Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Jeremy Reid on Anger and Forgiveness (Episode 92)
888 Plays1 year ago
In this conversation, Caleb speaks with Jeremy Reid. Jeremy is an Assistant Professor in Philosophy at San Francisco State University. They talk about anger and forgiveness, using his excellent paper “Stoic Forgiveness” as a launching off point.
This is an excellent conversation for understanding the Stoic view of anger and enriching it with their practical and compassionate take on forgiveness. Highly recommended.
https://jeremywreid.weebly.com/
(00:30) Stoics on Anger
(11:13) Why Do We Get Angry?
(15:47) Responding to Wrongdoing
(26:24) Forgiveness
(35:08) Forgiving Everyone at Once
(37:36) Self-Forgiveness
(40:48) Flexibility
(43:15) Children Healing Children
(47:59) Intuitive Stoicism
(50:56) Other People's Anger
(54:38) Becoming Less Angry
(01:00:26) Compassion in Stoicism
***
Subscribe to The Stoa Letter for weekly meditations, actions, and links to the best Stoic resources: www.stoaletter.com/subscribe
Download the Stoa app (it’s a free download): stoameditation.com/pod
If you try the Stoa app and find it useful, but truly cannot afford it, email us and we'll set you up with a free account.
Listen to more episodes and learn more here: https://stoameditation.com/blog/stoa-conversations/
Thanks to Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music in the conversations: https://ancientlyre.com/
Recommended
Transcript
Understanding Anger Through Stoicism
00:00:00
Speaker
It's that when you get into the relevant perspective on wrongdoing, and what human life is like, and what happiness consists in, the anger kind of falls away from a certain perspective. I think that's really important. Welcome to So Conversations. My name is Caleb Andoveros, and today I'm here with Professor Jeremy Reed in person in the flesh. That's always a good thing. Yeah, thanks so much for coming over. Thanks for having me. It's nice to be back.
The Nature of Anger and False Judgments
00:00:24
Speaker
Let's start with a jump right into it. So what fundamentally is the issue that stoics have with anger? So I think there are two important assumptions that go into an angry response.
00:00:40
Speaker
And that is that there's a judgment of value that something bad has happened in the world, that it shouldn't be that way, that it ought to have been otherwise, that someone knew what they were doing and deliberately made a bad decision. And so that the appropriate and fitting response to that is to get angry. And there's also a second assumption, which is that it's useful to get angry, that we do better together as a society and in our relationships if
00:01:08
Speaker
We express and communicate that what the other person did was bad and wrong and hurtful and so anger then is not just a way of registering that something is wrong it's also a productive way of kind of showing to other people that if we continue to act in this way that the relationship will end or that revenge or punishment or some kind of retaliation is merited on the basis of what they did.
Moderate Stoicism and Justified Anger
00:01:34
Speaker
So on the one hand, there is a false judgment about the idea that what someone else has done has made your life worse, that they have harmed you in some way and that they have acted in ways that they can be held responsible for.
00:01:50
Speaker
And then the second is that anger is also just a good way of dealing with it, so it's flagging that there is a problem, the problem has harmed you, and that we're going to fix it by getting angry with the other person, and then the thought of the anger then is supposed to be a kind of motivation to fix it. The stoics think that that is also a mistake, that one, it's not the case that you've been harmed by the person, your life has not been made worse.
00:02:13
Speaker
but also that anger is a good way of responding to that person's wrongdoing. And I think that they think that that is also not the right way to deal with other people's wrongdoing in the world.
00:02:25
Speaker
Right. Right. So I guess there's if you want to say many people, of course, they think there are cases where, you know, I shouldn't have gotten angry in a circumstance or someone else should have gotten angry at me. But nonetheless, there are some cases where we feel like anger is appropriate. And that is either because someone has been significantly harmed by some terrible thing that someone, some other person committed
00:02:50
Speaker
Or perhaps because anger is just useful. It has some motivational power. It has some social power, whatever it is. And the Stoics are not, they don't agree with either of those clients. What's up with that?
00:03:01
Speaker
Yeah, that's right. So we have to say kind of each of them in turn to try to get the argument off the ground. So first of all, why is it that the stoics would say that you haven't been harmed by other people?
Judgment vs Actions in Stoic Philosophy
00:03:12
Speaker
So the easy response is it's not what other people do to you, it's your judgment about them that the harm consists in. Okay, but that just pushes the question back. Why is it that other people haven't really harmed us? I think the thought here is in the same way that all kinds of stuff happens to you in life that you would prefer
00:03:31
Speaker
not to happen in various ways. It can't be the case that a good life depends on nothing going wrong. So you can go into some pretty easy intuitions here. It might be that you had great plans for the weekend and you prefer that it didn't rain, but it's not the case that just because it rained there's no way you can have a good weekend. Okay, that's a small case. Now we can start building up.
00:03:52
Speaker
It's clear that there are things that other people do to you that you prefer that they didn't do. So it might be that someone on public transit insults you for some reason, or it's just disrespectful of your space. You would prefer that they didn't do that, of course, but to think that your commute is somehow ruined by this other person's behavior is a mistake. And this is the kind of thing that, again, some people get angry at and other people are like, this is just what happens when you're on public transit.
00:04:17
Speaker
So some of the passages in Star Citizen that attest to this is the famous Blitzen-Epictetus where he's like, look, if you're going to the bath and you expect not to be splashed, you just have a false understanding of the way that the world works in this way.
00:04:31
Speaker
So the thought then is, okay, so now that we start to get a bigger class of cases where some people seem to get irrationally angry and other people just kind of take it in their stride, the storks say, okay, well, we can dial that up a little bit more. Do you really expect that your partner and that your spouse and that your loved ones and the people that you work with are every day going to treat you in exactly the way that you want? Do you expect that they're really going to
00:04:56
Speaker
be psychologically attentive to all your needs at all times, that they really appreciate what you're going through and that they're always going to make things as easy and wonderful and helpful for you as they can. No, that seems like an unreasonable expectation as well. And you're going to have a really tough time getting through life if you only expect people to treat you in the ways that you'd prefer.
00:05:18
Speaker
So I think what they're putting pressure on with respect to the idea that other people can harm you and that anger is a good response to it is just a kind of false expectation about how you expect other people in the world to cooperate with your particular needs, wants, and desires. And especially the important point is if you're trying to describe your realistic, happy human life, it can't be one that involves nobody treating you in ways that you would prefer that they didn't.
00:05:44
Speaker
So the move is to try to get you into a perspective where you stop seeing wrongdoing as kind of, you stop seeing wrongdoing as an egregious violation, like an unusual thing that happens. You first look at all the things that happen in life that you prefer wouldn't. And then you start to think about human action within that bigger perspective where you say, okay, well, did you really expect that everyone was going to do what you wanted?
00:06:10
Speaker
Similarly, did you really expect that the people in society were going to, that the society at large was going to treat you in a way that was like, maximally beneficial for your position? No. So the idea is that we should think of wrongdoing as the norm in the same way that we should think of basically things out of your control, not always going the way that you want them to as being the norm.
00:06:36
Speaker
And it's from that bigger perspective that even if you recognize that some kinds of wrongdoing might be more harmful than others in various ways, it's not going to be the case that you see that kind of wrongdoing as unusual or unexpected or somehow surprising.
00:06:55
Speaker
think that it's the kind of thing that this is just what happens to human beings and human lives, and although there are things that you should do in response to those, getting angry isn't the right kind of response because getting angry presupposes that this was the kind of thing which is unexpected in various ways or was a gross violation of norms that people should otherwise have followed.
