Stoicism and Emotions: What the Stoics Really Taught

Question

What do the Stoics really say about emotions? The popular image — that Stoicism teaches the suppression of feeling, that the Stoic is the man who never cries, never fears, never loves — is one of the most persistent misunderstandings in the history of philosophy, and the answer to it is the key to the whole Stoic theory of the inner life.

Quick Answer

The Stoics distinguished sharply between the passions (pathē) and the good emotions (eupatheiai), and they taught the elimination of the first and the cultivation of the second. The passions are the destructive emotions: fear, desire, distress, and pleasure, each defined as a judgment in which we mistake an indifferent — health, wealth, reputation, comfort — for a good or an evil. The good emotions are the rational states of the wise: joy (chara), the delight in what is genuinely good; wish (boulēsis), the desire for what is genuinely good; and caution (eulabeia), the aversion to what is genuinely evil. The goal of Stoic discipline is apatheia — freedom from the passions — which is not the absence of feeling but the presence of right feeling: the sage feels joy, love, and compassion with a depth and constancy that the turbulent emotions of the ordinary person cannot match.

Historical Wisdom

The Stoic theory of the emotions was one of the most developed parts of the system. Chrysippus, the systematizer of the school, devoted a whole treatise to the passions, analyzing their species with extraordinary precision; Seneca made the therapy of the passions the center of his practical philosophy, above all in On Anger, the fullest surviving treatment of a single emotion; and Epictetus organized his teaching around the discipline of desire and aversion, which is the practice of the theory. The theory descends from Socrates's intellectualism — the passions are errors of judgment, and the cure is knowledge — and it was developed in polemic against the Aristotelian view that the passions have a legitimate role in the moral life. The Stoics did not deny that we feel; they denied that we must be governed by what we feel.

Philosophical Perspectives

The Stoic analysis of the emotions has three components. The first is the definition: the passions are judgments. Fear is the judgment that something evil is imminent; desire is the judgment that something good is absent; distress is the judgment that something evil is present; pleasure is the judgment that something good is present. Each judgment is false, because the objects of the passions are indifferents — things that are neither good nor evil. The passions are therefore not irrational forces that invade the soul; they are the soul's own acts, and they can be examined and corrected.

The second component is the distinction between the first impulse and the passion proper. When something frightening appears, the body responds before the judgment — the startle, the flush, the quickened pulse. The Stoics called this the "first movement," and they insisted that it is not yet a passion: the passion is the assent, the judgment that "this is terrible." The first movement is not in our power; the assent is. This is why the Stoics could say that the wise person is not immune to the first movements — they feel the startle, the pang, the pull — but they do not assent, and therefore they do not suffer the passion. The space between the impulse and the assent is the space of freedom, and the discipline of prosoche is the practice of occupying it.

The third component is the eupatheiai, the good emotions. The wise person does not live without feeling: they feel joy at what is good, wish for what is good, and caution toward what is evil. Their love is deeper, not shallower, than the love of the ordinary person, because it is free from the grasping that contaminates the ordinary passions. The Stoic account of the sage is not the account of a cold man but of a man whose warmth is constant, because it does not depend on the changes of fortune.

Lessons From Thinkers

From Chrysippus: the passions are judgments, and judgments can be corrected — the therapy of the emotions is the correction of belief. From Seneca: the first movement is not the passion, and the discipline is to interrupt the assent — "the best remedy for anger is delay." From Epictetus: the discipline of desire and aversion is the practice — "do not seek to have events happen as you want them to, but want them to happen as they do happen." From Marcus Aurelius: the goal is not the absence of feeling but the absence of disturbance — "you have power over your mind, not outside events."

Practical Application

The Stoic theory of emotion has direct practical application. In the face of fear, examine the judgment: what exactly is threatened, and is it a good or an indifferent? In the face of anger, delay: the first impulse is not the passion, and the passion dies if it is not fed. In the face of grief, distinguish the natural pain of loss from the judgment that the loss is an evil that destroys us: the first is human, the second is the passion, and the second can be corrected. In the face of desire, ask what is actually wanted: the object of the desire is an indifferent, and the freedom from craving is the freedom to enjoy what is genuinely good. The practice is the daily discipline of attention: to catch the impression before the assent, and to feel — fully, deeply, rightly — without being enslaved by feeling.

Quotes

Epictetus states the foundation: "It is not the things themselves that disturb us, but our judgments about them." Seneca states the therapy: "The first impulse is not the passion; the passion is the assent." And the Stoic ideal of right feeling is stated in the account of the sage: "The wise man feels joy, wish, and caution — the good emotions of the soul that has corrected its judgments."

Related Questions

• What Is Stoicism? — the system in which the theory operates.
• What Is Apatheia? — the goal of the discipline.
• Is Stoicism Toxic? — the modern critique of the theory.
• How to Control Emotions — the practical discipline.