 OK, we're going to be talking today about the stoic theory of emotions. And you've read the constellations, the two constellations of Seneca that are in the textbook. But instead of concentrating directly on that work, I'm going to first give a sort of abstract or analytical overview of the theory. And then we can give concrete examples on the basis of the readings. But obviously, anybody can interject at any time to clarify, or even if there's something in particular, you want to discuss from the reading. OK, but first of all, this is one of the most important and influential areas of stoicism. And this genre of writing, a consolation, which is a form of writing, which is designed to relieve painful experiences. The stoics are masters of, they develop this genre. And Seneca, in particular, is without here. And all later consolations written in the medieval period, the Renaissance period, the early modern period, down to those that are still being written today, in any form, all are directly influenced by Seneca. I should say directly or indirectly, because a lot of people have other influences, directly from Seneca. So how is it that a piece of writing or reasoning could actually relieve painful emotions? So first of all, instead of just saying emotions, let's learn the Greek word here, which is pathway. And it has a very general application, where it means something just like any experience, or in fact anything that happens to you, anytime you are a patient as opposed to an agent. So literally anything that is inflicted on you is a pathway. And so the immediate and most radical and primitive meaning of it is something like a disease, or an illness, or a sickness, something that comes upon you and affects you, especially negatively. So the term is most frequently employed in the medical lexicon and the medical literature with references to diseases that people suffer. So you can describe cancer or diabetes as being a pathway. You can describe manic depression and anxiety as being a pathway. One of course of the body, the other of the soul. But then philosophically the term also takes on this meaning that in a way it stems from this abstract and this medical use, but to mean a kind of affection, that is a way that one is affected, and so generally feelings and emotions of all kind. Now the term emotion has other various technical meanings in psychiatry, psychology, and contemporary philosophy, not of all, not all of which map on perfectly either to ancient conceptions of pathway in general or the stoic theory in particular, it is useful to continue talking about emotions. Now to give everything constructed on both sides of this handout, the slide that I'm going to be dwelling on mostly today is the one about emotions, and then on Wednesday I'll say a little bit more about a general schema of virtues and vices for the stoics. But everything on both sides of these handouts, I simply put together out of the textbook by Inwood, so every one of these references you could follow up into that textbook to get more of the context if you want. I just constructed my abstract account of the theory purely out of those texts available to you in the textbook. Now the first thing is to find a general definition of this. I mean this is not a definition, these are just glosses of this term. These are just synonyms of this term. But they give a general definition of pathway, an irrational and unnatural movement of a soul or an excessive impulse. Now by saying that it's an irrational movement, they show the central and most important feature of their theory, which is what we call a cognitive theory of the emotions. Essentially the stoics think that emotions, at least the bad ones, are problems with cognition. They're problems with how people think about things. That is the cause of them, the cause of this kind of suffering, these kind of excessive feelings and so forth, is because people reason incorrectly. It's not as if people just have some other part of their soul or something that naturally feels emotions and that somehow the rational part of the soul has to try to mediate this irrational part. That's a picture that we see in Play-Doh and Aristotle and in other ancient philosophers. The stoics reject that because they don't think there are parts in the soul. The soul is just a singular thing. In fact, it's a body. And the causes of emotions are entirely due to the rational faculty that is identical to the soul in their view. Therefore, as Chrysippus says, passions are judgments. We can define every emotion. I don't think I put passion up here, but that's another translation. Passion related to the idea of passivity or being affected, i.e. in affection as opposed to being an agent. Passions are judgments. Judgments are thoughts or sentences, complete thoughts or sentences where one thing a predicate is predicated of as a subject. So that is a rational thing that requires the ability to use language and the ability to use reason. So the kinds of things that they're talking about here are not the kinds of things that animals can possibly suffer. So it might look to us like a cat is angry or sad or something, but that's just an anthropomorphic thing that we project onto them. They've got their own instincts, their own behaviors, and so forth. We just conceive of it on analogy to feelings that we have that are caused by reasoning. Now, so what we can do is, as in the chart here, break down between four general kinds of emotions. And remember, all these emotions are forms of suffering. So even pleasure or delight, heed and need, is considered not something that happens to you, it's a feeling you have, an emotion you have. In the Stoic view, it's a bad thing. So are desires. Desires or lusts and appetites, all of these are synonyms for the same phenomenon in the Stoic view called epithymia. Similarly, forms of pain, distress, loopy, these are, this is a class of emotions. And similarly, fear or phobos is a kind of emotion. And every other, every specific kind of emotion in their theory fits under one of these four. And so I've given you definitions of a vast set of emotions there. So under fear, there's not just fear, there's also dread, shame, hesitation, shock, etc., and pain. We shouldn't just be thinking of physical pain. In fact, distress is probably a better translation. And it includes things like pity, grudging, envy, resentment, heavy-heartedness, congestion, sorrow, anguish, confusion. All of these have their own independent definitions and analyses in their view. But first we'll concentrate on the definition of the general kinds of emotions and how they are conceived of as judgments and thus as irrational movements of the soul. So take the case of pleasure. Pleasure or delight, the Stoics say, involves a judgment that something is