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Taxonomies of the passions have long claimed to serve a quest for self-knowledge, by specifying conditions under which certain passions arise, formal objects they possess, and qualities essential to their particular feelings. I argue that David Hume's theory of the passions provides resources for a different kind of self-knowledge – a sceptical self-knowledge depending on our ability to articulate how the passions feel rather than always identifying our passions as tokens of an identifiable passion-type. These resources are distinctions between four qualitative aspects that passions may possess – pleasantness or painfulness, calmness or violence, invigoration or softening, and directedness or lack thereof towards specific actions. Reflection on these aspects produces a more accurate understanding of the nature of our emotions and chastens our judgmental tendencies in ways that benefit both self and others.

Art is the one corner of human life in which we may take our ease. To justify our presence there the only thing that is demanded of us is a passion for representation. In other places our passions are conditional and embarrassed; we are allowed to have only so many as are consistent with those of our neighbours; with their convenience and well-being, with their convictions and prejudices, rules and regulations. Art means an escape from all this. Wherever her brilliant standard floats the need for apologies and exonerations is over; there it is enough simply that we please or that we are pleased. There, the tree is judged only by its fruits. If these are sweet, one is welcome to pluck them.1

Polemics are a sort of critique typically suffused with inimical emotions and passions. But how are these emotions and passions to be construed? Neither authorial expression nor actual arousal properly account for their role in polemics. Rather, the polemicist must stage an unequal battle between a polemical self and the polemical target vis-à-vis an anticipated audience, skilfully handling, through his or her words, the emotions ascribed to each of them.

The problem of evil for theists was how to reconcile suffering with a benevolent God. Hume solved the problem of evil by claiming that the divine was amoral but not by denying God's existence which he needed in order to advocate his favoured notion of a general providence. Indeed, Hume's treatment of the problem of evil showed that his quarrel in the Natural History of Religion1and the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding,2Section XI, was with a particular providence rather than the possibility of a divine orderer. The fundamental problem of evil for Hume, was evil's potential to drive people to the notion of a particular providence with its attendant damaging passions. In considering his alternative of the general providence Hume is shown to be closer to theism than has often been thought.

Plato's dialogues show discourse strategies beyond purely intellectual methods of persuasion. The usual assumption is that linguistic understanding depends on a match of inner experiences. This is partly explained by an underlying engagement with the historical Gorgias on discourse and psychology, as well as Parmenides on philosophical logos. In the Gorgias and the Symposium, speakers cannot understand alien experiences by philosophical conversation alone. There is no developed alternative model of understanding in the Platonic dialogues. The difficulties in bringing ‘philistine souls’ into Socratic alignment are the result of possessing an inferior soul, suffering misdirected passions, or missing the philosophy bug.

Aristotelian virtue ethics invests emotions and feelings with much moral significance. However, the moral and other conflicts that inevitably beset human life often give rise to states of emotional division and ambivalence with problematic implications for any understanding of virtue as complete psychic unity of character and conduct. For one thing, any admission that the virtuous are prey to conflicting passions and desires may seem to threaten the crucial virtue ethical distinction between the virtuous and the continent. One recent attempt to sustain this distinction – considered in this paper – maintains that the contrary-to-virtue emotions and desires of the virtuous (by contrast with those of the continent) must relinquish their motive power as reasons for action. Following some attention to the psychological status of feelings and emotions – in particular their complex relations with cognition and reason – this paper rejects this solution in favour of a more constructive view of emotional conflict.

The logic of Leviathan is formally made to derive commonwealth and the rights of sovereignty (the obligations of subjects, read the other way around) from an elaborate process beginning in the physiology of human perception and passions, through language and reason, into the state of nature (the war of all against all) and, finally, under the direction of the laws of nature, to a collective and formal resignation of all their natural rights to create an absolute sovereign. This process of ‘instituting’ the sovereignty stamps the resulting sovereign with legitimacy. Early in the Second Part of Leviathan, however, Hobbes moves to attach all the rights and legitimacy of that instituted sovereignty onto what he calls ‘Despotical Dominion’, the power created when a conqueror exacts a promise from the conquered on pain of immediate death. The result is to translate all that Hobbes has said about sovereignty in general into a defence of the legitimacy of this crude force and violence. The whole of Leviathan's political argument is coloured, then, by this strategy and the best reading of it turns out to be the oldest one—that it is a defence of tyrannical power.

