Ricerc@Sapienza

Dans certains articles (112 et suivants) des Passions de l’âme, Descartes définissait déjà les expressions corporelles des passions comme des
« signes », encadrant ainsi déjà la question dans un horizon sémiotique. Le choix se retrouve aussi chez Kant, qui emploie, pour envisager la
question, le terme de caractéristique anthropologique. La thèse que nous voulons soutenir ici est que chez Descartes, mais surtout chez Kant

May we plan to conduct our everyday life without referring to any kind of emotion or passion? Or, more radically, may we suppose that there is a philosophical theory claiming to either eliminate all affections or to at least control them thanks to a strong and prescriptively binding use of a form of rationality? Against the background of such dogmatic presuppositions, what about Pyrrhonists? Do they really ignore the multifarious, difficult, and complex web of all those passions and emotions that crowd and sometimes influence or change the course of our everyday life?

Free thinkers of the 17th century, identified as «erudite libertines», present religion under two aspects: as a product of passions and credulity of man, and as utilization of this product by astute politicians that have deceived men in order to build new societies and empires on the solid base of the religious charisma. The phenomenology of religion delineated by the libertine critique starts from an attentive analysis of belief-formation mechanisms, makes interesting references to mass psychology and reformulates the idea of religion as imposture and instrumentum Regni.

The paper analyses two passages from Thyestes and Oedipus, where the protagonists cry unexpectantly and involuntarily. In the first case, where Thyestes has a sort of metamorphoses in a werewolf, there is an exploration of all the semantic possibilities for this attitude: any of them is in part true. It is interesting the comparison with two Homeric passages, one where Odysseus manage to stop his tears, another where the unexpected crying is due to the goddess Athena. Oedipus cries after the revelation, when he represent the incarnation of rage.