"There are few moralists who know how to arm our passions against one another."
— Helvétius, Claude Adrien (1715-1771)
Work Title
Place of Publication
Paris
Date
1758
Metaphor
"There are few moralists who know how to arm our passions against one another."
Metaphor in Context
There are few moralists who know how to arm our passions against one another ... for the purpose of having their counsel adopted. Most of the time their advice would inflict too much injury if followed. Yet they should realize that this sort of injury cannot win out over feeling; that only a passion can triumph over a passion; that, for example, if one wishes to induce more modesty and restraint in a forward woman (femme galante) one ought to set her vanity against her coquetry and make her realize that modesty is an invention of love and refined voluptuousness ... The moralists might succeed in having their maxims observed if they substituted in this manner the language of interest for that of injury.
(p. 159-60)
(p. 159-60)
Categories
Provenance
Reading A. O. Hirschman's The Passions and the Interests (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997), 33.
Citation
Helvétius. De l'esprit. Paris, 1758. 159-60.
Date of Entry
10/20/2003
