What Everyone Ought to Know about Stoic Thought on the Emotions pt IV of IV

Was I being too hard on the Stoics?

I have strongly criticized the Stoics, concluding that their assumptions about the fundamental difference between the mind and the body, coupled with the insistence that you really must choose to ignore anything most people would say is ‘bad’ lead to impossible recommendations for how to act among people. You might think I’ve been too harsh, but I saved the best for last.

At §20 Epictetus makes the utterly stoic claim that “foul word or blows” are only an outrage because you judge them to be. §29 makes sure you get the point is serious, warning the would-be stoic that there are real costs to choosing the stoic life: grueling hours, you will have to “abandon your own people” and suffer the social humiliation of being looked down on by slaves and “ridiculed by those who meet you”. In fact, according to Epictetus, a true stoic gets the worst of every type of social good such as honors and offices, and even justice. And the reward for losing out on everything social is “peace of mind, freedom and tranquility”. So they shouldn’t care in any way about social norms or insults etc and they shouldn’t ditch their ‘stained’ friends.

So you see the Stoic position is simply a lost cause when it comes to the emotions and socialization. The two go hand in hand. And as we’ll see below the ad hoc revisions later Stoics make are nice only in the context of their assumptions and are intellectually spurious when viewed from outside the theory.

Theoretical & methodological problems

So I’ve made a lot of hay by attacking the core Stoic idea that emotions are judgments, and by pointing out how difficult it is to hold on to other key Stoic principles while still trying to account for proper socialization. But in fact, it seems even the early Stoics were aware of the problem. They just didn’t do very much convincing theoretical work to address it.

Chrysippus, who I mentioned before, and the Roman Stoic Seneca, whom Dante, among others, thought very highly of, did try to patch up the Stoic issues with emotions. Sort of.

Chrysippus tried to change the view to the idea that each emotion involves two separate value judgments. The first that there is a good or bad at hand, and the second is that it is appropriate to react to it. What type of emotion you experience will be determined by whether the thing is thought to be good or bad. So, when you decide that someone smearing gunk on your shirt deserves punishment, you experience the emotion anger, even if you can’t or won’t actually act on it. Chrysippus thought that this showed that it’s the second judgment – that its appropriate to react – that is the very bad judgment. He does this, of course, because you tend to lose trust and interest when you argue that awful things such as your wife dying in childbirth, or genocide, aren’t “actually” bad. But this was the original Stoic position.

So since the Stoics started with the goal of convincing you emotions are bad – which they had to – they needsomething to be wrong about you being upset about the truly bad things that are happening to you. They separated the mind from the body in an irrevocable way by saying you can only control your mind and that you must control your mind. The orthodox Stoic view held that your emotions are functions of your reasoning power, your ability to figure out what to do in a given situation. To the extent the emotions look like bad thinking, they must be fixed. (And if the emotions had a physiological (body) component and were able to overcome your mind, well that’s just awful).

In philosophy we call changing your core theory for the sole purpose of saving it from a killer objection ad hoc reasoning. It’s considered very poor arguing and thinking to do so. If the new additions to the theory are true, or make the new theory true, that’s fine. But you shouldn’t go around trying to argue that your original theory was correct. And its very often the case that these theoretical refinements are simply made-up and have no supporting evidence, don’t fix the problem or are undone by other problems.

I think their ad hoc move fails and I’ll take a moment to explain why. First, let’s keep in mind that the Stoics lean heavily on the idea that human emotions are voluntary. Their best piece of evidence for that is that emotions are eradicable; they felt that because we can get rid of an emotion, this proves that emotions are by their nature voluntary.

Of course, this absolutely does not follow logically. Here’s an analogy: Imagine that for no reason that you had anything to do with you got selected as the winner of a prize. But you can get rid of the prize by refusing it or giving it away. Does that mean you chose to win it? It’s silly, but the Stoics need it to be true. So they insist it is.

Seneca

Plato, Seneca and Aristotle. I can understand why the artist made them look like twins.

