Passions (or vices)

In its philosophical sense—far deeper than its everyday usage—passion, derived from the Latin patior (“to suffer”) and the Greek pathos (πάθος), refers to those raw inner forces, those instinctive and emotional surges that arise within us.

The Stoics identified four primary ones, what they called the fundamental irrational passions, literally evils, collectively referred to as kakoi (πάθη):
– fear (phobos, φόβος),
– desire (epithymia, ἐπιθυμία),
– sorrow (lypē, λύπη),
– and pleasure (hēdonē, ἡδονή).
These are not mere feelings, but true illnesses of the soul, symptoms of a mind that has lost its way in judging what is truly good or bad. When they grow too powerful, these waves overwhelm us, cloud our clarity, and distort our ability to choose calmly. It's no longer us acting, but something within us taking over.
You've surely felt it before, that moment when anger grips you before you've even chosen it, when desire pulls you in against your will, when anxiety takes the reins without asking your permission.

From the Stoic perspective, these passions are seen as disturbances of the soul, born from mistaken judgments. They arise when you place too much weight on things that lie outside your control, wealth, reputation, health...These external things, when deemed essential, become tyrants. And with them comes their procession of emotions: fear of losing, sorrow over what you lack, excessive joy when you think you have them.
Inner peace? Dissolved.

Zeno of Citium put it bluntly: passion is “an irrational movement of the soul, contrary to nature,” because it goes against reason. Passions are deviations, disorders, parasites that steer our nature away from what it is meant to be: clear-minded, stable, aligned. And so, according to our school, the wise person experiences no passions, and therefore, the happy life is one entirely free from them.

What you need to understand to deepen your Stoic journey, {{username}}, is that these passions are impulses (hormai) ¹, in other words, reactions that precede action. These impulses come from your ruling principle, your innermost soul, your very reason (hegemonikon). So paradoxically, they are rational impulses but based on a faulty judgment: you believe that what is happening to you is good or bad, when in fact, from the Stoic point of view, these things are indifferent. So instead of guiding you toward right action, your mind draws from misguided values. The decisions you make from that place are not truly reasonable. Passions arise when you give your assent, that is, when you accept and endorse a judgment that, by our Stoic standards, is mistaken.
Do you see what I mean?
It’s not that passions come from a place devoid of reason that makes them “irrational”, but rather that they betray a reason that has deliberately placed its focus in the wrong place, that has erred in its view of what is good and what is bad. They are, in a way, rational—but they’ve grown on tainted soil.

I know I’ve gone a bit technical here, but I hope you’re still with me. Maybe one last time, just to make sure the idea is clear: these choices you made consciously… were made by relying on a misguided conscience.

But where it goes even deeper is when you start believing that a certain emotion is normal. Say, for example, you fall ill, you believe your sadness or anxiety is natural, almost inevitable. You might tell yourself: This is serious, so I should be upset. But from a Stoic perspective, that reaction isn’t just emotional, it’s intellectual. You’re not just feeling something; you’re giving your assent, you’re agreeing with a false idea. You believe that illness is a true evil, that it harms your happiness, that it threatens your personal fulfillment. And that judgment, not the illness itself, is what triggers your distress. In other words, it’s not the fever that drains you, or the diagnosis that makes you cry. It’s the thought: This is terrible. I can’t be happy like this. What you’re experiencing, in the Stoic view, is a cognitive error, a confusion between what is merely a “non-preferred indifferent,” like illness, and what is truly bad for your being. And as long as you cling to that belief, your mind will continue to prescribe the wrong responses: anxiety, tears, panic. Not because the situation demands it, but because your faulty judgment decided it should.

That’s why, for the Stoics, passions aren’t something to be ripped out by force, like yanking a tree from the ground by its trunk. These emotions can’t be tamed through sheer willpower, they must be healed at the root, by patiently correcting what our mind wrongly agrees to. And that takes time, clarity, and a deep inner work.

Now, after laying out all this reasoning, you might be tempted to say: Sometimes, it’s not such a big deal, right? To indulge in a small lapse? One more drink, a fleeting infidelity of thought, a little lie, a betrayal that stays hidden—surely these things can’t really hurt us, can they?
Not for us.
Because these passions, even when they take hold in small doses, pull us away from ourselves. Away from our rational nature. Away from the (benevolent) role we’re meant to play in the world, a role rooted in benevolence.

The Stoics, in response—as you’ve seen in the last four articles, offer a kind of therapy, a “medicine for the soul”: virtue. By refining your judgment, you can free yourself from the grip of the passions, deflating them at the root. And you can also begin to correct those subtler passions, the ones you mistakenly believe are essential to your life.

It’s not always easy.
We all feel the urge to give in at times, and we all do, at some point. But that’s not the real issue. What is serious is repeating the same mistake day after day, without awareness, letting a harmful habit take root when you know it’s hurting you and those around you. The Stoics understood how hard this was. They knew it took courage and perseverance to resist the pull of the passions. That’s why they developed the idea of the prokoptôn, the one who is making progress. Because it means you’ve stepped onto the path, you’re looking in the right direction, you’re committed to correcting yourself
so you can live better.

And finally,
as a kind of open-ended bonus note to close this article, I’ll leave you with this observation from an old author ², who reminds us:
Fear and pleasure are primary; dread and desire are secondary. But above all:
– fear is a perceived evil in the present,
– pleasure is a perceived good in the present,
– fear is a perceived evil in the future,
– desire is a perceived good in the future.