The false idea of emotions

One of the most common and recurring conversations I get into with people who are starting out studying and practicing Stoicism arises when a person admits to experiencing an emotion that they think they shouldn’t feel. Often they have picked up the false idea that Stoicism advocates for an ideal of calm or tranquility that rules out having any emotional responses at all (except perhaps that “Stoic joy’ they have heard of. They may also think that when they do feel emotions, what Stoicism requires is for them to ignore, deny, or repress those feelings, and that they are somehow failing if they don’t do this. Often they do have a secondary negative emotion about their own experiencing emotions, for instance anger or disappointment at themselves for failing, fear that they’re going astray, even shame over not being a “good Stoic.”

I’ve worked out a sort of stock response to this, which seems to prove helpful. usually start with the assumption that Stoicism teaches the human emotions are all bad and to be repressed or avoided. People can pick this incorrect idea up from a vast variety of places, not least the adjective “stoic” used in late modern popular culture to denote being unemotional, but also from a plethora of poorly informed books, articles, videos, podcasts that are often a person’s first (mis) encounter with Stoicism.

The "bad" emotions

It is true that the Stoics do view a number of common human emotions as generally bad, for example anger, envy, or grief. But that term “bad” is all too often where people stop, when really one needs to think about why and in what sense an emotion would be such. What makes an emotion something bad isn’t just one factor. They are bad for us in that they typically feel bad to experience or inevitably lead to feeling bad. They also go against, distort, or disable our rationality in some ways. They involve and can also lead to sets of false judgements about matters, and that’s bad for us as well as for others who might be affected by the actions and attitudes that result from them. They may coalesce into vicious habits and dispositions rooted in our character.

Not all emotions are bad

The Stoics don’t view all emotions as bad, though. There are an entire range of good emotional stages (eupatheiai in Greek, constantiae in Latin) that the Stoics recognize and advocate for, including the broad categories of joy, rational desire, and caution, encompassing other emotions. Caution (eulabeia) is fear that is felt in accordance with reason, that is, for the right reasons, towards the right objects. Fear in and of itself is not a bad emotion, so what’s needed is understanding and making the distinction between good and bad experiences of it.

Repressing emotions can be counterproductive

Unless one is the legendary and perhaps non-existent sage, one will inevitably have problematic emotional responses. Repressing or denying them would actually be counterproductive for multiple reasons. The first is that, if such an approach works in the short term, it generally doesn’t continue for long. A person can land themselves within a recurring cycle of denying their actual feelings until they eventually spill over in even more excessive and irrational manners. Without acknowledging the emotions that one feels, a person deprives themself of the possibility of examining, understanding, evaluating, and eventually changing their characteristic emotional responses.

Feel, acknowledge and examine your emotions

A more authentically Stoic approach to addressing one’s emotions would require one to allow oneself to feel them, acknowledge their reality in one’s psyche, and then examining how one comes to feel them. This last part is where one can make progress in understanding and then working on one’s emotional responses.

Stoicism offers a host of useful and time-proven resources for carrying out analysis of one’s own judgements, assumptions, habits, perceptions, that feed into and foster emotional responses. Much more can and has been written about that, so what I’d rather draw attention to here is that none of that can take place unless one is honest with oneself about what one does feel. Going beyond that, one must devote attention to disentangling the complex knot of assumptions, judgements, inferences, and choices balled up in the emotion one finds concerning. Doing that isn’t easy, of course, but it does provide the path to make genuine progress towards the better emotional responses and states that Stoicism views as part of the good life.

Greg Sadler is the president of ReasonIO, a member of the Modern Stoicism Team, an APPA-certified philosophical counselor, and teaches at Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design.

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