Interview With Margaret Graver

Professor Margaret Graver is the keynote speaker at this year’s Stoicon conference in Toronto .  We are all eagerly looking forward to her plenary address, titled “The Dispassionate Life”. Below is an interview about her longstanding interests in, and scholarship on, Stoicism.

How would you introduce yourself and your work to our readers?

I’m a professor at Dartmouth College, which gives me the privilege of teaching young adults how to read ancient texts accurately and attentively. Born in Louisiana, I now live year round in New Hampshire, where I love the mountains and the lakes in summer. Swimming with the loons, picking blueberries from your kayak. In winter I can at least say that I don’t mind shoveling snow.
As a scholar, I work in Hellenistic and Roman philosophy, with a particular interest in Stoic views on the nature and management of the emotions. I have three books out. Cicero on the Emotions: Tusculan Disputations 3 and 4  gives an annotated translation of a text by Cicero that is actually one of the best introductions to Stoicism that I know, particularly for anyone who has struggled with grief.
Stoicism and Emotion is a more comprehensive study that concentrates on the early period of Stoicism. In addition to the main emotion theory, it treats such related topics as freedom of the will and character development. Most recently, I have worked with A.A. Long on a complete translation of Seneca’s Letters on Ethics. The letters are a fascinating glimpse into Roman life as well as a wonderful topic-based exploration of Stoicism. I’ve loved working on an accurate translation that would have a contemporary feel. Now, as I write this, I’m at work on two other projects. One is a broad-based study of Seneca’s philosophy of values, the emotions, and literature, and the other is on Cicero’s relationship to Stoic ethics.

When and how did you first become interested in Stoicism?

It was really Seneca that drew me in. I had been studying classical literature at Brown, and one day picked up a volume of the Letters, wanting to get back into Latin prose after doing an awful lot of Greek poetry. What caught my attention was the structure of that book, how Seneca makes it feel natural and right to read one letter a day, so that the book becomes a life companion as well as an educator. The fuller understanding of the Stoic system came later for me. Of course I have been much enriched by conversations with other scholars. While I was still in graduate school it was especially Martha Nussbaum and Victor Caston, then over the years Brad Inwood, Chris Gill, Tad Brennan, and Tony Long have all taught me a great deal, and these are only a few of many. Students, too, both my own students and those from other schools, and adult learners – they are always showing me new perspectives, so that I feel like I am rediscovering the subject every day.

What are the most important aspects of Stoicism to you?  

The rule of reason. Yes, there are other things in human nature besides our ability to reason, and those are important too. But this is fundamental. We don’t like being deceived; we don’t wish to be mistaken. Epictetus: “Try to believe that it is night.” When the sun is shining in the window, you just can’t do it—you can’t make yourself accept views that contradict each other, just because you are fundamentally a rational creature. All of Stoicism comes down to this. Getting things right, discerning what is true from what only seems true, getting to a point where your actions and even your feelings are based on reality—this is just a better way for a human being to live.
The immediate extension of that is the Stoic way of thinking about values. The idea that things like playing fair, speaking the truth, facing up to challenges, being kind and gentle, really matter and matter in a completely different way from what you own, what people think of you, even how long you live—that is the very core of their ethics. And that much seems to me very straightforward and correct. What that actually looks like in any given situation is a lot harder, though.

In what ways do you think Stoicism still matters today?

The toughest problems facing us today have to do with the fragmentation of the media, the ever more staggering inequalities of wealth and privilege, and hatred and mistreatment based on ethnicity. To some extent, any system of ethics should be able to suggest some ways forward. But there are some key elements of Stoicism that speak directly to these issues.

  • First and foremost, intellectual independence. Stoicism is all about thinking for yourself, using your own mind and not just passively accepting the views other people want you to hold. In ancient Stoicism there was no party line, no orthodoxy. Everyone respected and studied the views of Zeno and Chrysippus, and there were some points that were held in common. But there was also a lot of divergence—each author is working out their own version of Stoicism that makes sense to them, because that is what they have to do.
  • Next, values based on character and not on externals. All of us are constantly bombarded with the message that what matters is what you have, how you look, what jobs and degrees you hold, what influence you can wield. And people are judged accordingly. The ancient Stoics resisted those sorts of messages—they saw them as the prime cause of unhappiness. They spoke of the “transmission of error,” or just “corruption,” that gets to us already when we’re very young and trying hard to do what people expect of us. Not that it’s wrong to get your degree, earn your living, care for your family—that’s exactly what we should be doing most of the time. But those things in themselves are not where happiness lies, and they’re certainly not what defines a person. Remember when character was something most people looked for in a political leader? We could go back there—and we could make the same demand of ourselves.
  • The other big one is what the Greeks called philanthropia, the attachment to the human. In Stoic thought all rational creatures are akin to one another by virtue of their rationality. That’s actually encoded in human nature: the way children bond to their caregivers, the naturalness of connecting to other people just because they’re near at hand. Of course our first and strongest ties are to our families and our immediate communities, and that is fine. But we can also learn to recognize a bond of shared humanity with those who are more distant, “draw the circles inward,” as Hierocles says. This business of othering, of in-grouping, of sending the refugees back where they came from—Stoicism is diametrically opposed to all of that.

What’s one of your favorite Stoic quotations and why?

Don’t know if I can do just one. Here are three.

Have you no hands? Wipe your own nose, then, and don’t blame God.

You just can’t beat Epictetus! Sit down and pray that your nose may not run? No, you have hands. The point is that we have to take responsibility for our own emotional well-being—and we are equipped to do that, if we make the effort.

