Take an outside view
You may excel at providing comfort to those in need, but are you equally good at comforting yourself? Robert just realized that he isn’t. He has always been the person everyone turns to for comfort, and he rarely fails at helping others gain perspective on their situations. But as things have become stressful in his own life, it has been hard for him to gain a similar perspective. This Stoic exercise can help Robert—and the rest of us—gain equanimity through adopting a new perspective on our own troubles.
"It is in our power to discover the will of nature from those matters on which we have no difference of opinion. For example, when another man’s slave has broken the wine cup, we are very ready to say at once, ‘Such things must happen.’ Know then that when your own cup is broken, you ought to behave in the same way as when your neighbor’s was broken. Apply the same principle to higher matters. Is another’s child or wife dead? Not one of us but would say, ‘Such is the lot of man’; but when one’s own dies, straightaway one cries, ‘Alas! miserable am I.’ But we ought to remember what our feelings are when we hear it of another.”
Epictetus, Enchiridion, 26
This is Epictetus at his most frank. It would appear that the Stoic philosopher is encouraging us to adopt a purposely callous attitude toward our own bad luck by viewing it as though it had happened to someone else. From a modern perspective, this isn’t easy advice to swallow as we strive to cultivate empathy toward other people’s situations. In fact, the Stoics, including Epictetus, aren’t that callous—they were very clear that the goal of Stoic practice is not to turn us into lumbering robots incapable of emotional responses, because that would strip us of our humanity. As the Stoic philosopher Seneca writes to his friend Lucilius: “The first thing which philosophy undertakes to give is fellow-feeling with all men; in other words, sympathy and sociability.”1 If the Stoics promote this sense of shared feeling, what, then, is Epictetus trying to say?
To begin with, let’s talk about the difference between sympathy and empathy. Both words entered our vocabulary much later than the times of Epictetus: in 1579 and 1850, respectively. Interestingly, they both carry the Greek root pathos, meaning “emotion,” but they modify it in different directions. To have sympathy with another’s distress, according to Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, is to care for and feel sorry about another’s grief or misfortune. To empathize, by contrast, means that—to the extent possible—you share another’s experiences on an emotional level.
The Stoics suggest that we should cultivate sympathy more than empathy. Both modern psychology and philosophy provide some backing for this ancient insight. Yale University psychologist Paul Bloom2 and City University of New York philosopher Jesse Prinz3 have made compelling cases that empathy is ethically problematic because, as with all highly emotional responses, it is easy for others to manipulate. Empathy also tends to be disproportionate to the situation (we feel more empathy for people we know or see directly), and does not scale up (it is impossible to feel empathy for anonymous thousands or even millions of people, regardless of how deserving they are). By contrast, sympathy is informed by reason and is therefore more wide ranging. We can sympathize even with people we do not know, or whose specific situation we have never experienced, because we are able to recognize that similar situations would be distressing for us, and that it would be unjust both for us and for anyone else to have to suffer through them.
In a sense, then, what Epictetus is observing is that in the normal course of events we tend to self-empathize (“Alas! Miserable am I.”) while we sympathize with others (“Such is the lot of man.”). The difference stems from our capability for more balanced judgment when the event does not touch us directly. Attempting to rectify this imbalance does not make us callous; it simply makes us more reasonable.
Now let us turn this insight around to help ourselves and Robert, whom we met earlier. Once we recognize that helping our friends take a broader perspective on their troubles actually helps them cope with their situation, we can then accept and internalize the same insight and apply it to our own lives. Robert is able to aid his friends by helping them distance themselves from their natural and immediate emotional reactions. Reminding ourselves that difficult things happen—and not just to us—is comforting. We can start developing equanimity with respect to the things we don’t fully control. Likewise, we can be grateful when things go our way but not become too attached to them, as they can just as easily be taken away. And when tough things happen, we are able to find the courage to face them in the best way possible, because such is the human condition.