good, which is not actually a good, and that that good is present to me. So for example, if I think that wealth is good, and of course wealth is not actually a good, it's merely an indifferent. It can be good or it can be bad, depending on how it's used. But suppose that I'm confused, and I think that I'm one of these fine-ran people and I think that wealth just is good, and I have that confusion. And then I also think that I have a lot of wealth. That's a ridiculous proposition I know for a philosophy professor to say. But suppose that I was somebody that actually had wealth, and I thought, this is really great. I'm a rich guy. And I take pleasure or delight in that. They would say, that is an irrational form of suffering. Now to make that a bit more plausible, I consider the analysis of desire. Desire is a belief, a wrong belief that something is good, such as wealth, but a belief that I don't have it. So suppose Monty Johnson was one of those fine-ran people who thought that wealth really is intrinsically good, but I correctly realized that I don't have it, because I'm a poor, starving philosophy professor. And so I have a desire for this thing that I think is intrinsically good, that I think is good by nature. I want wealth, all the cool people have wealth. Wealth makes life so much better. And so I want it. I desire to have it. And this desiring is a form of suffering. It's something that's happening to me, and it's a feeling that I have. Now again, we could change any of the purported goods that aren't actually goods for wealth here. So help, for example, could be something that I mistakenly think is good, and mistakenly think I have it, or think that I have it, maybe I do have it, and then I take delight in that, or think that I don't have it, and so desire to have it, either way I'm suffering an irrational or unnatural movement of the mind. Now, pain is a case where I falsely believe that something is bad, and I believe that it is present to me. So this is a definition of distress, a judgment that something is bad which is not actually a bad, and is present to me. So to make this easiest, just flip the cases I just gave you, suppose that I think that wealth is something bad, and I think I'm just a poor philosophy professor, I'm never going to be rich like these people that went on to law school, and so forth, and so then I have distress about that. Again, the cause is irrational because it's just not true that wealth is something good, and were I to not think that way, I might not suffer from this kind of emotion. Again, if I think that disease, a disease like diabetes is a bad thing, and I also think that it's present to me that I've been diagnosed with it and that I'm suffering from it, then I might very well be distressed about that, and that would be an irrational form of suffering. And so the final category is when one has this belief that something is bad, but thinks that it's absent to them, this is the category that we call fear. So I believe that it would be bad to die, and I think about this. It's not present to me now, but when I think I'm going to die, eventually I could have fear about this. That would be irrational because I'd be thinking that death is a bad thing, which of course it's not. It's just an indifferent thing. It's quite a good thing sometimes, but if I was confused and thought it was a bad thing, then I might fear it. Or again, sickness, poverty, and so forth. And so that's why we can break this down into a table of two-by-two things. Is the confusion and the irrationality about what's good or is it about what's bad? And furthermore, is it about something that is present to me or something that is absent from me? And it is judgments about these things that cause these forms of suffering and emotion. And so each one of the subdivisions of these general kinds of emotion involve judgments about things in particular domains. So for example, in the case of fear, I don't just fear, for example, death or pain or something like that. You might fear having a bad reputation. And we call that shame, and that's a negative, bad emotion that one might suffer from. And hesitation, shock, et cetera. There's a similar story for each of these. So it is a cognitive theory because the theory is that all emotion and suffering is caused by cognition or by thoughts that we have. And so this is what makes the idea of a consolation possible. An idea that you could reason with somebody in order to relieve their suffering or distress. Now in the form that we have it in these consolations by Seneca, we have long letters addressed to specific people. In fact, there are open letters, I think. And you can see that by reading them. Not all of the advice even given in them would be applicable to the person who happens to be suffering from something. So for example, when he gives the advice to Marcia, yes, I know you're suffering because your son died, but what people should do is reflect on the fact that death isn't something bad and so forth, but they should also anticipate that everybody around them is going to die and so that when this eventually happens, they won't be surprised by it. Well, that doesn't work very well if it's already happened. You can't anticipate that your son is going to die beforehand and you're already suffering from the shock and distress because by the time it happens, you have these confused and irrational thoughts about what's good and what's bad. But the consolation need not be deployed in exactly that form. We could deploy it also in the form of a psychoanalyst with a patient on a couch that's suffering from irrational disturbances and emotions. And the idea is that the therapist can actually reason with that person, talk through the problem, find what's causing the confused thoughts that produce the emotion, and replace those with a different form of cognition. And this is essentially the idea behind what we now call cognitive behavioral therapy and what the ancients just call therapy. We have to use terms like cognitive behavioral therapy because many of our forms of therapy now target the bodily causes of these diseases instead of the psychological causes. And so psychopharmacology is a major way to address these problems. But the ancients had various pharmacological solutions but they weren't nearly as effective so they were more dependent on these kind of cognitive behavioral therapies and so the Stoics developed an enormous storehouse of them and we see them being deployed in particular cases with respect to these particular people in Seneca's consolations. Okay, so with that, that's the general theory. Now, does anybody have any questions about the general theory? Yes. Just to clarify with just that thing, you're saying how it has a negative connotation with the disease, illness, and