Glossary
Adiaphora
ἀδιάφορα (adiaphora)
Adiaphora are the things the Stoics called indifferent: neither good nor bad, because they can be used well or badly. George Long, in the essay that opens his 1862 Meditations, lists them as life, health, wealth, power, disease, poverty and death. His index of terms glosses the Greek word as “things indifferent, neither good nor bad” and gives mesa, the middle things, as its equivalent. Indifferent does not mean unimportant: such a thing makes no difference to whether a person is good.
Marcus Aurelius draws the line in VI, 32: to the little body all things are indifferent, and to the understanding those things only are indifferent which are not the works of its own activity. In Meditations, XI, 16 the line becomes the condition of living well: the power is in the soul, if it be indifferent to things which are indifferent, since none of them produces an opinion about itself; the judgment is ours. Elizabeth Carter’s 1758 Enchiridion applies it to divination in chapter XXXII: an event not in our own power can by no means be either good or evil, so one goes to the diviner without desire or aversion.
Indifference to the thing is not indifference to its use. Long’s 1877 Discourses gives the formula in II, 5: things themselves are indifferent, but the use of them is not; the counters and the dice do not matter, the careful cast does. Marcus, in III, 11, still attempts to ascertain the value of each indifferent thing. Later accounts of the school, in Diogenes Laertius and Cicero, divide indifferents into preferred, such as health, and rejected; those names are not in our editions. Choosing among them is the field of kathekon, and holding them indifferent underlies the dichotomy of control.
In the texts
Marcus Aurelius · Meditations, VI, 32
But to the understanding those things only are indifferent which are not the works of its own activity.
Marcus Aurelius · Meditations, XI, 16
As to living in the best way, this power is in the soul, if it be indifferent to things which are indifferent.
Epictetus · Enchiridion, XXXII
For if it is among the Things not in our own Power, it can by no means be either good or evil.
What the term does not mean
- Not “indifference” in the everyday sense of not caring. The word says that a thing is neither good nor bad, not that it leaves one cold; Marcus still weighs the value of each (III, 11).
- Not a list of things to renounce. Health and wealth are not evils either; what can be good or bad is the use made of them, not their possession (Long 1877, Discourses II, 5).
- Not the theological adiaphora. From the Reformation on, the word names church practices neither commanded nor forbidden; the Stoic sense concerns the value of things, not worship.
Related terms
- Kathekon — καθῆκον (kathekon)
- Dichotomy of control — τὰ ἐφ’ ἡμῖν / τὰ οὐκ ἐφ’ ἡμῖν (ta eph’ hēmin, ta ouk eph’ hēmin)
- Prohairesis — προαίρεσις (prohairesis)
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