A Pre-Stoic History To Premeditatio Malorum

the Stoics weren't the originators of this powerful philosophical practice

I experienced an interesting philosophical dovetailing this weekend, during the book release session for Beyond Stoicism (the videorecording of which you can watch here), which the authors - Massimo Pigliucci, Greg Lopez, and Meredith Kunz - invited me to host.

As many of you readers know, I’ve been writing a series of pieces on the topic of Stoicism, grief, and grieving. For the time being, I’ve recently been mining one of Cicero’s longer texts, the Tusculan Disputations for ideas, arguments, and practices bearing upon grief and grieving. He discusses not only the Stoic perspective, but also a number of other approaches drawn from philosophical schools of antiquity.

These include major schools many are familiar with, like the Platonists, Aristotelians, Epicureans, Cynics, and Skeptics, but also some lesser known schools like the Megarians, and most importantly here, the Cyrenaics, founded by a hedonist student of Socrates, Aristippus.

In book 3 of the Tusculan Disputations, in the course of discussing why it is that different philosophical schools and their members think we get distressed or pained by what we perceive as bad things happening (for example someone close to us dying), Cicero’s discussion of the Cyrenaics (at least to me) clearly shows that a philosophical practice most closely associated with the Stoics antedates the rise of that school and perhaps even originates with the Cyrenaics (or possibly even earlier).

Those passages came up in our discussion on Saturday, and it was Massimo, if I remember correctly, who mentioned that very point I’ve been mulling over for a while now. He expressed it with a bit more reserve than I would: it could be the case that premeditatio malorum wasn’t originally a Stoic practice, but one developed by the Cyrenaics, since Cicero attributes something like it to that earlier school. For my part, I’m fine with saying that, assuming Cicero is right (which I have no reason to doubt), the Cyrenaics were the first to fully articulate and use premeditatio malorum as a philosophical practice, prior to the Stoics appropriating and arguably expanding it.

What Is Premeditatio Malorum?

This is a Latin term which translated quite literally means “meditating in advance on bad things”. You might rephrase “meditation” as “thinking about in a deliberate way”, or as “being mindful of”, or even as “visualization”. As noted earlier, it tends in the present to be viewed primarily as a Stoic practice, and I’d say that the vast majority of references to and recommendations of it are found in Stoic communities and groups, videos and podcasts, or blogs and books.

When people want to be (or at least appear) erudite or fancy, they’ll usually use the Latin. If they want to use the English vernacular, they term they most often substitute is “negative visualization”. I think that can be a bit misleading, given the emphasis on the one range of sense, memory, and direction of the mind - the visual - that inevitably gets invoked. In order for it to work, “visualization” has to extend to whatever of our senses might be relevant, and it also has to include the thoughts and feelings we are attempting to grapple with and deal with. But perhaps that’s a quibble we can set aside.

Whatever we choose to call the practice, what one does with it is the same. Before something that one (at least for now, rightly or wrongly) regards as a bad thing happens to one (or perhaps to someone one cares about), the person deliberately and purposively imagines that thing happening to them. Ideally, they linger or tarry with that imagination, so that they can genuinely explore its facets, make it as real as they can to themselves, even experience the thoughts or emotional responses that would likely get provoked if the situation were a real one.

This can be a practice that a person does as part of a regular training or discipline, perhaps setting aside a given time each day to engage in it. It can also, at the other end, be something that a person only does as needed, when expecting to face something unpleasant or troubling in the near future. One can select a wide range of possible experiences, events, objects that provoke negative emotions. One could focus in on just one thing one expects to face, or extend it to a vast array of calamities or annoyances. So there’s a pretty wide scope for this practice.

Why would one deliberately make oneself feel bad, you might ask? It turns out that, at least for many people (some probably shouldn’t use this practice), it can be helpful in a number of distinct, and mutually supporting ways.

• It can help to curb unrealistic expectations one might harbor that one isn’t going to experience anything one considers bad. So one won’t be completely surprised if something one didn’t want to happen does happen.

