The subject producing discourse, culture, and society is a being of passions. His will to impart the truth, his intention to communicate, and his beliefs and convictions are motivated by the passion for knowledge, and the drive to live in a community, to create beauty, and to transform nature into an inhabitable environment. The subjective pathos is responsible for an opacity that makes intersubjective relations worth experiencing and discourse worth interpreting. Passion — theoretical, practical, aesthetic — 'swells the sails of the vessel, without which we could not go on" Voltaire wrote. The Romantics will confer the aura of creation and genius upon the man of passion. And yet pathos, in its relation of tension to logos, has always come out second best — our intellectual tradition quasi-automatically identifies pathos with the pathetic and the pathological. It is an age-old story: passion for the Greeks is frenzy, morbidity, agitation; according to Zenon, it is "contrary to nature" and is immediately situated in a medical framework. Pathein has the connotations of pain and misfortune, sorrow and sickness. Pathos predicates death, madness, obscurity, chaos, disharmony, the underworld, variability, particularity, and the indistinct, while the field of logos is that of reason, life, clarity, the cosmos, harmony, the celestial, universality, regularity, distinctness. All the classics of the history of philosophy include a reflection on the theme of passion, but this is always marginal to the main thrust of these works. Aristotle's Rhetoric, Descartes' The Passions of the Soul, and Kant's Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View are examples of this marginality. Other authors situate their theory of the passions within an all- encompassing synthesis, like Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologica or David Hume in his Treatise on Human Nature. One could say that the marginalization of passions as a subject of theoretical reflection in philosophy and the social sciences, and the expulsion of the passions into the domains of artistic creativity and interpersonal intimacy, are two complementary gestures. This precariousness of thinking about passions has been observed quite often, and it is only a short time ago that the passions have been reintegrated into philosophical anthropology¹, structural semiotics², and argumentation theory³. "Affective psychology", a strand of thought that was very much alive during the 1920's (but since then forgotten) has only recently been rediscovered, and plenty of valuable lessons can be drawn from it.