00:07:15
Speaker
You kind of see it as just part and parcel of what it means to live a human life with other people who are imperfect and not paying the attention to your needs that perhaps you think that they should.
00:07:27
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. To what extent does it depend on the stoic theory just of what a happy
Expectations and Anger Management
00:07:33
Speaker
life is? Because I think you could have the view where, sure, we should expect people to be mistreat us in a variety of different ways. There are going to be shameless people. You know, this is one of them. It's one of the outlines for Marcus Aurelius. But nonetheless, there's still going to be some room where anger might be appropriate just because some deeds, either of our own or others, are so wrong or something of that sort.
00:07:58
Speaker
Yes, if you want to have a more moderate stoicism, then I think that that would be the way that you could do it, as you could say. What the Starks are really pointing out is that the vast majority of our angry responses, or that our negative emotional responses, are based on false expectations and are based on just unrealistic ways of thinking about the world.
00:08:18
Speaker
and that it displays a kind of childishness in the same way that getting angry about bad weather is a kind of childishness. It's like, look, you're an adult. You should have worked out that this kind of stuff happens. And to let yourself be upset by it is just to kind of see the world in the wrong way. So yeah, I'm more moderate sources, I might say.
00:08:36
Speaker
90, 95% of our anger is misguided, but there really is a place for serious, serious violations of norms and serious wrongdoing that anger is a good response for. But that's why I think if you're going to go orthodox to our system, if you want to try to explain the ancient view and how it applies now, the key is just to get into the different perspective where you're really seeing the happiness of your life as being a result of what you choose to do of your agency.
00:09:05
Speaker
The way that Julia Annes puts it, she says, it's about how you live your life, not what happens to you. It's about the decisions, the actions that you take, not the circumstances you find yourself in. And I think that's a very helpful way to think about it, where there are certainly ways of evaluating circumstances as being better or worse. That's what the role of preferred and dispreferred indifference is doing in the theory. But ultimately, you think about the goodness of your life in the way that you acted, because you expect the circumstances of your life
00:09:34
Speaker
to be non-ideal in all kinds of ways, and how other people act towards you as part of the circumstances of your life. You don't get to decide what other people do, you only get to decide how you respond to it. So yeah, it takes a little bit longer, I think, to get into the perspective where you can see anger has always been an irrational response, as always kind of presupposing a conception of happiness that the Stoics think is wrong.
00:09:58
Speaker
But even the more moderate view, I think has a lot going for it in terms of just recognizing how many of our responses are based on unrealistic expectations of how you think that the world should go, and especially how you think other people should respond to you in it. And once you see that, you then start to think, okay, although I would have preferred that this person didn't act, or that this group of people didn't act in this way towards me,
00:10:25
Speaker
Did I really think that it was gonna be perfect in that respect where this kind of thing was never going to happen? Did I really think that no relationships would end, nobody would betray me, nobody would lie to me, nobody would try to swindle me, nobody would try to get away with exploiting me in various kinds of ways. And when you put it that way, it's like, well, no, I guess I didn't expect that I would be able to go through life without that happening.
00:10:50
Speaker
And so the stoics say, okay, well, if a good and a bad human life both involve people treating you badly, then it can't be that what the difference between a good human life and a bad human life is, is that people don't treat you badly in a good human life. It must be that there's something about how the person is responding to that wrongdoing, which is making their life good, not the fact that the wrongdoing happened.
00:11:13
Speaker
So what's the traditional account of why humans get angry at all? Why do human creatures experience this negative emotion? Not just in the sense that they have false beliefs or irrational, but what is it that makes us especially prone to having this kind of rational belief?
00:11:36
Speaker
Yeah, and this isn't the respect in which stoicism can start to sound quite Buddhist, which is I think it depends on kind of attachment to things outside of your control, where you value certain things other than your own agency and your own judgments in a way that you take those to partly constitute your happiness.
00:11:55
Speaker
So when, for example,
Anger, Attachment, and Philosophical Views
00:11:57
Speaker
your partner does something that makes you angry, it's because you've valued them behaving in a certain kind of way as part of your identity, as part of what you thought it meant to live well, as part of your life. So you come to identify, you come to value, you come to attach yourself to things that are outside of your control. And so anger then is a negative response to when those things go badly.
00:12:19
Speaker
So the thought is your anger responses are evidence of your attachment to things outside of your control and they're evidence of the ways in which you either consciously or subconsciously value those things as being part of a good life. And again, what's the easy test case? Well, just think about things that you're not angry at.
00:12:37
Speaker
If you're not particularly into sports and your local sports team loses a final in a game and you're completely unperturbed, okay, well, what's going on there? Presumably it's because you don't actually care about what happens. There's a sense in which you don't value the winning, your sports team winning or losing as part of your happiness. It's just something that passes you by.
00:12:58
Speaker
And again, most people have that attitude towards weather. Suddenly, if you live in the Pacific Northwest, or if you come from New Zealand like me, you just won't be able to get through life responding negatively to rain. And again, those examples are supposed to be examples of where you start small, but the same principle holds for bigger things, where if you find yourself getting angry at something going well or badly, it's probably because you think that that thing is important to your identity or is important to your happiness.
00:13:24
Speaker
in a pretty deep way because it's clear that other people don't respond negatively to those same things. So you must be valuing it in a way that they're not. And just the same way that people who are very invested in sports teams can get angry when they lose and other people are just like, who cares? Yeah. Well, how does that compare with, uh, the modern accounts or I guess the best in your view, the best psychological theories of why we get angry?
00:13:52
Speaker
So the vast majority of people who I know on this topic are happy to say that emotions are appraisals of value.
00:13:59
Speaker
And so in that sense, the thought is emotions, most fundamentally, indications of pro or negative judgments. And in that sense, the ancients are well on board. The ancients in modern psychology are pretty consistent, or philosophy in the emotion is pretty consistent, that the emotions are tracking value. So this is why I think that when people criticize the Stoic theory of emotions, often what they're doing is they're criticizing the Stoic theory of value.
00:14:22
Speaker
It is true that the Stoics say a lot of things about anger and grief that people might find unintuitive or that they don't like, but it's falling out of this bigger theory of, well, really what is good and bad in life? What is it that contributes to our happiness and what doesn't? And the psychology that the Stoics are giving in terms of emotions involved in judgments, that there are appraisals of value positively or negatively, that they often involve,
00:14:47
Speaker
They often involve desires to generate certain kinds of actions afterwards, so the standard account here with anger is that anger is directed at revenge or retaliation or some kind of payback, as I think kind of the best way to put it, that the angry person wants the person who wronged them to suffer in some kind of way.
00:15:05
Speaker
So in that sense, I think the Stoics and contemporary philosophers of emotion and psychologists don't really have any beef with each other.
Happiness and Emotional Responses
00:15:12
Speaker
They agree that emotions are appraisals of value. They agree that emotions have motivational and behavioral components. They agree that emotions have a certain kind of phenomenology, a certain kind of feel.
00:15:23
Speaker
What they're disagreeing about are what are the appropriate objects of those emotions. So all of the disagreement is really about, does this thing genuinely contribute to my happiness? Is this thing genuinely good? Is it the kind of thing I should value or not? And so it's not the stoic theory of emotions that is causing the problem. It's the stoic theory of value in their account of happiness where that's the part of the theory that needs defending.
00:15:47
Speaker
Got it, got it. So there's agreement on anger being grounded in value judgments, but you might have disagreement because you think, well, sometimes anger is just going to be justified. Maybe I think in an intuitive sense many people have is that sometimes the world almost as it were gets out of balance.