Seneca, famous for his work on anger, gave a better argument for how Stoics should understand the emotions. He explained that the initial appearance (“first movements”) of anger or shocks of anger don’t have to lead to full anger because full emotion requires acts of assent and will. His idea is that since you can question appearances and not accept them, you don’t have to become angry. If it looks like someone is stealing your laptop you don’t automatically get angry, you can stop the process and see whether or not the person really is stealing it and then get angry for real or not. But if you let the initial ‘anger shock’ guide you to act out, it’s your own damn fault.

I kind of like this idea, but it’s far away from orthodox Stoicism. It seems to leave the possibility that some emotional action is justified. But it has the flaw of not realizing that in some cases this “initial” part of anger could be the difference between life and death. And it’s changing the concept of anger by somewhat arbitrarily cutting it up between the ‘initial’ shock and the rest of it; why isn’t the heat I feel in my chest when I’m bumped harshly on the subway steps ‘actually’ anger?

What I like best about Seneca’s kinda Stoic view is that it really comes close to agreement with P-A-L; that line of thinking says that time to reflect often enables us to halt our emotions too. But at the end of the day the Stoics want and need to say that emotions are voluntary judgments through and through if they really want to convince people that they can and should get rid of their emotions. But this “two-part judgment process” that equals one emotion isn’t very convincing – or practical.

Final thoughts on Stoicism

In the end, advocating that people lose all their sentiments, leave their family and give up any chance at a meaningful social life simply is absurd. It’s ridiculous to suppose that human beings ought to follow this plan in order to be happy. Humans, our minds and bodies, are social creatures. At the bottom, Stoics believe this, even if they overtly try to deny it. That’s why they are so inconsistent about whether social concepts such are reputation are truly good or bad. It’s as simple as realizing that if you really believe that when someone makes you angry it’s simply always “just you” who has angered yourself, you’ve created a hopeless situation. The extent to which stoic psychology denies that emotions exist at both hot and cold levels and that some emotions can and must be experienced and acted on, is the extent to which Stoicism is useless as an ethical theory.

In the next post I’ll discuss the rise of materialism and introduce you to the father of Modern Philosophy, René Descartes.

Materialist and Mechanistic philosophy created the modern world

What Everyone Ought to Know about Stoic Thought on the Emotions pt II

Introduction

As I mentioned in the first post on Stoicism, the famous Stoic Epictetus wrote a very influential guide on how to be a Stoic called Enchiridion. The title translates to “the Handbook” or “the Manual”, and Epictetus certainly had the expertise to write it. So that makes it an excellent place to get a good grasp on Stoicism in practice and away from more “academic” debates.

I’m briefly bringing up the idea of the difference between Stoicism in practice and theoretical Stoicism for a couple of reasons. First, I’m trying to be as generous as possible to the philosophy. Many great, intelligent individuals, people who have really had interesting and good lives, counted themselves as Stoics. That says something to me. So there’s a lot about Stoicism in practice that I want to applaud, and I’ll try to be clear about that.

But I’m here to attack, and one of the first things I noted in studying Stoicism with a focus on the emotions was how blatantly Stoic psychology deviates from earlier theory. Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius and many others were all in basic agreement that the emotions were things that happen to us, that they are a major source of human action, and that virtue consists in properly acting on them. They even argued that acting emotionally is often good and proper.

But not the Stoics. They didn’t believe that things that happen to us could directly cause us to act. Instead, they argued that "what disturbs men’s minds is not events, but their judgments on events… so when we are hindered, or disturbed, or distressed we should never lay the blame on anyone but ourselves, on our own judgments”.

That basically means that for the Stoics, emotions are nothing but negative choices, the willful act of subverting or undermining yourself. Before explaining how they got there, let me point out that when Stoicism was first being developed by Zeno and then even further by a man named Chrysippus, many thinkers felt they were being so blatantly anti-Platonic and anti-Aristotelian that they were disagreeing with them and others just for the sake of having their own school of thought. We’ll never know if that’s true, but I admit that something like that seems right to me.

Chrysippus, the "second founder" of Stoicism

Foundation: Section 1 of Enchiridion

Enough about that, though, let’s get on with our study of the Stoicism and the emotions. The Enchiridion begins with a hugely important, incredibly influential pair of closely related claims. Epictetus writes that “everything is our own doing, our thoughts, our impulse to act, and our will to get or avoid things, etc, are completely within our power to control”. I genuinely like how life-affirming that idea is. But its not just a life-affirming aphorism, its part of a major, fundamental claim for the whole of Stoic psychology. And its directly followed by the claim that “our bodies are not under our control”.

