On not being “bothered”

Dear Massimo,

My experience concerning people’s response to Enchiridion 3 is similar to yours. On its face, the text could easily be read as psychopathic. But I don’t think the text should be read so superficially.

The Enchiridion is a popular place for people to start learning about Stoicism. Its seemingly simple and terse prose provides short bites of Stoic wisdom that makes it easy to devour in a day. Digesting it, however, takes a lot more.

After all, the Enchiridion summarizes key themes from the thorough Discourses. And the Discourses are not a systematic syllabus of Epictetus’ curriculum, but rather snippets of things Epictetus said, recorded by his student Arrian. Arrian’s intent was to capture “the kind of things that one person would say to another on the spur of the moment, and not such as [Epictetus] would write to find a readership in later times” (Arrian’s prefatory letter to Lucius Gellius, 3). So when we look at the Enchiridion, we’re looking at a highly condensed summary of what Epictetus said “on the spur of the moment” whose purpose was to preserve Epictetus’ “frankness of speech” (Arrian, 2), not to be a clear and complete exposition of his theory. No wonder that a lot is lost on people who start their Stoic journey with the Enchiridion or take one part of it out of context!

So why is Epictetus seemingly counseling us to “not be upset” when loved ones die? To answer this question requires understanding what’s so bad about being “upset” in the first place according to the Stoics.

A lot of people turn to Stoicism in order to get rid of negative emotions. But that’s not the point of Stoicism. The goal of Stoicism is not to feel good, but to be good. And the Stoics argue that a certain subset of emotions (called “passions”, which are emphatically not everything we’d call an emotion!) make us worse human beings.

How do passions make us worse human beings? Because what makes us uniquely human is our ability to reason and our capacity for social cooperation. According to Stoic psychology, passions arise from false judgements: in other words, a failure in reasoning. Furthermore, they can take over our minds and push reason to the side, often to the detriment of those around us, thus working against our capacity for prosocial behavior.

Since passions work against the things that make us human, the Stoics hold that they should be eliminated since they are the sole roadblocks to being the best version of yourself that you can be–not because they feel bad. In fact, the Stoics counsel us to eliminate passions that feel good as well, including lust and righteous anger. As the scholar Tad Brennan succinctly puts it in The Old Stoic Theory of Emotions: “If things had been otherwise, so that the perfection of our rational souls and their possession of truth and consistency entailed that we should have some subjective feeling-tone, as for instance gloominess or angst, then the Stoics would have advocated that we should perfect our rationality, and feel gloominess or angst.”

The Stoics weren’t particularly concerned with the subjective experience of feelings, nor were they particularly concerned about the basic manifestations of how we feel. Turning to Brennan again, the Stoics had a “…relative Iack of interest in the phenomena that we think of as emotions – the laughter and tears and whatever may underlie them. They do not wholly neglect them, but the Stoic theory does not have their explanation as its primary focus…. Accordingly, the fact that the Stoics were opposed to [passions] tells us nothing, in itself, about whether the Stoics were opposed to emotions in the more familiar sense. And so the Sage [a “fully enlightened” Stoic who has perfected their practice], who is free from [passions], might still have emotions.” So even a Stoic sage could feel sad when a loved one dies.

Another key aspect of Stoic passions is that they must have behavioral consequences. Turning one last time to Brennan, the Stoics held that a passion was “not [the result of] an idle and innocuous false belief, but a false belief taking effect in the agent’s behavior.”[emphasis mine]

So my retort to the critic of Enchiridion 3 is that avoiding “disturbance” does not necessarily mean not feeling sad when a loved one dies. Instead, it means avoiding overt, anti-social behavior.

It may seem a bit odd to talk about anti-social behavior when it comes to mourning. But the ancient literature provided us with a good example in Seneca’s letter to Marcia, who was mourning the loss of her son for three years.

In that letter, Seneca attempts to convince Marcia to end her prolonged mourning by describing the negative consequences extended grief had on Octavia (the sister of Augustus) as she mourned the loss of her son Marcellus: “[Octavia] lived buried and hidden from view, neglecting her accustomed duties, and actually angry with the excessive splendor of her brother’s prosperity, in which she shared. Though surrounded by her children and grandchildren, she would not lay aside her mourning garb, though by retaining it she seemed to put a slight upon all her relations, in thinking herself bereaved in spite of their being alive.” (Marcia II)

Seneca uses this example to drive the point home to Marcia that if she follows in the footsteps of this negative role model, “you will remove yourself from the number of the living; you will shun the sight both of other people’s children and of your own, and even of him whose loss you deplore.”

Seneca also mentions the negative impact Marcia’s extended mourning had on her friends: “I pray and beseech you not to be self-willed and beyond the management of your friends. You must be aware that none of them know how to behave, whether to mention [your son] in your presence or not, as they neither wish to wrong a noble youth by forgetting him nor to hurt you by speaking of him.” (Marcia, V)

In short, excessive mourning can make you turn away from and hurt those who you claim you love, family and friends alike. It can also desecrate the memory of the person who’s loss you’re mourning. That’s the kind of “disturbance” Epictetus is likely referring to. Not just feeling sad.

This view makes sense to me. After all, think about the lives you want your loved ones to live after you’ve died. Would you want them to suffer minimally and live happy, fulfilled lives as soon as possible, touched by the positive impact you made on their lives? Or would you prefer they suffer, wallow, and withdraw from the world for an arbitrary amount of time you deem to be satisfactory?

If you’re in the former camp, you’re in line with Epictetus. If you’re in the latter camp, then it may be valid to raise the question of whether it’s really Epictetus who’s the psychopath.

Vale,
Greg Lopez