Emotions of the soul

The Passions of the Soul is first and foremost a book on psychology in which Descartes attempts to analyze various passions, desires, and emotions to understand them and explain their mechanism, then allowing the mind to control them and harness them to serve the individual‘s happiness in his emotional life. It is also a book on ethics that completes what its author had established in provisional ethics. In this book, the will plays an important role, not to eradicate passions and emotions, but to tame them and lead them toward this great victory in the individual‘s social life, the victory of nobility of heart over stinginess, fear, hesitation, cowardice, and meanness. It is a book about the relationship between the soul and the body and the emotions and pleasures each has. The soul has its mental pleasures and the body also has its pleasures and enjoyments, which must not be neglected in favor of the former under the pretext of the priority of the spiritual over the physical. Descartes never forgets this human being who carries the machinery of the body, and must enjoy the goodness and blessings that this body allows him.