00:16:05
Speaker
And someone has significantly wronged another one in order for it to be back into its proper balance. You need an eye for an eye, and that other person is going to need to be punished in some way. Whereas the stoics just aren't going to think about
00:16:20
Speaker
the, you know, the shape of value, I think, in that way. What happens when another person wrongs another one isn't that necessarily that, you know, the victim is the person who was wronged. It's the wrongdoer who is expressing their bad character. Yeah, good. So I think there's a little, there's a little finesse that needs to happen here, which is you need to distinguish between whether a wrong has been done and whether the agent has been harmed.
00:16:46
Speaker
So something that's very important to me is that the stoics do think that wrongdoing demands a response. So for example, if I came and stole your computer, I think it's like, oh, well, Caleb is a stoic, so he's not going to try to get revenge on me for stealing his computer. So I can just walk all over him and I can do what I want and he's just going to be.
00:17:05
Speaker
passive and un-angry and say, well, you know, it was an external anyway, I didn't really need it and I can be happy without it and people live for thousands of years happily without computers. So I can just get away with stealing your computer. That's not the right response. The thought is, insofar as an injustice has been done and you are trying to become a just stoic, then you need to give a just response to wrongdoing and the just response to wrongdoing. So that example, at the most basic level, involves getting your computer back in some way.
00:17:34
Speaker
The difference is you don't do that with anger. You don't do that with a desire to retaliate. You do it as a rectification of the misbalance in the world. So the thought is it's not as though the stoic is passive with respect to wrong. The thought is they're not doing it from a position of anger. You're reasoning about the wrong that has been done. You're thinking about what needs to be done to fix it and what is just and appropriate in order to fix it. And so a lot of your motivational states are not coming from a position of emotion.
00:18:03
Speaker
And again, there are really easy examples of this. We act without emotional motivation, recognizing that something is wrong all the time. So in stoic fashion, we can start with an easy example. You spill a bunch of water on your kitchen floor. You don't go, oh, this is the worst. I hate cleaning. What a horrible circumstance. I mean, you just you just clean it up.
00:18:25
Speaker
Similarly, you know, building up to their examples, as a teacher, it's often the case that there are things that my students are doing that is wrong, both with respect to their academic work and with respect to their conduct as students. I don't need to get angry in order to be like, hey, notice you're having trouble with deadlines.
00:18:43
Speaker
It's important that you get things in by the time that they're due. Here are some strategies that you could try to use to improve it. Here's what works for me or tell me what's going on in your life and we'll think through it. Similarly, when my students make mistakes, academic errors on their papers, I don't get angry with them. I just tell them why what they've done is wrong and try to help them to fix it and point to
00:19:04
Speaker
ways that they can do it. So the thought is we do this all the time. The idea that you have to get emotional in order to motivate yourself, I think, is just a mistake. It's often the case that we recognize that there's some problem that needs to be fixed or there's something that needs to be done. And so the stoic point here is, yeah, and what this shows is that the anger is superfluous. It's not the case that anger is necessary in order for fixing
00:19:29
Speaker
In order for fixing problems, we do it all the time. And the stoic examples here are also very helpful. They compare angry soldiers with non-angry soldiers. They say they do the same things. Similarly with gladiators, they notice that gladiators are unaffected when people stab them in various ways. They don't get angry at the person. They talk about athletes. The example I find most helpful is judges.
00:19:53
Speaker
because it has an easy contemporary parallel. When we talk about judicial temperament, what we mean is that there's a way in which the judge is trying to reason as impartially as they can about the wrongs that they're trying to rectify. And I think there's a good case to be made that if a judge were to get angry at every case that came before them, one, that would make their job impossible to do.
00:20:17
Speaker
Two, it's not clear that they'd make better judicial decisions acting from their place. So, you know, there's an empirical question about the extent to which emotions can inform or undermine those kinds of judgments. But I think what's important for the Stoics is just that there seem to be a lot of cases where people are responding to wrongdoing. Not taking it has a personal harm and are motivated by rational considerations in terms of the problem that needs to be solved rather than getting angry.
00:20:45
Speaker
So I think a lot of the debate is focusing too much on examples where it seems like people are justly getting angry or people are getting angry in a way that seems to be really helpful and ignoring a whole host of cases where we don't need those emotions or those emotions aren't helpful in helping us fix the problem at hand.
Rationality Over Anger in High-Stakes Scenarios
00:21:05
Speaker
And the stoics are saying, okay, cool, well, why don't we try generalizing those kinds of cases as opposed to just focusing on the good ones.
00:21:12
Speaker
And I think this is just crystal fear in Seneca, where Seneca never denies that anger can be motivationally efficacious. Seneca never denies that many people are motivated by anger. His argument is that they don't need to be, and it's often better when they're not. So those, for me, are the claims that are the ones that need bolstering. It's possible to be motivated by reason and not by emotion in various ways, and then the kind of more empirical question of, and things often go better when people are motivated rationally rather than out of anger.
00:21:42
Speaker
And it is striking the examples of war or gladiators where we think these are exceptionally high-stake events and it just is true that one, you don't need to be angry to motivate yourself to do some of these incredibly demanding things that you might be faced with and say war or something of this sort.
00:22:01
Speaker
too, it may in fact distort your vision of the world if you are consumed by anger for the enemy. And I think many competitors would probably hope their opponent gets angry and try to advantage, you know, seek some advantage. Yeah, absolutely. And it's a particularly nice example of the idea that the harm is in the judgment and not in what happens to you because there's a very clear case with like boxes.
00:22:25
Speaker
is that someone in a boxing match, if they get punched in the face, they're not taking that personally. They don't see that as a harm. Again, there's something they need to do in response, but they're not getting angry about it. Whereas when someone in public punches you in the face, it's much more common for people to get angry at that. So Barb rolls on Friday and Saturday nights, right? But the thought is, in both instances, there's a sense in which you can describe the action the same way someone is being punched in the face.
00:22:52
Speaker
So you can't just say, when you get punched in the face, you get angry because that's patently untrue. It's only when someone gets punched in the face, plus all of these extra judgments about the context and the appropriateness that end up making the person angry.
00:23:07
Speaker
So that's for me just a very competent example of how do you make sense of this idea that the hang is not in what happens to you, it's in your judgment. Well, you take two cases where the same thing is happening, someone is getting punched in the face, and yet there are two different emotional responses. And the stoics say, well, if there are two different emotional responses, something must be explaining that. What explains it? Well, it's the judgment that the person is making. It's their perspective on the situation. It's not what happens to them that ends up making a difference.
00:23:36
Speaker
So do you think there are any cases where anger is useful or do you generally just agree with the stoics here, I think? I mean, of course there are cases where in a particular instance, it was useful for someone to get angry, but could they have achieved that same outcome? Would it have been better for them to achieve that same outcome with a different emotional state? So now we're getting, so the view here is that the stoic views on anger end up falling out of a bigger perspective on happiness.
Philosophical Perspectives on Happiness and Anger
00:24:05
Speaker
So in so far as I think that one of the things which is fun about ancient philosophy and why I find it interesting is that there are competing visions of happiness. And in so far as especially I find Aristotelian views very plausible as well. Those were the ones that got me excited about ancient philosophy and I think they're worth taking very seriously. Yeah, within other frameworks, I can certainly see why many people would think that anger is good and beneficial and part of a happy life.
00:24:35
Speaker
But if you're in a stoic, if you think that the stoic account of happiness has a lot going for it, which I do, then I can see how you can get to no instances of anger or justified. Precisely because to get the justification of anger off the ground, you need to start thinking that how other people treat you is a necessary part of a good life, that people treating you well is part of a good life.
