Stoicism connotes, to many people today, “unfeeling.” Yet sometimes the Stoics not only welcome feeling but seek it. To borrow two passages we will meet in Chapter 11:
This is the first promise that philosophy holds out to us: fellow-feeling, humanity, sociability.
I should not be unfeeling like a statue; I should care for my relationships both natural and acquired – as a pious man, a son, a brother, a father, a citizen.
Or recall Seneca’s instruction at the end of Chapter 4 to “Snatch the pleasures your children bring, let your children in turn find delight in you, and drain joy to the dregs without delay.” These are not the words of one who is hostile to feeling. Yet the Stoics do seek to avoid some varieties of it, especially those that take a form, or rise to a level, that we might call emotion. So which sorts of feeling are welcomed by the Stoics, and how much is too much?
In keeping with the approach of this book, some basic answers can be sketched without recounting the full theoretical apparatus that the Romans and especially the Greeks developed. First, it helps to view the Stoics not as against feeling or emotion (we will return to the distinction in a moment) but as in favor of seeing the world accurately, living by reason, and staying detached from externals. Feelings and emotions – any inner states – are unwanted to the extent that they interfere with those aims. Sometimes they do. Someone who is furiously angry is probably not making clear judgments, and an ill-advised attachment is probably the basis of the fury. The fellow-feeling Seneca endorses above is different because it does not unseat reason and does not involve an illusion or an attachment to any external. Those are the best measures of whether a feeling is more than a Stoic would welcome: has the happiness of whoever has the feeling come to depend on the subject of it? Does the feeling blur the vision, causing the holder of it to make misjudgments? If these questions can be answered in the negative, there is no need to disparage a state of feeling, or any similar state, on Stoic grounds.
It is useful to have simple words to refer to the distinction just explained – between a state of inner upheaval that involves attachment to externals or that threatens the priority of reason, and a state that doesn’t have those properties. We do not have ready-made English terms for that difference. For the sake of convenience, I will sometimes refer to the first state as an emotion and the second as a (mere) feeling. There are modern definitions of “emotion” and “feeling” to which this usage does not conform; I don’t mean to controvert those other definitions or create confusion about them. The words are only used here as rough placeholders for the practical difference sketched above, which is important to the Stoics.
Next, the Stoics, at least the late ones (this chapter belongs mostly to Seneca), are more realistic than their reputation sometimes suggests. Seneca does not begrudge surges of feeling – tears, trembling, lusts – so long as reason is able to get them under control. They are considered physical impulses. And he accepts that grief is inevitable after a loss; he dismisses doubts on that point as quickly as any non-Stoic would. The Stoic’s aim, as he sees it, is to avoid making natural grief worse by talking to ourselves unhelpfully about it and taking our cues from convention. These are humane counsels. If they would cause some to say that Seneca was an insufficiently pure Stoic, let us be content with the philosophy in its impure form.
An essay in Chapter 13 provides some further discussion of these themes. It suggests that the Stoic tries to respond to events in a manner similar to what would be expected of anyone after long experience with them – the kind of response you might have after encountering the occasion for it a thousand times. The result is not an uncaring or unfeeling attitude, though it will probably not involve much emotion. It is the posture of the veteran.
This chapter starts with some Stoic analysis of emotions in general, then turns to three of them in particular: fear, anger, and grief. Stoicism offers ways of coping with all three, and those methods can be carried over easily enough to emotions of other kinds.
1. Inevitabilities. The Stoic is sometimes caricatured as denying a place for emotion in human experience. We therefore might start by showing what place Seneca does concede for them. First, some involuntary reactions can’t be helped.
There are certain things, Lucilius, that no courage can avoid; nature reminds courage of its own mortality. And so the courageous man will frown at sad things; he will be startled by a sudden occurrence; he will feel dizzy if, standing at the brink, he looks down from the precipice. This is not fear, but a natural feeling not to be overcome by reason.
Whatever is implanted and inborn can be reduced with practice but not overcome. Some of those who appear in public most often will break into a sweat, just as if they were tired and overheated; some tremble in the knees when they are about to give a speech; in some cases teeth chatter, tongues falter, lips quiver. Neither training nor experience will ever get rid of these things. Rather, Nature is exerting its strength to admonish even the strongest among us – each through his particular flaw.
Nor do the Stoics believe that the soul of their sage can resist visions and imaginings when they first surprise him. Rather, they concede that it is in his nature to react to a loud noise from the sky or from a collapsing building (for example) by turning pale and tense; and likewise for all other emotions, provided his judgment remains sound and intact, that the seat of his reason does not suffer any damage or change, and that he does not give consent to his fear and pain.
