Classic Stoics On Grief And Grieving (part 5)

Cicero helps us understand why we think we have to grieve and whether that really is the case or not

Some time back, I started a set of posts focused on what Stoic philosophers have to teach us about the emotion of grief and the behaviors associated with grieving. So far I’ve published four pieces in the series, which you can read here, here, here, and here. The last one took us into Ciceronian territory, namely book 1 of his work Tusculan Disputations. Cicero himself isn’t a Stoic, but rather an eclectic thinker who officially identifies with the (mitigated) Academic Skeptic school, but he draws heavily upon the Stoics and often agrees with them on a number of points. When it comes to grief and grieving, this is more or less the case, as we will see.

Cicero examines a range of viewpoints and approaches to this emotion in book 3 of the Tusculan Disputations, including the Stoics, but also Epicureans, Cyrenaics, Platonists, and Aristotelians. We will extend our focus in the next post to some of his critical considerations of these other schools, and in this one restrict ourselves to looking at the position of the Stoics. In fact, this post will not even examine the entirety of the Stoics’ views articulated in Tusculan Disputations book 3, since the goal here is to look closely at one main set of insights Cicero derives from the Stoics.

Useful Lessons About Grief

As we noted in the very first post in this series, grief has its own particular place in the overall Stoic theory of the emotions. It is one of a number of types of “pain” or “distress”, the Stoic designation for one of four main categories of emotional states and responses. (In Greek the usual term for this is “lupē” and Latin typically uses two main terms to translate this “dolor” and “aegritudo”.)

Near the end of the book 3 exploration of grief, Cicero will tell us that in examining it, “[w]e have considered [tractatum est] the one greatest [unum et omnium maximum] kind of distress” (3.33). The lessons derived from analyzing this emotion are applicable to other, less troubling kinds of pain or distress. So then, what are those lessons? There are several interconnected ones to highlight in the text.

Several of them are set out in this passage:

The wise person does not call in any imaginary belief [opinione] to buttress distress [aegritudinem], or think it right to let himself be cruelly tortured and weakened by sorrow [luctu], as he thinks nothing can be more degraded [quo pravius nihil esse possit]. . . I have come to see that, whatever evil there is in distress, it is not due to nature [naturale], but brought to a head by a judgement of the will [voluntario judicio] and by mistaken belief [opinionis errore] (3.33).

Notice what he is asserting there in that summary.

Someone who is wise, or more realistically those of us who value and strive for wisdom, looks at grieving as something particularly “degrading”, something that damages and lowers us. It isn’t simply feeling any grief though. It is allowing oneself to be tortured and weakened by grief that is particularly problematic.

How does this happen? Although you can certainly say that the emotional response of grief does have its roots partly in our common human nature, that’s not the main reason why we feel it. We make a contribution to our feeling of grief, in two interconnected ways.

• One of these is cognitive. You notice that the Latin term opinio is used twice here in this passage. We have, or even “call in” (adfingat assumatque) a belief or opinion, one which is off-base or incorrect.

• The other is volitional, involving a “judgement of the will”, that is a judgement that we voluntarily make, that on some level we choose.

If you focus on who is to blame for us lapsing into this seemingly bad emotion of grief, you might miss the potentially optimistic implications involved in the Stoic perspective. We don’t get to deflect the responsibility for the grief we feel and express simply onto “nature”, saying something like “I can’t help how I feel” or “It just is what it is.”

Interestingly, Cicero does consider a challenge to the position he embraces that is raised by a Platonist, Crantor, who wrote a work On Grief (among many others, very little of which, unfortunately, has been preserved). Cicero writes:

Who is so mad as to mourn [maertat] of his own free choice [sua voluntate]? It is nature that causes grief [dolorem], and your Crantor, they say, thinks that we must give way to it [cedendum]. And so the hero Oieus in Sophocles, though he had previously consoled Telemon for the death of Ajax, yet broke down when he heard of his own son’s death. . . . When they argue in this way, their object is to prove that there is no possible means of withstanding nature. Yet they admit that men are victims of distress more grievous (graviores aegritudines) than nature enforces (3.29).

Stoics and Cicero would point out that we are, at least to some degree, responsible for the emotions we feel, since we do have a capacity for voluntary choice that extends to what we judge, and we do have some role in what it is that we think, that is, what opinions we consider to be true and what we consider false.

But this also means that precisely because we have this capacity to choose, coupled with the possibility of holding (or assenting to) true instead of erroneous views on matters, we are not necessitated by nature to feel grief, or at the least not to feel it more than nature imposes upon us. We don’t have to make our grief more grievous, you might say, and if we find that we have, it is possible for us to remedy that mistake.