00:25:00
Speaker
And yeah, I think that there's a pretty good case to be made for the stoic conception of happiness, having a more compelling vision of what a good life is, where you really are focusing on how you act rather than what happens to you. But there are also easy counter examples to that conception in some way. So the way that I see it is there are different conceptions of happiness, especially in antiquity. I think a lot of them have a lot going for them.
00:25:27
Speaker
depending on which one I think has the most, which theory I think is the best at the end of the day. I mean, I haven't worked that out after you get in 40 years. But, but, you know, I think this, I think the thought is, whatever conception of happiness you end up having, it's going to run into problems at some point.
00:25:43
Speaker
Philosophy is hard. It's hard to make views consistent. It's hard to get clear on exactly what makes for a happy life, especially when you might not have had enough experience in the world to make a good judgment. But I think there's a lot going for the story perspective. And in that sense, there's a lot going for the anti-anger arguments that they give.
00:26:01
Speaker
God, I got it. Well, so it seems then in your view that the best objections to the stoic view on anger are ultimately going to rely on different accounts of happiness, namely ones that make people somewhat dependent on matters that are outside of their control, matters that are outside of their character.
00:26:24
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's what's doing most of the work. The sense in which anger and forgiveness end up being related is, I think, honing in on one part of that theory, which is, to what extent is it reasonable to expect people to act better than they do?
00:26:42
Speaker
And that's something that I've been thinking a lot about. And this is a place where I think it's helpful to get into the text because it's not just these more general considerations about happiness. It also ends up being a theory about
00:26:56
Speaker
basically how good we should expect other people to be. And the thought is anger is often holding the person accountable because we think that they could have and should have done better than they did. So it's importantly communicating to them that you want them to act better in the future. And I think a part of the Stoic theory that is not often appreciated is the way in which the Stoics think that that actually is the right way to think about other people's wrongdoing. So this is the passage in Seneca's On Anger that is,
00:27:25
Speaker
has been bouncing around in my mind for a couple of years now. So I'm at OnAnger210, and this is the Castor and Nussbaum translation, and this is what Seneca writes.
00:27:41
Speaker
What if one were to become angry at people unable to put one foot surely after another in the dark? Or at deaf people who don't listen to orders? Or at children because they don't pay attention to their duties, but look instead to their age mates' games and silly jokes? What if you should choose to become angry at those who grow sick, or old, or tired?
00:28:03
Speaker
Among all those other disadvantages that are ours as mortals, there's this, the murkiness of our minds, whence both the inevitability of our mistakes and our fondness for the mistakes we make. To keep from becoming angry with individuals, you must forgive all at once. The human race should be granted a pardon. If you become angry with young men and old men because they do wrong, then be angry with infants. They're going to do wrong.
00:28:31
Speaker
Surely no one becomes angry with children of an age incapable of drawing distinctions, do they? Being a human being is a greater excuse and more just than being a child. These are the terms and stipulations of our birth. We are creatures subject to no fewer diseases of mind than of body. Neither dull nor slow, to be sure, but misusing our acuity, all of us are offering each other examples of vices.
00:28:58
Speaker
When anyone follows those who have gone before down the wrong route, how could he not have an excuse since he's gone astray on the common highway? General strictness is unsheathed against individuals, but pardon is required when the whole army has deserted. What eliminates a wise man's anger? The great crowd of wrongdoers. He understands how unjust it is and how dangerous to be angry with a vice that's pandemic.
00:29:24
Speaker
Whenever Heraclitus left his house and saw all around him such a mass of people living badly, or rather dying badly, he wept out of pity for all the happy and prosperous people he met. This was the behaviour of a mind that was gentle but too weak. Besides, he himself was among those deserving of his tears. By contrast, they say Democritus was never without a smile in public, so hard did he find it to take seriously all the transactions being conducted in earnest.
00:29:53
Speaker
Where's the place for anger there? All things deserve either our laughter or our tears. So the wise man will not be angry with wrongdoers. Why? Because he knows that the wise man is not born but made. He knows that very, very few turn out wise in the whole expanse of time. Because he's come to recognize the terms that define human life, and no sane man becomes angry with nature.
00:30:19
Speaker
That would be as pointless as choosing to wonder why fruit doesn't hang on woodland briars, or why brambles and thorn bushes aren't formed with some useful fruit. No one becomes angry when nature defends the vice.
00:30:31
Speaker
And so the wise man, calm and even-tempered in the face of error, not an enemy of wrongdoers but one who sets them straight, leaves his house daily with this thought in mind. I will encounter many people who are devoted to drink, many who are lustful, many who are ungrateful, many who are greedy, many who are driven by the demons of ambition. All such behaviours he will regard as kindly as a doctor does his own patience.
00:30:56
Speaker
When a man's ship is taking on a lot of water, as the joints buckle and gape on every side, he surely doesn't become angry with the sailors and the ship itself, does he? Rather, he runs to help, keeping the water out here, baling it out there, plugging the gaps he can see, working consistently to counter the unseen gaps that invisibly draw water into the bilge.
00:31:16
Speaker
And he doesn't leave off just because more water takes the place of all the water he drains. Prolonged assistance is needed against constant and prolific evils. Not so that they cease, but so that they don't gain the upper hand.
00:31:30
Speaker
So I love this passage, I mean, in part because I think there are the parallels to the famous Marcus Aurelius passage of the when I wake up in the morning, I expect to see people who are a pain to me in various ways. But it puts it in this in this bigger schema of thinking of kind of human wrongdoing as a natural part of life and the sense in which it's actually not people's fault that they're not as good people as they should be.
00:31:54
Speaker
So you can play the standard accounts here where no one got the upbringing they should have gotten. There are ways in which everybody thinks their parents could have done better and we all have instances of ways in which we think our parents and caregivers kind of messed us up. The values that our society hands to us and the people who are held up in society obviously aren't stored paragons. They focus our attention on things there.
00:32:17
Speaker
aren't actually helpful to our happiness and end up being unfulfilling in various ways. And so when you think of it that way, the thought is, well, of course, like, did you expect people to be fully virtuous? How could they possibly have become wise people in situations like this?
00:32:33
Speaker
And then how that's connected at the end with this this image of like bailing water out of a boat. It's like you're not expecting you're not expecting things to be perfect. You're not expecting you're not expecting to like solve the problem of human vice. You're just trying to like do what you can to kind of stop the boat from sinking in various ways.
00:32:52
Speaker
I also think that the Heraclitus passage in the middle is really interesting, where he mentions Heraclitus basically like being in tears and pitying everyone about the state that they're in. And Seneca says this is the behavior of a mind that was gentle but too weak.
00:33:07
Speaker
So I think the thought there is like, in some sense, if you really reflect on kind of the frailty of human life and the terrible upbringing that all of us get and the ways in which we wrong each other, you might be tempted to be reduced to tears. And Seneca is pointing out, well, the stoic strength in some respects is not
00:33:26
Speaker
becoming so upset and crushed by that but rising above it, recognizing what you can do to help and recognizing what you can do to improve things. The sense in which it highlights that a lot of what people are doing is just like laughable and ridiculous and not worth your time. So you think of the things that people get angry about, you think of the things that that occupy people's times and you kind of you recognize that they're not very important and then presumably you're supposed to do the same thing in your own life recognizing
00:33:53
Speaker
that emails are worth getting angry at to take a personal example or that, you know, what a friend said to you six years ago isn't worth your time.