Seneca also acknowledges that larger forms of feeling sometimes will not be denied no matter what we may think about them. Grief is like this, and we will return to it in more detail later in the chapter. But the basic goal of the Stoic is to make such reactions no worse by the way we think about them, or by the way that others encourage us to think.
Whenever you are surrounded by people trying to convince you that you are unhappy, consider not what you hear them say but what you yourself feel.
Now, am I urging you to be hard-hearted, do I ask that you betray no emotion at the funeral, do I refuse to let your spirit even be touched? Not at all. It would be barbarous, not courageous, to watch the burial rites of one’s own – with the same eyes that watched them while living – and not be moved as one’s family is first torn apart. Suppose I did forbid it: some things have rights of their own. Tears fall even from those trying to hold them back; being shed, they lift the spirit. What, then, shall we do? Let us allow them to fall, but not order them to do so; let there be as much weeping as emotion may produce, not as much as imitation may demand. Let us add nothing to grief, nor enlarge it to match the example of someone else.
Stoicism offers taxonomies to describe an emotion’s development, and they can be hard to keep straight. The most important practical point to understand, however, is just the larger Stoic goal: to make reason the basis for one’s choices, actions, and sense of equilibrium, and to maintain a detachment from externals.
An emotion, then, does not consist in being moved by the appearances of things, but in surrendering to them and following up this casual impulse. For if anyone supposes that turning pale, bursting into tears, sexual arousal, deep sighs, flashing eyes, and anything of that sort are a sign of emotion and mental state, he is mistaken and does not understand that these are merely bodily impulses…. A man thinks himself injured, wants to be revenged, and then – being dissuaded for some reason – he quickly calms down again. I don’t call this anger, but a mental impulse yielding to reason. Anger is that which overleaps reason and carries it away.
2. Fear. We turn to specific emotions, and will treat fear as one of them. It qualifies under the definition of this chapter, as it is a state of feeling that sometimes interferes with reason and judgment. The Stoic technique is now familiar: identify the foolishness in a certain state of mind or way of reacting to the world, then suggest rational ways to reform it. The trouble with fear, first, is that it multiplies our problems. If something will be bad when it arrives later, we increase its effects when we pull them into the present by fearing them. Why suffer twice?
If foolishness fears some evil, it is burdened by the anticipation of it, just as if the evil had already come. What it fears lest it suffer, it suffers already through fear…. What then is more insane than to be tortured by things yet to be – not to save your strength for actual suffering, but to summon and accelerate your wretchedness? You should put it off if you cannot be rid of it.
And fear does more than bring misfortunes forward. It tends to overdraw them.
There are more things, Lucilius, that frighten us than affect us; we suffer more often in conjecture than in reality…. We magnify our sorrow, or we imagine it, or we get ahead of it.
In addition to causing us to endure twice, or many times, what might have been endured once, fear spoils the enjoyment of the present. The pain of whatever is coming is not here yet, so we can’t feel it unless we impose it on ourselves by thinking about it. As discussed in the previous chapter, meanwhile, what is here is probably bearable.
It is ruinous when a mind is worried about the future, wretched before its wretchedness begins, anxious that it may forever hold on to the things that bring it pleasure. For such a mind will never be at rest, and in awaiting the future it loses sight of what it might have enjoyed in the present. The fear of losing a thing is as bad as regret at having lost it.
Bygone things and things yet to be are both absent; we feel neither of them. And there is no pain except from what you feel.
Fear also makes us worse off by causing us to think and do foolish and cowardly things.
Well, then, we act like deer. When they are frightened and flee the feathers that the hunters are waving at them, where do they turn, toward what place of safety do they retreat? Into the nets. They are destroyed by confusing what should be regarded with fear with what might be regarded with confidence.
Montaigne recounted a long series of similar disasters involving people whose fears drove them into error and disgrace. His conclusion:
What I fear the most is fear.
Finally, fear and other emotions tend to accumulate once they get going. That is why Seneca is a skeptic about the possibility of indulging emotions moderately.
If reason prevails, the emotions will not even get started; while if they begin in defiance of reason, they will continue in defiance of reason. It is easier to stop their beginnings than to control them once they gather force. This “moderation” is therefore deceptive and useless: we should regard it in the same light as if someone should recommend being “moderately insane” or “moderately sick.”
Stoicism thus regards fear as akin to a sickness or form of enslavement. The conquest of it is a great priority for the philosopher.
Even when there is nothing wrong, nor anything sure to go wrong in the future, most mortals exist in a fever of anxiety.
No one who is afraid or distressed or troubled is free; and whoever is released from distress and fear and trouble, is in the same way released from slavery.
