How to Think Like a Roman Emperor: The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius

by Donald J. Robertson

They had names for many different types of good passion (eupatheiai), a term encompassing both desires and emotions, which they grouped under three broad headings: 1. A profound sense of joy or gladness and peace of mind, which comes from living with wisdom and virtue 2. A healthy feeling of aversion to vice, like a sense of conscience, honor, dignity, or integrity 3. The desire to help both ourselves and others, through friendship, kindness, and goodwill They also believed that we have many irrational desires and emotions, like fear, anger, craving, and certain forms of pleasure that are bad for us. Stoics did not believe that unhealthy emotions should be suppressed; rather, they should be replaced by healthy ones. However, these healthy emotions aren’t entirely under our control, and we’re not always guaranteed to experience them, so we shouldn’t confuse them with virtue, the goal of life. For Stoics, they’re like an added bonus. They also taught that our initial automatic feelings are to be viewed as natural and indifferent. These include things like being startled or irritated, blushing, turning pale, tensing up, shaking, sweating, or stammering. They are natural reflex reactions, our first reactions before we escalate them into full-blown passions. We share these primitive precursors to emotion with some non-human animals, and so the Stoics view them with indifference, as neither good nor bad. Indeed, Seneca, as we’ll see, noted the paradox that before we can exhibit ...