Classic Stoics On Grief And Grieving (part 4)
Classic Stoics On Grief And Grieving (part 4)
moving on to insights from Cicero's Tusculan Disputations book 1
This piece might seem a bit of a departure from the series on Stoics, grief, and grieving so far. Why? This one moves from focusing on philosophers who explicitly identify as Stoics to a figure who is much more eclectic in his perspective, Marcus Tullius Cicero.
Granted, we did reference his work in the first post that outlined Stoic views on emotions in general and on grief more particularly. And the work of Cicero we mentioned there was the Tusculan Disputations, portions of which we will be exploring in this and several subsequent posts. But although the Stoic school is one that Cicero admires, endorses, and draws upon in many respects, he is also critical of them on a number of points. The degree to which he really does belong to the school he identifies himself as a member of (the Academic Skeptics) is a somewhat controversial matter, but it is clear that he isn’t a “Stoic” in the sense that Epictetus or Seneca are.
The portion of the Tusculan Disputations I focus upon here, found in book 1 of the work, won’t strike you as being particularly, let alone uniquely, derived from Stoicism. In fact, bits of it are coming from a rival school, the Epicureans. It is perhaps best to view the passages there and the practices we unpack from them here as what you might call Stoic-adjacent (by analogy to calling a band that isn’t heavy metal, but shares some characteristics and audience with metal bands “metal adjacent”).
Not only is there nothing incompatible between what Cicero sets forth and Stoicism when it comes to perspectives on death of the body and the soul, and the implications we can draw from them. In fact, they fit together well, which makes you think that even in this portion of the work, the Stoics are lurking in the background.
Cicero’s Project in Tusculan Disputations Book 1
The central matter that book 1 is concerned with is expressed by an exchange between the interlocutors in the semi-dialogue.
A: To my thinking, death is an evil.
M: To the dead, or those who have to die?
A: To both.
Everyone has to die sooner or later, so if death is indeed an evil, then everyone ends up being miserable sooner than later. And the scope of this unavoidable evil would encompass other people, and bear implications for grief and grieving. Not only would death be an evil to those who are dead, or an evil to those who are not dead but will have to eventually. The death of another person, an evil to them, would also be an evil to those who love, care for, and miss them. That is, to those who feel grief and mourn them. This would be one reason precisely why grieving would be a reasonable response.
Near the end of the book, Cicero (as M) will summarize, and explain his motivation, for the argument he made at length in book 1:
I had already given you in a few words an answer, which was, as it seemed to me, at any rate sufficient, for you had admitted that the dead were in no evil plight (nullo in malo mortuos esse), but the reason why I have striven to speak to you at greater length is that in this admission of yours we find our chief solace (consolatio maxima) in seasons of longing and sorrow (in desiderio et luctu). For our own pain (dolorem) and pain felt on our account (nostra causa), we ought to bear in a spirit of moderation (modice ferre), thay we may not seem to be lovers of self; it is a notion of unendurable torment if we believe that those, of whom we have been bereft, have some feeling of consciousness amid the evils in which ordinary belief imagines them involved. It has been my wish too root up this belief from my mind and cast it out.
I should note that the King translation of this passage uses the term “grief” for dolor, which might be more accurately rendered as the broader term “pain”. The category of pain certainly can include grief, and the term that follows, luctus, means “mourning” or “grief”. Notice another important term here as well, consolatio, from which we get the cognate English term “consolation.” That is actually a genre of literature where a person attempts to provide reasons why things aren’t as bad as they seem (or perhaps not even bad) to a person who is grieving.
This declaration makes it clear that what Cicero is offering is a cognitive remedy for the emotional responses of grief that arise from considering that death is an evil. This certainly can be applied to our own case, so that realizing that death will not be an evil for us can keep us from feeling sadness about it in advance (or fear or anger for that matter). But its more important application is to how we feel about other people close to us, those we care about, experiencing what we (and most people in our society) take to be an evil. If we can be brought to understand that this is not the case, then while we might miss that person, we don’t have to think and feel that something bad has happened (or continues to happen) to them.