Professor Phillips's short paper 'Ten Questions for PsychoAnalysis' (Philosophy 68, 1993) goes back a long time to 1964 or 65. The questions were originally directed to me after a paper I read to the Philosophical Society in Swansea. I have answered some of these questions in my books on Freud, though perhaps not to Phillips's satisfaction. Here I shall try to do so again, however briefly. Let me begin by saying that I find Phillips's presentation of my views in the first section of his paper, with quotations from my paper 'The Unconscious', Mind 1959, perfectly fair. It is true that I find nothing recondite or theoretical about the notion of the unconscious, such as when we speak of a person's unconscious envy or hostility. He describes my attempt to bring this out as a demystification of the concept. Certainly, the way the unconscious operates in life, I mean what people contribute to their engagements and activities over and above what they can avow of it, does figure in my perception of things. It is a living reality for me. Indeed, in my estimate, human life is much less tractable and more irrational than, as I see it, we care to admit. Not only are most of us much less moral than we recognize, but also much less sane and mature. We are often driven by affective commitments and considerations which have little to do with our conscious, rational considerations and with our conscious, adult passions and convictions. In Freud's words, our conduct is 'over-determined' and has an aspect which does not easily square with our accepted appreciation of it-something which novelists like Dostoevsky bring home to us in their presentation of extreme characters in which we may at first find it difficult to see ourselves. This point bears on the notion of 'the real explanation of a person's behaviour' which Phillips mentions in the opening line of his paper. The term 'the real explanation' suggests that other explanations must be untrue. I do not think that Freud thought so, though he sometimes suggested reductive accounts of certain kinds of common explanation when in the grip of 'theory'. What is important is that when they are perfectly true explanations the person whose conduct is in question can take refuge in this fact to shut his eyes to other explanations which are equally true. This is

‘Our passions are psychological instruments,’ Rousseau says, ‘with which nature has armed our hearts for the defence of our persons and of all that is necessary for our well-being. [But] the more we need external things, the more we are vulnerable to obstacles that can overwhelm us; and the more numerous and complex our passions become. They are naturally proportionate to our needs.’

But if reason has no original influence, it is impossible it can withstand any principle which has such an efficacy, or ever keep the mind in suspense a moment. Thus, it appears, that the principle which opposes our passions cannot be the same with reason, and is only called so in an improper sense. We speak not strictly and philosophically, when we talk of the combat of passion and of reason.

The general question to which this paper is addressed is whether knowledge and rationality carry within themselves the seeds of their own destruction. Some of those who set out in search of knowledge come to believe as a result of their inquiries that the object of their quest is not what they had taken it to be; seeking to discover the way the world actually is, they are led to conclude that all they can hope to find is a reflection of their own needs and interests; the grail is but a beaker. Similarly, some of those whose aim is to formulate the principles of rational thought are led by reason to deny that any beliefs can be rationally justified; reasons are never reasons for believing but mere epiphenomena, produced by but not producing events whose only begetter is the passions; the quest is just another power struggle. The particular question I wish to ask is whether this picture is an accurate representation of social inquiry. That it is is the central claim advanced by Dr Steven Lukes in a recent publication.1 While not espousing relativism in general, Lukes raises doubts about the applicability of the Galilean style of reasoning and the Cartesian conception of knowledge to social explanation. The constitutive ideal of science, so understood, is 'objectivity, involving increasing abstraction and detachment from particular, internal and subjective points of view'.2 Lukes contends, however, that 'at least some areas of social enquiry are inherently perspectival'.3 By that he means that the description and explanation of at least some social phenomena cannot be detached from sets of beliefs, attitudes, assumptions and moral and political judgments. The objectivity characteristic of the natural sciences is therefore unattainable. I shall now examine two versions of the thesis put forward by Lukes, namely, strong and weak perspectivism.

