This chapter is about another set of misjudgments we commit at our own expense: undervaluing the present, undervaluing time generally, undervaluing other intangible goods, overvaluing ourselves, and misjudging others by seeing our flaws in them. The treatment of these problems next to one another isn’t inevitable. The second half of this chapter has little enough to do with the first. But the topics all involve mistakes of the mind that, unlike most of the errors the Stoics talk about in this book, do not involve desire or fear or pleasure or pain. Each is a kind of misjudgment about value.
Some teachings of the Stoics are found in other traditions as well. This chapter shows some prominent examples. One of them is appreciation of the present. The Stoics mean to correct our preoccupation with the past and future; they regard the time we pour into memories, hopes, and fears to be mostly ill-spent (though not always, as we shall see). They also regard us as unconscious of the value of time generally. We give it away lightly, and waste it with less alarm than we waste money, though time is more valuable in the end.
The Stoics’ analysis of time resembles their more general view of intangible costs and benefits, which this chapter will consider as well. We overrate money and undervalue time, just as we overrate material goods and the approval of others while undervaluing the gains we get by forgoing them. Stoics look at many things that way. When something bad seems to happen, it often has quiet compensations; exciting opportunities, to the contrary, tend to be costlier than they first seem once their consequences, visible and not, have all been noticed and weighed. Grasping all this helps the Stoic toward an even keel in both circumstances.
Our errors of valuation continue with respect to ourselves and others. We overlook faults in ourselves but find them easily in those around us. Recognizing this is an encouragement to forgiveness. What another has done that annoys you is probably no worse than what you have done on another day. But the point is also subtler: we condemn in others precisely what we detest but cannot see in ourselves; we project our faults onto them. So the Stoic works hard for self-knowledge and makes unhesitant confessions of weakness.
1. The present. The Stoics are sensitive to misjudgments about time. Later we will see various other ways that time may be wasted or misunderstood, but here we examine the first and simplest: neglect of the present.
There is a parallel between the Stoic analysis of our mistakes in judging time and our mistakes in judging material things. Chapter 5 discussed the difficulty of being satisfied with anything once it belongs to us. The present moment fails to satisfy in a similar way. We worry and plan in the same spirit that we crave the next acquisition; whatever we look forward to, whether it be the future or some new object, looks more appealing than it ever quite turns out to be once it arrives. The Stoic holds that satisfaction can better be found by making peace with what we have than by chasing what we don’t, and by paying attention to the present rather than by dwelling on the past and the future.
Some Stoic comments on this theme are of a general character, observing that the present moment is both elusive and all that really exists.
Present time is very short – so short, indeed, that for some it seems not to exist. It is always in motion, it flows and hurries on; it ceases to be before it arrives.
Keep this in mind, that each of us lives only this present and indivisible moment. Everything else has either already been lived or is uncertain.
Stoic reflections on the present are usually more practical, though. They seek to address the bad habit of burdening the mind with worry about the future. Part of the argument is that imaginings of the past and future are harder to bear than the present moment tends to be. The present is always tolerable.
Do not disturb yourself by imagining your whole life at once. Don’t always be thinking about what sufferings, and how many, might possibly befall you. Ask instead, in each present circumstance: “What is there about this that is unendurable and unbearable?” You will be embarrassed to answer.
Memory recalls the torments of fear, and foresight anticipates them. It is only the present that makes no one wretched.
Nothing is more pathetic than worry about the outcome of future events. How much time remains, and what it will be like – on these counts the troubled mind is vexed with fear that cannot be explained. How shall we escape this wallowing? There is only one way: if our life does not project forward, if it stays contained in itself. Those who worry about the future are failing to profit from the present.
Apart from the refuge the present moment provides from imagined troubles, it is the only place where actual living occurs. By spending our thoughts on the future, we fail to attend to what is happening now and so fail to live.
Think about individuals; consider men in general; there is not one whose life is not focused on tomorrow. What harm is there in that, you ask? Infinite harm. They are not really living. They are about to live.
