Do Stoics suppress emotions? What they actually did

No. The Stoics did not aim to feel nothing. They sorted feelings by whether a mistaken judgment is inside them, called those feelings passions, and tried to remove the judgment while leaving the rest. Feelings with no judgment in them, such as a flinch, were allowed, and a wise person was supposed to have good feelings of their own. The cold, unfeeling Stoic of the stereotype is a caricature, and the Stoics themselves cared about the difference.

Where the caricature comes from

Stoicism began in Athens around 300 BCE with Zeno of Citium. The Stoics said the virtuous person feels no passions, in Greek pathē, and so the wise person is apathēs. It is a famous and notorious claim, and our word apathy sounds like the same thing. The caricature follows the word.

The mistake is blunt to state: it is grossly incorrect to say that the Stoics aimed at a passionless life, or at the suppression of emotions. Their word passion did not mean what we now mean by it, and did not match our word emotion either. Whatever the Stoics were trying to remove, it was something narrower than feeling.

What a passion was

The ancient definition: a passion is impulse which is excessive and disobedient to the dictates of reason. The important part is what the Stoics thought a passion contained. It was not an automatic reaction. Passions are the result of a judgment, giving assent to an impression. First something strikes you; then you accept a belief about it; the passion follows the belief.

Passions come in four kinds, sorted by what they are about: distress, a present perceived bad; fear, a future perceived bad; appetite, a future perceived good; and delight, or pleasure, a present perceived good. The same family can be sorted by health. The unhealthy passions included pain, fear, craving and pleasure, and each but one had a healthy counterpart:

An example shows what a judgment inside the feeling means. You learn you have heart disease and feel distress. On the Stoic view that distress contains the belief that illness is bad for your happiness, and the Stoics held that belief to be false: disease is dis-preferred, but not bad, and its presence makes no difference to your happiness. What is wrong with the passion is the false belief, not that you minded.

You do not have to agree with that. The claim is a hard one, since few people think illness makes no difference to a life. But it makes clear what the Stoics were aiming at. They were not trying to turn emotion down. They were arguing with the thought inside it.

What they kept

The robot image fails on the Stoics' own terms: their account of the virtuous person's good feelings, eupatheiai, belies the caricature of the Sage as an unfeeling robot. The Sage's good feelings are emotional responses to genuine goods, that is, to virtue, virtuous actions, and virtuous friends.

And the Stoics admitted a second category, feelings that arrive before any judgment. At some point in the school's history they introduced what the entry calls pre-emotions, emotional reactions that occur without the intervention of assent. A wise person could flinch, go pale or feel a surge of fear without any loss of wisdom, because nothing had yet been agreed to.

The practical conclusion follows: the Stoics realized that we have automatic responses that are not under our control, and so focused on what is under our control, the judgment rendered on the likely causes of our instinctive reactions.

A modern parallel, with a caveat

One author argues that the Stoic view of emotions finds close parallels in modern neuroscience, citing Joseph LeDoux's point that there is a difference between what neuroscientists mean by "emotion" and what psychologists mean. In the neuroscientific sense, fear is a fast, involuntary defence reaction. What psychologists call fear adds a conscious interpretation to it. That second layer is close to what the Stoics meant.

Treat it as an interesting analogy and not a confirmation. It is one author's view, in an encyclopedia entry about Stoicism, about a different vocabulary. A researcher who defines fear differently would not find a match.

Where it sits among living positions

In the 2020 PhilPapers Survey of professional philosophers, virtue ethics, the family Stoicism is usually grouped with, was the most popular of three answers: 36.99% accepted or leaned towards it, against 32.05% for deontology and 30.56% for consequentialism. The survey asked only about ethics in general, not about the Stoics, so it is context and not evidence for the Stoic view of emotion.

On our own map the contrast is with the other great school of calm, Epicureanism. Stoicism leans to the side that holds something is higher than pleasure, and Epicureanism sits at the pleasure end, where for it the question is close to decisive. These are our model's estimates. Seneca himself borrowed from Epicurus when it made sense, saying it was his custom to cross even into the other camp, not as a deserter but as a spy. See Epicureanism versus Stoicism.

Our view

The useful part of Stoicism is not the goal, which is demanding and arguable, but the technique, and it is separable from the goal. The technique is to insert a pause between an impression and the agreement to it. Everything before the pause is a reaction; everything after is a judgment you can inspect.

You can try it without believing anything about virtue or fate. Next time a strong feeling arrives, split it into two sentences. First: what happened, in one flat sentence, with no adjectives. Second: what you are telling yourself it means. The Stoics claimed the second sentence is where the passion lives, and that it is often a claim you would not defend if you wrote it out.

The strongest objection is that this treats feelings as beliefs, which is too intellectual: some emotions do not obey arguments, and a person can know illness is not a moral failing and still dread it. The Stoic answer is the pre-emotion, that the reflex is allowed and only the agreement is yours. We find that answer honest but incomplete, because the line between reflex and agreement is not always clear to the person feeling it.

What would change our mind is evidence that the practice of examining the judgment does not reduce distress any better than distraction does. We did not find such a comparison in our sources.

Where to read next

The Internet Encyclopedia's entry on Stoicism covers the three parts of Stoic philosophy and the main texts, and the Stanford entry's section on the passions is the most careful account. On this site, Stoicism, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius and Seneca have pages, and virtue and character takes up the wider question. To see where your own answers place you on the map, take the walk.