3. Antidotes to fear; rational scrutiny. From a Stoic perspective, fears are opinions about what is to come. Those opinions can be reduced to a series of things that the fearful person must believe, even if they aren’t conscious or articulate – a belief that a certain thing is going to happen, that it is going to be terrible, that it is worth getting upset about now. The Stoics regard most such propositions as mistaken, and would defeat fear by dismantling them. First, fearful things should be examined directly, and their realism severely tested.
We do not disprove and overthrow by argument the things that cause our fear; we do not examine into them; we tremble and retreat just like soldiers who have abandoned their camp because of a dust-cloud raised by stampeding cattle, or who are thrown into a panic by the spreading of some rumor of unknown veracity. And somehow or other it is the false report that disturbs us most. For truth has its own definite boundaries, but that which arises from uncertainty is delivered over to guesswork and the license of a mind in terror.
And if rational scrutiny doesn’t dissolve fears, we can adjust our standard of proof until it does; Seneca invites us to fix the game in our favor. We might as well, because the adversary doesn’t fight fair, either. It’s another case of questionable philosophy but good psychology.
Weigh your hopes against your fears. When everything is uncertain, favor your own side: believe what you prefer. If fear obtains more votes, bend more the other way nevertheless and stop troubling yourself.
4. Don’t borrow trouble. A next line of response to a fear: the feared thing might not happen. We often fail to discount enough for this possibility. Since whatever is feared may not come, we are foolish to agonize about it. Rather than causing us to suffer twice when we might have suffered once, the fear can cause us to suffer once when we need not have suffered at all.
The things that terrify you, as if they were about to happen, may never come; certainly they have not come yet. Some things torment us more than they should, some before they should, some when they should not torment us at all.
It is likely that some bad thing will happen in the future, but it is not happening now. How often has the unexpected happened! How often has the expected never come to pass! … Many things may intervene that will cause an impending or present danger to stop, or come to an end, or pass over to threaten someone else. A fire has opened up a means of escape; a disaster has let some men down gently; the sword has sometimes been withdrawn from the very throat; men have survived their executioners. Even ill fate has its quirks. Perhaps it will be, perhaps it will not be; meanwhile it is not.
When Seneca urged this line of thought, he said that he wasn’t speaking as a Stoic. The upshot nevertheless fits comfortably among his other ideas. Still, it is one of the points in this book that the purist may regard as a teaching of a Stoic rather than as a Stoic teaching.
Only those evils which are sure to come at a definite date have any right to disturb us; and how few there are which fulfill this description. For evils are of two kinds; either they are possible only, at most probable; or they are inevitable. Even in the case of evils which are sure to happen, the time at which they will happen is uncertain. A man who is always preparing for either class of evil will not have a moment of peace left him. So, if we are not to lose all comfort in life through the fear of evils, some of which are uncertain in themselves, and others, in the time at which they will occur, we should look upon the one kind as never likely to happen, and the other as not likely to happen very soon.
5. And what if it does? Suppose, finally, that your fears do end up being realized. Maybe they are not so bad after all if looked at realistically; or their ultimate consequences may be harder to judge than they seem. In any event, you will deal with them by use of the same resources that allow you to cope here and now.
I will conduct you to peace of mind by another route: if you would put off all worry, assume that what you fear may happen will certainly happen. Whatever the evil may be, measure it in your own mind, and estimate the amount of your fear. You will soon understand that what you fear is either not great or not of long duration.
Let someone else say, “Perhaps the worst will not happen.” You say, “And what if it does? Let us see who wins. Perhaps it is happening for my benefit, and such a death will dignify my life.” The hemlock made Socrates great. Pry from his hand Cato’s sword – the vindicator of his freedom – and you take away the greater part of his glory.
This theme – ways in which things that we fear sometimes turn out to be for the best – is taken up in more detail in Chapter 10, Section 8.
Do not let things still in the future disturb you. For you will come to them, if need be, carrying the same reason you now employ when dealing with things in the present.
6. Anger. This is the passion that Seneca discusses most extensively. On the dangers and costs of anger:
If you will look at the effects of anger, and at the harm it has done, no plague has been more costly to mankind. You will see slaughters and poisonings, the mutual vileness of litigants, the downfall of cities and the destruction of entire nations; princes sold into slavery at auction, houses put to the torch, fires not confined within city walls but vast stretches of countryside aglow with enemy flame.
