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Ideas for 'works', 'The Will to Power (notebooks)' and 'fragments/reports'

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3 ideas

18. Thought / A. Modes of Thought / 3. Emotions / a. Nature of emotions

23950	Freud said passions are pressures of some flowing hydraulic quantity [Freud, by Solomon]
	Full Idea: Freud argued that the passions in general …were the pressures of a yet unknown 'quantity' (which he simply designated 'Q'). He first thought this flowed through neurones, …and always couched the idea in the language of hydraulics.
	From: report of Sigmund Freud (works [1900]) by Robert C. Solomon - The Passions 3.4
	A reaction: This is the main target of Solomon's criticism, because its imagery has become so widespread. It leads to talk of suppressing emotions, or sublimating them. However, it is not too different from Nietzsche's 'drives' or 'will to power'.

18. Thought / A. Modes of Thought / 3. Emotions / b. Types of emotion

23938	Passions are ranked, as if they are non-rational and animal pleasure seeking [Nietzsche]
	Full Idea: The whole conception of an order of rank among the passions: as if it were the right and normal thing to be guided by reason - with the passions as abnormal, dangerous, semi-animal …and nothing other than desires for pleasure.
	From: Friedrich Nietzsche (The Will to Power (notebooks) [1888], §387)
	A reaction: This thought of Nietzsche's seems to be very important, because the Enlightenment relegation of passions was inherited from Christianity, and dominated European culture (and Buddhism too, I think).

18. Thought / A. Modes of Thought / 3. Emotions / f. Emotion and reason

23939	We fail to see that reason is a network of passions, and every passion contains some reason [Nietzsche]
	Full Idea: The misunderstanding of passion and reason, as if the latter were an independent entity and not rather a system of relations between various passions and desires; and as if every passion did not possess its quantum of reason.
	From: Friedrich Nietzsche (The Will to Power (notebooks) [1888], §387)
	A reaction: This seems to me a much more accurate account of the relation of reason and passion than almost anything in earlier philosophy (though Aristotle is quite good on it). I am retraining myself to see my mental life in this way.