This is huge. It’s radical. I take them to be the first psychologists who ever argued for this fundamental disconnect between what the mind and body are and what they do. As I’ve argued, this idea is not present in prior psychological theories. But it is present in a whole lot of philosophies afterward. The most important and influential person to accept this disconnect was Descartes.

Look, if you’re like most people, its likely that you (unlike I) believe there is a fundamental difference between ‘your soul’ and ‘your body’. And you probably do for religious reasons. But religion or metaphysics is not the point here. For all I care, let there be such a thing as an incorporeal soul.

The problem is what happens when you insist that the human brain/mind is wholly distinct from the human body, and that one is everything good and valuable about you and the other is everything bad and worthless about you. This belief ignored the best empirical science of their time and the Stoics had the benefit of studying the psychological and ethical theories of Plato,  Aristotle and Lucretius, none of which accept the Stoic disconnect, and in fact, reject such thinking.

In rejecting the P-A-L account of mind and emotions, the Stoics turn to a wholly ungrounded theory absolutely committed to the primacy of the ‘purely rational’ intellect. The main underlying thesis of the Enchiridion, fundamental to Stoicism when it was written, was already totally at odds with basically all thought on the emotions since Homer.

As the Enchiridion makes clear, for Stoicism, in theory and in practice, you are your mind. And having emotions is choosing to cloud yourself, to mislead yourself with incorrect judgments. You, your rational mind – and not your body – are the only thing in the world that can harm you because you are only harmed when you think yourself harmed. Its all in the first section of the book.

And as I’ll explain, this fundamental disconnect between the mind as ‘our own doing” and the body as “not our own doing” leads them inexorably  to conclusions that create insolvable problems regarding what to say about the emotions and emotional actions. Ethics is in large part about human relations. And Stoicism in practice is supposed to guide you to a happy, virtuous life. Unfortunately, what the Stoics think about emotions will make it pretty plain that their philosophy contains a fundamental contradiction that cannot be resolved without question-begging or rejiggering the account of emotions (which we call ad hoc revision).

A bit more on emotions as judgments

The Enchiridion leaves no doubt that emotions are identified as judgments. At §16 for example, Epictetus suggests that if we see someone crying in sorrow we ought to remember that what distresses him is not the event (e.g. his child dying), because that does not distress another, but his judgment on the event. The idea is that because a complete stranger would not feel as badly as a child’s parent when the child died, this proves that the real problem here is not the child dying but the parent’s decision that the child dying was a terrible thing. No matter the situation, your judgment is the reason you get distressed and any sorrow you feel is simply from the judgment. Of course this does not follow logically, and experience tells us otherwise, but that’s what they’re selling.

Yet just a few pages later, in §30, Epictetus introduces an idea in great tension with this belief.  There he advises us that you can only discover what to judge people on, you can only discover what you should expect from people, when you understand the relation between that type of person (parent, sibling, employer, etc) and you. His idea is that if you only expect your mother to act the way mothers do, and to see the world through the eyes of a mother, then you will not be disturbed by the way your mother acts towards you.

So, for example, if you think your mom is always on your case about how fast you drive and you get offended and get angry, all that’s happened is that you have failed to understand the situation, you made a bad judgment. When you see that your mom’s comments are made out of care, you will cease to be insulted and realize you’re not hurt. Now, wouldn’t the parent who lost her child have a reasonable expectation about their child’s life-long relation to them? Would that relation have a major influence on the person?

Let’s pick up with that thought next week.

What Everyone Ought to Know about Stoic Thought on the Emotions

A brief background on the Stoics


If you say someone is stoic, you’re almost certainly giving them a compliment, specifically that they stood strong in the face of a very bad situation. And with that sort of good PR, its probably not a surprise that Stoicism is a very popular search term on Google. In fact, ‘Stoicism’ gets 56% more hits than ‘Platonism’ and 469% more hits than ‘Aristotelianism’.  Now, a lot of this is likely due to the facts that people usually search for ‘Plato’ instead of ‘Platonism’ and ‘Aristotle’ instead of ‘Aristotelianism’ and relatively few people know that Zeno of Citium founded Stoicism or even that its most well known exponent was Epictetus.