The distinction between private immorality and public indecency plays a significant and perhaps a crucial role in H. L. A. Hart's argument in Law, Liberty, and Morality.1 This distinction, and the uses to which he puts it, have, however, been largely overshadowed in the 'debate' between Professor Hart and Lord Devlin which has centred around such 'great' questions as whether a shared morality is necessary for a society. I shall argue that Hart's position, in so far as it is based on that distinction, is quite untenable, and that even if it were to be a possible position, it would none the less be incompatible with the sort of 'libertarian' view of society expressed by John Stuart Mill, whose 'spirit', at least, Hart believes himself to be defending. The position that Hart sets out to defend is that society has no right to prohibit any action simply on the ground that it is immoral; the only actions with which society may interfere are those which are likely to cause harm. For instance, no matter how morally abhorrent many, perhaps most, members of society believe homosexual actions to be, homosexuality should not be held subject to regulation by society in the absence of clear and compelling evidence that such actions are harmful. But there are cases which even the libertarian would intuitively think of as subject to regulation, even though they are not obviously 'harmful'. In particular, there are the cases which are usually considered under the heading of 'public indecency', such as public nudity, fornication, or sodomy. On the surface, the prohibition of actions of this type would appear to be enforcing the convictions of society that they are morally wrong. Thus, Lord Devlin says: 'Why then do we object to the public exhibition of a false morality and call it indecency? If we thought that unrestricted indulgence in the sexual passions was as good a way of life as any other for those who liked it, we should find nothing indecent in the practice of it either in public or in private. It would become no more indecent than kissing in public. Decency as an objective depends on the belief in continence as a virtue which requires sexual activity to be kept within prescribed bounds.'2

I shall (stipulatively) define a free action as one a man is able to do. Various things limit a man's freedom. The most unpopular is the government, or other people who have the power of preventing us from doing what we want. But our freedom is also circumscribed by lack of physical and mental strength or skill, including that of knowing how to manage other human beings. Other factors limiting our freedom are our ignorance, our passions and our habits. Some men say they value their freedom from these things, especially their freedom from passion, so much that they would prefer to be in prison or on the rack rather than be a slave to them, but one suspects they exaggerate.

‘It seems an unaccountable pleasure’, Hume writes, ‘which the spectators of a well-written tragedy receive from sorrow, terror, anxiety, and other passions that are in themselves disagreeable and uneasy. The more they are touched and affected, the more are they delighted with the spectacle; and as soon as the uneasy passions cease to operate, the piece is at an end.’ It is with this opening remark that Hume introduces the main subject of his essay, ‘Of Tragedy’. In that essay he attempts to account for the pleasure spectators of well-written tragedies receive, i.e. he attempts to solve what might aptly be called the ‘delightful tragedy’ problem, which, in essence, is the paradoxical phenomenon of pleasure being aroused from the ‘bosom of uneasiness’. In this paper I shall critically analyse Hume's solution to the problem; the ultimate point of my discussion will be to determine whether his solution is adequate. I shall begin by focusing briefly upon two accounts of the paradoxical pleasure which Hume mentions and criticizes. Then I shall set out and analyse Hume's own account, and thereby determine its adequacy.

During the period from Descartes to Rousseau, the mind changed. Its domain was redefined; its activities were redescribed; and its various powers were redistributed. Once a part of cosmic Nous, its various functions delimited by its embodied condition, the individual mind now becomes a field of forces with desires impinging on one another, their forces resolved according to their strengths and directions. Of course since there is no such thing as The Mind Itself, it was not the mind that changed. Conceptions of the mind changed. Yet even to say this is misleading, because it suggests that somewhere out there in nowhere there is Nous, Psyche, Soul or Mind, the true but opaque object of all these conceptions. But of course there is no Mind in the realm of things in themselves, waiting for us to see it truly, like a China of the noumenal world, amused that our various conceptions reveal as much about ourselves as about it.

Fulke Greville speaks of the will as inevitably divided between reason and passion. Shakespeare takes such a division seriously but, through Hamlet, he recognizes the possibility of reason and passion being united in a man's will and purpose. Hume denies the possibility of such a conflict. He represents the will as inevitably determined by the passions, with reason as their slave. Kant allows this as a possibility, but claims that the will can and ought to be determined by reason, with the passions subordinated to its sovereign demand. Neither Hume nor Kant, however, can see the possibility of reason and passion being 'commingled'. The question which they pose is this: Is the will inevitably determined by the passions? Is it possible for reason to overcome the passions? Behind Hume's and Kant's diametrically opposite answers to this question lies a dichotomy to which they both subscribe, namely the view that reason and passion are exclusive categories. Since for Hume reason is inevitably 'inert' there is no question of the will's conforming to reason in opposition to the passions. But for Kant 'conformity to reason' and 'subjection to passion' represent two exclusive and exhaustive conditions of the will, and indeed of humanity, and he favours the former as alone providing the condition necessary and sufficient for the autonomy of the will.

