SVF III.456

Original — Ancient Greek

δοκεῖ δὲ αὐτοῖς τὰ πάθη κρίσεις εἶναι, καθά φησι Χρύσιππος ἐν τῷ περὶ Παθῶν· ἥ τε γὰρ φιλαργυρία ὑπόληψίς ἐστι τοῦ τὸ ἀργύριον καλὸν εἶναι, καὶ ἡ μέθη δὲ καὶ ἡ ἀκολασία ὁμοίως καὶ τὰ ἄλλα.

StoicOs Translation

They hold that the passions are judgments, as Chrysippus says in his On Passions: for love of money is a supposition that money is a fine thing, and drunkenness and intemperance likewise, and the rest.

Context

Diogenes reports the doctrine of Chrysippus' four books On Passions — the work Galen would attack at length on Posidonius' behalf. Zeno had defined pathos as an excessive impulse (SVF I.205); Chrysippus radicalises: the passion is the judgment itself.

Source notes:Text visually verified against the page scan of von Arnim, SVF III (1903), no. 456, pp. 110–111 (Vol. III OCR unreliable for Greek). Von Arnim heads the section: 'Chrysippus' On Passions, four books, in which it is demonstrated that the passions are judgments of the ruling part.'

What the source actually tells us

Named with book title and a concrete example (greed as the supposition that money is fine). Galen's polemic confirms independently that this identification of passion and judgment was Chrysippus' distinctive position within the school.

Philosophical meaning

If passions are judgments, they are curable by argument: greed is not a force to be tamed but a false valuation to be corrected. Therapy of the soul becomes philosophy's proper work — the direct ancestor of Epictetus' 'it is not things that disturb us, but judgments about things', and of modern cognitive therapy's founding intuition.

Scholarly uncertainty

Diogenes' one sentence compresses four books; whether Chrysippus identified the passion with the judgment or with an entailed 'fresh' opinion is refined elsewhere (Galen's quotations) and debated. The link to Epictetus is a continuity noted by scholarship, not asserted by this source.

Go deeper

• Read SVF I.205 — Zeno's definition of pathos →
• Read SVF I.575 — Cleanthes: grief is a paralysis of the soul →
• Read SVF III.175 — impulse is reason commanding →