Apatheia

That's not what they were after.

Apatheia in the Stoic sense means freedom from destructive passions.

It means the absence of being ruled by emotion, not the absence of emotion itself.

This is a critical distinction because one of the most common misreadings of Stoicism is that it asks you to become a stone, expressionless, detached, robotic.

I think you also have the ability to live a life where We did an episode on this.

I don't remember when we did this because I preached a message on it many years ago about the difference between apatheia and autarkus.

Apatheia is the Greek term, which means without suffering.

And you can choose to not suffer.

Suffering is a perspective.

In terms of learning a bit more, I mean, one of the things I found fascinating in your book was the way you talked about some of the kind of key terms in Greek and their meanings and how we misunderstand their meanings.

So, for instance, apatheia, which is, as I understand it from your work, a Stoic concept.

But, you know, we have the common noun apathy, which maybe leads us in the wrong direction.

What does Stoicism mean when it looks at apatheia, and how does that compare to, I think you talk about, metropatheia?

I think in these ancient discussions, absence of weight is something like absence of feeling, which doesn't sound so attractive.

I think there are kind of three different ways in which this word is used.

And they say, no, that's not what we're doing.

There are other ancient philosophers out there that do that.