Plato was the first feminist. In the Republic he puts forward the view that women are just the same as men, only not quite so good. It is a view which has often been expressed in recent years, and generates strong passions. Some of these have deep biological origins, which a philosopher can only hope to recognize and not to assuage. But much of the heat engendered is due to unnecessary friction between views which are certainly compatible and probably correct. And here a philosopher can help. If we can divide the issues neatly, at the joints, then we need not quarrel with one another for saying something, probably true, because what is being maintained is misconstrued and taken to mean something else, probably false.

Reason in Theory and Practice, BY RoY EDGLEY. (Hutchinson, 1969. Pp. 180. Price 30s. Paper back 13s.) It will, I hope, seem no detraction from the originality of Mr. Edgley's impressive book to welcome it, in a way, as long overdue. Philosophers, pretty generally it seems, teach Plato academically, and remain hypnotised by Hume: Plato surely having made clear enough that, in its very nature, to think is something we do better or worse, appealing to standards. As to these last, we doubtless need not conceive them quite as he does; but we might have found enough here, I think, to dispose of the pseudoproblems neatly put in the title of Kohler's book The Place of Value in a World of Fact. Facts in brief, or at least putative fact-statements, are themselves things eminently calling for evaluation; a process without which there would never have existed that pure 'World of Fact' for values to be supposed to be divorced from. Thus we find Mr. Edgley first recalling 'the simple platitude that people's inferences and beliefs can be appraised, criticised and evaluated, not from a moral but what we may provisionally call a logical point of view'; which, it says, 'seems to run counter to some current assumptions'. (p. 52) It is, or at least ought to be, a 'platitude' (the description being perhaps over optimistic for what admittedly runs counter to current assumptions). What I call overdue is, of course, not the mere statement of that 'platitude' but in its full philosophical working-out; Mr. Edgley's achievement lies in his power, novelty and rigor in applying it. His starting-point is Hume's notion-which, despite the generally antiHumean tenor of his conclusions, it is his merit to take at face value and seriously-of reason as passive or inert; so that passions impel us, not reasons; whose job concerns the connection of means with ends. Reason, for Hume, only points out means to end in themselves intrinsically nonrational. Mr. Edgley, as I say, takes it seriously, extracting from it an important truth, namely this: that any inference from some premise, believed or stated, must have for its conclusion-not, following Aristotle, an action-but likewise a statement or a belief. Between statement and action the gulf remains; and no less where the statement is an evaluative one. Suppose we get to the conclusion, from appropriate premises, 'I ought to do such and such'; what we cannot reach is the act itself, the doing of it. Hence, no less than Aristotle's, Professor Hare's account fails; from appropriate imperative premises I may indeed deduce imperative conclusions. It remains that 1 may still fail to act on them. The way round the gap is a radical one. Actions of course must be physical; but partly, like beliefs, psychological, too; hence, from this standpoint, comes an unlooked-for but welcome step forward. Mr. Edgley stirs the mists to disperse, or take measures to disperse, that oppressively prevalent philosophical climate; I mean the general orthodoxy of anti-psychologism-in some forms, of course, harmless, indeed salutary. Yet this too: the 'laws of thought', with appropriate qualifications, are after all laws of thought. Granted that in a pure deduction relation, say that p implies q, we find nothing psychological; yet applied to the processes of thinking-not least, let us note, where the step is what is called purely formal or even (infelicitous phrase) tautological-it has

My Purpose is twofold: first, to interpret Rousseau's The Social Contract in terms of a serious interpretation of the Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality and second, to use as the principal interpretative concept for both, the concept of independence. One gets the impression in reading commentators that the Discourse on Inequality is not taken seriously in its own right but rather is treated as what it is, an essay which was suitable for submission as a prize essay, with the required clever rhetorical style, flashes of paradox and yet withal solemnly addressing itself to a virtually impossible question. However, if it is taken, in part, as Rousseau's social and psychological analysis of modern society, as an account of “men as they are” (The Social Contract, ed. Cranston, p.49), then it is not only worthy of serious study in itself, it also helps one to see that still puzzling book, The Social Contract, from a new perspective. Moreover, Rousseau's concept of independence is both interesting and helpful. What Rousseau means by “independence” may diner from what he means by “freedom”, but for most of this essay I shall draw from the latter a working definition of the former and thus shall mean by independence: (1) not being subject to or under the control of another person or persons, and (2) not being subject to or under the control of one's passions. The advantage of attending to the concept of independence is that it enables one to recognize that Rousseau is asserting three seemingly incompatible propositions: first, man is independent, second, no man is independent and in the given circumstances can be and, third, man must become dependent in order to become independent.