Forgiveness and Human Flaws
00:34:01
Speaker
So I think there's a lot in that passage where it's trying to reorient your perspective on the fact that anger presupposes that there's a sense in which you thought that the person really should have acted better and that they're responsible for it and that they should be held accountable.
00:34:15
Speaker
And the stoic's response to that is, no, you should have exactly expected that from people under all kinds of psychological pressures in a society that doesn't help them out with people who had aparenes that they shouldn't have gotten.
00:34:29
Speaker
And yeah, there are things that you can do to fix that, but ultimately you should be kind of going into life expecting people to act badly. And so that's the sense in which you get the cool line about forgiving people all at once, which is if you really reflect on the kind of conditions of human action and human relationships, you should expect it to be one which is bad. And if you expect everyone to act badly towards you and
00:34:54
Speaker
you also recognize that you're not perfect, then forgiving everyone all at once kind of starts to seem like a position that isn't just crazy but has a lot going for it as a different vision of how to get through human life.
00:35:08
Speaker
Yeah, so what is exactly that amount to when you say forgive everyone at once? My description of that would be something like, no one is worthy object of anger, and instead you focus on treating them with justice. And those are the two central aspects. Do you think that's a fine philosophy? That sounds great to me. Yeah, I got it from a pretty good paper.
00:35:33
Speaker
Yeah, I would also add to, you know, not just justice, but compassion. So I think Marcus Aurelius is especially good on this, where he thinks that the kind of main response to human wrongdoing is kindness, where, yeah, you're kind of, it's, you're appreciating
00:35:54
Speaker
You're appreciating the difficulties that other people are going through that life is hard and part of it, the justice part of it is I think taking the appropriate steps to rectify other people's actions and wrongdoing when you can.
00:36:07
Speaker
But often there's just not a lot you can do to fix other people. I don't want to give the impression that what the stoics are saying here is you should be going around basically acting as a therapist to everyone, identifying their vices, and trying to fix it. First, you're probably in no position to do that. But second, there's just a lot that you can't do in order to help other people. If there are other people you can help, then yes, absolutely, you should be doing that. You should be trying to improve them as much as you can.
00:36:32
Speaker
But that's almost certainly going to be in the context of close personal relationships and friendships. And a lot of the response, I think, is just going to be this kind of this compassion and this kindness in response to other people's wrongdoing. So, yeah, the thought is other people, when they wrong you, they aren't appropriate objects of anger for the reasons that cynic is giving. And then you think about your response.
00:36:55
Speaker
where it might be that you're just like, okay, this is the ordinary course of human life, this is what I should have expected, nothing I can do about it, move on. Or you say, is this something I can do to improve this situation? Then the justice kicks in. And a lot of the time, it's just going to be kindness and compassion. And yeah, that's, I think, a kind of a vision of stoicism, which I certainly would like to kind of hear, hear more widely appreciated, where it's not just about this kind of
00:37:20
Speaker
holding yourself to high standards and holding others to high standards and being pretty hardcore with respect to the emotions, but thinking about how your actions and your perspective on the world is an appropriate response to human fallibility and the difficulty of life.
00:37:36
Speaker
Well, how do you start, I suppose, with yourself? So think about forgiving yourself for things you've done in the past. I think there are a few other emotions associated with those sorts of things. Shame would be one, maybe you're not angry at mistakes you made, but do you still feel shame? Or how does that fit in a picture? Ah, well, I mean, I'm far from a paragon in this respect. So you've had more sagely people you should ask that question to.
00:38:02
Speaker
I don't know. I mean, the stuff about shame and anger towards oneself in stoicism is really interesting. So we know that there's an in-house debate amongst the Stoics as to the extent to which shame is beneficial. And there's this really important scene that I think primarily comes from Plato's symposium where the young and talented Alcibiades while he's still with Socrates. Socrates makes him feel shame.
00:38:25
Speaker
And he says Socrates makes him feel like his life was a waste of time and that the only thing that matters is becoming a good person. And he just breaks down and starts crying at kind of Socrates making him realize how much of a waste his life has been and how much more of a better person he needs to become. And so the Stoics think about this case and they say,
00:38:44
Speaker
Well, is Alcibiades' tears his shame at his own behavior? Is that the kind of thing which is based on a correct judgment of value? And they say, yeah, actually it is, because if vice is the only evil and virtue is the only good, Alcibiades has correctly identified an evil, namely his own bad character and his own bad actions. So this is when the second part of the stoic condition of emotions is really important. They say, but it's not beneficial for him to feel this way.
00:39:13
Speaker
So the kind of orthodox response is that although Alcibiades has made a correct judgment about the wrongness of his actions, it's not the case that it's useful for him to break down crying and be filled with shame. That's not motivationally helpful for him to become a better person. The thought is wallowing in your own vice doesn't help you improve your vice, it just kind of makes you dwell on it.
00:39:36
Speaker
Epictetus seems to disagree. Epictetus seems to think that there is a positive role for shame and that shame can be really helpful to motivate yourself to become better. So I think the stoic, I think thought is there's enough room within stoicism to kind of go either way on this, whether or not shame with respect to your own actions is helpful.
00:39:54
Speaker
Yeah, but he's interesting because he shames his students. He very much shames his students a lot. You have a sense that that's probably would work well for some people, but not others. Yeah, I do wonder how much this ends up being pedagogical where it's like, do you see yourself as someone who
00:40:09
Speaker
Yeah, the shame is actually really helpful for stopping you do it in the future or you someone who's really just like dwelling on dwelling on what you've done wrong. I think I probably more on the side of dwelling more on what I've done wrong in ways that aren't helpful, but
00:40:26
Speaker
yeah i think i think there's there's a there's an open question here i think yeah i insofar as i feel like my own proclivities are to dwell too much on the stuff i've done wrong in the past i could probably be a better stock in this respect in terms of focusing my energies on things i can do to improve myself in the future sure yeah but i don't know maybe the shame is helpful maybe unclear to me i think this brings out a flexibility and
00:40:50
Speaker
the aesthetic approach in terms of how we respond to wrongs, both with ourselves and in terms of anger.
Teaching Methods and Self-Improvement
00:40:57
Speaker
Where if you just take the shame example again, I am positive you have some people have more maybe a version of the coach who's harsh coach, almost like a boot camp leader. And that is going to work for some people. It's not going to work for many others. That stereotype has its pedagogical failure modes, you could say, but it also has some
00:41:18
Speaker
some, perhaps some virtues or at least in the sense that it's going to work well for some. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's just going to be across the board if you think about different strategies for managing your own mistakes in the past, different strategies for managing how people have wronged you the present and so on.
00:41:34
Speaker
That's right. I think it's important to think as well about, like, okay, well, what is causing the flexibility? Well, what do the stomachs really care about? They care about you becoming a good person. Like, at the end of the day, that's what's absolutely central to the theory, which is that virtue is the only good, that the happiness of your life depends on how you live it.
00:41:52
Speaker
And so then it's totally okay to then have an in-house debate about what is most effective for kind of getting people to that position. And it might be that, yeah, for some people, one strategy works and for another person, that strategy would be really harmful. So this is for me a good example of like, okay, well, I know what the orthodox textbook academic version of the stoic theory is and what they actually say on these points. But if you zoom out and you think about, well, why are they saying these things in the first place?
00:42:18
Speaker
Well, they're trying to walk out strategies for improving yourself. And then if it turns out that those strategies don't work for some people, then yeah, that's important to recognize. And I think if we had more texts from antiquity, we'd see a greater range of the kind of practical strategies that get put in place. But I think you can even see it in the text that we have and so far as how.
