Chrysippus · Philosophy
Why Chrysippus held that emotions are not blind feelings but mistaken beliefs.
Ask most people what an emotion is, and they will describe a kind of force: fear grips you, anger seizes you, grief overwhelms you. Emotions seem to come from somewhere below or outside reason, surging up to cloud our thinking and drive us to act against our better judgement. Plato had given this picture philosophical form, dividing the soul into a rational part and lower, appetitive and spirited parts that pull against it. Chrysippus rejected this whole way of seeing things. For him, an emotion - a pathos - is not a non-rational force at all. It is a judgement. Specifically, a passion is a mistaken belief: the belief that some external thing is genuinely good or bad, together with the excessive impulse that follows from such a belief.
Take fear. On Chrysippus’ analysis, to fear death is to judge that death is a great evil and that it is at hand - and to be moved, by that judgement, into shrinking and avoidance. The fear is not something added to the judgement; it largely consists in the judgement and the impulse it produces. Grief is the fresh judgement that some great evil is present, and that it is right to be cast down by it. Anger is the judgement that one has been wronged and that retaliation is called for. In every case the emotion is an act of the rational soul - a wrong one. This is a radical thesis with enormous consequences, for if emotions are judgements, then they are, in principle, within our control: we can examine them, find them false, and correct them. The turbulent inner life that seems to happen to us turns out to be something we are, in a sense, doing.
Chrysippus analysed each passion as containing a characteristic structure, and understanding it shows why the Stoics thought emotions were not just painful but mistaken. Take grief, his favourite example. Grief, he said, involves two judgements. First, the judgement that something bad has happened - that the loss is a genuine evil. Second, the judgement that it is appropriate to be cast down, contracted, depressed by it - that one ought to feel this way. The Stoic claims that both judgements are false. The loss of an external thing (wealth, status, even a loved one’s life) is, on the Stoic view, not a true evil at all, because the only genuine good is virtue and the only genuine evil is vice; external things are ‘indifferents.’ And even if something undesirable has happened, it is never appropriate to be crushed by it, because nothing outside our own character can damage the only thing that matters.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
Chrysippus held that the passions (pathe) are not irrational forces invading the soul but mistaken judgements of reason - false beliefs that some external thing is good or evil, plus an excessive impulse. Because the soul is unitary and rational, the cure for emotion is the correction of belief. This cognitive theory…
Leads to Plato.
Begin this lesson →epoché — a humanities education that remembers you.