Emotions of the soul

The emotions of the soul are, above all, a book in psychology in which Descartes attempts to analyze all the emotions, passions, and feelings to understand them and explain their mechanisms, so that the mind can then control and harness them to serve the individual's happiness in his emotional life. It is also a book in ethics that complements what its author had established in the temporary science of ethics. In this book, the will plays an important role not to eradicate passions and emotions but to tame them and guide them toward this great victory in the social life of the individual, 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 being who carries the machine of the body, and one must enjoy what this body permits him of blessings and bounties.