Do you ask what progress I have made? I have begun to be a friend to myself.

I love the idea that moral progress involves becoming your own friend. Of course we still want to have other people to be our friends, that’s a given and is very important in Stoic thought. But it’s rare to find somebody who is such a true friend that they will tell you the things you really need to hear. Even if you’re lucky enough to have such a friend, it’s hard to spend enough time with that person. But you can learn to be that sort of friend to yourself, and then you will never be without a friend.
The other thing I really like about this quotation is that we even know about it. It’s by Hecaton of Rhodes, an important author in his time but we have hardly any of his work. We happen to have this bit because Seneca encountered it in his own reading, liked it, and quoted it in one of the Letters.

Real joy is a serious matter.

Seneca has many beautiful ways of speaking about the joy that comes with wisdom. In the 23rd letter, more than anywhere else, he brings out the fact that there are feelings that are more worth having than what our culture calls happiness or fun. Think of the change agent speaking the unpopular truth, the soldier laying her life on the line, the nurse who’s there for the dying patient. Do they sense the goodness that is there? I think they do. Are they smiling and having a good time? We don’t need that.

What advice would you give someone wanted to learn more about Stoicism?

Get yourself a copy of the Letters on Ethics and read it a bit at a time. Not straight through necessarily—each letter takes up a different topic, so you can do very well working from the Table of Contents. Find the parts that really interest you, and let it spread from there. The beauty of Stoicism is that it’s quite systematic, so if you grasp some points and think hard about those, you begin to understand even some points you haven’t yet studied.

Do you have anything else that you wanted to mention while we have the chance?

Just a tip of the hat to Chris Gill, who first put the bug in my ear to do something on the 3rd and 4th Tusculan Disputations of Cicero. That text taught me so much about the emotions in Stoicism and has inspired most of what I’ve done since.

7 thoughts on Interview With Margaret Graver

  1. Catherine Pedersen says:

    Outstanding interview Margaret Thank you!!
    I was left wondering about the sentence “We don’t need that.” In relation to smiling and having a good time. I would love a little clarification from Margaret. As written one take-away could be the common misconception that Stoicism means you must be dour and serious and not have fun or pleasure in your life.

    • Margaret Graver says:

      Okay, Katherine, I can see that I need to make that clearer.
      Suppose you talked to this emergency room physician who’s been knocking herself out trying to save somebody’s life, and suppose you asked her, “Did you enjoy doing that?” The question seems fundamentally misguided, right? But maybe instead you ask, “Do you feel good about what you did today?” The answer could be a resounding yes. If that accords with your intuitions as it does with mine, then you have a point of entry to what Seneca is saying about joy.
      The deep issue is what is the role of pleasure—good feelings, mental as well as physical—in the life of someone we admire? Already in the earliest phase of Stoicism we have Chrysippus stating that pleasure is not the goal; instead it is an epigennêma, a by-product. That is, it’s possible to have pleasure and even intense pleasure without that being your reason to act as you do.
      Seneca explains the view too, in a beautiful analogy from On Happiness 9. He says that pleasure is like the wild poppies that spring up unbidden alongside a field of grain. A by-product, then, of what you do not for the sake of the pleasure, but because it is good and right. And yet the pleasure is there.

      • Catherine Pedersen says:

        Margaret thank you for your clarification. It was very helpful and made complete sense to me. For example, raising my children was often challenging but remains the highlight of my life. As I reflect further most of the things that have given me the most pleasure and meaning were challenging and demanded the application of one or more kinds of virtue.

  2. Mortran says:

    “But we can also learn to recognize a bond of shared humanity with those who are more distant, ‘draw the circles inward,’ as Hierocles says. This business of othering, of in-grouping, of sending the refugees back where they came from—Stoicism is diametrically opposed to all of that.”
    ——————
    This is a little bit of an oversimplification of the Stoic view. Did ancient Stoics not go to war? Did Stoics not own slaves? We should avoid projecting modern political thoughts on ancient Stoicism.
    In-grouping is part of human nature. The distinction between a friend and an enemy is reasonable. Stoicism would never advise against following nature or reason.

    • Margaret Graver says:

      There’s no lack of evidence for what I called the attachment to the human. Those who aren’t familiar with this aspect of Stoicism might start with Cato’s speech in Cicero, On Ends 3.63: “This [our natural attachment to family members] is also the source of the mutual and natural sympathy between humans, so that the very fact of being human requires that no human be considered a stranger to any other” (Woolf’s translation).
      The claim the ancients made is that while we do indeed have a natural orientation to our families and our immediate communities, our kinship to other human beings does not stop there. Reason requires us to acknowledge our relatedness even to the stranger and the foreigner, and when there is need, to do what we can for them. There may be situations where other responsibilities take precedence—that is normal moral reasoning. But that doesn’t mean your responsibility drops to zero.
      Did the ancient Stoics live by their own principles? Not always, I’m sure, any more than we do. But if the principle is sound, then it was incumbent on them to take it seriously and try to make the application, difficult as that can be. And the same is true for us, in our lives and yes, in our politics too. You can argue against this principle of philanthropia if you like, Mortran, but you can’t wall it off from us just by pointing out that some ancient Stoics held slaves. That’s not logical at all.

  3. […] Prof. Margaret Graver, from Dartmouth University, is our keynote speaker.  She is the author of Stoicism and Emotion, Cicero on the Emotions: Tusculan Disputations 3 and 4 , and a number of important articles on ancient philosophy. […]

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