A Guide to the Good Life

by William Braxton Irvine

  It is instructive to contrast these responses to disaster with the way authorities responded to disasters in the middle of the twentieth century. When, for example, a landslide of coal-mine waste buried a village school in Aberfan, South Wales, in 1966, the parents of the 116 children who died were left to deal with their grief on their own.13 As a result, many of them simply bore the disaster with, as the British say, a stiff upper lip. By the end of the century, one would have been hard-pressed to find a psychological therapist who would recommend a stiff upper lip as an appropriate response to disaster.

  In reply to this criticism of Stoic psychology, let me remind readers that despite widespread belief to the contrary, the Stoics did not advocate that we “bottle up” our emotions. They did advise us to take steps to prevent negative emotions and to overcome them when our attempts at prevention fail, but this is different from keeping them bottled up: If we prevent or overcome an emotion, there will be nothing to bottle.

  Suppose, in particular, that a Stoic finds himself grieving the loss of a loved one. This Stoic, it should be noted, will not react by trying to stifle the grief within him—by pretending, for example, that he is not grieving or by grimacing to block the flow of tears. He will instead recall Seneca’s comment to Polybius that when people experience personal catastrophes, it is perfectly natural to experience grief. After this bout of reflexive grief, though, a Stoic will try to dispel whatever grief remains in him by trying to reason it out of existence. He will, in particular, invoke the kinds of arguments Seneca used in his consolations: “Is this what the person who died would want me to do? Of course not! She would want me to be happy! The best way to honor her memory is to leave off grieving and get on with life.”

  Because grief is a negative emotion, the Stoics opposed it. At the same time, they realized that because we are mere mortals, some grief is inevitable in the course of a lifetime, as are some fear, some anxiety, some anger, some hatred, some humiliation, and some envy. The goal of the Stoics was therefore not to eliminate grief but to minimize it.

  A n a n t i - Sto i c m i g h t at this point suggest that the goal of minimizing grief, although less misguided than the goal of suppressing it, remains misguided. According to psychological counselors, we should work through our grief. It is true that trying to reason our way out of grieving is one way to work through it, but a better way is to try to elicit from ourselves various grief-related behaviors; we might, for example, make a point of having a good cry even though we don’t particularly feel like doing so. We might also make a point of talking to others about our grief, even though this kind of sharing of emotions doesn’t come naturally to us. Most important, if our grief is significant, we will seek the assistance of a grief counselor to assist us in the working-through process.

  In response to this suggestion, I would challenge current psychological thinking on the best way to deal with our emotions. I would, in particular, question the claim, made by many psychological therapists, that people are not well equipped to deal with grief on their own. I think people are less brittle and more resilient, emotionally speaking, than therapists give them credit for.

  To see why I say this, let us turn our attention back to the Aberfan disaster. Parents whose children were buried alive in the Aberfan landslide experienced a profound personal tragedy but received no professional help thereafter. According to the current psychological consensus, the lack of grief counseling should have turned these parents into emotional wrecks. The truth of the matter, though, is that they did remarkably well dealing with their grief on their own.14 In other words, the technique of keeping a stiff upper lip seems to have served them admirably.

  For another example of the consequences of dealing with negative emotions on one’s own, consider the plight of the British during World War II. When the war broke out, psychologists worried that mental hospitals would swell with civil-ians unable to cope with the horrors of war. As it turned out, though, the Brits were quite capable of fending for themselves, emotionally speaking: There was no change in the incidence of mental illness.15 In the absence of professional grief counselors, the Brits had little choice but to deal with their hardships with Stoic resolve, and for them, Stoic self-therapy proved to be remarkably successful.

  It would be bad enough if grief counseling were simply ineffective. In some cases, though, such counseling seems to inten-sify and prolong people’s grief; in other words, it only makes things worse. One study on the efficacy of grief counseling examined parents whose children had died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. It compared the parents who consciously tried to work through their loss, in accordance with the principles of grief therapy, with the parents who did not. Three weeks after the death of their child, the parents in the first group were experiencing more distress than the parents in the second group, and even after eighteen months the parents in the first group were worse off, emotionally speaking, than the parents in the second group. The obvious conclusion to draw from this research is that “forced grieving” in accordance with the principles of grief therapy, rather than curing grief, can delay the natural healing process; it is the psychological equivalent of picking at the scab on a wound. Similar research, by the way, has focused on Holocaust survivors, abused young women, and the partners of men who died of AIDS, and has obtained similar results.16

  But what about delayed grief ? If we cut short the grieving process, aren’t we setting ourselves up for a much more debilitating bout of grief later on? The consensus among experts is that the delayed grief phenomenon is genuine.17 Am I suggesting that they are wrong?

  Indeed I am. The concept of delayed grief apparently made its debut in a paper titled “The Absence of Grief,” written in 1937 by the psychiatrist Helene Deutsch. She claimed that failing to grieve after a personal loss would subsequently trigger a delayed bout of grief that would be “as fresh and intense as if the loss just occurred.”18 Unfortunately, Deutsch did not attempt to verify her theory empirically. Researchers who subsequently have tried to verify it have been disappointed: Cases of delayed grief seem to be quite rare.19

  More generally, the psychiatrist Sally Satel and the philosopher Christina Hoff Sommers, in a book that challenges certain aspects of modern psychological therapy, write, “Recent findings suggest that reticence and suppression of feelings, far from compromising one’s psychological well-being, can be healthy and adaptive. For many temperaments, an excessive focus on introspection and self-disclosure is depressing. Victims of loss and tragedy differ widely in their reactions: Some benefit from therapeutic intervention; most do not and should not be coerced by mental health professionals into emotionally correct responses. Trauma and grief counselors have erred massively in this direction.” These authors add that they reject the doctrine, now commonly accepted, that “uninhibited emotional openness is essential to mental health.”20

  In conclusion, although the Stoics’ advice on how best to deal with negative emotions is old-fashioned, it would nevertheless appear to be good advice. According to Seneca, “A man is as wretched as he has convinced himself that he is.” He therefore recommends that we “do away with complaint about past sufferings and with all language like this: ‘None has ever been worse off than I. What sufferings, what evils have I endured!’ ” After all, what point is there in “being unhappy, just because once you were unhappy?”21

  Modern politics presents another obstacle to the acceptance of Stoicism. The world is full of politicians who tell us that if we are unhappy it isn’t our fault. To the contrary, our unhappiness is caused by something the government did to us or is failing to do for us. We citizens are encouraged, in our pursuit of happiness, to resort to politics rather than philosophy. We are encouraged to march in the streets or write to our congressman rather than read Seneca or Epictetus. More significantly, we are encouraged to vote for the candidate who claims to possess the ability, by skillfully using the powers of government, to make us happy.

  The Stoics, of course, rejected such thin
king. They were convinced that what stands between most of us and happiness is not our government or the society in which we live, but defects in our philosophy of life—or our failing to have a philosophy at all. It is true that our government and our society determine, to a considerable extent, our external circumstances, but the Stoics understood that there is at best a loose connection between our external circumstances and how happy we are. In particular, it is entirely possible for someone banished to a desolate island to be happier than someone living a life of luxury.

  The Stoics understood that governments can wrong their citizens; indeed, the Roman Stoics, as we have seen, had an unfortunate tendency to be unjustly punished by the powers that be. The Stoics also agree with modern social reformers that we have a duty to fight against social injustice.

  Where they differ from modern reformers is in their understanding of human psychology. In particular, the Stoics don’t think it is helpful for people to consider themselves victims of society—or victims of anything else, for that matter. If you consider yourself a victim, you are not going to have a good life; if, however, you refuse to think of yourself as a victim—if you refuse to let your inner self be conquered by your external circumstances—you are likely to have a good life, no matter what turn your external circumstances take. (In particular, the Stoics thought it possible for a person to retain his tranquility despite being punished for attempting to reform the society in which he lived.)

  Others may have it in their power to affect how and even whether you live, but they do not, say the Stoics, have it in their power to ruin your life. Only you can ruin it, by failing to live in accordance with the correct values.

  The Stoics believed in social reform, but they also believed in personal transformation. More precisely, they thought the first step in transforming a society into one in which people live a good life is to teach people how to make their happiness depend as little as possible on their external circumstances. The second step in transforming a society is to change people’s external circumstances. The Stoics would add that if we fail to transform ourselves, then no matter how much we transform the society in which we live, we are unlikely to have a good life.

  Many of us have been persuaded that happiness is something that someone else, a therapist or a politician, must confer on us. Stoicism rejects this notion. It teaches us that we are very much responsible for our happiness as well as our unhappiness. It also teaches us that it is only when we assume responsibility for our happiness that we will have a reasonable chance of gaining it. This, to be sure, is a message that many people, having been indoctrinated by therapists and politicians, don’t want to hear.

  I f m o d e r n p s yc h o lo g y and politics have been unkind to Stoicism, so has modern philosophy. Before the twentieth century, those who were exposed to philosophy would likely have read the Stoics. In the twentieth century, though, philosophers not only lost interest in Stoicism but lost interest, more generally, in philosophies of life. It was possible, as my own experience demonstrates, to spend a decade taking philosophy classes without having read the Stoics and without having spent time considering philosophies of life, much less adopting one.

  One reason philosophers lost interest in Stoicism was their insight, in the first decades of the twentieth century, that many traditional philosophical puzzles arise because of our sloppy use of language. From this it followed that anyone wishing to solve philosophical puzzles should do so not by observing humanity (as the Stoics were likely to do) but by thinking very carefully about language and how we use it. And along with the increasing emphasis on linguistic analysis came a growing belief, on the part of professional philosophers, that it simply was not the business of philosophy to tell people how to live their life.

  If you had gone to Epictetus and said, “I want to live a good life. What should I do?” he would have had an answer for you:

  “Live in accordance with nature.” He would then have told you, in great detail, how to do this. If, by way of contrast, you went to a twentieth-century analytic philosopher and asked the same question, he probably would have responded not by answering the question you asked but by analyzing the question itself: “The answer to your question depends on what you mean by ‘a good life,’ which in turn depends on what you mean by ‘good’ and ‘a life.’ ” He might then walk you through all the things you could conceivably mean in asking how to live a good life and explain why each of these meanings is logically muddled. His conclusion: It makes no sense to ask how to live a good life. When this philosopher had finished speaking, you might be impressed with his flair for philosophical analysis, but you might also conclude, with good reason, that he himself lacked a coherent philosophy of life.

  One final but quite significant obstacle to modern acceptance of Stoicism is the degree of self-control it requires. Do we detect in ourselves a lust for fame? According to the Stoics, we should extinguish this desire. Do we find ourselves longing for a mansion filled with fine furniture? We would do well, say the Stoics, to content ourselves with a simple lifestyle. And besides overcoming our longing for fame and fortune, the Stoics want us to set many of our other personal desires aside so we can do our duty to serve our fellow humans. They were, as we have seen, a duty-bound group; unlike many modern individuals, the Stoics were convinced that there was something in life bigger than themselves.

  Many people, on hearing about the self-control Stoicism requires, will reject the philosophy. If you don’t have something you want, they reason, you will obviously be unhappy.

  Therefore, the best way to gain happiness is to get what you want, and the best way to get what you want is with a three-stage strategy: First, you take an inventory of the desires that lurk in your mind; second, you devise a plan for satisfying those desires; and third, you implement that plan. The Stoics, however, are suggesting that we do just the opposite of this.

  In some cases, they advise us to extinguish rather than fulfill our desires, and in other cases, they advise us to do things we don’t want to do, because it is our duty to do them. Stoicism, in other words, sounds like a sure-fire recipe for unhappiness.

  Although the strategy of gaining happiness by working to get whatever it is we find ourselves wanting is obvious and has been used by most people throughout recorded history and across cultures, it has an important defect, as thoughtful people throughout recorded history and across cultures have realized: For each desire we fulfill in accordance with this strategy, a new desire will pop into our head to take its place. This means that no matter how hard we work to satisfy our desires, we will be no closer to satisfaction than if we had fulfilled none of them. We will, in other words, remain dissatisfied.

  A much better, albeit less obvious way to gain satisfaction is not by working to satisfy our desires but by working to master them. In particular, we need to take steps to slow down the desire-formation process within us. Rather than working to fulfill whatever desires we find in our head, we need to work at preventing certain desires from forming and eliminating many of the desires that have formed. And rather than wanting new things, we need to work at wanting the things we already have.

  This is what the Stoics advise us to do. It may be true that being a Stoic requires self-control and requires that we sacrifice in order to do our duty, but the Stoics would argue that we are more likely to achieve happiness—indeed, joy—by following this path than by spending our life, as most people do, working to fulfill whatever desires pop into our head.

  Having said this, I should add that the word sacrifice, as I have just used it, is a bit misleading. The Stoics, while doing their social duty, will not think in terms of sacrifice.

  Ideally, they will, as a result of practicing Stoicism, want to do what their social duty requires them to do. If this sounds strange, think about the duties involved in parenting. Parents do lots of things for their children, but Stoic parents—and, I suspect, good parents in general—don’t think of parenting as a burdensome task requiring endless sa
crifice; instead, they think about how wonderful it is that they have children and can make a positive difference in the lives of these children.

  The Stoics, as I have suggested, are not alone in claiming that our best hope at gaining happiness is to live not a life of self-indulgence but a life of self-discipline and, to a degree, self-sacrifice. Similar claims have been made in other philosophies, including Epicureanism and Skepticism, as well as in numerous religions, including Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, and Taoism. The question isn’t, I think, whether self-disciplined and duty-bound people can have a happy, meaningful life; it is whether those who lack self-control and who are convinced that nothing is bigger than they are can have such a life.

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  T W E N T Y- O N E

  Stoicism Reconsidered

  In the previous chapter, I described the decline of Stoicism and tried to fathom the reason for its current moribund state.

  In this chapter, I will attempt to reanimate the doctrine. My goal in doing so is to make Stoicism more attractive to individuals who seek a philosophy of life.

  In the introduction to this book, I explained that philosophies of life have two components: They tell us what things in life are and aren’t worth pursuing, and they tell us how to gain the things that are worth having. The Stoics, as we have seen, thought tranquility was worth pursuing, and the tranquility they sought, it will be remembered, is a psychological state in which we experience few negative emotions, such as anxiety, grief, and fear, but an abundance of positive emotions, especially joy. The Stoics did not argue that tranquility was valuable; rather, they assumed that in the lives of most people its value would at some point become apparent.