Diller über Emotion vs. Passion bei Descartes – und über zwei grundsätzlich verschiedene Begriffe von Begriff

Drawing on a rich digitalized corpus of early modern texts, Hans-Juergen Diller argues that the concepts expressed by the English words ‘passion’ and ‘emotion’ are different in that the former in contrast to the latter has moral connotations: ‘emotion’ stands for an a-moral category. Focusing on the example of Descartes, I take issue with Diller’s method. Diller claims that his distinction applies to Descartes’ use of the French equivalents to ‘passion’ and ‘emotion’ But there are two concepts of a concept. According to the first, the meaning of a word expressing a concept is not sharply distinguished from the complete discourse in which it figures. According to the second, meaning is more narrow. For instance, it is restricted to the explicit definition an author provides. I show that Descartes provides an explicit definition of passion and emotion in purely physical, a-moral terms. So Diller’s method is not apt to trace concepts in the second, more restricted sense which Descartes himself has in mind.