Cases Where People Grieve Less

At several points in book 3, Cicero points out that in some cases people will either not grieve at all, or it will be lessened, or even that it will be postponed to later. Each of these examples reinforces the point that feeling grief and expressing it is not something that we are determined to do by necessity or by nature, but that we contribute to those (at least to some degree) by our choices and beliefs. And correspondingly that we can use our cognitive and volitional faculties rightly to head off the grief response.

One prime example of this centers on other beliefs one might hold about the appropriateness of the emotional response.

What of those who do not think that men should show their grief?. . . . What else was it that made them tranquil [placavit] except the thought that sorrow and mourning [luctum et maerorum] were unbefitting in a man? Therefore where others are accustomed to surrender themselves to distress in the belief that it is right [rectum], these men spurned distress in the thought that it was degrading [turpe]. From this it is understood that distress is not natural but a matter of belief [in opinione] (3.28).

He has in mind people who lost their sons to untimely deaths, including one person who lost two sons in quick succession. While others think that the right thing to do is to give way to grief, they think instead that this would be bad for them to do. You could say that they choose to see things differently than their peers, and that in turn enables them to choose not to surrender to an emotion they view as wrong to give in to.

He provides another similar consideration here:

What has more effect in putting grief aside than the realization [intellectum . . susceptum] of the fact that it gains us no advantage [nihil profici] and that indulgence in it is useless [frustra]? If then it can be set aside, it is also possible to refrain from indulging in it. It must therefore be admitted that distress is an indulgence due to an act of will and to conviction [voluntate . . . et judicio] (3.28).

Here there are really two matters that we apprehend. The first is that grief isn’t really doing any good. There is no benefit or advantage to it. And indulging ourselves in it (however “right” it might feel at the time) turns out to be of no use. Grasping that then open up the possibility of changing our belief about another related matter. It is possible for us both to set it aside when we are feeling it (and realize that isn’t any help) and to go further in refusing to indulge in it.

A bit earlier, Cicero brings up another relevant consideration. In this case, grief is not entirely avoided, but rather deferred. Pompey’s don’t grieve at the time when they witness him and their companions dying. “Only when they reached Tyre”, a position of safety, “did they begin to indulge in grief and lamentation (adflictari lamentarique coepisse, 3.27)”. This example demonstrates the general principle that: “It is in one’s power to throw grief aside when one will, in obedience to the call of the hour.” Cicero follows this up by asking pointedly: “Therefore fear had the power to drive it away their distress, and shall not reason have power to drive it away from the wise man?” (3.27).

What all of these drive home is that people do have the capacity to lessen, defer, or even head off their grief, precisely because it is at least in part a matter of our willing and our thinking about matters.

Why Do We Think We Must Grieve?

One important aspect of the Stoic theory of emotions sometimes gets overlooked. Many people do recognize that there are cognitive dimensions to the emotions we feel, that is, they involve thoughts, which we can call opinions, judgements, or assumptions, and lacking these thoughts, the emotions won’t arise. So for example, the class of emotion, pain or distress, to which grief belongs, involves the thought that one is experiencing something bad that is present. Take away the assumption that it is something bad, and you short circuit the emotional response.

But there is another assumption or judgement involved as well, and this plays a really significant role in grief, as Cicero tells us. This is the idea that the grief-response is the appropriate, the right, even the required way we should react in that kind of situation. He sums it up at one point, basically just drawing upon a standard Stoic treatment: “Distress (agritudinem) is the idea (opinionem) of a present evil, with this implication in the idea, that it is fitting (opportet) to feel distress” (3.31). A bit later he writes evocatively of a “call to grief (quadam invitatione ad dolendum), when we have made up our minds that it is a duty (opportere) to feel it” (3.34).

Why would we have such an idea implanted in our minds, actively guiding our thinking and feeling? Cicero’s answer to this question, articulated at length, is what I feel to be a particularly strong point to the Tusculan Disputations. The ideas motivating mourners seem to hold across cultures and civilizations and to be just as common in our present day as they were in ancient Rome. He writes

When, in addition to the idea of serious evil [opinionem magni mali], we entertain the idea that it is an obligation [oportere], that it is right [rectum est], that it is a matter of duty [ad officium pertinere] to be distressed at what has happened, then and not before, the disturbing effect of deep distress [gravis augritudinis perturbatio] ensues. In consequence of this idea come the different odious forms of mourning, neglect of person, women’s rending of the cheeks, beatings of the breast and thighs and head. . . . But all of this is due to the belief that it is a duty [opportere]. . . . the rooted idea that it is a duty for all good men to show the deepest possible sorrow [gravissime maerere] at the death of relatives (3. 26)

We think that we ought to grieve. And if we do not feel grief, indeed deep grief, over the deaths of those close to us, we can easily be led to think that there is something wrong with us. This belief, a mistaken one according to the Stoics, is widespread and effectively taught to us as part of the culture we grow up within. While in our contemporary late modern culture, the outward manifestations of it generally differ from those stereotypical examples of ancient societies that Cicero cites, many of us do believe that it is some sort of moral requirement for us, if we are decent people, to display similarly stereotypical expressions of grieving.

