A Human History of Emotion

To act virtuously, you can’t just let your pathē guide you. You have to learn to think about what’s really best—to evaluate, to judge. You have to stop and think, “Is this really the right thing to do?” You can’t just do it because it gives you nice feelings.

Eros isn’t about personal pleasure but the greater good.

6 Thymos translates as “anger,” and it’s in this part of the soul where you find the feelings that get stuff done.

God, here, is really being described as a thought, a soul of pure reason, an ability to know things.

that sort of perturbation can also cause the pathē of “hope,” which gets you to do things because you think they might be possible, even if they’re difficult.

The god soul was pure reason and couldn’t be perturbed by pathē directly. He called this soul the lógos.

What we think is real is just a shadow. In Plato’s view, our souls are the reality—our perfect form dancing in the sunlight at the cave entrance. Our bodies are just the shadows they cast.

The Greeks called emotions pathē, meaning “experience” or “suffering.”

In other words, emotional labor is the effort required to stay within an emotional regime.

Linked closely to emotional regimes is something called emotional labor. This term has been expanded to mean almost anything, from merely being polite to being the person in the household (usually a woman) who performs emotion-related tasks, such as sending birthday cards and keeping the house clean to impress the visiting neighbors.