00:42:40
Speaker
Seneca talks to himself and how Marcus talks to himself and how Epictetus talks to himself and his students. There's a variety of approaches. And so, yeah, thinking about why that would be. Ancient philosophers are very sensitive to how rhetoric needs to be tailored to the person that you're dealing with. And so to say that there's a stoic approach to
00:42:59
Speaker
bettering yourself in this respect it's like no that's that's that's misleading there are lots of strategies they give and then presumably the point is your teacher and and and you have to decide what is what is going to be best for you in terms of developing developing your own character
00:43:15
Speaker
Here's the kind of challenge that I would be interested in hearing response to. So, oh, the stoics often talk about these examples using example of a doctor and a patient example of a parent and a child. And we should think of people doing wrong. They're like children. They're like sick patients and we should respond accordingly. But the problem with that kind of initial strategy is that none of us are doctors or parents in this example.
00:43:41
Speaker
We are other children responding to other children. And insofar as sometimes the Stoics put them selves, you know, Seneca writes more letters to people. He's very careful to, you know, Seneca puts himself almost in this doctorly type position. He says, wait, you know, I'm not a doctor. I'm just someone who has advanced further in my experience of these sicknesses. But maybe he should have be a little bit more skeptical about
00:44:04
Speaker
this generally how Stoics talk about, you know, the responding to others as if they were children when we ourselves are in the same spot.
00:44:13
Speaker
Yeah, this is great. So I think there are a few things to say. One is that we might not all be equally children in the same respects. Certainly, I think there are things where some people are further along than others, and then Seneca's response is appropriate, where you can say, look, I'm not perfect. I have the things I'm still working on, but I can at least help you in this respect.
00:44:35
Speaker
I think another important part of the theory is just straight out of Epictetus where he says, we're really bad at applying the advice we give to others to ourselves. So when your friend is going through a breakup and you say, look, it's not the end of the world, like it's tough, but you will. There are other people out there.
00:44:52
Speaker
There isn't just one person who you can be happy with. You'll find other people. When you're saying that to your friend going through a breakup, you're not lying. It's not as though you're wrong. In fact, you have an important grasp of the truth in this respect, which is that
00:45:06
Speaker
Yeah, other people end up being special to you in various ways, but you probably do have a wrong view of the world if you think that there's one and only one person who you can live with and that can contribute to a good life. So why is it the case that it's so hard that when we are the person going through the breakup, we don't no longer follow that advice?
00:45:26
Speaker
And Epictetus is just highlighting that when our self-interest is involved, when our self, when our identity, when it's us that we have to apply the advice to, we just suck at doing that. And so this is why Epictetus recommends that we consider the advice that we give to other people, because we're not lying when we tell our friends these things. And so I think a lot of the way in which we can act as doctors and as parents to each other or just as helpers is
00:45:52
Speaker
because it's easier to be impartial and to give good advice when you're not the one who has to put it into practice. Often what's hard about applying the advice to yourself is that you're the one who has to do it. You're the one who has to take the actions and you're the one who has to change your beliefs and perspectives. And that kind of sucks when you're really upset and emotional and just want to wallow. So I think that there are resources in the theory to explain why we can still help other people even though we're imperfect ourselves.
00:46:22
Speaker
You also might just think that in some respect, although there's a deep philosophical objection here in terms of who is going to be an authority to help others, I think practice is the best evidence here, namely that we clearly do this. It's clear that friends and others and other people in our lives help us and improve us. So if a philosophical theory says it's impossible for anyone to help anyone, the problem is with the theory somewhere and leave it to the philosophers to work out exactly where the problem is.
00:46:51
Speaker
I think the thought is we shouldn't just deny this very basic, this very basic phenomenon of people help you in life and so we shouldn't get too caught up on.
Social Influence on Personal Improvement
00:47:00
Speaker
when the philosophy seems to suggest that there's like a devastating problem that the theory must be applicable in practice because everyone's vicious and all vice is equal. So technically it can't be that anyone's better than anyone. It's like, okay, now we're getting into the technicalities of stoic doctrine, but there's a concrete phenomenon on the ground and that's what we need is people helping each other. Right, right. Yeah. And I think a common advice many cognitive behavioral therapists will give to their patients is, you know, especially if they're struggling with a particular
00:47:30
Speaker
issue or self judgment is think about, well, if your friend was in this situation, what advice would you? Yeah, perfect. And thinking about your situation from this more of a third person perspective, which I think is both a common theme, of course, a cognitive behavioral therapy, but in stoicism, of course, in the text, you see many different techniques or rhetorical lines on trying to get into this larger third person perspective.
00:47:59
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I think this is a good example as well in terms of sometimes people think that stoicism is unintuitive. I prefer to think of it as tapping into a certain set of intuitions that we just need to think through more carefully. And like you could think of this as like a Socratic project where
00:48:15
Speaker
you're highlighting that people actually have inconsistent beliefs. And one way in which the inconsistency comes through is you think about the advice and the judgments that people make about themselves, and the advice and the judgment that they make about others. And they say, well, which one do you think is more likely to be true? The one where your ego is involved, or the one where you're invested in your own projects and interests, or the ones in which you seem to be acting more impartially, and you're not lying when you give this advice to your friends.
00:48:43
Speaker
And so then the stoics of putting pressure on which set of intuitions do you want to lean into? Do you want to lean into the ones that are more personal or the ones that involve other people? And I think they're trying to suggest that we tend to make judgments more reliably about other people than we do about ourselves. Right. Right. Yeah. And I think that example also is.
00:49:04
Speaker
a gives at least some intuitive grounding to the stoic anti-anger case where we think about you know it's the right are you going to come to the right decision when you are in the height of passion is your friend going to come to the right decision when they're in the height of passion is that passion useful to motivate themselves to do what they need to do in many cases the answer is pretty obviously no yeah and that's a you know common ordinary judgment and nothing too uh too fancy or too too theoretical
00:49:32
Speaker
And one thing to stress there as well is, again, if you want to have a more moderate position here, you can still grant that there are going to be instances where it really is the case that anger helps you come to. A better understanding of the situation, it highlights things that you've previously missed, and that it really does motivate you too. It really does motivate you to do the right thing. I think there are important cases where that seems to be true.
00:49:55
Speaker
And so then the response from the stoic needs to be something like, right, but what we're not asking is what action should you do in every particular instance? Really what we're trying to get at is what kind of character do you want to cultivate? What kind of perspective on the world do you want to cultivate? And so showing that there are a few instances of right anger or justified anger that doesn't actually get you to the stronger claim, which is, well, do you want to cultivate yourself to become
00:50:20
Speaker
an angry person who sees the wrongdoing as others, as something that you need to respond to and that you need to fix and that you need to get worked up about. And so sometimes shifting the discussion not from, is this particular instance of anger justified? Or was this action based on anger a good one? Shifting the question to, is this the kind of person I wanna become? And is this the kind of perspective I wanna take on life more generally?
The Role of Anger in Character Formation
00:50:45
Speaker
Again, I think there's a lot going for,
00:50:48
Speaker
There's a lot going for the stoics here, even if you want to have a more moderate position that allows for particular instances of anger being helpful. Yeah, I think that's a useful shift. I think it also brings out a possible failure mode, I think, for many stoics. Certainly one that I've applied in my own life is thinking about specific instances of anger, maybe that another person has exhibited as being wrong.
00:51:17
Speaker
And that judgment, in fact, it's correct. I totally agree with the stoics on anger. That instance of anger was wrong. But in that situation, was it the most important thing to focus on? And did my preoccupation with that fact lead me?