A bit later he stresses again the seeming moral imperative: “All these things they do in the hour of grief, assuming (putantes) that such things are right (recta) and proper (vera) and obligatory (debita)” (3.27). He adds that this grieving occurs from “a sort of conviction of duty” (quasi officii judicio), and then notes a very telling phenomenon.

[I]f any of those who think they should be sorrowful [in luctu esse vellent] chance to act more humanly [humanius] or speak more cheerfully [hillarius], they resume a gloomy demeanor [revocant ad maestitiam] and accuse themselves of misconduct [peccatisque se insimulant] because of this interruption to their grief. (3.27)

They judge themselves as bad for not continually feeling grief, precisely because they view that emotion as the proper, indeed morally obligatory, response that a good person would have. He adds another interesting phenomenon:

Indeed, mothers and teachers are even accustomed to punish [castigare] children, if in the midst of family sorrow they show any undue cheerfulness in act or speech, and not merely with words but even with the whip they force them to tears [luctu]. What is the meaning of this? When actual cessation of sorrow [remisio lucta] has ensued and it is thus realized that nothing is gained by mourning [maerendo], do not the facts of the case show that it is entirely a matter of will [voluntarium]?

We could say that this dynamic represents the opposite of the threat “You want to cry? I’ll give you something to cry about!” that some of us heard from adults as children. In this case, children are being taught by their adult caretakers a lesson Stoics would consider to be emotional miseducation, namely that they must grieve, and keep on grieving, or else they are bad (and then will be given something else to grieve over, i.e. verbal and physical castigation.

There are a few other reasons based in what the Stoics would consider false beliefs, again generally rooted in and transmitted by one’s culture that lead to mistakenly thinking grieving is morally obligatory. He tells us that “[p]eople also think that by the intensely grieving for them (graviter eos lugitant) they are gratifying the dead (gratum mortiuis se facere)” (3.29). If one thinks the dead have consciousness, and that they care about what the living do, and that they want grief expressed over them (sort of like Tom Sawyer attending his own funeral to see whether people miss him or not), then that might make sense. But Stoics don’t buy into any of those.

Cicero also mentions “a certain womanish superstition; for people think they will more easily satisfy the immortal gods if they admit they are crushed and prostrated by an overwhelming blow” (3.29). That’s probably a view much less common in our own present day. He brings that particular discussion to an end by noting that we certainly ought to love those who are dearest to us as much as we do ourselves, but that this doesn’t mean that we have to lose ourselves in grief over them. He tells us: “It is enough to refrain from making ourselves wretched as well as losing our friends, for fear our love go further than they themselves would wish if they were conscious, certainly father than our love for ourselves” (3.30)

One Conclusions For The Present

The next post in this series will be looking specifically at Cicero’s assessments of different philosophical schools and their preferred approaches toward the activity of consolation, that is, giving comfort to people who grieving. So right now, I’ll just give you a brief preview that connects directly to the main lessons in this post. Cicero tells us that:

These are the duties [officia] of comforters: to do away with the distress root and branch, or to allay it, or diminish it as far as possible, or stop its progress and not allow it to extend further, or to divert it elsewhere (3.31).

How does one accomplish these? That will depend on the approach one takes, and that in turn will depend on one’s basic philosophical doctrines about emotions and why we feel them. The approach that Cicero seems most to identify with is that one of the Stoic scholarchs:

Chrysippus considers that the main thing in giving comfort is to remove from the mind of the mourner the belief described, in case he should think he is discharging a regular duty which is obligatory [officio . . . justo atque debito] (3.31)

This line of consolation could indeed be very helpful for anyone who holds such a belief, at least if one can get them to accept the reasoning involved. A person trained in Stoic philosophy might even be able to do this for themselves, at least to some extent.

I should note that is a somewhat disputed matter for the Stoics whether once we are in the grips of a strong and fully developed emotion, we can volitionally bring the resources of reasoning to bear upon it or not. Seneca seems to assert that this is impossible (though he is not entirely consistent on this point), while at least on some readings of them Musonious Rufus, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius seem to suggest that one might be able to do that, albeit with difficultly.

Nonetheless, understanding the reasons why we seem to feel that we ought to grieve, and the involvement of the will, judgement, and beliefs in that, holds out the prospect that we might be able to forego grief to some extent (certainly to lessen it and to avoid excesses of it) and still be decent human beings.