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Ataraxia (ἀταραξία "complacency") is a Greek term used by
Pyrrho and Epicurus for a lucid state, characterized by
freedom from worry or any other preoccupation.
For the Epicureans, ataraxia was
synonymous with the only true happiness possible for a person. It
signifies the state of robust tranquility that derives from
eschewing faith in an afterlife, not fearing the gods because they
are distant and unconcerned with us, avoiding politics and
vexatious people, surrounding oneself with trustworthy and
affectionate friends and, most importantly, being an affectionate,
virtuous person, worthy of trust.
For the Pyrrhonians, owing to one's inability to
say which sense impressions are true and which ones are false, it
is the quietude that arises from suspending judgment on dogmatic
beliefs or anything non-evident and continuing to inquire. The
experience was said to have fallen on the painter Apelles who was trying to paint
the foamy saliva of a horse. He was so unsuccessful that, in a
rage, he gave up and threw the sponge he was cleaning his brushes
with at the medium, thus producing the effect of the horse's
foam.[1]
The Stoics, too, sought mental tranquility, and
saw ataraxia as something to be desired and often made use
of the term, but for them the analogous state, attained by the
Stoic sage, was apatheia or absence of passion.[2]
Notes
- ^
Sextus
Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, Translated by R.G.
Bury, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1933., p.
19, ISBN 0-674-99301-2
- ^
Steven K. Strange, (2004), The Stoics on the Voluntariness of
Passion in Stoicism: Traditions and Transformations,
page 37. Cambridge University Press.
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