This is part 2 of a series on the book The Logic of the Body by Matthew La Pine. For the others, see the top of Part 1.

Terminology: Emotions, affections, or passions?

Before diving into his main argument, LaPine warns that he will use the language of passions, emotions and affections interchangeably throughout, while acknowledging this to be a controversial move. These terms probably convey different nuances to different readers, and each come with histories. The term affections, for example, has been developed in certain Christian traditions of thought in quite a specific way, through the Puritans and later Jonathan Edwards.

As far as I can see LaPine’s basic justification for using them interchangeably is twofold. Firstly, each has such a varied and changing history of use that to find consensus definitions will be more or less impossible, let alone ones that apply across all time. Secondly, within the psychological map that LaPine builds there is just one reality, one psychological category to which all these words refer. Better, in his view, to point to that one reality with all these words and seek to construct his own definition of it.

As his prime source for his map is Aquinas, LaPine does need to grapple with the terminology that Aquinas uses in this area, particularly because Thomas Dixon has argued that to subsume passions and affections under emotions is anachronistic and imbues these earlier notions with the modern connotations of amorality and irrationality that come with viewing emotions as bodily states. For Aquinas, according to Dixon, passions and affections were movements of different parts of the will (within the lower and higher faculties respectively), and the affections at least open to the influence of reason.

LaPine has two problems with this: firstly contending that the terms affections and passions are used more or less interchangeably by Aquinas, and secondly that passions (Aquinas’ main term) are not movements of the will at all, but of the sense appetite (for Aquinas’ map of the soul and its powers, see below). The sense appetite, moreover, is not irrational but occupies a zone between the higher consciously rational faculties and the lowest involuntary faculties. The notion of this psychological middle layer is critical to LaPine’s analysis, and we will come on to it later.

Without having read Aquinas or the key combatants which LaPine references in this debate (Dixon and Nicholas Lombardo) it is hard to judge whether his conclusions are accurate. It does seem to make sense in the context of his project to ditch existing distinctions between passions/affections/emotions (which are many and varied) and attempt to construct one view of what they refer to (given that LaPine thinks there is only one category of such things). His reading of Aquinas is certainly very coherent, although again I lack the competency to judge how accurate.

What I was not left convinced about here was whether enough was said about where this collapsing of distinctions leaves us with regards to describing affections in God. God cannot have passions if passions are essentially bodily (LaPine’s view, following Aquinas). But God certainly has what we would normally (analogically) call affections. Although LaPine says that Aquinas can use affections interchangeably with passions, he does refer to a distinction Aquinas makes: all passions are affections, but there are a category of affections which involve no bodily change and are therefore not strictly passions (Peter King calls them “pseudo-passions”). These are movements of the will towards a universal rational conception of the good. It seems to me that something like this must be maintained (as Aquinas seems to have done) for the sake of being able to relate our emotions to God’s affections. But LaPine does not really say much about this, either in the terminology discussion or in his conclusion. There was some helpful discussion that illuminated this need on the Mere Fidelity podcast episode with LaPine; I wasn’t sure he fully answered the questions put to him on the topic.

Terminologically, then, The Logic of the Body refers to one psychological reality by the terms passions, emotions, and (occasionally) affections, and analyses historical contributions to the understanding of that reality by their content, whatever terms were in use. That move stands or falls partly based on whether or not one is persuaded by the psychological map LaPine constructs (which broadly I was), and partly on whether one thinks some distinction needs to be preserved in order to relate that human experience to the analogous reality in God (which also seemed to me to require some more attention).