Just as the same chain joins the prisoner and the guard, so do these two things, which are so dissimilar, keep pace with each other: fear follows hope. I do not find this surprising. Each is the mark of a mind in suspense, a mind troubled by awaiting the future. The principal cause of either hope or fear is that we do not adapt ourselves to the present, but send our thoughts far ahead. Thus foresight – the greatest blessing of the human condition – is turned into an evil.
We are never home; we are always elsewhere. Fear, desire, and hope push us toward the future; they rob us of feeling and concern for what is by distracting us with what will be, even when we will be no more.
Schopenhauer’s rendition of the Stoic point:
Those who strive and hope and live only in the future, always looking ahead and impatiently anticipating what is coming, as something which will make them happy when they get it, are, in spite of their very clever airs, exactly like those donkeys one sees in Italy, whose pace may be hurried by fixing a stick on their heads with a wisp of hay at the end of it; this is always just in front of them, and they keep on trying to get it. Such people are in a constant state of illusion as to their whole existence; they go on living ad interim, until at last they die.
Instead, therefore, of always thinking about our plans and anxiously looking to the future, or of giving ourselves up to regret for the past, we should never forget that the present is the only reality, the only certainty; that the future almost always turns out contrary to our expectations; that the past, too, was very different from what we suppose it to have been. But the past and the future are, on the whole, of less consequence than we think. Distance, which makes objects look small to the outward eye, makes them look big to the eye of thought. The present alone is true and actual; it is the only time which possesses full reality, and our existence lies in it exclusively.
2. Using the past. All this makes it sound as though the Stoic wants to live entirely in the present, but that is a bit too strong. Stoics do not think the future should be ignored or met without planning. They mean that we should pay attention to the present; and they mean that we should carefully make decisions about the future that belong to us, but then waste no energy wondering and worrying about what is to come. (See Chapter 2, Section 6.) As for the past, Seneca holds to the pragmatic strain of Stoicism – that is, deciding whether and how to do a thing (in this case, looking back) by considering how it helps toward a better state of mind. Compare these passages:
Two things we must therefore root out: fear of distress in the future and the memory of distress in the past. The one concerns me no longer. The other concerns me not yet.
The man who is only happy with present things sets narrow limits to his enjoyment. Both the future and the past can delight us – one in anticipation, the other in memory – but one is uncertain and may not happen, while the other cannot fail to have been. What madness it is, therefore, to lose our grip on that which is the surest thing of all!
In that last passage, from a letter on the subject of grief, Seneca is advising the bereaved to value their memories. So he does not say that recollection of the past should be avoided on principle. He discourages the recollection of the bad but encourages happy memories, for they help us. The Stoic goal is not just to see time accurately but to make good use of it – the past as well as the present. Plutarch had a similar recommendation about the benefits of memory.
That each of us keeps within ourselves the storerooms of tranquility and despondency – and that the wine-jars of good and evil are not stored up “in the abode of Zeus” but in our own spirits – the difference in our feelings makes clear. For the foolish overlook and neglect even the good things at hand, because their thoughts are always intent on the future; while the wise, by memory, make vivid to themselves even those things that are no more.
For more on Stoic uses of memory, see Chapter 9, Section 13.
3. Time. On a Stoic view, we fail to see the significance not only of the present moment but of time in general. Seneca thought that most of us are barely conscious of its passage.
It was just a moment ago that I sat, as a lad, in the school of the philosopher Sotion, just a moment ago that I began to argue cases in the courts, just a moment ago that I lost the desire to argue them, just a moment ago that I lost the ability. The swiftness of time is infinite – something that appears more clearly to people looking backwards. It escapes the notice of those focused on the present, so gentle is the passage of its headlong flight. Do you ask the reason? All bygone time is in the same place; it looks the same, it lies together. Everything falls into the same abyss.
Sotion was a philosopher originally from Alexandria, and (along with Attalus) another of Seneca’s early teachers. He was an instructor in the school of Sextius, which blended Stoic and Pythagorean thought.
Even as conversation or reading or deep thought on some subject beguiles travelers, and they find that they have reached the end of their journey before realizing that they were approaching it, just so with this unceasing and most swift journey of life, which we make at the same pace whether waking or sleeping; those who are preoccupied become aware of it only at the end.
Inattention to time leads to waste of it. To make the point, Seneca introduces a favorite theme: comparisons of time to material wealth.
