APATHY (ἀ, privative; and πάθος, passion).—(1) The absence of passion; (2) a voluntary control of feeling preventing its natural rise; (3) indifference to the higher motives which should govern action; moral inertia—lack of energy (Kant’s Ethics, Abbot, 319).
| According to the Stoics, apathy meant the extinction, or, at least, severe restriction, of the passions by ascendancy of reason, according to the demands of their austere rule of life. «Those demands, developed to their legitimate consequences, require the unconditional extirpation of the whole sensuous nature, an extirpation which was originally expressed by the much vaunted apathy» (Zeller’s Stoics, &c, transl., p. 273). |
«By the perfect apathy which that philosophy (the Stoic) prescribes to us, by endeavouring not merely to moderate but to eradicate, all our private, partial, and selfish affections, by suffering us to feel for whatever can befall ourselves, our friends, our country, not even the sympathetic and reduced passions of the impartial spectator,—it endeavours to render us altogether indifferent and unconcerned in the success or miscarriage of everything which nature has prescribed to us as the proper business and occupation of our lives» (Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, pt. VII. sec. 2). This is, however, probably an exaggeration of the actual teaching of the Stoics (see Zeller, Hist. of Greek Phil., Stoics, Epicureans, and Sceptics, Eng. transl., p. 273; cf Ueberweg, Hist, of Phil., I. 198).
«In general, experience will show, that as the want of natural appetite to food supposes and proceeds from some natural disease; so the apathy the Stoics talk of, as much supposes or is accompanied with something amiss in the moral character, in that which is the health of the mind » (Butler, Sermon V.)—
«In lazy apathy let Stoics boast,
Their virtue fix’d; ‘tis fix’d as in a frost;
Contracted all, retiring to the breast;
But strength of mind is exercise, not rest.»—POPE.
