I expect that many of you are familiar with the series that I have been writing on Stoicism and grief, which is a topic that I've been thinking about for quite some time, and I had the opportunity to present some of my thoughts, largely drawn from the classic Stoic authors, about how we can look at the emotion of grief and and the activities of grieving back when I went to stoic camp and was an invited speaker there. And subsequently, I've given a few talks, and I've been writing a series of posts, trying to expand on that.
It gives me the opportunity to go back to the texts and dig in a bit deeper. I have the freedom to write as much as I'd like since I'm not writing for a press. There's no editor looking over my shoulder who has a certain word count in mind. And I get to go back to these great thinkers, particularly Cicero, who has a lot to say about it, Epictetus, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, among others.
At the stage that I am currently at in the series, I am looking in particular at one work by Cicero, which is called The Tusculan Disputations. It's a really excellent, long, dense work that is not only engages Stoic philosophy, but a number of other philosophical schools of antiquity as well, including the Platonists, the Aristotelians, the Epicureans, also some of the schools that we consider to be kind of minor, like the Cynics and the Cyrenaics. He also talks about the Skeptics, and he brings up examples from a number of other, we could call them one-off or standalone philosophers who are not part of a major school or tradition.
And he also will bring up quite a few poets, including playwrights and people that we would nowadays actually call poets who had a philosophical experience. And he's interested in examining their points of view and sifting out what he thinks would be most valuable.
I've talked elsewhere about Ciceronian eclecticism, which is the stance of teaching, taking in what is valuable from a variety of philosophical perspectives, methods, traditions, schools, and trying to assimilate or integrate what they have to provide into a coherent position of one's own. And I think that arguably is what Cicero is doing in that work among others. And I'm particularly drawn to that as well, so I like going along for the ride with Cicero. And that's exactly what he's doing in Book 3, particularly when it comes to the issue of consolation.
So consolation or comforting is what you do when somebody has experienced a loss. And it can be as simple as going to the funeral and going up to them while they're in the receiving line and you've dressed in some somber clothing. You go up and say, I'm so sorry for your loss. If there's anything that I can do, let me know. And you know, that probably doesn't have a huge effect on their mood, but it shows that you care, and that by itself can be something quite important.
I'll mention, as somebody who has been in those receiving lines at funerals quite a lot, including for my mother and my grandparents and a that sometimes the things that people have to say are not particularly helpful. It's much more about them getting to say something that they think is helpful for you but isn't, or is really there to help them out in one way or another. And so not every attempt at consolation, however well-intentioned, it may be, or at least is imagined to be, is going to be on point.
But Cicero thinks that philosophers can actually give us some helpful advice about how we ought to console other people. And he's going to look at a number of different positions, including those of the Epicureans and the Cyrenaics, several different Stoic positions, the Peripatetics or Aristotelians, among others. And he's going to give you a critical assessment of what's right about those and what is probably off base about those.
Human nature and even human interactions in society have not changed so radically since Cicero's time that these have become useless, although we can certainly say that we've learned some additional lessons. And there are other philosophical and perhaps religious perspectives or even literary perspectives that could be useful that, of course, Cicero didn't have the opportunity to bring in. But I think that the Tusculan Disputations is really quite helpful when it comes to this.
And there's two things that I want to say to sort of bring this to a close. And the first is that when you look at a work like the Tusculan Disputations, You could say that it is existentialist in a very, very broad sense. Obviously, Cicero is writing a long, long time before existentialism as a philosophical movement is arising in the 19th and 20th centuries. But we often talk about proto-existentialists, and people will often include figures such as Augustine of Hippo, or Blaise Pascal, or Marcus Aurelius, or even Socrates among them.
I think you could make a good argument that Cicero is very, very interested in and concerned with existential matters, the things that are characteristic of existential philosophy. He's interested in how philosophy interpenetrates our lives that we're actually living. He thinks that we don't have to go to Athens in order to philosophize. We can engage in it and we should engage in it wherever we happen to be within the world and he thinks that it can in fact apply to the day-to-day matters of our lives. As a matter of fact Cicero is somebody who it's not as if he disrespects theoretical philosophy or speculative philosophy he thinks that that's important. But he always wants to bring it back to the practical and to real life, we could say, and show how philosophy can helpfully inform that.
The other point that I want to linger on a bit is that Cicero is not just sitting back and saying: ‘hey, when you run into grief, I'm going to tell you how to get out of it. I'm the sage on the stage. I'm the super smart guy who has all the answers.” He is writing from a position of common experience, and we could even say common suffering.
Cicero himself wrote a book that we no longer possess called the Consolatio, or Consolation. And why did he write it? Well, somebody very important, very close to him, very beloved by him, died. His daughter, Tulia, who appears to have been a really incredible person and somebody who he could see as sort of a peer intellectually and practically. And she dies before him. As a matter of fact, the wife, who's not her mother, who he's married to at the time, in Cicero's view, doesn't sufficiently grieve for Tullia. She might have been a little bit jealous of the affection that Cicero had for his daughter, and he will divorce her afterwards as a result.
But coming back to Cicero himself, he feels the loss very deeply, and he goes looking for helpful philosophical works, which unfortunately no longer exist, but we know about through references, for example, Crantor the Platonist's work on grief. And Cicero finds them lacking so he decides to write a work himself now why is this in a way existentialist because he's not just telling other people how they ought to deal with this emotion this experience that he himself has gone through but now is above it all.
Instead, he is seeking for words of advice that he can give himself in a kind of inner dialogue, an interior exhortation that can help him navigate these difficult waters of grief and grieving. And in the process like so many other people who do similar projects he writes something that could be useful for others, indeed likely was quite useful for others
Again we've lost the work, the Consolatio, but we do possess the Tusculan Disputations. And I would say, as somebody who deals with grief himself, that reading through the Tusculan Disputations, and thinking about some of the things that Cicero tells us that other philosophers or other schools have had to say and have suggested as practices or insights bearing upon grief, that we can take that and apply it to our own lives very productively and perhaps lessen our own emotion of grief or restrain it, rein it in, not to banish it entirely.
I'd actually don't agree with him on the desirability of that myself, but to keep it within certain reasonable bounds that might make our grief something more reflective of not just our moral values, but the relationship that we have to the person who we have lost and whose loss we are feeling when we grieve.
So I think Cicero provides us with a really interesting example that we might follow or at least sit back and admire, when it comes to this particular work and his larger overall project ,and the way that he lived a philosophical life as we see it playing out in particular, at least for me today, in book three of that work.
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