Ataraxia

Ataraxia is the Greek word for freedom from disturbance, used by the Epicureans and the Pyrrhonian Skeptics as a term for the goal of philosophical practice. For the Epicureans, ataraxia is achieved through moderate pleasure, the cultivation of friendship, and the dissolution of irrational fears — particularly the fear of death and the fear of the gods. Epicurus holds that natural philosophy serves ataraxia: understanding that the gods do not concern themselves with us and that the soul perishes with the body removes the principal sources of mental disturbance.

The Pyrrhonian Skeptics arrived at ataraxia by a different route. By suspending judgment on questions where the evidence is balanced, the Skeptic ceases to be agitated by the dogmatic disputes of the philosophers and lives without the anxiety that comes from clinging to particular doctrines. Sextus Empiricus reports that the Skeptics noticed ataraxia following from suspended judgment as a shadow follows the body.

The Epicurean and Skeptical accounts of ataraxia, while sharing a vocabulary, differ on what produces it. For the Epicureans, ataraxia is the natural condition of a person whose desires have been correctly trained: needs satisfied moderately, vain desires recognized and dismissed, friendship cultivated, fears of the gods and of death dissolved by clear thinking about nature. For the Pyrrhonists, ataraxia is the side-effect of suspended judgment (epoche) on questions where evidence is balanced.

Stoic eupatheia — the healthy emotional states of the wise — is sometimes assimilated to ataraxia, but the Stoics generally avoided the term. For the Stoics, the goal is the rational use of impressions in accordance with the cosmic logos, and the resulting state is closer to active willing consent than to imperturbability. The differences across the Hellenistic schools matter: each tied its account of the wise person's inner life to a different physics, and the resulting accounts of ataraxia or its analogues differ accordingly.