A Guide to the Good Life : The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy (17 page)

Do the things that happen to me help or harm me? It all depends, say the Stoics, on my values. They would go on to remind me that my values are things over which I have complete control. Therefore, if something external harms me, it is my own fault: I should have adopted different values.

E
VEN IF WE SUCCEED
in removing the sting of an insult, we are left with the question of how best to respond to it. Most people think that the best response is a counterinsult, preferably one that is clever. The Stoics, however, reject this advice. And how are we to respond to an insult, if not with a counterinsult? One wonderful way, say the Stoics, is with humor.

Thus, Seneca points approvingly to Cato’s use of humor to deflect a particularly grievous insult. Cato was pleading a case when an adversary named Lentulus spit in his face. Rather than getting angry or returning the insult, Cato calmly wiped off the spit and said, “I will swear to anyone, Lentulus, that people are wrong to say that you cannot use your mouth!”
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Seneca also approves of Socrates’ response to an even more abusive insult. Someone once came up to Socrates and, without warning, boxed his ears. Rather than getting angry, Socrates made a joke about what a nuisance it is, when we go out, that we can never be sure whether or not to wear a helmet.
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Of the kinds of humor we might use in response to an insult, self-deprecating humor can be particularly effective. Along these lines, Seneca describes a man, Vatinius, whose neck was covered with wens and whose feet were diseased, who joked about his own deformities so much that others had nothing to add.
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Epictetus also advocates the use of self-deprecating humor. Suppose, for example, you find out that someone has been saying bad things about you. Epictetus advises you to respond not by behaving defensively but by questioning his competence as an insulter; for example, you can comment that if the insulter knew you well enough to criticize you competently, he wouldn’t have pointed to the particular failings that he did but would instead have mentioned other, much worse failings.
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By laughing off an insult, we are implying that we don’t take the insulter and his insults seriously. To imply this, of course, is to insult the insulter without directly doing so. It is therefore a response that is likely to deeply frustrate the insulter. For this reason, a humorous reply to an insult can be far more effective than a counterinsult would be.

T
HE PROBLEM WITH
replying to insults with humor is that doing so requires both wit and presence of mind. Many of us lack these traits. When insulted, we stand there dumbfounded: We know we have been insulted but don’t know what to do next. If a clever response comes to us, it comes hours later, when it is of little use to us. Nothing is more pathetic, after all, than a person who, a day after being insulted, walks up to the person who insulted him, reminds him of what the insult was, and then gives his reply to it.

The Stoics realized this and as a result advocated a second way to respond to insults: with no response at all. Instead of reacting to an insult, says Musonius, we should “calmly and quietly bear what has happened.” This is, he reminds us, “appropriate behavior for a person who wants to be magnanimous.”
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The advantage of a nonresponse, of simply carrying on as if the insulter hadn’t even spoken, is that it requires no thought on our part. Indeed, even the most slow-witted person on the planet can respond to insults in this manner.

Along these lines, Seneca approvingly points to the response of Cato when someone who did not know who he was struck him at the public baths. When the person subsequently realized who Cato was and apologized to him, Cato, rather than getting angry at the man or punishing him, simply replied, “I don’t remember being struck.”
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Cato, says Seneca, showed a finer spirit by not acknowledging the blow than he would have by pardoning it.
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Refusing to respond to an insult is, paradoxically, one of the most effective responses possible. For one thing, as Seneca points out, our nonresponse can be quite disconcerting to the insulter, who will wonder whether or not we understood his insult. Furthermore, we are robbing him of the pleasure of having upset us, and he is likely to be upset as a result.
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Notice, too, that by not responding to an insulter, we are showing him and anyone who is watching that we simply don’t have time for the childish behavior of this person. If a humorous response to an insult shows that we don’t take the insulter seriously, a nonresponse to an insult makes it look as if we are indifferent to the existence of the insulter: Not only
don’t we take him seriously, but we don’t take him at all! No one wants to be ignored, though, and the insulter is likely to feel humiliated by our failure to respond to him—not with a counterinsult, not even with humor!

T
HE ABOVE DISCUSSION
makes it sound as if the Stoics are complete pacifists with respect to insults, as if they will never respond to an insult with a counterinsult or by punishing the insulter. This is not the case, though. According to Seneca, there are times when it is appropriate for us to respond vigorously to an insult.

The danger in responding to insults with humor or with no response at all is that some insulters are sufficiently slow-witted that they won’t realize that by refusing to respond to their insults with counterinsults, we are displaying disdain for what they think of us. Rather than being humiliated by our response, they might be encouraged by our jokes or silence, and they might start bombarding us with an endless stream of insults. This can be particularly awkward if the person doing the insulting was, in the ancient world, one’s slave or if he is, in the modern world, one’s employee, student, or child.

The Stoics realized this and offered advice on how to deal with such persons. In the same way that a mother might admonish or punish the child who pulled her hair, we will, in some cases, want to admonish or punish the person who childishly insults us. Thus, if a student insults her teacher in front of the class, the teacher would be unwise to ignore the insult. The insulter and her peers might, after all, interpret the teacher’s nonresponse as acquiescence and as a result unleash a barrage
of insults against him. This behavior would obviously disrupt the classroom and make it difficult for students to learn.