Reason considers nothing but the question at issue; anger is moved by trifling things that lie outside the case. An overconfident demeanor, a voice too loud, unrestrained speech, overrefined attire, over-solicitous advocacy, popularity with the public – anger is inflamed by all of them. Many times it will condemn the accused because it hates his lawyer; even if the truth is piled up before its very eyes, it loves error and upholds it; it refuses to be convinced, and counts persistence in what is wrongly begun to be more honorable than penitence.
Great anger ends in madness, and therefore anger is to be avoided – for the sake not of moderation but of sanity.
Anger may have been of special interest to Seneca because its destructive potential was on such lavish display during his times. He writes, for example, of the wrath of Vedius Pollio. When angry with his slaves, Vedius fed them to his lampreys – a species of toothed, eel-like, bloodsucking fish that was a popular delicacy in Rome (we met them in passing in Chapter 5). The emperor Augustus was a guest when one of Vedius’s slaves was ordered to be killed in this way for breaking a crystal cup. According to Seneca, Augustus ordered that the slave’s life be spared and that Vedius’s other cups be broken in front of him. Seneca, if he were here to do so, might cite the decline in the incidence of this sort of problem as some further evidence that the extent and expression of our anger are up to us.
7. Anger as opinion. Anger provides, indeed, a good example of the necessary role of opinion, or judgment, in forming an emotion. Though anger may take on a life of its own, it begins and is supported by beliefs we hold about the subject of it. One can see this by thinking of any real case of anger and observing how the emotion tends to change or vanish if it is found to have been based on mistaken beliefs. You think that your goods have been carelessly damaged; they turn out to have been someone else’s. You thought something bad was done to you on purpose; you discover that it was an honest mistake. The feelings follow the facts, or rather your thoughts about the facts. The Stoic views all cases of anger as open to this kind of analysis. Even if the factual details that support the anger aren’t wrong in the ways just described, the anger still has to depend on other beliefs, too, that are certainly mistaken from a Stoic standpoint – such as a belief that the subject is worth getting angry about.
There can be no doubt that anger is aroused by the impression that we have been wronged. The question, however, is whether anger follows immediately from that impression and springs up without assistance from the mind, or whether it is aroused only with the mind’s cooperation. Our opinion is that it ventures nothing by itself, but acts only with the approval of the mind. For to form the impression of having received an injury and to want to avenge it, and then to couple together the two propositions that one ought not to have been wronged and that one ought to be avenged – this is not a mere impulse of the mind acting without our volition.
So a first Stoic remedy for anger, as for other such problems, is a return to Chapter 1: recognize it as an opinion and let it go.
Still you are indignant and complain, and you don’t understand that in all the evils to which you refer, there is really only one – that you are indignant and complain.
Nothing is heavy if we take it lightly; nothing need provoke anger if one does not add one’s anger to it.
It is not what men do that disturbs us (for those acts are matters of their own control and reasoning), but our opinions of what they do. Take away those opinions – dismiss your judgment that this is something terrible – and your anger goes away as well.
8. Uses of humor. But as we have seen at various earlier points in the book, the Stoics understand that inner disturbances aren’t always possible to get rid of in that way. So we have here the same pattern seen in Chapter 7, Section 8 (on the handling of insults, a topic closely related to our current one): beyond treating anger as an opinion to be dropped, the Stoics offer other remedies as well – ways to redirect the mind and substitute better ideas for unproductive ones. One such response to anger is to make light of its cause. A Stoic needs a good sense of humor.
We should bring ourselves to see all the vices of the crowd not as hateful but as ridiculous; and we should imitate Democritus rather than Heraclitus. For the latter, every time he went out into public, used to weep; the former used to laugh. One saw everything we do as wretchedness, the other as absurdity. Things should be made light of, and taken more easily: it is more civilized to laugh at life than to bewail it.
Democritus and Heraclitus were pre-Socratic Greek philosophers. Heraclitus died early in the 5th century BC, and Democritus was born soon afterwards. Democritus became known as the laughing philosopher for finding the comic side of all things, Heraclitus as the weeping philosopher for his darker view. The pairing of the two in this way evidently was an invention of Sotion, one of Seneca’s teachers from childhood.
It should be noted that Stoicism doesn’t commend laughter at the expense of others.
It is better to accept common behavior and human vices calmly, without bursting into either laughter or tears; for to be hurt by the sufferings of others is to be forever miserable, while to enjoy the sufferings of others is an inhuman pleasure.
It is good humor at the expense of oneself, and about the affronts one receives, that is fully endorsed by the Stoic. Self-effacing humor disarms an opponent and makes the user of it a less appealing target of attack. (See Chapter 7, Section 11.) Humor has other uses that the Stoics recognize as well; one who manages to be amused by an attack rises above it and diminishes the attacker. Above all, however – and most to our point – humor can cause anger to dissolve.
