Stoicism isn’t About Reducing Negative Emotions
Published in
4 min readOct 8, 2019
In his book The Stoic Challenge, Bill Irvine claims that the goal of Stoicism is to decrease negative emotions:
Their goal wasn’t to banish emotion but to minimize the number of negative emotions — such as feelings of frustration, anger, grief, and envy — that they experienced.
This is subtly, but importantly misleading. What ultimately matters to a Stoic…