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Today, I read my friend’s notes on Neo-Stoicism. The Neo-Stoics believed that there were four passions: pleasure, desire, fear, and sorrow. They didn’t think that these passions proceeded from an irrational faculty, though. Rather, they held that the rational faculty is making an error, the same way that our mathematical mind can make mathematical mistakes. In the case of the passions, our rational faculty is treating indifferent things—wealth, honor, power, and pleasure—as if they are good, when actually they can harm us and are outside of our control. We should be valuing the virtues alone.
Earlier Stoics, such as Zeno and Chysippus, likewise thought that the passions are mistaken judgments. But Posidonius went with the Platonic view that an irrational part of the soul was the source of the passions.
The Neo-Stoic position reminds me of Augustine’s belief that evil comes from good, since good was what we started out with, God having made all things good at the outset. For the Neo-Stoics, the passions proceeded from the rational faculty—something good—making a mistake, by valuing things that seem to be good as if they actually are good.