Let us look at the examples of those whose forbearance we praise – such as Socrates, who took in good humor the public jests made at his expense, seen on stage in the comedies, no less than when his wife Xanthippe had doused him with the chamber pot. Antisthenes was taunted with the fact that his mother was a barbarian, being a Thracian; he answered that even the mother of the gods came from Mount Ida [in Crete].
There are various ways in which anger can be checked. Many things can be turned into a game and a joke. They say that when Socrates once received a blow on the head, he merely said that it was too bad that a man could not tell when he ought to go out wearing a helmet. What matters is not how offense is given but how it is received.
As Cato was arguing a case, Lentulus – that violent partisan, remembered by our fathers – gathered as much thick saliva as he could and spat right in the middle of Cato’s forehead. Cato wiped off his face and said, “I’ll assure everyone, Lentulus, that they’re wrong when they say that you’re not worth spit.”
This last passage involves a pun that does not translate well literally. Cato really told Lentulus that they were wrong to say he had no mouth; it was a play on words in Latin. I’ve sought to suggest something equivalent in English.
Some are offended if a hairdresser jostles them; they see an insult in the surliness of a doorkeeper, the arrogance of an attendant, the haughtiness of a valet. What laughter such things should draw! With what satisfaction should your mind be filled when you contrast your own peace of mind with the unrest into which others blunder!
Believe me, these things that incense us not a little are little things, like the trifles that drive children to quarrels and blows. Not one of them, though we take them so tragically, is a serious matter; not one is important. That is where your anger and madness come from, I tell you – the fact that you attach such value to trifles.
9. Uses of delay. Some simple Stoic advice: wait before acting when angry. The first essay in Chapter 13 will suggest that Stoicism is a shortcut to the frame of mind created naturally by the passage of time. Here the point is the reverse: those who can’t maintain an even temper by philosophical effort can get there by letting some time go by.
The best corrective of anger lies in delay. Ask this concession from anger at the outset, not in order that it may pardon, but in order that it may judge. Its first assaults are heavy; it will leave off if it waits. And do not try to destroy it all at once; attacked piecemeal, it will be conquered completely.
Who among us is so harsh as to whip and chastise a slave because five or ten days ago he burned the food, or knocked over the table, or was slow to come when called? And yet these are the very things that – when they have just happened and are fresh in our minds – upset us and make us harsh and implacable. For just like bodies seen through a fog, so things seen through a mist of rage appear greater than they are.
10. Avoiding causes for anger. Here is more Stoic pragmatism. A good way to avoid anger is to avoid situations where it is likely to be aroused, or at least to avoid seeking them out in ways that we might find tempting. Seneca observes that people sometimes want to know whatever has been said about them that might be cause for resentment. But these provocations are so hard to see clearly and fairly that we’re usually better off ignorant of them.
You don’t want to be irritable? Don’t be inquisitive. People who try to find out what has been said about them, who dig up malicious gossip even if it happened in private, are only upsetting themselves. Our interpretations can make things appear to be insults when some should be put aside, others laughed at, others forgiven.
Seneca praised the self-control of this kind showed by rulers who declined to expose themselves to causes for anger.
The great Julius Cæsar displayed this same quality, on showing himself so merciful in victory in the civil war. When he discovered packets of letters written to Pompey by people who probably belonged to the opposing or neutral party, he burned them. However moderate his tendency to anger might have been, he preferred to avoid any occasion for it. The most graceful form of forgiveness, he thought, was not to know the offense that might have been given by each of them.
In view of the Stoics’ usual insistence on the unvarnished truth, one might wish they had discussed more fully when is it better not to know than to know. But it may be enough for the everyday Stoic to recognize it as a question that should be answered more deliberately than is common.
The same restraint can also be applied internally – that is, to how we interpret things once we do hear them. Seneca saw that we sometimes have an appetite for indignation, or at any rate are too quick to find grounds for it. We should tilt the other way, being slow to construe what others say as offensive or hostile and learning to distrust suspicious instincts.
Suspicion and surmise – those deceptive provocations – ought to be banished from the mind. “This man did not give me a civil greeting; that one did not embrace me as I kissed him; that one broke off the conversation abruptly; that one did not invite me to dinner; that one tried to avoid seeing me.” Grounds for suspicion will never be lacking. But we need to be straightforward and to see things in their best light. We should believe only what is thrust under our eyes and becomes unmistakable. And every time our suspicion proves to be groundless we should blame our own credulity; this rebuke will develop the habit of being slow to believe.