00:51:33
Speaker
to make the right decision. In some cases, probably not. There are many negative emotions, many mistakes in judgment. Anger is just one of them, and being preoccupied with it can lead to a mistake of its own kind, being preoccupied with it in particular instances.
00:51:52
Speaker
Of course, it's easy to note situations in which your opponent in whatever domain, politics, whatever happens to be angry, and that's a terrible advice. But perhaps that doesn't mean they're mistaken about politics, whatever policy proposal they have or something of this sort.
00:52:11
Speaker
That's right. And it's always worth addressing that stoicism, I think, is best applied when you're thinking about yourself. I think a lot of the, like, pernicious applications of stoicism end up being when you're going around judging other people's responses who, again, haven't even necessarily started to try to get into the stoic perspective in any way, shape, or form. And I think that's certainly the right way to think about a lot of political anger.
00:52:35
Speaker
where what you should be paying attention to as a star is, is it the case that this person has knowledge or information about injustices and forms of oppression that are going on in our society and is like their anger is responding to those things?
00:52:50
Speaker
And so I think even a good stoic should see other people's anger as involving really important information about how they're seeing their life going, how they see their society going. And even if you think that as a stoic anger isn't the best response to that, well, they're not stoics, so it's not fair to hold them accountable to that standard. And two, you shouldn't dismiss their anger insofar as part of you being a good just stoic, especially if you're in a position of power. Your job is to fix that.
00:53:18
Speaker
So it's one thing to kind of judge your own anger and judge your own negative responses. It's a completely another to judge other people's. And certainly the stoic account shouldn't be used as an excuse to dismiss other people's anger as, as always irrational. The view is more sophisticated and subtle than that. And I think it's, I think it's really interesting that when the stoics are considering how a stoic should respond to other people.
00:53:44
Speaker
Again, the primary responses are like forgiveness and compassion. You shouldn't be going around judging them for not being good stoics when, of course they're not good stoics, they're not stoics at all. So their anger is doing something else entirely in whether, and the fact that you think that that's not the best way for you to respond or that you have a different perspective on happiness. Okay, cool.
00:54:03
Speaker
you can go work on yourself and then you can kind of treat other people's anger as information about how that they're seeing the world again information about their appraisals is what's going what's going well or badly and when you start to see it that way i think the theory is much more plausible it's not just dismissing other people's anger as completely misguided i think i think that's a very important part of like how the stoic theory works out in practice is certainly i see it as primarily self-directed
00:54:31
Speaker
And there's a much more complicated story to be told about how the stoic should respond to other people's emotions. Right, right. Well, what about taking that same line of thought to oneself and thinking about, OK, I get angry sometimes, but I'm just a progressor. And maybe I grew up in a culture that values some forms of anger, teaches you to be angry in certain situations where you are in fact being wronged. And perhaps the fact that I get angry in these circumstances isn't actually the most important.
00:55:01
Speaker
feature of them, and if I'm thinking about what are the top three things that I want to work on over the next few months, maybe anger isn't going to make that less, even if it's a common experience for me. What do you think about that? I think you can go either way on it. So one is you could, again, I think it depends on the person, but you could say certainly forgiveness and compassion towards oneself is going to be very important for some people.
00:55:32
Speaker
The concern on the other side though, and this also I think doesn't get emphasised enough, the Stoics agree with Aristotle and Plato a lot on the power of habituation and that character is formed over a long period of time where you're consistently acting in certain kinds of ways and you're letting yourself feel in certain kinds of ways.
00:55:52
Speaker
And so while it might be a case that there are particular instances of your own anger or shame at your own disappointment where yeah, you should give yourself a little slack and you can apply the same advice that Seneca is giving to thinking about other people, you can apply that to yourself as well.
00:56:08
Speaker
But you also need to be aware of the sense in which you are habituating your character going forward. And that it might be that if you continually let yourself off in various ways to get angry, or certainly if you continue to habituate yourself to act badly, that's going to have serious consequences in the future. And so I think there's a delicate balancing act here in terms of might it be the case that sometimes letting yourself off is important. Yeah.
00:56:36
Speaker
But the sense in which I think you're supposed to be holding yourself to a higher standard is, yeah, but you also know that you shouldn't have gotten angry at this, or that this isn't the kind of thing which is worth having anxiety over. And you're training yourself to have an angry or an anxious response to the same thing in the future, and you should have caught yourself.
00:56:55
Speaker
So I think the way that I think about it is your kind of baseline is you're supposed to be habituating yourself towards virtue and you know, especially if you had a little bit of stoic training, you know pretty roughly what you're supposed to be doing with respect to those things.
00:57:09
Speaker
And then the question is just like, okay, so now we're talking about habit formation. How many times can I break a habit before it starts to be harmful? It's like, okay, well, there's going to be no number I can give you, but suddenly if you're acting out of anxiety, you're acting out of anger more often than you're not, then you're habituating yourself in the wrong direction entirely. So, you know, practical examples, right? If you're trying to improve yourself physically, sometimes it is true that you can take a day off the gym and that you can have a cheap day.
00:57:37
Speaker
But if there are more non-gym days and there are more cheat days than there are gym days and non-cheat days, then something's going wrong. So I think in that respect, you're supposed to be holding yourself to a higher standard and thinking about the ways in which your behavior's patterns of thinking and actions are forming habits or not.
00:57:55
Speaker
And you are supposed to be habituating yourself towards virtue. And so that's not happening at the end of the day. You need to calibrate for yourself the extent to which you are being too harsh on yourself or the extent to which you are not being hard enough. Right, right. Yeah. I think if you maybe wanted to make the case for this, the case would be something like a training wheels view of anchor where say you're being mistreated and you need to assert yourself. It might
00:58:21
Speaker
feel and might in fact be in some sense easier for someone to assert themselves while they are in a state of being angry. It could be a sort of situation where really asserting themselves is a scary thing to do and anger might make it easier to do that even if it's not ideal. And after making a number of other
00:58:41
Speaker
decisions are proving themselves further so they can assert themselves in those sorts of situations, they can take off the training wheels, as it were. But that kind of reasoning is very hard for me to say about these sorts of cases. But I guess it does have to be recognized there's a kind of danger in that sort of reasoning, right? Where maybe the training wheels will never come off, maybe in fact you're wrong about how you evaluate that situation.
00:59:05
Speaker
Yeah, and there are parallels, right, where it might be that this works for some people and messes them up and others. So again, an easy example is people who reward themselves with food, right? Yeah, it might be that if you reward yourself with food in some instances, that gets the relevant motivational mechanisms going and that you can then kind of end up doing the thing for its own sake later on, but it might also be the case that you then end up
00:59:31
Speaker
basically developing lack of self-control or a lack of temperance insofar as you are now using food as rewards in various ways. And so I think we thought as like, that's an example of just how it can go either way, depending on your own psychology and how the habituation works and that in habituating, trying to habituate yourself in one respect, in one respect, well, you might be habituating yourself in another respect badly.
00:59:54
Speaker
And so I think the thought is supposed to be, if you don't need to rely on anger in order to get the relevant psychological mechanisms going and performing the right actions, then don't. Because there is this danger that if you start habituating yourself to use anger as a motivational tool, then that's going to become more ingrained. And then you just have another problem you have to deal with. Yeah, yeah. Is there something else you want to say in terms of objections that we haven't covered?
01:00:22
Speaker
to the stoic view are possible misunderstandings that you think we haven't touched on adequately. The one thing I'd like to finish on is that sometimes I worry that people don't see the extent to which this kind of compassionate, caring, forgiving aspect is a part of genuine stoicism.