• It can provide an opportunity for considering whether the thing one does present to oneself as bad really is bad or not, or whether it is as bad as one thinks or fears it to be

• It can inoculate one emotionally ahead of time, by allowing oneself to feel the emotion in smaller doses, so to speak, before the situation is something real that then produces that emotion in oneself

• It can even let one engage in some proactive thinking about (rather than reactive worrying over) what one might do when faced with that situation, what resources one might need to bring to bear, what sorts of decisions or reasonings might be helpful

These are just some of the useful functions to this practice.

A Difference Between Hedonist Schools

Aristippus’ Cyrenaic school is a hedonist philosophical tradition (i.e. holding that pleasure is the fundamental good, and pain the fundamental bad) that antedates the later much more popular and influential hedonist school of Epicurus. Since we have none of the texts of the Cyrenaics, there is a bit of murkiness about precisely when their main philosophical doctrines got formulated and systematized.

If Aristippus was central in this, that would make him a contemporary of other students of Socrates, like Plato, Xenophon, Antisthenes (the traditional founder of the Cynic school), and others. And that would mean that the Cyrenaics would be working out their philosophy several generations before Epicurus comes to Athens and founds his Garden. If we follow some other doxographical materials and say that Aristippus started the school, passed it on to his daughter Arete, who then taught her son Aristippus, who then took what they had and developed it into a full philosophicla system, that would still give the Cyrenaics a full generation’s lead on the Epicureans.

Cicero contrasts the Epicureans and Cyrenaics on several different points when it comes to philosophical doctrines, assumptions, and practices. One of these is why we have the response of distress (aegritudo) to experiencing what we take to be something bad. He tells us that:

Epicurus holds that the distress which is the idea (opinionem) of evil produces is a natural effect, in the sense that anyone who contemplates (intueatur) some considerable evil feels distress, should he imagine it has befallen him (sibi accidisse opinetur) (3.13)

By contrast, the Cyrenaics think that there is another important element or qualification involved.

[They] consider that distress is not caused by every evil but by an unlooked for and unexpected evil (insperato et necopinato malo) (3.13)

And Cicero adds a reasoning why this might be the case:

That [i.e. unexpectedness] has no middling effect in augmenting distress, for all sudden ones appear more serious (3.13)

This difference in why and when we feel pained, upset, or troubled by what we take to be bad things will lead to two very different approaches to living well and directing our minds on the part of these two hedonist schools.

The Epicurean Approach

A bit later on in the work, Cicero discusses the Epicurean perspective in some detail. He writes that Epicurus holds that:

all people must necessarily feel distress, if they judge themselves (arbitrentur) to be facing evils, whether previously foreseen and anticipated (ante provisa et expectata) or long established (inveteraverint). For according to him evils are not lessened by duration nor lightened by previous consideration (premeditata). (3.15)

Notice how he frames their reasoning process. If it doesn’t matter at all whether the supposed evils are long-experienced or anticipated in advance, as far as the distress one feels goes, then the only thing that really matters is not experiencing the seeming evils, or at least minimizing one’s vulnerability to them. This leads to a rejection by the Epicureans of the practice of premeditation:

He thinks it foolishness to dwell on (meditationem) an evil which has still to come or maybe will not come at all. All evil, he says, is hateful enough when it has come. But the man who is always thinking a mishap may come, is making that evil perpetual. But if it is not destined to come at all, he is needlessly the victim of a misery he has brought on himself (miseriam voluntarium). Thus he is always tortured either by experiencing or by thinking about the evil. (3.15)

What does Epicurus propose in place of premeditation of evils?

Alleviation of distress, Epicurus sets down in two practices (in duabus rebus), namely in calling the soul away from thinking about vexation (a cogitanda molestia) and in recalling the consideration of pleasures (revocatione ad contemplandas voluptates) (3.15).

In the Epicurean point of view, we should shift our focus away from thinking about the things that trouble, pain, or distress us, and instead call to mind pleasures we have previously enjoyed or could enjoy in the future.

