Passion: An Essay on Personality
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| Author | Roberto Mangabeira Unger |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Philosophy |
| Publisher | Free Press |
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Publication date
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1984 |
| Pages | 300 |
| Preceded by | Law In Modern Society: Toward a Criticism of Social Theory |
| Followed by | The Critical Legal Studies Movement |
Passion: An Essay on Personality is a philosophical inquiry into human nature by philosopher and politician Roberto Mangabeira Unger. The book explores the individual and his relation to society, asking how one comes to an understanding of self and others. Unger here sees the root human predicament as the need to establish oneself as a unique individual in the world but at the same time to find commonality and solidarity with others. This exploration is grounded in what Unger calls a modernist image of the human being as one who lives in context but is not bound by context.
Unger’s aim is twofold. First, to level a critique, expansion, and defense of modern thinking about the human and society “so that this practice can better withstand the criticisms that philosophy since Hume and Kant has leveled against it.” And second, to develop a prescriptive theory of human identity centered on what Unger calls the passions—our raw responses to the world that are ambivalent towards reasons but also act in the service of reason. He outlines nine passions that organize and are organized by our dealings with others: lust, despair, hatred, vanity, jealousy, envy, faith, hope, and love. While these emotional states may be seen as raw emotion, their expression is always conditioned by the context within which the individual mobilizes or learns to mobilize them.
The book was critically hailed as successfully grappling with some of the most fundamental and enduring problems of human existence. It has been put into direct dialogue with Kant's moral law, and said to have provided one answer to Hume's Guillotine. Unger's analysis and the program he builds around this revolutionary understanding has also inspired new thinking and approaches to psychiatry.
Entering into a long philosophical tradition of inquiry into human nature, Unger begins by categorically rejecting the idea of a natural order to the world or a natural state of human organization. For Unger, there are no natural laws. Rather, he takes to the hilt the modernist thesis that we are shaped by context but not bound by context. As such, we have the power to work both within and beyond any constraints of social or cultural binds.
This perspective is derived from the Christian-Romantic tradition. Unger argues that this tradition has two themes: interpersonal relations with love as the redemptive moment, and that a person's identity is not defined by membership in social ranks and division. This then gives expression to the idea that humans are never at home in the world and that they are constantly striving to remake the world. The modernist development takes up this theme but emphasizes interpersonal relations over impersonal reality or good so that no institutional settings can limit the possibilities of humanity. We “can assert [our] independence only by perpetual war against the fact of contextually…”
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