Still, the fact is that Zeno and Epictetus created and spread a philosophy that is quite famous and well respected even to the present day. That certainly deserves a lot of respect. And I highly recommend anyone interested in how ethical philosophy influenced modern religions study the Stoics. I can't think of a philosophy closer to Christianity than Stoicism.

Zeno of Citium, Founder of Stoicism

Here are four stoic books I can happily recommend:

Discourses - Epictetus

Enchiridion – Epictetus

The Golden Sayings of Epictetus

The Meditations – (Personal journal of Stoic and Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius)

Marcus Aurelius

With all that said, let me go a head and put it on the table that I’m going to be highly critical of the stoic view of the emotions. But before that, a little more background.

Zeno the Stoic, a near contemporary of Epicurus (341 B.C.), was born in 334 B.C. 13 years after the death of Plato (347 B.C.) and about 20 years before Aristotle died (322 B.C.). Zeno probably never met Aristotle but almost certainly knew Epicurus very well. In fact, many people think Zeno set up his school specifically as a counter to Epicurus’ school.

Be that as it may, the sad thing is all of Zeno’s writings are lost. As a result, we typically turn to the Roman stoics to study Stoicism. (No doubt that its huge importance in Rome, coupled with the Western World’s subsequent fascination with Ancient Rome, has played a major role in making Stoicism popular to this day).


Epictetus - The spokesman for Stoicism

It is not very controversial to say that the most compelling, most well regarded source of Stoicism we have is the works of Epictetus. Not only was he a very clear writer and consistent thinker, but his life story is also quite compelling. Unlike so many of the great philosophers before him, Epictetus was not a wealthy man. In fact, he was born and raised a slave, and suffered from a permanent physical disability that left him with a pronounced limp. However unfortunate you judge those limitations to be, he had the relative benefit of being the slave of a very important Roman administrator and thus received an excellent education, focused squarely on Stoic philosophy. And he did eventually gain his freedom.

The fundamental Stoic beliefs regarding the emotions

The Stoic philosophy of emotion builds on three fundamental claims. The first, absolute bedrock idea is that

Emotions are identical with judgments

The other two fundamental beliefs are that

Emotions are voluntary

And that

Emotions should be eliminated

Just to be clear, what they believe is that like when you feel happy or sad, it is exactly the same sort of mental process as when you decide someone is boring or that you would prefer cheeseburgers to doughnuts. And that these choices, the decisive opinions, are completely up to you and no one else. No one can make you prefer cheeseburgers and no on can make you angry. Only you can decide. Finally, you should not have any emotions.

You probably noticed that that last bit doesn’t exactly follow logically. I mean, just because of the fact that emotions are choices that you make and that only you can make, it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have them. After all, they certainly don’t think you should have no judgments at all! So to understand the Stoics on the emotions we need to understand why emotions are not the kind of judgments you should have.

According to the great Cicero, a very famous Roman statesman, philosopher and legal scholar and in my opinion one of the 2-3 most brilliant Ancient Romans, who was often but not always an advocate of stoic teachings, the Stoics “refuse to concede that a person ought to have any feelings at all”. 

And he’s right, the Stoic position on emotions is quite simply that they are bad and must be completely excluded from life if a person ever wants to be good and happy. As you may have already figured out, I find this conclusion completely misguided, and easily the least satisfactory account of the emotions in the ancient world. I’ll argue that the Stoic philosophy of emotions was guilty of egregious errors that, due to Stoicism’s pervasive influence for subsequent thinkers, have done an extraordinary amount of damage to our understanding of the emotions and so to our ethical thinking.

More specifically, I’m going to show you how Stoicism was the starting point for the fundamental flaws present in what today we’d call “cognitive” theories of emotion and motivated the fundamental flaws present in what today we’d call “physicalist” (I call them visceral) theories of emotion.

Next week I'll begin laying out Epictetus' "handbook for Stoicism", the Enchiridion