apathy

apathy, in Stoic philosophy, condition of being totally free from the pathē, which roughly are the emotions and passions, notably pain, fear, desire, and pleasure. Although remote origins of the doctrine can probably be found in the Cynics (second half of the 4th century bc), it was Zeno of Citium (4th–3rd century bc) who explicitly taught that the pathē were to be extirpated entirely.

Attacks on the Stoics suggesting that they were insensitive to the human condition invoked rejoinders from the later Stoics, some of whom compromised by distinguishing between good and evil pathē. Early Stoics, however, rejected the pathē altogether, breaking with the Aristotelians, who sought a mean between them, and with the Epicureans, who proclaimed pleasure, rightly chosen, to be the only criterion by which to judge an action. One of the greatest of the Middle Stoics (2nd–1st century bc), however, Panaetius, rejected the idea of apathy altogether and reintroduced the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean (or of virtue as a mean between two extremes) and argued (as did Seneca, the 1st-century-ad Roman Stoic philosopher) that some of the goods of this world might be worth pursuing for their own sake.