Emotions of the soul | René Descartes

The emotions of the soul are, above all, a book in psychology in which Descartes attempts to analyze all the passions, desires, and emotions to understand them and explain their mechanisms, so that the mind may then control them and harness them to serve the happiness of the individual in his emotional life. It is also a book in ethics that completes what its author had established in the temporary science of ethics. In this book, the will plays an important role—not to eradicate desires and passions, but to tame them and lead them toward this great victory in the individual's social life, a victory of nobility of the heart over greed, fear, hesitation, cowardice, and baseness. It is a book about the relationship between the soul and the body, and the passions and pleasures each possesses. The soul has its intellectual pleasures, and the body also has its pleasures and delights that should 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 who carries the machine of the body, and one must enjoy what this body allows from its bounties and blessings.