The Stoic View of Emotions

No part of Stoicism is more misunderstood than its account of emotion. The popular image of the Stoic as cold, blank and unmoved gets the philosophy almost exactly backwards. The Stoics were intensely interested in the emotions, and they developed one of the most sophisticated theories of feeling in the ancient world, a theory whose central claim, that our strong emotions are rooted in judgements we make, would not be rediscovered by psychology until the twentieth century. This article sets out that theory in full: what the Stoics thought a passion is, how they classified the passions, what they meant by the freedom they sought from them, and why their goal was not an absence of feeling but the presence of the right kind.

The boldest move in Stoic psychology, associated above all with Chrysippus, is the claim that the emotions are not blind forces that happen to us but are constituted by our judgements. To feel a strong emotion, on this view, is to have made an evaluation, usually in an instant and without noticing, about what is good or bad, threatening or owed to us. Anger is not a tide that sweeps in from nowhere; it contains the judgement that I have been wronged and that it is fitting to strike back. Grief contains the judgement that something genuinely good has been lost and that distress is the proper response.

This was a contested claim even within the school. The later Stoic Posidonius, drawing on Plato, thought Chrysippus had made the emotions too purely intellectual, and argued that there are irrational movements in the soul that judgement alone cannot explain. The debate, preserved largely through the physician Galen, is one of the most interesting in ancient psychology. But the mainstream Stoic position held firm: change the judgement and you change the emotion, and that is what makes the emotional life something we can work on rather than merely suffer.

The Stoics traced the formation of a passion through a precise sequence. First comes an impression, the way some event presents itself to the mind. The impression carries a proposition, often an evaluation: that something good or bad is at hand. Then comes assent, the mind’s agreement to that proposition. And from the assent follows an impulse, a movement toward or away from the thing. A passion, in the full sense, is this whole movement when it rests on a mistaken or excessive evaluation.

Chrysippus analysed the passions as resting on a double judgement. In grief, for example, there is first the judgement that some bad thing is present, and second the judgement that it is right and fitting to be cast down by it, even to the point that contracting and sinking of the mind seems appropriate. Both judgements, the Stoics held, are mistaken, because the thing lost was never a genuine good in the strict sense, and because no external loss warrants the collapse of one’s reason. The passion is, quite literally, a wrong opinion in action.

The Stoics organised the disturbing passions into four basic kinds, generated by a simple grid. An emotion concerns either a good or an evil, and that good or evil is either present or in prospect. The four combinations give the four primary passions, under which the tradition gathered a great many named emotions as sub-species.

The scheme is more than a tidy classification. It shows that every passion contains a value judgement, an appraisal that something is good or bad, and so points directly at the place where the passion can be examined and, if mistaken, corrected. To understand an emotion, the Stoic asks what it is claiming about good and evil, and whether that claim is true.

If emotions are judgements, why are the passions so hard to govern, and why do they so often carry us past the point our calmer selves would choose? Chrysippus offered a memorable image. A person walking can stop the moment they decide to; a person running at full tilt cannot halt on command, but is carried on by their own momentum even after they wish to stop. The passions, he said, are like running rather than walking. The impulse, once assented to with excessive force, gathers a momentum that outruns the reason that set it going.

This is what the Stoics meant by calling the passions excessive impulses, or impulses disobedient to reason. The trouble is not that we feel, but that we assent too hard and too fast to impressions we have not examined, granting them a weight they do not deserve, and are then swept along by the impulse we ourselves have authorised. The remedy is to intervene earlier, at the moment of assent, before the running begins. This is why the Stoic therapy of emotion is preventive as much as curative: it works to catch the mistaken judgement at the start, when it can still be refused.

The goal of all this is what the Stoics called apatheia, a word that has caused endless confusion because it looks like our apathy. It does not mean indifference, numbness or the dulling of feeling. The Greek means, literally, freedom from the pathe, the disturbing passions just described. Apatheia is the condition of a mind no longer thrown about by mistaken value judgements, no longer at the mercy of every craving and dread.

This is a state of steadiness, not emptiness. The Stoic sage does not feel less; they feel rightly, undistorted by false appraisals of what matters. To confuse apatheia with apathy is to imagine that the only alternative to being ruled by the passions is to feel nothing at all. The Stoics insisted on a third possibility, and gave it a name of its own.

Against the four disturbing passions, the Stoics set what they called the good feelings, the well-reasoned emotional states of a mind in good order. Where the passions rest on false judgements, these rest on true ones, and so they belong to the wise person rather than being purged from them. The tradition named three.

One absence in this list is deeply revealing. There is no good counterpart to distress. The Stoics held that a wise person, who judges rightly, never regards a present thing as a genuine evil, since the only true evil is one’s own vice, which the wise person does not commit. There is therefore no rational form of the sinking grief that distress represents. The good life, on this account, is not a life without emotion, but a life of joy, of clear-eyed caution, and of well-aimed desire, drained of the anguish that comes from valuing the wrong things.

A theory that locates emotion in judgement faces an obvious challenge. What about the involuntary reactions of the body, the start of fright at a sudden noise, the pallor at terrible news, the welling of tears, the flush that precedes anger? These seem to arrive before any judgement is made. Seneca took up exactly this question, above all in his treatise on anger, and his answer is one of the subtlest parts of the whole theory.

He distinguished these first movements, as later writers came to call them, from the passions proper. The initial jolt, the bodily shock, the spontaneous welling-up, are natural and involuntary. They are not yet emotions in the Stoic sense, because the mind has not yet given its assent. Even the sage, Seneca insisted, will flinch, pale and feel the first sting; this is simply the body reacting, and it is no failing. The passion proper begins only at the next step, when the mind assents to the impression and adds its judgement that yes, this is a catastrophe, and yes, I am right to be overwhelmed.

This distinction does enormous work. It frees the Stoic account from the absurd demand that a wise person be a statue, immune to the startle reflex and the catch in the throat. And it locates human freedom precisely where the Stoics always placed it, in the moment of assent. We cannot help the first flinch. What we can govern is whether we feed it, whether we take the body’s first reaction and build upon it the elaborate, momentum-gathering structure of a full-blown passion. The whole therapy of the emotions lives in that gap between the involuntary first movement and the assent we choose to give or withhold.