Katharsis

Systematic purification of the hēgemonikon by identifying and eliminating false judgements (doxa hamartanē) that mistakenly assign the status of good or evil to external things.

In the Stoic context, katharsis does not denote emotional release (as in Aristotle) but rather the deliberate examination and elimination of those erroneous judgements (doxa hamartanē) that falsely attribute the status of goods or evils to external things. Chrysippus taught that all passions arise from such false judgements; katharsis is therefore the rational procedure of identifying, scrutinising, and neutralising these judgements in order to restore the ruling faculty (hēgemonikon) to its proper domain — the inner power of judgement.