Two rival passions are at work in men's hearts to-day, the cult of individuality and the cult of society. They give rise all too often to extravagant praise of liberty and to a no less extravagant insistence on discipline for society's sake. It is impossible to form a balanced idea of the functions of liberty and discipline, or of the right relation between the individual and his social environment, without having a clear view of the nature of personality and community. I offer a brief and dogmatic sketch of this subject. A personality is the product of the impact of the objective universe, past and present, on a particular experiencing subject. I do not wish to imply that a "subject" is necessarily a substance (in the philosophical sense) or a metaphysical ego, or an immortal soul. Whether such eternal individual spirits exist or not, I do not pretend to know. I do not even, by the word "subject," pledge myself to what Professor Broad has called a "centred theory" of the nature of mind, I do not know whether a mind is a system of experiences united in an enduring centre, as the spokes of a wheel are united in the hub; or whether it is a centreless "net" of experiences all related together in a special way. By "subject" I mean only "that which experiences," whatever the true philosophical account of it. I mean the seeming focus or centre of experience and action. This focus is in some sense located in time and space, in fact it is located within the organism. For my purpose the subject is simply that to which experience happens, and that which responds with conscious behaviour. I do not wish to raise the epistemological problem. I merely assume the rejection of solipsism, and the reality of an objective universe which the individual experiences, however imperfectly. Pure subjectivity is nothing but a completely featureless abstraction, a bare possibility of experience of some kind or other. It is through the intercourse of the subject with the objective universe that the subject assumes character and purpose. It "espouses" needs that are in principle objective to its own bare subjectivity. For instance it espouses the need of its own particular body for food, rest, sexual activity and so on. It is aware of its body as a going concern, and espouses its dynamic nature. It also espouses the dynamic needs of its own psychological self or person, its felt "me," which includes the need for fullness of personal life, for self-aggrandizement in a score of ways, such as intellection, constructiveness, self-respect

THE "Hyde" character of fear has been so widely, and generally so exclusively, dwelt upon, that a review of what can be truthfully said in praise of its "Jekyll" character is, I trust, not untimely. I shall proceed on the assumption that all the natural passions, without exception, are essential, ineradicable factors in our human make-up, each allowing of both use and abuse. This, as I shall endeavour to show, is no less true of fear than of what we quite justly call the higher emotions. Fear and unsatisfied desire are, it has been said, the twin sources of all unhappiness; and there are those who would represent fear as being the more formidable of the two evils, both as leading us astray in our pursuit of happiness, and as incapacitating us from enjoying it when brought within our grasp. There are two periods in the world's history when this question has bulked very largely, alike in popular thought and in philosophical controversy-the Hellenistic Period in the ancient world and the Enlightenment period in the modern world. In the Hellenistic period there is practical unanimity-not surprising in view of the political and religious conditions of the centuries before and after the birth of Christ-that fear is a main source of evil. The Stoics, it is true, gave it second place: it is easier, they seem to have believed, to subjugate fear than to satisfy desire. The Epicureans, on the other hand, as naturally followed from their hedonistic standpoint, had no manner of doubt to which of the two sources of evil to assign the primacy, as is indicated by the refrain that recurs throughout Lucretius' poem, and which we meet again, in heightened form, in Montaigne's

As a young man, General Smuts fought in the Anglo-Boer war for the political freedom of the South African Republics. As a member of the British War Cabinet during the Great War, he was prominent among the Allied leaders in what was declared to be a war to "make the world safe for democracy". As a signatory of the Treaty of Versailles, he was the first outstanding statesman who, on the very morrow of the signing, had the courage to confess the inadequacies of that settlement, and to appeal to a war-torn world to lay aside the passions of bitter conflict and return to sanity and co-operation. In the League of Nations, which he, more than anyone else, helped to conceive and bring into being, he has sought to create the machinery for the peaceful co-operation between nations. For more than thirty years, in his own country, he has, as Minister and Prime Minister, as leader of a party in power and of that same party in opposition, practised his faith in democratic institutions. Most recently, subordinating personal ambition and one-sided party interests, he has joined with his old political opponent, General Hertzog, in founding the United Party for the healing of the ancient feud between the two White peoples in South Africa. Nor has it been only as a General and a Statesman that he has achieved fame, but also as a Scientist and Philosopher. When a man such as he, the greatest living South African, declares Freedom to be in danger, I need make no apology for taking his Rectorial Address as my text and submitting his plea for Freedom to a sympathetic examination.