display all the ideas for this combination of texts
3 ideas
| 20850 | Passions are judgements; greed thinks money is honorable, and likewise drinking and lust [Chrysippus, by Diog. Laertius] |
| Full Idea: Chrysippus says (in his On Passions) that the passions are judgements; for greed is a supposition that money is honorable, and similarly for drunkennes and wantonness and others. | |
| From: report of Chrysippus (fragments/reports [c.240 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 07.111 | |
| A reaction: This is an endorsement of Socrates's intellectualist reading of weakness of will, as against Aristotle's assigning it to overpowering passions. |
| 7209 | There is no will; weakness of will is splitting of impulses, strong will is coordination under one impulse [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Weakness of will is misleading, for there is no will, and hence neither a strong will nor a weak one. Multiplicity and disaggregation of the impulses results as 'weak will'; coordination under the dominance of a single one results as 'strong will'. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 14[219]) | |
| A reaction: That Nietzsche seems to be right is clearer if we remember that the Greek terms are 'control' (enkrateia) and 'lack of control' (akrasia), with no reference to anything called the will. |
| 20869 | The highest degree of morality performs all that is appropriate, omitting nothing [Chrysippus] |
| Full Idea: He who makes moral progress to the highest degree performs all the appropriate actions in all circumstances, and omits none. | |
| From: Chrysippus (fragments/reports [c.240 BCE]), quoted by Sophocles - Sophocles' Electra 4.39.22 | |
| A reaction: Hence concerns about omission as well as commission in the practice of ethics can be seen in the light of character and virtue. The world is fully of nice people who act well, but don't do so well on omissions. Car drivers, for example. |