Life as we receive it is not short, but we make it so; nor do we have any lack of it, but we are wasteful of it. Just as great and princely wealth is scattered in a moment when it comes into the hands of a bad owner – while wealth, however limited, if it is entrusted to a good guardian, increases with use – so our life is amply long for him who orders it properly.
Johnson’s variation:
An Italian philosopher expressed in his motto, that time was his estate; an estate, indeed, which will produce nothing without cultivation, but will always abundantly repay the labors of industry, and satisfy the most extensive desires, if no part of it be suffered to lie waste by negligence, to be overrun with noxious plants, or laid out for show rather than for use.
The Italian philosopher Johnson mentions was Girolamo Cardano (1501–1576), who had the phrase Johnson mentions (Tempus ager meus) inscribed over the door to his library.
Seneca viewed time as the most valuable thing we own – really the only thing. Yet we guard it with none of the care we apply to our property. To lose some cash is alarming to anyone; to lose some time is alarming to few.
None will be found willing to distribute their money to others; but among how many others do each of us distribute our lives! Men are tight-fisted in guarding their fortunes, but extravagant when it comes to wasting time – the one thing about which it is right to be greedy.
Our stupidity can be seen by this, that we only think we have bought those things for which we pay cash, while we regard as free those things for which we expend our very selves. Things that we would never be willing to buy if we had to give our house in exchange, or some attractive and productive estate, we are fully prepared to attain at the cost of anxiety, danger, lost honor, lost freedom, and lost time – for we treat nothing as cheaper than ourselves.
All things, Lucilius, belong to others; only our time is our own. Nature has put us in possession of this one fleeting and uncertain property, from which anyone who wishes can eject us. And so great is the stupidity of mortals, that when they have obtained the cheapest and most unimportant things, easily replaced, they agree to be charged for them; yet no one considers himself indebted if he has taken up our time – though this is the one thing that even a grateful debtor cannot repay.
Seneca offered some mental exercises to help make the value of time more vivid. If we fail to grasp that time is more important than money, for example, we might compare the distress typically felt by those who are running out of each.
No one values time; everyone spends it extravagantly, as if it were free. But see how these same people clasp the knees of physicians if they fall ill and the danger of death draws nearer; see how ready they are, if threatened with capital punishment, to spend all that they have to live longer!
If each of us could have the number of our future years set before us, as we can with the years that have passed, how alarmed we would be, and how sparing of them, if we saw only a few remaining! And while it is easy to manage something when the amount you have is known, even if it is small, you must guard what you have more carefully if you don’t know when it may give out.
These views lead to particular alarm at the prospect of one’s time being lightly seized by another.
I am often amazed when I see some nagging others for their time, and those who are asked so indulgent. Each of them is looking at the object for which the time is sought, neither of them at the time itself, as if nothing were being asked and nothing given.
4. Invisible prices, intangible benefits. Stoicism calls for attention to the invisible and overlooked half of an equation: the wealth gained not by having money but by being indifferent to it, the destitution created by giving away our time with less concern than our property, and other forms of intangible gain and loss. This is a recurrent theme in Epictetus.
Keep this thought close, whenever you lose some external thing: what are you getting in exchange? And if what you have received is more valuable, never say “I have suffered a loss” – not if you get a horse in place of an ass, or a cow in place of a sheep, or a good deed in place of a little money, or cultured leisure in place of pointless chatter, or self-respect in place of obscenity.
Is a little oil spilled, is a little wine stolen? Say “this is the price of equanimity, this is the price of peace of mind” – for nothing comes free.
You have not been invited to someone’s dinner party? You did not give the host the price he charges for the dinner. He sells it for praise, he sells it for personal attention…. So don’t you have anything in place of the dinner? Certainly you do: not to have praised the fellow you did not want to praise, and not to have put up with the people at his door.
The idea can be turned from oneself toward others. Before resenting or envying them, one should consider the prices that they paid for what they have.
This is why I lost my lamp: because a thief was better than I am at staying awake. But he bought the lamp at a high price. In return he became a thief, he became untrustworthy, he became an animal. This seemed to him a good bargain!
