Zeno of Citium · Philosophy
Zeno made a startling claim about the emotions: the destructive passions - fear, grief, craving, elation - are not blind forces that overwhelm us but <em>mistaken judgements</em> about what is good and bad. If that is right, then the emotions can be cured the way a false belief can be corrected - and the sage need not be their slave.
We usually think of emotions as things that happen to us - storms that blow in from outside and sweep us along, forces of a different kind from our reasoning, which we can at best try to restrain. Zeno proposed something far more radical and far more hopeful: the destructive passions are not alien forces at all but judgements - acts of our own reason, assents we give to false beliefs about what is good and bad. Fear is the judgement that some approaching thing is a great evil, together with the impulse to flee it. Grief is the judgement that some present thing is a great evil, with the contraction of the soul that follows. Craving is the judgement that some absent thing is a great good worth pursuing at any cost. Even the giddy elation of getting what we wanted is, on this view, the false judgement that a present indifferent is a great good. In every case, a passion is a verdict the mind has reached and assented to - and an excessive impulse that flows from it.
Why is this hopeful? Because if a passion is a judgement, it can be examined and corrected like any other judgement. A storm cannot be reasoned with; a false belief can. The fear that grips me when I am about to lose my fortune contains, hidden inside it, a proposition: that losing my fortune would be a terrible evil. But Zeno has already argued that wealth is a mere indifferent - its loss cannot touch my real good, which is virtue. So the fear rests on a false valuation. Correct the valuation - truly see that the loss is not the catastrophe it seemed - and the fear, having lost its foundation, dissolves. The passions, in short, are not our fate; they are our errors, and errors can be unlearned. This is the engine of Stoic therapy.
The Stoics organised the passions into a clarifying scheme built on two axes: whether the object is judged good or evil, and whether it is present or in prospect. This yields four primary passions. When we judge a present thing to be a great evil, we feel distress or grief (lupē) - the soul contracts. When we judge a prospective thing to be a great evil, we feel fear (phobos) - the soul shrinks from what is coming. When we judge a present thing to be a great good, we feel delight or elation (hēdonē) - the soul swells with an excessive, unfounded pleasure. And when we judge a prospective thing to be a great good, we feel craving or appetite (epithumia) - the soul reaches greedily toward it. Every disordered emotion, the Stoics held, is a species of one of these four, and each is a false judgement about an indifferent.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Zeno held the destructive passions ( pathē ) - fear, desire, distress, and excessive pleasure - to be judgements : specifically, false judgements that some indifferent thing is a great good or evil, plus an excessive impulse following from that error. Cure the false judgement and you cure the passion.…
Leads to Aristotle.
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