The Will to Reign in Our Passions

It's not about being stoic, but by becoming a Stoic

“Death is a release from the impressions of the senses, and from desires that make us their puppets, and from the vagaries of the mind, and from the hard service of the flesh.” ~Marcus Aurelius

The Power of Our Passions

Marcus Aurelius would probably be stunned at how modern Western culture has evolved. We live in a society where our senses are constantly bombarded with impressions that are highly tuned to exploit our every desire, and instead of puppet strings, we are ensnared by strong ‘webs’ that have proven difficult for many to break away from (it is literally called the world wide web).

And while death is a release from these constant impressions and desires, it is only in life where we have the choice to resist and persist against them. A chance to become more than just a slave to passions, to become resilient in the face of adversity. But does this mean that we are to become passionless? Far from it. Rather, it is, as the saying goes, “to keep our passions in due bounds” so that excessive desires don’t lead us to destructive consequences.

Passions vs. Pathos

Unfortunately, there has been a lot of wisdom that has been lost in translation due to the evolution of words and context across the centuries. The root of the word passions comes from the Greek word Pathos, whose original meaning was ‘to suffer’ and more specifically, a harmful disturbance of the mind. It gets more confusing when we look at the modern interpretation of the word pathos as ‘an appeal to emotions’ as opposed to ethos (appeal to character) or logos (appeal to reason). Love for instance is a beautiful emotion and full of passion, and one would be hard-pressed to find anyone alive who doesn’t want to experience love, even with all its ups and downs. But taken to irrational extremes, love too can become a destructive passion that leads to suffering.

There is a path that offers the ‘fruits of salvation’ that leads towards Virtue or Arête by means of the rational passions. There is another path, one that leads to the ‘fruits of desolation’ that leads towards Vice or Kakia, by means of the irrational passions. Many have stated that our judgements of an event or situation contribute to our acting on a particular passion, and that we should focus on making rational judgements in pursuit of virtue. But there is something more primal, more innate, at work here that needs to be examined, and that is our willingness to participate in these judgments.

“Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” ~David Hume

Choosing to reign in our passions

Our ability to act rationally is an option, and not our default status. Even as we become older, we don’t automatically become wiser. All too often, many of us still ‘lose our shit’ because we are caught off-guard, our defenses down, and at the point of mental exhaustion, we forget that we are trying to do better. Other times, we will rationalize excuses to satisfy acting upon our irrational passions. No one is around to see what your doing, except yourself.

Unlike Plato’s description of the tripartite soul in the Republic, where Logos drives our will like a charioteer, it is rather our will, our spiritedness, our Thumos, that we must deliberately steer to align with the ability to reason, as opposed to letting it succumb to our appetites, or our Eros. We are meant to use our Thumos to develop our Theos thru the powers of Logos, our will to divine power. This supports our ontological development from Andros to Theos, and our esoteric transformation from Atomos to Henosis, or our indivisible selves to union with the divine.

Becoming Dispassionate

Very simply, our will is how we choose to navigate through life. When our will is aligned with our reason, we can learn to become dispassionate and hold back, as much as humanly possible, our irrational judgements to avoid needless suffering. This is the path that the Stoics have always advocated. Not to become an unfeeling statue and disconnected from society, but to be uplifted by experiencing rational passions such as joy (present elation), intent or wishing (expected desires), and caution (expected aversions).

When our will chooses to indulge our appetites instead at the expense of our reason, we are in a sense blinded by our passions. Our judgements of what is good can become irrational, as they draw us downwards to satisfy our appetites. It is only when it is too late that we realize and lament the consequences of our actions. The irrational passions that draw us downwards according to the Stoics are delight (present elation), lusts (expected desires), distress (present contraction), and fear (expected aversions).

It’s Not About the Heart vs the Head

Some perceive their world as a head versus heart dichotomy, and there are long arguments as to which school of thought is right up until the modern day, and there are plenty of memes to prove it.

But this approach puts us at war with ourselves. You are not only your head, and you are not only your heart. We are Atomos, indivisible. We might sometimes rely on one more than the other, but it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t examine ourselves now and exert our will to take command of the ship that is our life. Only then can we find peace in and for ourselves. And what does that peace look like? I’ll leave you with this quote to ponder on.

“Peace requires us to surrender our illusions of control. We can love and care for others but we cannot possess our children, lovers, family, or friends. We can assist them, pray for them, and wish them well, yet in the end their happiness and suffering depend on their thoughts and actions, not on our wants.”

~Jack Kornfield

Safe travels! 𓁟

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