This style of inquiry is not limited to the plain wrongdoing of the thief. It applies to all the choices people make. Holders of office are a frequent subject of this kind of Stoic analysis.
When you see someone often wearing the robe of office, or someone whose name is famous in the Forum, do not be envious; those things are bought at the cost of one’s life.
Whenever you see another man holding office, set against this the fact that you have no need to hold office. If someone else is wealthy, see what you have instead. For if you have nothing instead, you are miserable; while if in place of wealth you have no need of wealth, know that you possess something more than he does, and much greater in value.
I have good manners, he has a governorship; he has the rank of general, I have self-respect.
So whenever we hear someone say that our affairs are insignificant and woefully minor because we are not consuls or governors, we may reply, “Our affairs are splendid and our life is enviable: we do not beg, or carry burdens, or flatter.”
Again, Seneca had a knack for visual comparisons to bring a point to life – here, the cost of things that usually seem free.
So in all our plans and activities, let us do just what we are accustomed to do when we approach a sidewalk vendor who is selling some merchandise or other: let’s see what it will cost to get this thing we have our hearts set on. The thing for which nothing is paid often comes at the highest price. I can show you many things whose pursuit and acquisition has cost us our freedom. We would belong to ourselves if these things did not belong to us.
Imagine the following scene: Fortune is holding games, and over this mob of humanity she is shaking out honors, riches, influence. Some of these trinkets have been torn in the hands of people trying to grab them, some shared by a treacherous partnership, some caught with great injury to those who get them. Some fell to people doing other things entirely; some were dropped because people were trying too hard to catch them, and knocked away from those snatching at them greedily. But even among those to whom this booty has luckily fallen, there is no one whose joy in it has lasted until the next day. So it is that the wise run from the theater as soon as they see the trinkets being brought in. They know that these small things come at a high price.
A typical Stoic conclusion:
If you set a high value on liberty, you must set a low value on everything else.
A relevant anecdote of Diogenes the Cynic, narrated by Diogenes Lærtius (no relation):
Once Diogenes, who was washing vegetables, jeered [Aristippus] as he passed by, and said, “If you had learned to eat these vegetables, you would not have been a slave in the palace of a tyrant.” But Aristippus replied, “And you, if you had known how to behave among men, would not have been washing vegetables.”
In retellings since, the sequence in that anecdote is often reversed and given a more Stoic flavor: Aristippus taunts Diogenes that he would not have to live on lentils if he would learn to flatter the king. Diogenes replies that Aristippus would not have to flatter the king if he had learned to live on lentils.
Guillaume du Vair offered a way to express our current point: before envying others, ask whether you would accept an offer to pay what they did to get what they have.
I find that most of the time we envy others for their wealth, honor, and privilege; but if someone were to say to us, “You can have the same amount that they have for the same price,” we would not want it. For in order to have these things that they do, we must flatter, we must endure insult and injury, we must give up our freedoms.
5. Self-knowledge; humility. We turn to another family of self-deceptions: those involving our own qualities. Stoicism, as we have seen at many points, is a humble philosophy. It starts with candid assessment of one’s own flaws and foolishness. As the Stoic sees it, a confession of weakness is not weakness; it is the way to wisdom.
The beginning of philosophy – at least for those who take hold of it in the right way, and through the front door – is an awareness of one’s own weakness and incapacity when it comes to the most important things.
Epicurus expressed the idea as a maxim:
The knowledge of error is the beginning of deliverance.
Seneca turned the point into a method: prosecution of the self by the self.
He who does not know he is at fault does not wish to be corrected: you must catch yourself in the wrong before you can do better. Some people boast of their faults; when they count their vices as if they were virtues, do you think they intend any remedy? Therefore establish your own guilt as far as you can. Investigate yourself; play the part of the prosecutor, then of the judge, only then of the advocate. Offend yourself sometimes.
Johnson’s version of self-prosecution:
The learned, the judicious, the pious Boerhaave relates, that he never saw a criminal dragged to execution without asking himself, “Who knows whether this man is not less culpable than me?” On the days when the prisons of this city are emptied into the grave, let every spectator of the dreadful procession put the same question to his own heart…. For, who can congratulate himself upon a life passed without some act more mischievous to the peace or prosperity of others, than the theft of a piece of money?
