Indifferents

For the Stoa, the only genuine good is virtue, and the only genuine evil is vice. Everything else — health, wealth, reputation, loss, pain, even life and death — is adiaphoron, indifferent, in the strict evaluative sense (Sorabji 2000, par. 68). The doctrine is the logical substrate of apatheia: if indifferents are not truly good or evil, then the pathē — which are assents to the proposition that they are — are errors, and therefore eliminable.

The Stoics refined the doctrine by distinguishing preferred from dispreferred indifferents (Sorabji 2000, par. 68). Health is preferred over illness, life over death, but neither is good; they are selected, not chosen. This allowed Stoic ethics to accommodate practical action without surrendering the claim that virtue alone is good. Seneca’s consolations exemplify the move: he will acknowledge that a loss is great and still insist that the sage does not grieve it as an evil.

The doctrine travels with apatheia into the Christian tradition, sometimes openly (Clement cites preferred indifferents) and sometimes in disguised form, through the language of the world’s vanity and the soul’s detachment (Sorabji 2000, par. 136). In depth-psychological terms, the doctrine anticipates the withdrawal of projections: the ego learns to recognize that its valuations of external circumstance are its own judgments, and that the true site of good and evil is the inner relation to the self.

Relationships

• apatheia
• pathos
• self

Primary sources

• Emotion and Peace of Mind (Sorabji 2000)
• Stoicism and Emotion (Graver 2007)