The Stoics do not usually pause to acknowledge that a reaction may be easier for some to tame than for others just because we are born with different temperaments. But Seneca does sometimes talk about this. We saw examples in Section 1 of this chapter and in Chapter 6, Section 9 (on pleasures and games), where he distinguished between the challenges faced by fiery dispositions and those that might be described as either dry or watery. When it comes to anger, too, some need to take different precautions than others.
As for nature, it is difficult to alter it, and we may not change the elements that were combined once for all at our birth; but though this be so, it is profitable to know that fiery temperaments should be kept away from wine, which Plato thinks ought to be forbidden to children, protesting against adding fire to fire.
Anyone who is quick to anger should abstain from rare and curiously wrought things, like drinking-cups and seal-rings and precious stones; for their loss drives their owner out of his senses more than do objects which are common and easily procured. This is the reason why, when Nero had an octagonal tent built, an enormous thing and a sight to be seen for its beauty and costliness, Seneca remarked, “You have proved yourself a poor man, for if you ever lose this you will not have the means to procure another like it.” And indeed it did so happen that the ship which conveyed it was sunk and the tent lost. But Nero remembered Seneca’s saying and bore his loss with greater moderation.
Nero was a prolific executioner – of his rivals, of his first wife, of his mother, and of various others (finally including Seneca); so one may wonder if Plutarch wrote that passage with some irony. But what the “greater moderation” of Nero looked like in this case is not recorded.
11. The endlessness of anger. Seneca holds that if anger is ever warranted by externals, it is warranted constantly; life overflows with good grounds for annoyance.
What is more unworthy of the wise man than that his emotions should depend on the wickedness of others? Shall great Socrates lose the power to carry back home the same look he had when he left? If the wise man is to be angered by low deeds, if he is to be upset and unsettled by crimes, surely nothing is more woeful than the wise man’s lot; his whole life will be passed in anger and in grief. For what moment will there be when he will not see something to disapprove of ?
That passage alludes to what Xanthippe, the wife of Socrates, is recorded as having said about him: “that when the State was oppressed with a thousand miseries, Socrates still always went out and came home with the same look. For he bore a mind smooth and cheerful on all occasions, far remote from grief and above all from fear.” (Aelian, Various Histories 9.7)
The pattern of argument used by Seneca in the last excerpt – the “no end to it” argument – is common in Stoicism: if you are ever going to get upset about X, you should realize that chances for X are everywhere, so you might as well be upset all the time – or be sensible and stop ever (or so often) getting upset about X at all. We have seen this idea applied to sensitivity to insults, to worry about what others think, and now to anger about wrongdoing. Elsewhere Seneca applies it to sadness:
Come, look about you, survey all mortals – everywhere there is ample and constant reason for weeping…. Tears will fail us sooner than the causes for grief…. Such is the way we spend our lives, and so we ought to do in moderation this thing we must do so often.
12. Justice without anger. To conclude our discussion of anger, we might reflect briefly on whether it is needed to support values such as justice; the opposition of the Stoics to anger will sometimes raise questions about whether they are pacifists, and too detached to care about righting wrongs. Not in the least. The Stoic disposition affects the spirit in which justice is administered and in which the good is pursued, but it does not imply mild views about the substance of those things or timidity in securing them.
If need be, reason silently, quietly wipes out whole families root and branch, and households that are a plague on the state it destroys along with wives and children; it tears down their very houses, levelling them to the ground, and exterminates the names of the enemies of liberty. All this it will do, but with no gnashing of the teeth, no violent shaking of the head, nothing that would be unseemly for a judge, whose countenance should at no time be more calm and unmoved than when delivering a weighty sentence.
The Stoic judge, in something like the spirit of the dispassionate physician, is concerned with deterrence and rehabilitation – with the good of the community and the good of the offender, very broadly understood – rather than with retribution. Some further thoughts on how such a judge might think:
He will look to the future, not to the past. For as Plato says: “A sensible person does not punish a man because he has done wrong, but in order to keep him from doing wrong; for while the past cannot be recalled, the future may be forestalled.” And he will openly kill those whom he wishes to have serve as examples of the wickedness that is slow to yield, not so much that they themselves may be destroyed as that their destruction may deter others. These are the things a man must weigh and consider, and you see how free he ought to be from all emotion when he proceeds to deal with a matter that requires the utmost caution – the use of power over life and death.
The Stoic sees honor in fighting to the death for a good cause, and takes a perspective broad enough to identify virtue on both sides of a conflict.
Great is Scipio, who lays siege to Numantia, and constrains and compels the hands of an enemy, whom he could not conquer, to resort to their own destruction. Great also are the souls of the defenders – men who know that, as long as the path to death lies open, the blockade is not complete, men who breathe their last in the arms of liberty.