Herman Boerhaave (1668–1738) was a Dutch scientist and philosopher, and is often considered a founder of modern medicine.
6. Love of self. Against the efforts at self-examination just endorsed, Stoics identify a countervailing force: love of oneself. We humans habitually overrate ourselves and overlook or excuse our own shortcomings.
The faults of others we keep before our eyes, our own behind our back.
Every man overrates the offense of his companions, but extenuates his own.
No weakness of the human mind has more frequently incurred animadversion than the negligence with which men overlook their own faults, however flagrant, and the easiness with which they pardon them, however frequently repeated.
These tendencies can be reduced to more particular mistakes they cause us to commit, such as making self-serving excuses and assignments of blame.
None of us recognizes that we ourselves are greedy or covetous. But while the blind at least ask for a guide, we wander around without one, saying “I’m not ambitious, but there’s no other way to live in Rome. I’m not extravagant, but the city itself requires a significant outlay. It’s not my fault that I’m irritable, that I haven’t yet decided on a settled way of life – that’s just my youth.” Why do we fool ourselves? Our evil is not on the outside, it is within us, it is seated in our vitals – and it is that much harder to attain health when we do not know we are sick.
Or using double standards.
“Why, then, are we upset by the wrongs done to us by our enemies?” Because we did not expect them, or at least not wrongs so serious. This is the result of undue love of self; we think we should remain untouched even by our enemies. Each of us has within himself the royal mindset: license for what he does, but not for what is done to him.
Let us put ourselves in the place of the person with whom we are angry; from that point of view, we see that our anger comes from an unwarranted opinion of ourselves. We are unwilling to bear what we ourselves would have been willing to inflict.
Or being susceptible to flattery.
Our principal hindrance is that we are so easily satisfied with ourselves. If we come across someone who says that we are good men, that we are wise, that we are upright, we acknowledge the accuracy of the description. We are not content with moderate praise: whatever shameless flattery heaps upon us, we accept as our due. We agree with those who maintain that we are the best and wisest of all, though we know they are greatly given to lying.
If you stroke a cat, it will purr; and, as inevitably, if you praise a man, a sweet expression of delight will appear on his face; and even though the praise is a palpable lie, it will be welcome, if the matter is one on which he prides himself.
On the stubbornness of the tendency:
Why does no one confess his faults? Because he is still in their power. You tell your dreams when you are awake; to confess your faults is the mark of a sound mind.
Montaigne made a similar point about why it is so hard to catch our own misjudgments. Our limited capacities prevent us from perceiving our limited capacities.
It is commonly said that good sense is the gift Nature has distributed most fairly among us, for there is no one who is unsatisfied with the share he has been allotted – and isn’t that reasonable enough? For whoever saw beyond this would see beyond his sight. I think my opinions are good and sound, but who does not think the same of his own?
The descendants of the Stoics have offered some additional theories to account for the trouble we have seeing our own flaws clearly. Another of Montaigne’s was that we look at ourselves in the idealized way that people see anyone with whom they are in love.
There is another variety of glory, which is the exaggerated opinion that we have of our own worth. We flatter ourselves with careless affection, and it shows us to ourselves other than as we are. It is like the passionate love that lends beauty and grace to whatever subject it embraces, and makes those who are caught up in it, by their disturbed and disordered judgments, regard what they love as other and more perfect than it is.
Johnson suggested a different mechanism – that we imagine others don’t see what we know to be true about ourselves.
Self-love is often rather arrogant than blind; it does not hide our faults from ourselves, but persuades us that they escape the notice of others, and disposes us to resent censures lest we should confess them to be just. We are secretly conscious of defects and vices, which we hope to conceal from the public eye, and please ourselves with innumerable impostures, by which, in reality, nobody is deceived.
Smith had a different view still: self-knowledge is unbearably painful, so we look the other way.
