A Guide to the Good Life : The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy (18 page)

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.)
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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.

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PICTETUS 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.”
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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.

On Overcoming Anti-Joy

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NGER 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.
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OME 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.”
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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 corrections, 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.”
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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.
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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.

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ENECA 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.
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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 this 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.
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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.”
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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!”
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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.

Marcus also offers advice on anger avoidance. He recommends, as we have seen, that we contemplate the impermanence of the world around us. If we do this, he says, we will realize that many of the things we think are important in fact aren’t, at least not in the grand scheme of things. He reflects on the times, almost a century earlier, of Emperor Vespasian. People everywhere were doing the usual things: marrying, raising children, farming, loving, envying, fighting, and feasting. But, he points out, “of all that life, not a trace survives today.”
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By implication, this will be the fate of our generation: What seems vitally important to us will seem unimportant to our grandchildren. Thus, when we feel ourselves getting angry about something, we should pause to consider its cosmic (in)significance. Doing this might enable us to nip our anger in the bud.

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UPPOSE WE FIND
that despite our attempts to prevent anger, the behavior of other people succeeds in angering us. It will help us to overcome our anger, says Seneca, if we remind ourselves that our behavior also angers other people: “We are bad men living among bad men, and only one thing can calm us—we must agree to go easy on one another.” He also offers anger-management advice that has a parallel in Buddhism. When angry, says Seneca, we should take steps to “turn all [anger’s] indications into their opposites.” We should force ourselves to relax our face, soften our voice, and slow our pace of walking. If we do this, our internal state will soon come to resemble our external state, and our anger, says Seneca, will have dissipated.
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Buddhists practice a similar thought-substitution
technique. When they are experiencing an unwholesome thought, Buddhists force themselves to think the opposite, and therefore wholesome, thought. If they are experiencing anger, for example, they force themselves to think about love. The claim is that because two opposite thoughts cannot exist in one mind at one time, the wholesome thought will drive out the unwholesome one.
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What if we are unable to control our anger? Indeed, what if we find ourselves lashing out at whoever angered us? We should apologize. Doing this can almost instantly repair the social damage our outburst might have caused. It can also benefit us personally: The act of apologizing, besides having a calming effect on us, can prevent us from subsequently obsessing over the thing that made us angry. Finally, apologizing for the outburst can help us become a better person: By admitting our mistakes, we lessen the chance that we will make them again in the future.

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VERYONE OCCASIONALLY
experiences anger: Like grief, anger is an emotional reflex. There are also people, though, who seem to be angry pretty much all of the time. These individuals are not only easily provoked to anger, but even when provocation is absent they remain angry. Indeed, during leisure hours, these individuals might spend their time recalling, with a certain degree of relish, past events that made them angry or things in general that make them angry. At the same time that it is consuming them, anger appears to be providing them with sustenance.

Such cases, the Stoics would tell us, are tragic. For one thing, life is too short to spend it in a state of anger. Furthermore,
a person who is constantly angry will be a torment to those around her. Why not instead, Seneca asks, “make yourself a person to be loved by all while you live and missed when you have made your departure?”
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More generally, why experience anti-joy when you have it in your power to experience joy? Why, indeed?