Kindness and Compassion in Stoicism
01:00:40
Speaker
And I think it's just because they're not reading the relevant texts and that it's really easy to get an impression of stoicism, especially from Epictetus's handbook. Like we're already talking about Epictetus shaming his students in various ways. And like, yeah, Epictetus is one of the more hardcore of the stoics in terms of he's
01:00:56
Speaker
pretty brutal in the standards that he suggests that we hold ourselves to. And, you know, some people get into that. But there is so much stuff in stoicism that emphasizes kindness and that emphasizes the ways that a proper stoic is supposed to be strong enough in their self and in their character. So again, thinking about what Seneca said about Heraclitus being too weak in terms of, in some respects, the pity response is a weak response and that
01:01:24
Speaker
The Stoic strength is supposed to be a source of kindness and generosity and compassion to others. And I think it comes out clearest in a passage from book 11 of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. And this is just an example of like, look, if you have a copy of Marcus, like, think hard about how often you've made it towards the end of the book.
01:01:43
Speaker
Yeah, it's really easy to read book two and the start of book two and how cool that is and then kind of pat yourself on the back for reading the story text. But like once in a while, jump to one of the other books, like jump to book 11. So here's a passage from from 1118. He says, first consider how you stand in relation to other people and how we were born to help one another and from a different angle how I was born to preside over them as the ram over his flock or the bull over his herd.
01:02:14
Speaker
And then go back to first principles. If all things are not mere atoms, nature must be the power that governs the whole. And if that be so, lower things exist for the sake of the higher and the higher for one another. Secondly, consider what kinds of being they are, other people, at table, in bed, or elsewhere. Above all, what compulsions they're subject to because of their opinions and what pride they take in these very acts.
01:02:38
Speaker
Third, consider that if they are acting rightly in what they do, there is no reason for you to be annoyed. But if they're acting wrongly, it's plain that they're doing so, involuntarily and through ignorance. For as no soul is ever willingly deprived of the truth, so neither is it willingly deprived of the capacity to deal with each person as he deserves. At any rate, people are upset if they hear themselves spoken of as unjust, callous, aberricious, or in a word, as people who offend against their neighbours.
01:03:07
Speaker
Fourthly, consider that you for your own part also commit many wrongs and are just the same as they are, and that even if you do refrain from certain kinds of wrongdoing, you at least have the inclination to commit such wrongs, even if cowardice or concern for your reputation or some other vice of that kind saves you from actually committing them.
01:03:27
Speaker
Fifthly, that you cannot be certain that what they are doing is wrong, for many actions are undertaken for some ulterior purpose, and as a general rule you must find out a great deal before you can deliver a properly founded judgement on the actions of others. Sixthly, when you're annoyed beyond measure and losing all patience, remember that human life lasts but a moment, and that in a short while we shall have all been laid to rest.
01:03:52
Speaker
Seventhly, it's not other people's actions that trouble us, for those are a matter for their own ruling centres, but the opinions that we form about those actions. So eliminate your judgement that this or that is of harm to you, make up your mind to discard that opinion, and your anger will be at an end.
01:04:08
Speaker
How are you to do this? By reflecting that wrong done to you by another is nothing shameful to yourself. For unless action of which one should be ashamed is the only true evil, it would follow that you too must commit many wrongs and become a brigand and one who will stop at nothing. Atefully, remember that anger and distress that we feel at such behaviour brings us more suffering than the very things that give rise to that anger and distress.
01:04:33
Speaker
Ninthly, remember that kindness is invincible if it be sincere and not hypothetical or a mere facade. For what can the most insulting of people do to you if you are consistently kind to him? And when the occasion allows, gently advise him and quietly put him on the proper course at the time when he is attempting to do you a mischief. Know, my son, you were born for something other than this. It is not I who am harmed, it is you, my son, who are causing harm to yourself.
01:04:58
Speaker
and show him tactfully in general terms that this is so, and that not even bees behave in such a fashion nor any other creature of a gregarious nature. But you must do so in no sarcastic or reproachful spirit, but affectionately, with a heart free from rancor, and not as if you were lecturing him like a schoolmaster or trying to impress the bystanders, that as one person to another, even if others should happen to be present.
01:05:24
Speaker
Remember these nine rules as if you had received them as a gift from the Muses and begin at last to be a human being while you still have life in you. So that's just a beautiful nine step guide where I think Marcus is bringing together a lot of the more famous stuff that he says elsewhere. But it's all in the spirit of kindness and compassion and appreciating that wrongdoing is part of the fabric of
01:05:48
Speaker
of human life and what the appropriate response to it is. And he goes out of his way to point out that even when you're helping other people, it needs to be something which is done in a way that it will be well received, that is coming out of a place of compassion and kindness and not as
01:06:03
Speaker
not as a strict schoolmaster. And just the kind of psychological insight in that passage in terms of thinking about the psychological pressures that people are under, thinking about how easy it is to misunderstand why other people are doing the things that they're doing, how quick we are to make judgments about those things.
Stoicism's Approach to Emotions and Conclusion
01:06:20
Speaker
And so, yeah, it all sounds very wholesome, but it's, again, like, I almost never hear people talk about passages like this, even though it's in a text that a lot of star people read relatively consistently. And it's just a version of stoicism that I think is... It's a version of stoicism that has a lot more heart than how it can sometimes, for example, be misapplied in terms of judging other people harshly or calling them irrational.
01:06:44
Speaker
I don't see that kind of thing at all in this passage. And so the thought is like, if you're thinking about these issues and the extent to which what I'm saying is reflecting orthodox dogism, I think a lot of it is, well, think about which passages you focus on. And maybe keep reading a little bit more and you might get a bit of a different vision of how the theory is supposed to apply in practice and what its vision of how to respond to wrongdoing is. Right, right. I think you get this.
01:07:11
Speaker
The sense that yes, that packet passage has more hearts, but also it's much more detail. It's much more reality focus and nearly saying this, you know, people are going to be irrational, you're going to be irrational. And that's that it's much more psychologically intensive notes on, you know, remind yourself specific circumstances that people are in. You remind yourself of your past. Think about why you are your intentions behind the action. Not only what the action is and so on and so on.
01:07:39
Speaker
And it's a demanding list that I think many of us, most of us don't go through very often when it comes to experiencing anything like anger or thinking about how we help other people.
01:07:52
Speaker
Nice. Yeah, so I think the thing I'd like to finish on then is the really good sense in which it's not just that the Starbucks don't like anger. It's that when you get into the relevant perspective on wrongdoing and what human life is like and what happiness consists in, the anger kind of falls away from a certain perspective. I think that's really important that they're not just
01:08:15
Speaker
they're not just targeting particular emotions and saying, oh yeah, we think those are bad. It's that they are thinking pretty seriously about the conditions of human life and human happiness and then thinking about whether or not it makes sense to get angry from that perspective or whether some other response is more constructive and more warranted. And I think that's what's going on here is that Marcus is trying to focus our attention on the ways in which these considerations prompt
01:08:43
Speaker
kindness and compassion rather than anger. Excellent. Well, thanks so much for coming over. Thanks for having me. Thanks for listening to Stoa Conversations. Please give us a rating on Apple podcasts or Spotify and share it with a friend. If you want to dive deeper still, search Stoa in the App Store or Play Store for a complete app with routines, meditations, and lessons designed to help people become
01:09:10
Speaker
more stoic. And I'd also like to thank Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music. You can find more of his work at ancientlyer.com. And finally, please get in touch with us. Send a message to stoa at stoameditation.com if you ever have any feedback, questions, or recommendations. Until next time.