It is so disagreeable to think ill of ourselves, that we often purposely turn away our view from those circumstances which might render that judgment unfavorable. He is a bold surgeon, they say, whose hand does not tremble when he performs an operation upon his own person; and he is often equally bold who does not hesitate to pull off the mysterious veil of self-delusion, which covers from his view the deformities of his own conduct…. This self-deceit, this fatal weakness of mankind, is the source of half the disorders of human life. If we saw ourselves in the light in which others see us, or in which they would see us if they knew all, a reformation would generally be unavoidable. We could not otherwise endure the sight.
7. Projection. An exaggerated love of self often comes with sensitivity to offense given by others and flaws found in them. The Stoics have a particular interest in one feature of this last tendency: the inclination to fault others for what is at least as objectionable in ourselves. Sometimes the point is just that we criticize people without reflecting on what similar faults we have within us. If we don’t do the same things they do, we should admit that we have the capacity for it, or that we do other things as bad or worse.
Whenever you take offense at someone else’s fault, turn immediately to find the fault most similar in yourself – such as attachment to money, or pleasure, or reputation, or whatever it might be. In seeing this, you will quickly forget your anger; it will occur to you that he was forced to act that way. For what else could he do?
If anyone will recall how often he himself has fallen under undeserved suspicion, how many of his good services chance has clothed with the appearance of wrongdoing, how many people he once hated and learned to love, he will be able to avoid all hasty anger, particularly if as each offence occurs he will first say to himself in silence: “I myself have also been guilty of this.” But where will you find such a fair-minded judge?
“That man has already injured me, but I have not yet injured him.” But perhaps you have already harmed, perhaps you will someday harm, someone else. Do not count only this hour or this day; consider the whole character of your mind. Even if you have done no evil, you are capable of it.
But sometimes the problem is more insidious. It is not just that we criticize others without reflecting on our own culpabilities. It is that we see in others precisely those things that we find most uncomfortable in ourselves. In a word, we engage in projection.
The strictest enforcer of loyalty is the traitor, the punisher of falsehood is also a perjurer, and the unscrupulous lawyer deeply resents an indictment brought against himself.
We are all inconsiderate and unthinking, all untrustworthy, complaining, ambitious – why hide the universal sore in softer words? – we are all wicked. Each of us will find inside ourselves whatever fault we rebuke in another…. And so let us be more kindly toward one another; being wicked, we live among the wicked. Only one thing can bring us peace – a compact of mutual good nature.
Plutarch:
Poverty of thought, emptiness of phrase, an offensive bearing, fluttering excitement combined with a vulgar delight at commendation, and the like, are more apparent to us in others when we are listening than in ourselves when we are speakers. So we ought to transfer our scrutiny from the speaker to ourselves, and examine whether we unconsciously commit such mistakes…. Everyone ought to be ready ever to repeat to himself, as he observes the faults of others, the utterance of Plato, “Am I not possibly like them?”
Montaigne describes this sort of projection as “the most universal and common error of mankind.” He continues:
We mock ourselves a hundred times a day when we mock our neighbors; we detest in others the defects that are more evident in us, and wonder at them with a marvelous absence of awareness and shame.
We every day and every hour say things about others that we might more properly say about ourselves, if only we knew how to turn our observation on ourselves as skillfully as we extend it toward them.
Johnson again had an idea about the source of this habit. Sometimes we are suspicious of others precisely because we deserve suspicion ourselves, and assume that others are the same.
We can form our opinions of that which we know not, only by placing it in comparison with something that we know; whoever, therefore, is over-run with suspicion, and detects artifice and stratagem in every proposal, must either have learned by experience or observation the wickedness of mankind, and been taught to avoid fraud by having often suffered or seen treachery, or he must derive his judgment from the consciousness of his own disposition, and impute to others the same inclinations, which he feels predominant in himself.
Schopenhauer thought that we have trouble seeing our vices because we live in the midst of them. Our criticisms of others therefore have a side benefit. They provide an unintentional glimpse at what is ugliest within us.
A man bears the weight of his own body without knowing it, but he soon feels the weight of any other, if he tries to move it; in the same way, a man can see other people’s shortcomings and vices, but he is blind to his own. This arrangement has one advantage: it turns other people into a kind of mirror, in which a man can see clearly everything that is vicious, faulty, ill-bred and loathsome in his own nature; only it is generally the old story of the dog barking at its own image; it is himself that he sees and not another dog, as he fancies.