The Cyrenaic Approach (And Earlier And Later Ones)

The rival hedonist school, according to Cicero, advocates this practice of premeditation of evils - even though it does involve for the moment giving oneself pain instead of pleasure - precisely because they see some positive value in the outcomes of engaging in that practice. Cicero himself clearly endorses the Cyrenaic position:

For my part, in confronting the changes and chances of life I indeed accept from the Cyrenaics such weapons as they provide to enable me, with the help of long previous considerations (praemeditatione), to break the coming of life’s assaults. (3.15)

Notice that here he uses that very term, praemeditatio, to characterize their position and practice. And if Cicero is claiming that he derives these “weapons” (arma) from the Cyrenaics, that seems to me good reason to think that it was an well-established practice for that school. Whether it was the original founder Aristippus, or his grandson namesake, who made it part of their body of philosophical practices really doesn’t matter. It seems well-attested as belonging to them as a deliberate means for alleviating distress in advance by anticipating it.

And yet, interestingly, in the very section where Cicero uses the full term we are accustomed to associate with the Stoics, writing:

This anticipation therefore of future evils (praemeditatio futorum malorum) lightens the approach of evils whose coming one has long foreseen. (3.14)

He brings up a number of other, non-Cyrenaic, authors who seem to be advocating for something along those lines. Among them is Euripides, through the lines his character Theseus says.

For since this lesson from wise lips I learnt
Within my heart I pondered ills to come
. . . . . .
That if dread chance should bring calamity
No sudden care should rend me unprepared (3.14)

Euripides belongs to an older generation than Aristippus, and so this seems to be a reference to something like premeditatio malorum before it becomes a Cyrenaic practice. Cicero goes on to suggest that Euripides himself learned this from a wise man, namely Anaxagoras, who according to the story, was able to deal with his own son’s death by reminding himself that he knew he had begotten a mortal being. (3.14)

Cicero then draws some further inferences:

It does not admit of doubt that everything that is thought evil is more grievous if it comes unexpectedly. And so. . . as foresight and anticipation (proviso. . . et preparatio) have considerable effect in lessening pain, a human being should ponder (meditanda) all the vicissitudes of human life. (3.14)

Shortly afterwards, he cites some lines of a much more recent playwright, Terrence, and then rambles a bit about Socrates and the elder Crassus, seemingly to give some additional examples.

Whether the philosophical practice of premeditatio malorum originated with the Cyrenaics, or had a still older history, it seems evident that the Stoics are latecomers to it. One can argue plausibly, citing a number of texts, that they made great use of it, and perhaps expanded its scope further than earlier thinkers and schools, but it does appear clear that the Cyrenaics were using it and discussing it consistently prior to its Stoic formulations.

Cicero himself offers an expanded version of the practice:

There is nothing so well fitted as to deaden and alleviate distress as the continual life-long reflection that there is no event which may not happen, nothing so serviceable as the consideration of our condition as human beings, as the study of the law of our being and the practice of obedience to it. And the effect of this is not to make us always grieving (maeremus) but to prevent us from being so at all. For the person who reflects upon nature, upon the diversity of life and the weakness of humanity, is not saddened by reflecting upon these things, but in doing so he fulfills most completely the function of wisdom. (3.16)

To me, this sounds more in consonance with what we know of the Stoics than of the Cyrenaics, and what Cicero tells us next is also suggestive.

In adversity he finds a threefold relief (consolatione) to aid his restoration:

First because he has long since reflected on the possibility of mishap, and this is by far the best method of lessening and weakening all vexation

Second because he understands that the lot of a human being must be endured in a human spirit (humane)

Third because he sees that there is no evil but guilt (culpam), but that there is no guilt when the issue is one against which a person can give no guarantee. (3.16)

The first of these fits well with both the Cyrenaic and Stoic schools. Perhaps the second does as well, though we just don’t have enough summaries of the Cyrenaic teachings to affirm that sentiment of them. It certainly jibes well with what Stoics do explicitly say. The third is definitely at odds with what Aristippus taught as a hedonist, and in consonance with what Stoics say.

So perhaps, to bring this to a close, we need to distinguish between more and less developed versions of the philosophical practice of premeditatio malorum, an earlier one articulated and advocated by the Cyrenaics, and a later and fuller one that we find in Stoic authors, as well as in Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations