The Stoics realized this and offered advice on how to deal with such persons. In the same way that a mother might admonish or punish the child who pulled her hair, we will, in some cases, want to admonish or punish the person who childishly insults us. Thus, if a student insults her teacher in front of the class, the teacher would be unwise to ignore the insult. The insulter and her peers might, after all, interpret the teacher’s nonresponse as acquiescence and as a result unleash a barrage of insults against him. This behavior would obviously disrupt the classroom and make it difficult for students to learn.
In such cases, though, the Stoic needs to keep in mind that he is punishing the insulter not because she has wronged him but to correct her improper behavior. It is, says Seneca, like training an animal: If in the course of trying to train a horse, we punish him, it should be because we want him to obey us in the future, not because we are angry about his failure to obey us in the past.17
We live in a time, to be sure, in which few people are willing to respond to an insult with humor or with a nonresponse.
Indeed, those who advocate politically correct speech think the proper way to deal with some insults is to punish the insulter. What most concerns them are insults directed at the “disadvantaged,” including members of minority groups and people with physical, mental, social, or economic handicaps.
Disadvantaged individuals, they argue, are psychologically vulnerable, and if we let people insult them, they will suffer grievous psychological harm. Advocates of politically correct speech therefore petition the authorities—government offi-
cials, employers, and school administrators—to punish anyone who insults a disadvantaged individual.
Epictetus would reject this manner of dealing with insults as being woefully counterproductive. He would point out, to begin with, that the political correctness movement has some untoward side effects. One is that the process of protecting disadvantaged individuals from insults will tend to make them hypersensitive to insults: They will, as a result, feel the sting not only of direct insults but of implied insults as well. Another is that disadvantaged individuals will come to believe that they are powerless to deal with insults on their own—that unless the authorities intercede on their behalf, they are defenseless.
The best way to deal with insults directed at the disadvantaged, Epictetus would argue, is not to punish those who insult them but to teach members of disadvantaged groups techniques of insult self-defense. They need, in particular, to learn how to remove the sting from whatever insults are directed at them, and until they do this, they will remain hypersensitive to insults and will, as a result, experience considerable distress when insulted.
It is worth noting that Epictetus would, by modern standards, count as doubly disadvantaged: He was both lame and a slave. Despite these disadvantages, he found a way to rise above insults. More important, he found a way to experience joy despite the bad hand fate had dealt him. The modern “disadvantaged,” one suspects, could learn a lot from Epictetus.
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T W E LV E
Grief
On Vanquishing Tears with Reason
Most parent s, on learning of the death of a child, will be emotionally devastated. They will weep, perhaps for days on end, and they will be unable to go about their daily routine for a time. Long after the death, they might experience grief flash-backs; their eyes might well up, for example, on seeing a picture of their child. And how will a Stoic respond to the death of a child? One might imagine that he will respond with no response at all, that he will suppress whatever feelings he might be having or, better still, that he will have trained himself not to grieve.
The belief that Stoics never grieve, although widely held, is mistaken. Emotions such as grief, the Stoics understood, are to some extent reflexive. In much the same way that we cannot help being startled when we hear a loud, unexpected noise—
it is a physical reflex—we cannot help feeling grief-stricken when we learn of the unexpected loss of a loved one—it is an emotional reflex. Thus, in his consolation to Polybius, who was grieving the death of his brother, Seneca writes, “Nature requires from us some sorrow, while more than this is the result of vanity. But never will I demand of you that you should not grieve at all.”1
How much should a Stoic grieve? In proper grief, Seneca tells Polybius, our reason “will maintain a mean which 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.” Consequently, he advises Polybius to “let your tears flow, but let them also cease, let deepest sighs be drawn from your breast, but let them also find an end.”2
Although it might not be possible to eliminate grief from our life, it is possible, Seneca thinks, to take steps to minimize the amount of grief we experience over the course of a lifetime.
And given that such steps exist, we ought to take them. We live, after all, in a world in which there is potentially much for us to grieve. Consequently, says Seneca, we ought to be parsimo-nious with our tears, since “nothing must be husbanded more carefully than that of which there is such frequent need.”3 It was with these thoughts in mind that Seneca and the other Stoics developed strategies by which we can prevent ourselves from experiencing excessive grief and overcome quickly whatever grief we might find ourselves experiencing.
The Stoics’ primary grief-prevention strategy was to engage in negative visualization. By contemplating the deaths of those we love, we will remove some of the shock we experience if they die; we will in a sense have seen it coming.
Furthermore, if we contemplate the deaths of those we love, we will likely take full advantage of our relationships with them and therefore won’t, if they die, find ourselves filled with regrets about all the things we could and should have done with and for them.
Besides being used to prevent grief, negative visualization can be used to extinguish it. Consider, for example, the advice Seneca gives to Marcia, a woman who, three years after the death of her son, was as grief-stricken as on the day she buried him. Rather than spending her days thinking bitterly about the happiness she has been deprived of by the death of her son, Marcia should, says Seneca, think about how much worse off she would be today if she had never been able to enjoy his company. In other words, rather than mourning the end of his life, she should be thankful that he lived at all.4
This is what might be called retrospective negative visualization. In normal, prospective negative visualization, we imagine losing something we currently possess; in retrospective negative visualization, we imagine never having had something that we have lost. By engaging in retrospective negative visualization, Seneca thinks, we can replace our feelings of regret at having lost something with feelings of thanks for once having had it.
In his consolation to Polybius, Seneca offers advice on how to overcome whatever grief we happen to be experiencing.
Reason is our best weapon against grief, he maintains, because
“unless reason puts an end to our tears, fortune will not do so.” More generally, Seneca thinks that although reason might not be able to extinguish our grief, it has the power to remove from it “whatever is excessive and superfluous.”5
Seneca then sets about using rational persuasion to cure Polybius of his excessive grief. For example, he argues that the brother whose death Polybius is grieving either would or wouldn’t want Polybius to be tortured with tears. If he would want Polybius to suffer, then he isn’t worthy of tears, so Polybius should stop crying; if he wouldn’t want Polybius to suffer, then it is incumbent on Polybius, if he loves and respects his brother, to stop crying. In another argument, Seneca points out that Polybius’s brother, because he is dead, is no longer capable of grief and that this is a good thing; it is therefore madness for Polybius to go on grieving.6
Another of Seneca’s consolations is addressed to Helvia, Seneca’s mother. Whereas Polybius had been grieving the death of a loved one, Helvia was grieving the exile of Seneca.
In his advice to Helvia, Seneca takes the argument he offered Polybius—that the person whose death Polybius is grieving wouldn’t want him to grieve—one step further: Because it is Seneca’s circumstances that Helvia is grieving, he argues that inasmuch as he, being a Stoic, doesn’t grieve his circumstances, Helvia shouldn’t either. (His consolation to Helvia, he observes, is unique: Although he read every consolation he could find, in not one of them did the author console people who were bemoaning the author himself.)7
In some cases, such appeals to reason will doubtless help alleviate, if only for a time, the grief someone is experiencing.
In cases of extreme grief, though, such appeals are unlikely to succeed for the simple reason that the grieving person’s emotions are ruling his intellect. But even in these cases, our attempts to reason with him might be useful, inasmuch as such attempts can make him understand the extent to which his intellect has capitulated to his emotions and thereby induce him, perhaps, to take steps to restore his intellect to its rightful role.
Epictetus also offers advice on grief management. He advises us, in particular, to take care not to “catch” the grief of others. Suppose, for example, we encounter a grief-stricken woman. We should, says Epictetus, sympathize with her and maybe even accompany her moaning with moaning of our own. But in doing so, we should be careful not to “moan inwardly.”8 In other words, we should display signs of grief without allowing ourselves to experience grief.
Some will be offended by this advice. When others are grieving, they will assert, we shouldn’t just pretend as if we sympathize with them; we should actually feel their losses and actually grieve ourselves. Epictetus might respond to this criticism by pointing out that the advice that we respond to the grief of friends by grieving ourselves is as foolish as the advice that we help someone who has been poisoned by taking poison ourselves or help someone who has the flu by intentionally catching it from him. Grief is a negative emotion and therefore one that we should, to the extent possible, avoid experiencing. If a friend is grieving, our goal should be to help her overcome her grief (or rather, if we properly internalize our goals, it should be to do our best to help her overcome her grief ). If we can accomplish this by moaning insincerely, then let us do so. For us to “catch” her grief, after all, won’t help her but will hurt us.
Some readers will at this point become skeptical about the wisdom and efficacy of Stoic techniques for dealing with negative emotions. We live in an age in which the consensus view, held by health professionals and laypersons alike, is that our emotional health requires us to be in touch with our emotions, to share them with others, and to vent them without reservation. The Stoics, on the other hand, advocate that we sometimes feign emotions and that we sometimes take steps to extinguish the genuine emotions we find within us. Some might therefore conclude that it is dangerous to follow Stoic advice regarding our emotions, and because such advice lies at the heart of Stoicism, they might go on to reject Stoicism as a philosophy of life.
Rest assured that in chapter 20 I will respond to this criticism of Stoicism. I will do so, to the amazement of some, by questioning consensus views on what we should do to maintain our emotional health. It is doubtless true that some individuals—those experiencing intense grief, for example—can benefit from psychological counseling. I also think, though, that many people can enjoy robust emotional health without resorting to such counseling. In particular, I think the practice of Stoicism can help us avoid many of the emotional crises that afflict people. I also think that if we do find ourselves in the grip of a negative emotion, following Stoic advice will, in many cases, allow us single-handedly to subdue that emotion.
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T H I RT E E N
Anger
On Overcoming Anti-Joy
Anger is another negative emotion that, if we let it, can destroy our tranquility. Indeed, anger can be thought of as anti-joy. The Stoics therefore devised strategies to minimize the amount of anger we experience.
