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Wellsprings
ethics

The Passions

πάθη

The strong emotions — fear, desire, grief, delight — that the Stoics sought to uproot entirely and Aristotle only to moderate.

The passions, or pathē in Greek, are the emotional disturbances that disrupt rational thought and virtue. The Stoics, particularly philosophers like Zeno and later Chrysippus, developed a systematic theory of the passions as false judgments about what is truly good or evil. Rather than viewing emotions as natural responses beyond our control, the Stoics argued that every passion—fear, grief, desire, pleasure—stems from mistaken beliefs about external things and our relationship to them.

Because passions arise from faulty judgments, the Stoics believed they could be eliminated through philosophy and reason. Fear, for instance, is merely the expectation of evil; avarice is the supposition that money is good; panic is simply fear intensified by sound. By recognizing these emotions as errors in reasoning and by training the mind to accept what lies outside our control, a sage could achieve apatheia—freedom from passion—and thus attain tranquility and virtue.

Where this idea shows up

219 Greek sources

Where to read it