Numantia, also mentioned in Chapter 4, was a city in Spain that was besieged by the Romans in 134 BC. The siege lasted for 13 months, at the end of which the inhabitants killed themselves rather than surrender. For readers wishing to keep their Scipios straight, the one referenced here is Scipio Aemilianus, adoptive grandson of Scipio Africanus (the Roman general who had defeated Hannibal about 60 years earlier). Neither is to be confused with Metellus Scipio (encountered in Chapter 4, Section 7).
As these passages show, Stoic detachment does not imply a shortage of engagement with the world or reluctance to act in it. The detachment of the Stoic is a technique for preserving one’s equilibrium and seeing the world accurately. The requirements of justice are a separate matter, and one very important to the Stoics. Choices about how to spend one’s time and energy are likewise a separate issue – one on which the Stoic advice is exactly the opposite of withdrawal. (See Chapter 11 for more on those points.)
These excerpts, and the longer discussions from which they come, can still raise additional questions. How exactly do Stoics, with all their detachment, find the will or motivation to fight hard and successfully for things – to give them their all, so to speak – without caring too much about them, or (perhaps to say it better) without caring about them the wrong way? One possibility is that they cheat on their Stoicism a bit, and sometimes become more invested in externals than they say they should. We see glimpses of this from time to time in Seneca. But more satisfying answers are available as well. The good Stoic, while regarding any particular case with detachment, may have a strong commitment to ideals that allow the case to nevertheless be treated as urgent. The best doctors care intensely about their patients and will fight hard to help any one of them. They do give it their all. But those same doctors tend not to get emotional about it, and are able to move on from any individual failure quickly enough. (They have to.) This approximate mindset, with its combination of commitment and detachment, is one way to think about the balance to which Stoics aspire more generally. We will come back to this line of thought in Chapter 13.
13. Grief. The greatest challenge to the Stoic approach to emotion has probably been the unavoidability of grief over a loss. A fairly uncompromising view of the subject is suggested in the accounts of the early Stoics given by later authors. Seneca’s view of grief is more measured. He acknowledges that no one can avoid grieving on some occasions, and he does not describe this as a mistake. He claims, rather, that natural grief creates a risk of excess when we feed it and urge it on with our thoughts.
“But surely to grieve for one’s relatives is natural.” Who denies it – so long as it is in proper measure? Merely the parting, let alone the loss of those dearest to us, brings an unavoidable sting and a tightness even to the stoutest heart. But expectation adds something more to our grief than nature has commanded.
When the news of a bitter death first hits us – when we are holding the body that is about to pass from our embrace into the flames – a natural compulsion wrings out our tears; the breath of life, struck by the blow of grief, shakes the whole body and likewise the eyes, from which it presses out and discharges the adjoining moisture. Such tears, being forced out, fall against our will. Tears of a different kind escape when we recall the memory of those we have lost: these we allow, but the former overcome us.
What we teach is honorable: that when emotion has wrung some tears from us and has, so to speak, stopped frothing, the mind is not to be given over to grief.
Seneca was careful to distinguish his position from others that he considered less reasonable. He was probably talking here about other Stoics:
I well know that there are those whose wisdom is harsh rather than brave, who deny that the wise man will ever grieve. But these people, it seems to me, can never have run into this sort of misfortune; if they had, Fortune would have knocked their proud philosophy out of them and forced them to admit the truth even against their will. Reason will have accomplished enough if it removes from grief only what is both excessive and superfluous; that reason should not allow grief to exist at all is neither to be hoped nor desired. Rather let reason establish a measure that will copy neither indifference nor madness, and will keep us in the state that is the mark of an affectionate, and not an unbalanced, mind. Let your tears flow, but let them also cease; let deepest sighs be drawn from your breast, but let those, too, come to an end; so rule your mind that you can win approval both from wise men and from brothers.
Seneca’s writing on these themes was informed by experience. When he was in his forties, he had a son who died early. The passage just shown appears to have been written a few years later.
b. Grief and mastery. Seneca offered views on the process of overcoming grief. He thought it was appropriate to have the feeling for a while, to reckon with it, and then to reason it to the ground. This is preferable to dealing with grief by distracting ourselves or just waiting until it wears off.
When you have lost one of those dearest to you, to suffer endless grief is foolish indulgence; to suffer none, inhuman hardness. The best middle course between devotion and reason is to feel a sense of loss and to subdue it.
