Proairesis

Προαίρεσις (proairesis) is the Greek term for rational choice or moral will. Aristotle introduces the concept in the Nicomachean Ethics as the deliberate desire informed by reason — the capacity by which a human being chooses one course of action over another after rational consideration. Epictetus, inheriting and radicalizing the term, makes proairesis the essential self.

Sorabji‘s account: “the Stoic holds that we can decide to locate ourselves either in externals or in our proairesis — let us say in our will — and our will is something we can develop. Proairesis is really something more intellectual than will. It is the disposition of reason towards certain kinds of moral decision. Once our self is our proairesis, it will have become inviolable” (Sorabji 2000, sorabji-emotion-peace-of-mind, p. 245).

The force of Epictetus’s formulation lies in its situation. He had been a slave; his leg had been broken. The doctrine is not armchair reflection but the survival strategy of a man whose body and social status had been taken from him. “‘You will fetter my leg, but my will (proairesis) not even Zeus can conquer’” (Epictetus, in Sorabji 2000). What belongs to fortune — body, status, possessions, reputation — is not the self. The self is proairesis. Fortune cannot touch it.

For the Seba lineage proairesis matters as the classical distinction between the outward-presented role (the prosopon, the persona) and the interior self that the role cannot exhaust. The Jungian theory of persona-ego differentiation is, in one respect, the modern psychological articulation of what Epictetus worked out as ethics.

The concept should be held alongside but distinguished from thumos, the Homeric affective faculty. Thumos is the body’s affective knowing; proairesis is the mind’s rational choosing. The Stoic move is precisely to relocate the self from the thumos the Homeric world knew to the proairesis Stoic philosophy names — a move Snell would later trace as the “discovery of the mind.”

Relationships

• prosopon
• persona
• thumos
• tripartite-soul
• discovery-of-depth

Primary sources

• sorabji-emotion-peace-of-mind (Sorabji 2000, pp. 245–246)
• Long, A.A. and Sedley, D.N. — The Hellenistic Philosophers
• Epictetus, Discourses (as cited in Sorabji)