“FEELINGS” VS. “PASSIONS”: THE STOIC THEORY OF EMOTIONS
How is it that anger, or any other extreme emotion, arises in the first place?
According to the Stoics, if we could learn the answer to that question, it would be possible to eliminate negative emotions before they even develop. Of course, no one said this would be easy. It might take long periods of education and training, and would require the development of considerable self-awareness. But even learning about the Stoic theory of emotions, in my experience, can significantly help reduce anger and other negative emotions and improve a person’s overall mood.
In fact, shortly after first reading Seneca’s book On Anger a few years ago, I found myself in a situation where I could have become very angry and felt the early signs of anger coming on. But before the anger had a chance to develop fully, I recalled what Seneca had written and was able to deconstruct the emotion before it ever took hold.
As we’ve seen, one common misconception about Stoics is that they don’t experience feelings, or they suppress their emotions. That is untrue. Seneca consistently pointed out that even a Stoic sage will experience normal human feelings. Like other people, a sage doesn’t resemble “some kind of rock.” He or she will experience pain, grief, and other feelings.11 Similarly, Epictetus said, a Stoic should not be “unfeeling like a statue.”12 Marcus Aurelius frequently wrote about love and even wept in public. The Stoics, as a school, were known for their love for humanity. As Seneca noted, writing about the Stoics, “No school is more kindly and gentle, none more full of love for mankind and more concerned for the common good.”13
For the Stoics, the most primary human feeling is affection and love for others. Parents naturally feel love for their children, and human affection binds people and communities together. But to understand how anger comes into being, and how to defeat it, we must understand the three different kinds of emotions that the Stoics defined clearly, in addition to love:
1.Feelings. The first kind of emotions, known as “first feelings” or “protopassions” (propatheiai in Greek), are experienced by everyone, and include spontaneous, instinctual responses. These include things like blushing, sexual arousal, being startled if someone sneaks up behind you, having stage fright, changing your expression at a sad event, and so on. In this book, we’ll refer to these as feelings or natural human feelings, which everyone experiences, including a Stoic sage. It is important to note that these feelings are involuntary and come and go on their own. Also, these feelings are morally indifferent. Since they are beyond our control, they have no positive or negative impact on our character.
2.Negative emotions. The next group of emotions, which these earlier feelings can help give rise to, are known as “passions” (pathē). These are negative emotions like anger, fear, greed, envy, and so on. In this book, I refer to them as negative emotions, extreme negative emotions, or unhealthy emotions. These negative emotions arise from mental judgments, but judgments that are mistaken or false. Because they are based on false beliefs, these negative emotions are harmful to our character. In other words, they are vices.
3.Good emotions. The third and final group of emotions are “good passions” (eupatheiai in Greek). In this book, we will refer to them as good emotions, healthy emotions, or positive emotions. These include joy, cheerfulness, sociability, goodwill, and forms of friendship and love. Just like negative emotions, positive emotions are based on mental judgments. But good emotions are based on rational and accurate judgments, while negative emotions are based on false judgments. And as you might imagine, good emotions are not indifferent or bad, but good for our personality and character.
And that’s that: For the Stoics, feelings are just feelings, neither good nor bad, and everyone experiences them. Healthy emotions are good, and based on sound, accurate judgments. For the Stoics, the real enemies are the extreme negative emotions or passions, which are based on false opinions and harmful to one’s inner character. Seneca pretty much summed up the Stoic view about negative emotions when he wrote, “Anyone enslaved to a passion is living under a tyrant.”14
If you live under a negative emotion’s tyranny, you will never experience peace of mind because your mind is not under your own control. It’s under the control of something else: a false judgment or opinion, which will cause you to act in harmful and self-destructive ways. When Seneca said that “anger is a temporary form of madness,” it’s something that applies to all of the passions or extreme negative emotions. In the words of Stoic scholar John Sellars, they are like “little mental illnesses” that take over our minds. It’s just that anger is the most powerful.15
What does it mean that a passion is based on a judgment? Take the example of greed. For a Stoic, someone who suffers from greed agrees with the judgment that having a lot of money is not just a possible advantage but essential for human happiness. Ultimately, this is based on a widespread social belief, like many other false opinions, that are “deeply ingrained errors about the value of external objects.”16 Significantly, the Stoics were among the first thinkers to deeply explore the adverse effects that social conditioning can have on our inner development.
Let’s also imagine, as a thought experiment, that my friend Mike was walking through the city one day and noticed a gorgeous woman on the other side of the street. Mike might think, “Oh, she’s beautiful!” Perhaps he felt his heart was beginning to melt a bit, but he kept walking and quickly forgot about her. For the Stoics, this would just be a normal feeling, and nothing more. But if Mike saw the beautiful woman and became obsessed with her, thinking, “I could never be happy living without her!” that would be the beginning of a full-blown passion, or negative emotion, because it would no longer be based on just a feeling, but a false and potentially harmful judgment.
THIS BRINGS US TO the point where we can now understand how anger and other negative emotions come into being.
Seneca was not by any means the first Stoic to write about this process, but he is our single most important source, because the earlier writings have been lost.17
Anger itself, as Seneca tells us, is always based on two mental judgments. The first judgment is “I’ve been harmed” or “someone has treated me unjustly.” The second judgment is “If I’ve been harmed, I should seek payback through retribution or vengeance.” Should these two judgments be combined, the outcome is likely to be a manifestation of extreme anger.
Seneca explains in some detail how extreme anger comes into existence, following a three-step process. This mirrors the ABC Theory of Emotion, discussed earlier, in chapter 3:
A.In the first step or “movement,” there is an involuntary motion, or a natural, instinctual feeling. This natural feeling is a protopassion and a kind of warning that something worse might be coming. Seneca calls this raw feeling a “jolt,” an “agitation,” and “a first movement.” This is not a passion but an impression or feeling that could turn into a passion. In the case of anger, the two involuntary impressions that first come to mind are “I feel harmed” and “I feel like I should take vengeance.”