Lying beneath the irascible passion, then, is a deeper awareness of the soul's long range pursuit of the good. To make a trite illustration: the irascible passion of the fear of becoming obese (and thus having a heart attack leading to premature death) can, at least in theory, overrule the concupiscent passion of joy I have in the consumption of ice cream. The irascible power is essential to the soul, however, because it is the ability of one passion to overrule another. The concupiscible power of the passions would make sense without the existence of the irascible power, but not vice versa. The former is the soul's simple disposition to pursue pleasure and avoid pain, while the latter is the soul's more complex power to resist things that are either obstacles to pleasure or that will cause pain. ST 1.81.2) within the appetitive part of the soul-a distinction of the concupiscible and the irascible. The first point Aquinas makes here is to remind the reader of a distinction made earlier in the Summa (cf. Having laid this foundation, in ST 2.23 Aquinas turns to a taxonomy of the passions in the soul. The soul's appetite is drawn toward its own perfection but is limited by the objects presented to it by the objects of sense as managed (or mismanaged) by the soul's intellectual powers. In that reflection (on ST 2.22), the focus was on the nature of the soul's passivity in its appetitive part, a feature that inheres in the soul by virtue of the fact that it exists in potentiality rather than actuality. In a previous post I began a commentary on Aquinas' understanding of emotion (or "the passions") as it is laid out in the Summa theologica.
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