So what considerations does Cicero provide us with to remove this idea from our minds and hearts?
Is Death An Evil For The One Who Dies?
Both the Epicureans and the Stoics were materialists, and that has important implications for death and the human soul (if the language of “soul” bothers you, substitute “mind” in its place - just realize that for Latin authors, there are two distinct terms, anima and animus, for soul and mind). Strictly speaking, for both of these schools, or anyone else who is a materialist of their sorts, when a person’s body dies, that is it for their soul as well. They had various ideas about just what the soul was composed of, and whether it might remain for a rather brief time after the death and dissolution of the body, but there isn’t any robust afterlife for these philosophical traditions.
If that is the case, then there are a number of reasons to think that, despite how we typically think and feel about these matters, death isn’t really an evil to the person who dies. Here’s the first line of argument:
Suppose as these thinkers hold, that our souls do not survive after death. I see that in that case we are deprived of the hope of a happier life. But what evil does such a view imply? For suppose the soul perishes like the body. Is there then any definite sense of pain or sensation in the body after death?. . . . [T]here is no sensation in the soul either, for the soul is nowhere. Where then is the evil, since there is no third thing?
You might wonder why Cicero introduces this non-existent “third thing”. He’s simply saying something like this: After death, you don’t have pain in your body, and you don’t have it in your soul. And that’s it, those two things. There’s nowhere else for you to feel pain in.
He goes on to address a possible objection:
Is it because the actual departure of the soul from the body does not take place without a sense of pain? Though I should believe this to be so, how petty a matter it is. But I think it is false, and the fact is that often the departure takes place without sensation or even with a feeling of pleasure.
So if there isn’t any pain to suffer in the body or soul after death, and the time of dying isn’t necessarily painful, what evil is it that people think the dead do suffer by dying? Here we get to a set of concerns about the dead that to some might seem to provide a better argument for them suffering some evil by dying.
Death As Deprivation Of Goods
What happens when a person dies? Their life, and all that it encompassed and included, is brought to an end, closed off. There’s a great line in a Clint Eastwood movie, Unforgiven, where his character quips:
It's a hell of a thing, killing a man. You take away all he's got and all he's ever gonna have.
What is it that the living person has and the dead person doesn’t? Cicero notes:
What does cause anguish (angit) or rather torture, is the departure from all those things that are good in life.
He turns this line of thinking on its head:
Take care it may not more truly be said, from all its evils. . . . Death withdraws us from evil, not from good, if truth is our object.
If our lives contain disappointments, frustrations, losses, humiliations, or the like, and if we view these as bad things, then dying actually removes them from us or us from them.
Still, one might point out the lives of people that seem filled with good things. If we see someone who is in the prime of their life, surrounded by friends and family, having developed and living in accordance with the virtues, experiencing the proverbial Stoic “smooth flow of life”, with the prospect of going on like that for decades to come, isn’t it something bad for a life like that to be brought to a premature end?
Cicero puts his finger on precisely what our thought-processes are when we consider that to be the case:
Let us go so far as to make the admission that mankind are deprived (privari) of good things by death. Must we therefore also grant that the dead feel the need of the comforts (commodis) of life, and that this is a condition of wretchedness (miserum)?
We might consider a person who dies and say to ourselves, about them: “they have been deprived”, most likely along with the qualifying adverb “unfairly”. I’ve done that myself with respect to my mother and father, the one who died at the age I currently am at, 53 years old, the other at just 36 years old. Neither of them got to meet their grandchildren, for example. Both of them were very active and involved people who did quite a lot of good in their world and in their work. Isn’t it a shame they didn’t get to do so well into old age?
Cicero addresses these concerns by examining the meaning and application of “feeling the need of” or “missing out on”, carere in Latin. He formulates a key question:
It is possible for the person who doesn’t exist to “feel the need” of anything? The mere term “feeling the need of” has a melancholy sound, because the meaning the underlies it is, he had, he has not; he misses, looks for, wants.
Feeling the need of something involves a kind of privation or lack. Something that should be there for that person is missing or defective. Cicero uses the example of blindness as feeling the need of eyes. And he makes two points in response:
This holds good among the living, but as regards the dead, no one “feels the need”, I do not say of the comforts of life (vitae commodis), but even of life itself.
As a second point, he asks:
[D]o we who exist “feel the need” in this sense of horns or feathers?. . . [A]s you are without that for which you are suited neither by acquired skill nor by nature, you cannot “feel the need of” it, even if you should be conscious that you do not possess it.
A bit later, he makes another important clarification:
To “feel the need of” is not used in connection with evil, for then evil would not be a thing to feel upset about. The expression “to feel the need of” a good us used, and that amounts to an evil. But not even a living man “feels the need of” of a good if he does not want it.
So all this said, what can we draw from these passages? From Cicero’s perspective, the sorts of things we commonly say and think about people who have died turn out to rest on mistaken assumptions about what people who are dead can feel or suffer.
In some sense it is true that dying precludes a person from enjoying any good things they otherwise might have enjoyed, had they continued living. But as someone dead, there quite literally isn’t a “them”, a “person” who has been deprived of any goods. And the dead on this account certainly can’t feel the need of or lack any goods that the living enjoy. Even the living, as he points out, who can feel the need of some things, don’t feel that towards many other things.
How can we make use of these considerations? The answer to that is straightforward. When we are tempted to think or feel that someone we have lost to death themselves lost out on good things they would have enjoyed were they to still be alive, we can remind ourselves of this: However we might think about this lack, the dead don’t suffer or feel it. So if the grief we feel stems from our judgement that the dead have been deprived of goods and feel the lack of those goods, once we realize that judgment is off-base, we don’t have to feel that grief
Concerns Over Bodies Of The Dead
Later on in book 1, Cicero turns to considerations of what is to be done with dead bodies. He writes:
One principle must be adhered to in dealing with the whole purpose of burial, that it has to do with the body, whether the soul has perished or still retains life; in the body, however, it is plain that when the soul has either been annihilated or made its escape, there is no remnant of sensation.
He then runs through a number of literary examples that show famous persons concerned with the bodies of the dead. Interestingly the cases he selects, those of Achilles and Hector, and those of Thyestes and Atreus, are situations where it isn’t mourning that takes place, but rather the hope that desecration of the corpse will somehow affect the dead person. They illustrate a common mistake, however, which many people fall into, thinking that the “grave is the body’s haven, and that the dead person finds peace in the grave”.
Then, Cicero mentions a number of different funerary practices of contemporary cultures he and his audience would be familiar with. Egyptians, Persians, Hycranians, just as much as Greeks and Romans, have their own deeply established customs about how dead bodies are to be treated, all of which involve “deception” (errore) on their part, one which many in our own time share. He advises
Let the living attend to funeral observance to the extent to which they must make a compromise with custom and public opinion, but with the understanding that they realize that in no way does it concern the dead.
This might remind you of Epictetus’ advice discussed in an earlier post in this series that when we see someone grieving, we should outwardly grief with them, but not lament inwardly. Cicero and the Stoics think it is fine to externally observe the customary rituals and institutions associated with death and loss, but that doesn’t mean that we have to buy into the beliefs that many people seem to have about the dead, specifically that what happens to dead people’s bodies in any way affects that dead person.
Does this insight help us with the grief we might feel faced with the loss of a person we love, their death made manifest to us by the lifelessness of their body? It might help us to not be overly concerned about what happens to or with their body, a matter that quite a few people mourning their loss become emotionally invested in.
Perhaps they genuinely, though mistakenly, believe and worry over what the departed person would think or feel about what is being done to their body. Or, perhaps these misplaced concerns represent a coping mechanism, a way of distracting oneself from the grief they do feel. Either way, realizing that the body without a soul is simply lifeless matter, not a person any longer, can prove liberating for the living person.
In the next several posts, we will be going further into Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, specifically books 3 and 4, where he considers the emotional response of grief, and actions and attitudes of grieving, in greater detail. In the meantime, if you haven’t read them yet, you might check out the three earlier posts in the series