Vices
Epithymia (Desire)
Stoic Vices
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Origin Early and middle Stoa, roughly the third to first centuries BCE; the classification survives mainly through later doxographical reports rather than the school's own lost founding texts.
Epithymia, desire or appetite, is one of the four principal pathe of Stoic ethics, the irrational reaching after something taken to be a future good. Stoic doctrine treats anger, longing and craving of every kind as varieties of this passion, and holds that the wise person is not free of impulse altogether but free of this irrational excess, since a rightly reasoned impulse toward a genuine good is not counted a passion at all.
Facts
Origins
Origin PeriodEarly and middle Stoa, roughly the third to first centuries BCE; the classification survives mainly through later doxographical reports rather than the school's own lost founding texts. 1 Place of OriginAthens, where Zeno of Citium founded the Stoic school around 300 BCE, and later the wider Hellenistic and Roman world. 1 Origin of the NameAncient Greek epithymia, desire or appetite, from epi-, upon, and thymos, spirit or passion. 1 Attributed Author / CompilerSystematized within Stoic ethics chiefly by Chrysippus of Soli, the school's third head, whose own treatise on the passions survives only in fragments and later paraphrase; the fourfold scheme is best known today through Diogenes Laertius's later summary. 1 Status
Status Within the TraditionStandard teaching, not formally defined 1 Doctrinal Status DetailStoic doctrine treats anger, longing and craving of every kind as varieties of this passion, holding that the wise person is not free of impulse altogether but free of this irrational excess, since a rightly reasoned impulse toward a genuine good is not counted a passion at all. 1 Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourceDesire or appetite, the irrational reaching after something taken to be a future good; one of the four principal pathe of Stoic ethics. 1 Cross-Tradition Connections
Belongs to Tradition
Opposed By
Sophrosyne is the correct disposition toward one's own appetites that epithymia, desire, distorts into an irrational reaching after a merely apparent good.
Originates in Language
Held Differently
Stoic epithymia names the whole class of irrational reaching after a supposed future good, wider than money or possessions; Christian moral theology narrowed one branch of that same appetite into the capital sin of avarice, a different scope over a related diagnosis of desire.
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