A01=Philip Fisher
Aesthetics
Akrasia
Ambiguity
Analogy
Anger
Anguish
Aristotle
Arousal
Attempt
Author_Philip Fisher
Awareness
Boredom
Category=QDTK
Circumference
Consciousness
Consideration
Courage
Cowardice
Cruelty
Death anxiety (psychology)
Deed
Defection
Deliberation
Disease
Disgust
Embarrassment
Epictetus
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
Ethics
Explanation
Feeling
Greed
Grief
Hatred
Humiliation
Immanuel Kant
Instant
Interdependence
Irony
Literature
Lucretius
Modernity
Moral absolutism
Mourning
Narration
Narrative
Paradox
Philosopher
Philosophy
Pity
Psychology
Rational choice theory
Rationality
Reason
Result
Rhetoric
Self-esteem
Self-love
Shame
State of Fear
Stoicism
Structuring
Sympathy
Symptom
The Other Hand
Theory
Thomas Hobbes
Thought
Uncertainty
Uniqueness
Vocabulary
Writing
Year
Product details
- ISBN 9780691115726
- Weight: 397g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 05 Oct 2003
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Breaking off the ordinary flow of experience, the passions create a state of exception. In their suddenness and intensity, they map a personal world, fix and qualify our attention, and impel our actions. Outraged anger drives us to write laws that will later be enforced by impersonal justice. Intense grief at the death of someone in our life discloses the contours of that life to us. Wonder spurs scientific inquiry. The strong current of Western thought that idealizes a dispassionate world has ostracized the passions as quaint, even dangerous. Intense states have come to be seen as symptoms of pathology. A fondness for irony along with our civic ideal of tolerance lead us to prefer the diluted emotional life of feelings and moods. Demonstrating enormous intellectual originality and generosity, Philip Fisher meditates on whether this victory is permanent-and how it might diminish us. From Aristotle to Hume to contemporary biology, Fisher finds evidence that the passions have defined a core of human nature no less important than reason or desire.
Traversing the Iliad, King Lear, Moby Dick, and other great works, he discerns the properties of the high-spirited states we call the passions. Are vehement states compatible with a culture that values private, selectively shared experiences? How do passions differ from emotions? Does anger have an opposite? Do the passions give scale, shape, and significance to our experience of time? Is a person incapable of anger more dangerous than someone who is irascible? In reintroducing us to our own vehemence, Fisher reminds us that it is only through our strongest passions that we feel the contours of injustice, mortality, loss, and knowledge. It is only through our personal worlds that we can know the world.
Philip Fisher is the Reid Professor of English at Harvard University. He is the author of "Still the New World, Hard Facts, Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences", and "Making and Effacing Art".
