dispositions” [eide kai ethe], are set out in the Republic 
(435 d). Th ey comprise the rational part [logistikon] and the non-ra-
tional part, which is divided in two, the spirited [thymos] and the ap-
petitive [epithymetikon, 439 d-e]. Of these the lowest, desirous part is 
specifi cally called a-rational; the middle part, which includes feelings 
of shame and pride, is shown to be particularly responsive to reason, 
but is not itself reason. One might say it is reasonable but not rational. 
Th ere is, in the tradition, some argument whether desire and appetite, 
the low-grade aff ects comprising the lowest part, are to be counted 
among the passions proper. But the motions of the soul belonging to 
the middle part are surely emotions; in fact one translator, Raymond 
Larson, renders thymoumetha, “we show spirit,” forthrightly as “we feel 
emotions”: “We learn with one, feel emotions with another and desire 
the pleasures of nourishment, procreation, and so forth with a third 
part” (436 b). I cite this—I believe acceptable—translation because 
it points up what will become the mainstream view: Th e passions or 
emotions occupy the central location in the constitution of the soul.

Th ey do so even more unequivocally when Aristotle adds a lowest 
part, the “vegetative” or “natural” [physikon] part which is common 
to all living things. To it he assigns life functions like nourishment 
and procreation (Nicomachean Ethics 1102 b). Th e middle part is the 
aforementioned—still a-rational—part capable of being obedient to 
reason; here the virtues are to be found together with the passions. It 
is no accident that the fi rst pathos Aristotle takes up in his treatment 
of the passions in the Rhetoric (Book II) is anger, aroused by a slight to 
honor, which is certainly a “thymotic” passion.

Th omas Aquinas amalgamates these schemata into one enormous 

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plan, in which, once again, the passions have a topographically central 
place in a tripartite soul consisting of an “intellectual,” a “sensitive” and 
a “vegetative” part. Th e middle, the sensitive, soul includes, toward the 
bodily side, the senses, divided into the internal senses such as imagi-
nation, and the external senses such as sight. Toward the intellectual 
side we fi nd the passions, divided into the desirously receptive ones 
such as love and the strenuously aggressive ones such as pride. Th ese 
subdivisions are, of course, adaptations of Socrates’ epithymotic and 
thymotic parts. Note that in all psychic “topographies” (the word is 
Freud’s) location has signifi cance, one end being higher in dignity and 
dominance. What, however, does it mean to be central?

For central is what the passions are by position. Th is is true even in 
Freud’s schema. For, although emotions are at home in the infernal 
Unconscious (Freud’s epigraph for Th e Interpretation of Dreams is a line 
from the Aeneid: “If I can’t bend the gods above I will move the gods 
below,” 7.312), they come close to consciousness and dominate the 
fantasy life of the Preconscious.

So in what sense are the aff ects in general and the passions in par-
ticular central? Just insofar, one might say, as they are crucial to human 
being but not ultimate. Th e human center is passionate; the passions 
are what we gladly suff er, with gladness and suff ering in about equal 
proportion, and the passions are what we strenuously battle, with vic-
tory and defeat about equally the issue. In the ancient formula for a 
human being as a “living thing having reason” [zoon logon echon], the 
passions belong to the living, the animal or animated side. Th ose who 
think that a part of the soul is separable from the embodied living be-
ing and is capable of separate survival, as Socrates, perhaps speaking 
mythically, intimates in the Phaedo and Aristotle surmises in On the 
Soul (408 b), mean the rational part. Its dignity is for this, along with 
other reasons, greater even in its incarnate phase. Of the mainstream 
ancients one must therefore say: Th e human being is centrally but not 
ultimately aff ective.

But that is not the end of it, for the ancients or the moderns. Both 
Plato and Aristotle subdivide the rational soul into a part that discur-
sively “thinks things through” [dia-noia] and a higher part that sees 

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directly, intuitively [noesis]. Th is latter part is understood, very explic-
itly by Aristotle in On the Soul (429 a), to be in one aspect receptive. 
Indeed, its peculiar passivity is analogous to that of sense-perception, 
though, on the other hand, it is also nothing like it, for it is bodiless. 
Th us its faculty, the intellect [nous], is passive insofar as in receiving the 
knowable forms of all things it is said to become them, though its pas-
sive receptivity is also an active fulfi llment. Th is analogy of intuition to 
feeling is what Pascal means when he says that “the heart has its reasons 
that the reason does not know”—not that the heart is a-rational, but 
that it gets things directly, receptively.

So now we might be allowed to say that in this understanding of a 
two-tier rationality (still maintained by Th omas but denied by Kant),4 
we are ultimately aff ective, meaning receptively open to being touched 
and entered by intelligible being. But that aff ectivity is a far cry from 
passionate aff ectivity, from the bodily feelings, the sensory aff ections, 
and the intentional feelings called passions or emotions. Yet this high 
aff ectivity, the receptivity to being, is a human capacity that must be 
considered in this context since it is, at one point at least, transmuted 
back into what is ordinarily called a feeling. Moreover, the claim is 
made that it is in fact only that feeling which opens us to meta-physi-
cal intimations.

Th is function of the metaphysical aff ect is set out most explicitly 
by Heidegger in the essay “What is Metaphysics?” (1998). He means 
to reclaim aff ectivity as ultimate in human existence. Th e aff ect he 
turns to is not an emotion but a mood. “Mood,” in its narrow signifi ca-
tion, is distinguished from emotion by its non-intentional character. 
Love and hate, bold confi dence and fear, pride and shame are “about” 
something, that is, about the objects of love or fear or the reasons for 
confi dence and shame. A mood, on the other hand, is about nothing. 
It is a diff use, unfocused feeling. Who could doubt that human beings 
have been moody through the ages? Yet the curious fact is that the 
ancients, at least until late in antiquity, made no great point of being 
subject to such intentionless aff ects or of analyzing them. Th eir inter-
est, particularly that of the Stoics, the most purposeful students of the 
passions, lay precisely in the “intentional object” of an aff ect, for it was 

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through its appraisal that they sought relief. To be sure, there was the 
long-lasting humoral theory which included in its four states melan-
cholia, a depressive mood, but it was recorded as a medical category. 
In medieval theology acedia, a slothful disgust with the spiritual life, 
was only one of several moodlike conditions of the religious life. It was, 
however, regarded not primarily as an aff ect but as one of the seven 
capital theological sins. In modern times the Romantics were certainly 
preoccupied with diff use feelings of searching longing and pleasurable 
reminiscence. 

But it was only in 1844, when Kierkegaard published Th e Concept of 
Anxiety, that the intentionlessness of mood was made explicit and put 
to philosophical use. Th is anxiety would in the twentieth century be-
come what might be called its paradigm mood. Kierkegaard, observing 
that the concept of anxiety is ignored in psychology, says that “it is al-
together diff erent from fear and similar concepts that referred to some-
thing defi nite, whereas anxiety is freedom’s actuality as the possibility 
of a possibility” (1980 [1844] 1.15). “Freedom’s actuality” describes a 
presentiment of a capability—an as yet unfi xed sense of a freedom to 
be free. Th is was Adam’s condition before the Fall, a “dreaming” state 
of innocence, before he knew the diff erence between good and evil. In 
that dream state of uneasy repose, Adam has “indeed nothing against 
which to strive.” At this point Kierkegaard has recourse to the verbal 
trick that will have great consequences in Existential philosophy: Th e 
“nothing” which Adam has to strive against in the mood of dreaming 
anxiety turns into an intentional object. “But what eff ect does nothing 
have?” Kierkegaard asks. “It begets anxiety.”  Th us the inherited sinful-
ness of the human race originating in Adam’s fall is conditioned not, 
as in the tradition, on the perversion of the will, the rational faculty of 
desire, but on a mood, an aff ective sense of the freedom to be possibly 
bad (41–46).

Heidegger adapts for his essay this Kierkegaardian transmutation 
of the nothing that anxiety “is about” into a meta-physical Nothing. 
Th e mood (in German Stimmung, “attunement”) of anxiety opens the 
human being to Nothing. In their uncanny alienated indiff erence to 
existence, beings as a whole distance themselves from us. Th e human 

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68 Question: Are Human Beings Ultimately Aff ective?

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foothold in existence is gone. Anxiety is revealingly about the Noth-
ing that environs existence. Th us anxiety becomes our access to the 
wonder of beings.  We realize, we feel, that they are something and not 
nothing: Anxiety is the fundamental metaphysical feeling (Heidegger 
1998, 102).  

Th at Heidegger is, in this perennial duality of the Western tradi-
tion, on the side of ultimate aff ectivity, is confi rmed by comparing Be-
ing and Time (1927) with the somewhat later “What is Metaphysics?” 
(originally published 1929, postscript added in 1943, introduction in 
1949). In the book anxiety had functioned almost oppositely to its role 
in the essay: Instead of taking Dasein, a human existence, beyond the 
beings that constitute its world, it arose from Dasein’s sense of having 
been cast into its world (Heidegger 1927, 134 ff ., 184 ff .).  What seems 
to me remarkable is that in this vacillation about the role of anxiety, 
one factor remains fi rm: that a mood—anxiety in particular and at-
tunement, mood, in general—is ontologically fundamental to human 
existence. For not only do all the features that characterize human ex-
istence in ordinary terms—emotions and understanding —eventuate 
from this aff ectivity as ground, but it itself is the defi ning mode of 
existence:  openness to the world.  I know of no more unsentimentally 
positive answer to the question, “Are human beings ultimately aff ec-
tive?”

Is that the last word? Has the question been answered once and for 
all? Of course not. Each hierarchical placement, topographical setting, 
human valuation of the passions depends not only on a psychology but 
on an ontology. Hence to accept one or another view of the ultimacy of 
the passionate part of human nature is to accept—explicitly or implic-
itly—a view of the world and of being itself. To realize that is the fi rst 
fi rm outcome of an inquiry such as this.

Endnotes

1. References to classical texts are to the standard paginations.  Most translations 
are by the author.

2. Zeno of Citium (b. 334) and Chrysippus (280–207) were the founders of 
Stoicism whose doctrines dominated all later discussions. Th e Stoic system, 

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gleaned from their fragments, is set out by Julia E. Annas in Hellenistic Philoso-
phy of Mind (1992), part III.

3. For the parts involved in the passions, see Summa Th eologiae, First Part of the 
Second Part, qu. 22, art. 2.

4. See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1963 [1781], B 170).

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