No emotion is governable, least of all that which is born of grief; it is wild and stubbornly resists every remedy. Sometimes we want to conceal it and to choke back our sobs, yet tears pour down the face despite its assumed composure. Sometimes we occupy the mind with games or gladiators; but amid the very sights meant to divert it, some slight reminder of grief makes the mind break down. Therefore it is better to conquer sorrow than to trick it; for sorrow that has been deceived, and diverted by pleasures and engagements, rises again and from this very respite gathers strength for its raging. But the grief that has yielded to reason is settled forever.
I know that what I am about to add is very trite, but I am not going to omit it just because everyone says it. If grief is not brought to an end by the use of your judgment, it is brought to an end by the passage of time. Yet the basest remedy for grief, for a person of sense, is to become tired of it. I would rather you abandon your grief than have your grief abandon you. You should stop doing soon that which, even if you wish, you cannot do for long.
c. Grief and futility. The Stoics speak of conquering grief with reason. Some of the reasoning they offer for the purpose is found in Chapter 4 of this book (on death), but they also offer ideas specifically about grief and its reduction. One of them is that grief does no good for its subject, nor perhaps for anyone else.
Does Panthea or Pergamus now sit by the tomb of Verus? Does Chaurias or Diotimus sit by the tomb of Hadrian? Ridiculous. Well, suppose they did sit there, would the dead be aware of it? And if the dead were aware of it, would they be pleased?
Passages like this make their point whether or not one knows who the author is talking about, but nevertheless: Verus was the adoptive brother of Marcus Aurelius, and they were co-emperors until Verus died in 169. Panthea was Verus’s mistress. Hadrian was an earlier emperor – one of those known as the “Five Good Emperors,” along with Marcus Aurelius himself. The others he mentions are unknown.
And it will help you, too, not a little if you reflect that your grief can accomplish nothing either for the one whose loss you mourn or for yourself; for you will not want to prolong what is useless.
No one is less pleased by your grief than the person to whom it seems to be offered. Either he does not want you to suffer, or he does not know that you do. So your supposed duty has no point. If he for whom it is performed is unaware of it, it is useless; if he is aware of it, he does not like it. I may say boldly that there is no one in the whole wide world who takes the slightest pleasure in your tears.
Is there anything more effective in overcoming sorrow than realizing that it does no good and is pointless to take up?
d. Grief and memory. The Stoic also finds solace for grief in memories, which Seneca regards as things with an ongoing existence. Memories live securely in the world of all that has been, which need not be so different as existing in the present. They can have much value to us.
Believe me, a great part of those we have loved remains with us, even if some accident has taken them away. Bygone time belongs to us; nor is anything stored more securely than what has been. We are ungrateful for what we have already received because of our hope for what is yet to be – as if whatever is to be, if it comes to us at all, will not quickly pass over to what has already been.
If we believe our friend Attalus, “Thinking of friends who are alive and well is like enjoying honey and cake; the remembrance of friends who have died delights us, but with a certain bitterness. Yet who will deny that sour things, with a touch of sharpness, can also whet the appetite?” I don’t agree: thinking of my deceased friends is sweet and pleasant to me. I had them as if I was going to lose them; I have lost them as if I have them still.
For more on the Stoic treatment of memory, see Chapter 8, Section 2.
14. Limitations. This chapter has sought to present the late Stoic teachings on emotion in a practical way. But I want to end by briefly noting some complexities that this discussion has avoided and that some readers may wish to pursue separately.
The early (Greek) Stoics took a hardline view of emotion along the lines discussed in section 8 of this chapter. They held that every emotion amounts to a judgment. A person experiencing an emotion is agreeing to a proposition (such as “this is something to be enraged about”), and the agreement is a mistake, because it involves attachment to an external: namely, whatever the object of the emotion might be. Seneca relaxed that approach a bit, as we have seen, but the basic idea is still present in all forms of Stoicism. It is a theory, especially in its strict form, that has been criticized on many grounds. Infants and animals seem to be capable of anger and fear, for example, but the Greek Stoic view makes it hard to understand how such creatures could have any emotions at all; for they lack the mental capacity to form propositions or assent to them. There have then been efforts to save the Stoic theory from this problem by revising it a bit. The late Stoics, at least, knew that the judgments we hold can be ingrained and nonverbal, as noted in Chapter 1. Maybe animals and infants, too, can be viewed as making nonverbal evaluations of events that produce their emotions.
The analysis of these and related questions by modern philosophers has been extensive and complex. And the thinking of the Greek Stoics about emotion is itself quite involved. It includes an elaborate taxonomy of the emotions and claims about where they each come from. None of that can be done justice in this space. But those who wish to pursue these avenues of Stoic theory can start by consulting the recent scholarly work of Martha Nussbaum and Margaret Graver, which discusses it all in detail.