Passionate and Performative Utterance Morals of Encounter

Abstract

Abstract In Aristotle’s Categories, meant to list the basic objects or components of thought, the little that is said about the concept of passion (or affection) is paired with the concept of action, and the only example offered, I believe (in chapter 4, referred back to in chapter 9), is the following: ‘“To lance,’ ‘to cauterize’ [are terms indicating] action; ‘to be lanced,’ ‘to be cauterized,’ affection.” Call this the metaphysical sense of passion. The psychological sense of passion, as naming members of a constellation of emotions (for example, anger, fear, pity, envy), Aristotle treats most fully in his Rhetoric, as aids to the rhetorical goal of persuasion and dangers to the means of worthy argumentation. The connection between the metaphysical and psychological “senses” of passion, suggested in the idea of suffering, is that of passiveness.