In such cases, though, the Stoic needs to keep in mind that he is punishing the insulter not because she has wronged him but to correct her improper behavior. It is, says Seneca, like training an animal: If in the course of trying to train a horse, we punish him, it should be because we want him to obey us in the future, not because we are angry about his failure to obey us in the past.
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W
E LIVE IN A TIME
, to be sure, in which few people are willing to respond to an insult with humor or with a nonresponse. Indeed, those who advocate politically correct speech think the proper way to deal with some insults is to punish the insulter. What most concerns them are insults directed at the “disadvantaged,” including members of minority groups and people with physical, mental, social, or economic handicaps. Disadvantaged individuals, they argue, are psychologically vulnerable, and if we let people insult them, they will suffer grievous psychological harm. Advocates of politically correct speech therefore petition the authorities—government officials, employers, and school administrators—to punish anyone who insults a disadvantaged individual.

Epictetus would reject this manner of dealing with insults as being woefully counterproductive. He would point out, to begin with, that the political correctness movement has some untoward side effects. One is that the process of protecting disadvantaged individuals from insults will tend to make them hypersensitive to insults: They will, as a result, feel the sting not
only of direct insults but of implied insults as well. Another is that disadvantaged individuals will come to believe that they are powerless to deal with insults on their own—that unless the authorities intercede on their behalf, they are defenseless.

The best way to deal with insults directed at the disadvantaged, Epictetus would argue, is not to punish those who insult them but to teach members of disadvantaged groups techniques of insult self-defense. They need, in particular, to learn how to remove the sting from whatever insults are directed at them, and until they do this, they will remain hypersensitive to insults and will, as a result, experience considerable distress when insulted.

It is worth noting that Epictetus would, by modern standards, count as doubly disadvantaged: He was both lame and a slave. Despite these disadvantages, he found a way to rise above insults. More important, he found a way to experience joy despite the bad hand fate had dealt him. The modern “disadvantaged,” one suspects, could learn a lot from Epictetus.

On Vanquishing Tears with Reason

M
OST PARENTS
, on learning of the death of a child, will be emotionally devastated. They will weep, perhaps for days on end, and they will be unable to go about their daily routine for a time. Long after the death, they might experience grief flashbacks; their eyes might well up, for example, on seeing a picture of their child. And how will a Stoic respond to the death of a child? One might imagine that he will respond with no response at all, that he will suppress whatever feelings he might be having or, better still, that he will have trained himself not to grieve.

The belief that Stoics never grieve, although widely held, is mistaken. Emotions such as grief, the Stoics understood, are to some extent reflexive. In much the same way that we cannot help being startled when we hear a loud, unexpected noise—it is a physical reflex—we cannot help feeling grief-stricken when we learn of the unexpected loss of a loved one—it is an emotional reflex. Thus, in his consolation to Polybius, who was grieving the death of his brother, Seneca writes, “Nature requires from us some sorrow, while more than this is the result of vanity. But never will I demand of you that you should not grieve at all.”
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How much should a Stoic grieve? In proper grief, Seneca tells Polybius, our reason “will maintain a mean which will copy neither indifference nor madness, and will keep us in the state that is the mark of an affectionate, and not an unbalanced, mind.” Consequently, he advises Polybius to “let your tears flow, but let them also cease, let deepest sighs be drawn from your breast, but let them also find an end.”
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Although it might not be possible to eliminate grief from our life, it is possible, Seneca thinks, to take steps to minimize the amount of grief we experience over the course of a lifetime. And given that such steps exist, we ought to take them. We live, after all, in a world in which there is potentially much for us to grieve. Consequently, says Seneca, we ought to be parsimonious with our tears, since “nothing must be husbanded more carefully than that of which there is such frequent need.”
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It was with these thoughts in mind that Seneca and the other Stoics developed strategies by which we can prevent ourselves from experiencing excessive grief and overcome quickly whatever grief we might find ourselves experiencing.

T
HE
S
TOICS’ PRIMARY
grief-prevention strategy was to engage in negative visualization. By contemplating the deaths of those we love, we will remove some of the shock we experience if they die; we will in a sense have seen it coming. Furthermore, if we contemplate the deaths of those we love, we will likely take full advantage of our relationships with them and therefore won’t, if they die, find ourselves filled with regrets about all the things we could and should have done with and for them.

Besides being used to prevent grief, negative visualization can be used to extinguish it. Consider, for example, the advice Seneca gives to Marcia, a woman who, three years after the death of her son, was as grief-stricken as on the day she buried him. Rather than spending her days thinking bitterly about the happiness she has been deprived of by the death of her son, Marcia should, says Seneca, think about how much worse off she would be today if she had never been able to enjoy his company. In other words, rather than mourning the end of his life, she should be thankful that he lived at all.
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This is what might be called
retrospective
negative visualization. In normal, prospective negative visualization, we imagine losing something we currently possess; in retrospective negative visualization, we imagine never having had something that we have lost. By engaging in retrospective negative visualization, Seneca thinks, we can replace our feelings of regret at having lost something with feelings of thanks for once having had it.

I
N HIS CONSOLATION
to Polybius, Seneca offers advice on how to overcome whatever grief we happen to be experiencing. Reason is our best weapon against grief, he maintains, because “unless reason puts an end to our tears, fortune will not do so.” More generally, Seneca thinks that although reason might not be able to extinguish our grief, it has the power to remove from it “whatever is excessive and superfluous.”
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Seneca then sets about using rational persuasion to cure Polybius of his excessive grief. For example, he argues that the brother whose death Polybius is grieving either would or wouldn’t want Polybius to be tortured with tears. If he would
want Polybius to suffer, then he isn’t worthy of tears, so Polybius should stop crying; if he wouldn’t want Polybius to suffer, then it is incumbent on Polybius, if he loves and respects his brother, to stop crying. In another argument, Seneca points out that Polybius’s brother, because he is dead, is no longer capable of grief and that this is a good thing; it is therefore madness for Polybius to go on grieving.
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