Passions of the Soul - Descartes

Section: Psychology

Number of pages: 152 pages

A book on psychology in which Descartes attempts to analyze various emotions, passions, and feelings to understand them and explain their mechanism, to then allow the mind to control them and harness them to serve the individual's happiness in his emotional life. It is also a book on ethics that completes what its author had put in provisional ethics. In this book, the will plays an important role, not to eradicate passions and feelings, but to tame them and lead them toward this great victory in the individual's social life, the victory of nobility of heart over stinginess, fear, hesitation, and cowardice.