The best single source for Stoic advice on preventing and dealing with anger is Seneca’s essay “On Anger.” Anger, says Seneca, is “brief insanity,” and the damage done by anger is enormous: “No plague has cost the human race more.” Because of anger, he says, we see all around us people being killed, poisoned, and sued; we see cities and nations ruined.
And besides destroying cities and nations, anger can destroy us individually. We live in a world, after all, in which there is much to be angry about, meaning that unless we can learn to control our anger, we will be perpetually angry. Being angry, Seneca concludes, is a waste of precious time.1
Some maintain that anger has its uses. They point out that when we are angry, we are motivated. Seneca rejects this claim.
It is true, he says, that people sometimes benefit from being angry, but it hardly follows from this that we should welcome anger into our life. Notice, after all, that people also sometimes benefit from being in a shipwreck, yet who in their right mind would therefore take steps to increase their chances of being shipwrecked? What worries Seneca about employing anger as a motivational tool is that after we turn it on, we will be unable to turn it off, and that whatever good it initially does us will (on average) be more than offset by the harm it subsequently does. “Reason,” he cautions, “will never enlist the aid of reckless unbridled impulses over which it has no authority.”2
Is Seneca saying, then, that a person who sees his father killed and his mother raped should not feel angry? That he should stand there and do nothing? Not at all. He should punish the wrongdoer and protect his parents, but to the extent possible he should remain calm as he does so. Indeed, he will probably do a better job of punishing and protecting if he can avoid getting angry. More generally, when someone wrongs us, says Seneca, he should be corrected “by admonition and also by force, gently and also roughly.” Such correc-tions, however, should not be made in anger. We are punishing people not as retribution for what they have done but for their own good, to deter them from doing again whatever they did.
Punishment, in other words, should be “an expression not of anger but of caution.”3
In our discussion of insults, we saw that Seneca makes an exception to his rule to respond to insults with humor or with no response at all: If we are dealing with someone who, despite being an adult, behaves like a child, we might want to punish him for insulting us. It is, after all, the only thing he will understand. Likewise, there are individuals who, when they wrong us, are incapable of changing their behavior in response to our measured, rational entreaties. When dealing with this sort of shallow individual, it does not make sense to become actually angry—doing so will likely spoil our day—but it might make sense, Seneca thinks, to feign anger.4 By doing this, we can get this person to mend his ways with minimal disruption of our own tranquility. In other words, although Seneca rejects the idea of allowing ourselves to become angry in order to motivate ourselves, he is open to the idea of pretending to be angry in order to motivate others.
Seneca offers lots of specific advice on how to prevent anger.
We should, he says, fight our tendency to believe the worst about others and our tendency to jump to conclusions about their motivations. We need to keep in mind that just because things don’t turn out the way we want them to, it doesn’t follow that someone has done us an injustice. In particular, says Seneca, we need to remember that in some cases, the person at whom we are angry in fact helped us; in such cases, what angers us is that he didn’t help us even more.5
If we are overly sensitive, we will be quick to anger. More generally, says Seneca, if we coddle ourselves, if we allow ourselves to be corrupted by pleasure, nothing will seem bearable to us, and the reason things will seem unbearable is not because they are hard but because we are soft. Seneca therefore recommends that we take steps to ensure that we never get too comfortable. (This, of course, is only one of the reasons Stoics give for eschewing comfort; in chapter 7 we examined some others.) If we harden ourselves in th
is manner, we are much less likely to be disturbed, he says, by the shouting of a servant or the slamming of a door, and therefore much less likely to be angered by such things. We won’t be overly sensitive about what others say or do, and we will be less likely to find ourselves provoked by “vulgar trivialities,” such as being served lukewarm water to drink or seeing a couch in a mess.6
To avoid becoming angry, says Seneca, we should also keep in mind that the things that anger us generally don’t do us any real harm; they are instead mere annoyances. By allowing ourselves to get angry over little things, we take what might have been a barely noticeable disruption of our day and transform it into a tranquility-shattering state of agitation.
Furthermore, as Seneca observes, “our anger invariably lasts longer than the damage done to us.”7 What fools we are, therefore, when we allow our tranquility to be disrupted by minor things.
The Stoics, as we have seen, recommend that we use humor to deflect insults: Cato cracked a joke when someone spit in his face, as did Socrates when someone boxed his ears. Seneca suggests that besides being an effective response to an insult, humor can be used to prevent ourselves from becoming angry:
“Laughter,” he says, “and a lot of it, is the right response to the things which drive us to tears!”8 The idea is that by choosing to think of the bad things that happen to us as being funny rather than outrageous, an incident that might have angered us can instead become a source of amusement. Indeed, one imagines that Cato and Socrates, by using humor in response to an insult, not only deflected the insult but prevented themselves from getting angry at the person who had insulted them.
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