sickness, but does it overall have a negative connotation as well? Just talking about none of the emotions when you use that word refers to negative emotions just because the Stoics view emotion as this is bad. Well, yes, it's a good question because I'm going to get into, in a moment, what they call the you, patea, which means the actual good patea. So there we need to translate patea as something like feeling or something so it turns out there actually are good affections, good feelings, even good emotions that it's possible to experience. But, and I'm going to discuss and describe that controversial doctrine and it's important to ask whether that doctrine is consistent with their generic account of patea or not because many people accuse them of simply renaming things and replacing what we all thought along that there's good and bad emotions with this theory that essentially says emotions are all bad and we need to extricate them but there are some feelings that we can approve of under certain circumstances and so Cicero and other people take them to task for doing a similar thing that they do with goods by saying, well, these things aren't really goods, they're indifference but then there's indifference and there's indifference or preferred indifference and disagreeing indifference and so see if you think that they're playing a similar terminological game in their account of the good emotions but those aside and they say much less about those than they do about the bad ones and when they're talking about the bad ones they don't call them something like kaka patea which would mean bad emotions, they just call those patea so if it's not modified, you can assume that it has a negative connotation even if it just means something like feeling or emotion it's got this intrinsic... it's got this connotation of being something you're suffering from okay, yeah, Chrissy? So would they say that agency is inherently good and then possibility is just bad? Is that how they would kind of define why emotions are bad or negative? Well, no, because it's inevitable that things happen to us and we suffer from things the question is how that lines up with our cognition and how we think about them happening So, as such, pathway in the sense of disease or illness generically cannot intrinsically be a bad thing it only is in combination with how it's thought about and similarly, I don't think that they can say that agency in and of itself is something good because are we talking about agency to use my extremely crude false dichotomy or talking about the agency of Mother Teresa or the agency of Hitler, right? Agency itself isn't good Agency is important and hopefully the use of the term indifference doesn't get confused make it seem like that's not an important thing but the point is that agency can be used can go one way or the other and so can passivity Things can happen to me that are good or bad but the suffering and the problem arises based on my cognition of it So, the stoic position is that if you have the right understanding of what's good you cannot be in pain that seems unreasonable You cannot be in distress and if you have the right account in this case of what's bad you don't think that you don't think something is bad that isn't actually bad then you are actually immune to distress and now we have to distinguish between a feeling, a physical sensation in the body and a full-blown emotional state and so take a case like anger and suppose that I'm made angry by some outrageous act of hubris where somebody comes up and punches me randomly on the street Okay, well then there's a point where I suffer in a sense and I'm pained by the blow that hits me but when that blow hits me and I feel that and I'm a patient and I suffer this that necessary affection because stoics don't, it's not that they completely anesthetize themselves from feeling anything they still feel that initial thing then the question arises about an ascent to a certain proposition so then the thought occurs to me that this pain I'm feeling is a bad thing or this pain that I'm feeling is something I should be indifferent to now in the latter case that was painful, that sucked but I don't really care I don't let things like that bother me I don't let things that are out of my control not only hurt me in that way but then hurt me even worse on a mental level where I become emotional or angry about it so the former, the initial impact and the initial, and we have to call that a feeling or something that cannot be eliminated or extirpated but the judgment about it the axiological consideration of whether it's good or bad that is completely up to me and in my power, in my control and this of course is the crucial moment of our agency is what we give ascent to and so then the actual suffering from the emotion of anger or distress, that is up to me and so I think it's a bit provocative that the term loopy which really does mean pain although there are other words for pain and then reclanguage there's even more in the Roman language it's crazy, just like they have thousands of extra words for how to kill people they also have lots of extra words for pain that's just an accident of which of our texts have survived but this is a kind of theme in ancient literature anger and pain but I think the phenomenon and as far as we're talking about an emotion and emotional suffering is actually about distress if I ascent to the idea that this pain I'm suffering in my foot because I have a horrible case of gout or like Epicurus because I've got painful kidney stones or something the Stoics no more than anyone else has no means of eliminating those initial feelings and to wait until psychopharmacology got good enough to deal with it on that level they can't eliminate that but there's an added emotional response to pain and I think people have seen this we know people that deal better and worse with pain and there are people that not only experience pain but experience distress at the fact that they're experiencing pain and then this can also enlarge into fears about greater pains and so forth and you get this kind of cycle of emotional disruption and all of that is irrational in their view but we certainly need to I mean it's a good point you're working on the theory of pleasure and pain in Epicureanism and Utilitarianism for your research paper so we have to see that to some extent there's a different definition of both pleasure and pain going on here than we find in the Epicureans and the focus is on the cognitive part of pleasure and pain the thoughts we have about pleasure and pain and because those we can actually do something about we can relieve people's suffering or their irrational bliss and so forth by helping them to reason better and using consolations and psychoanalysis and that sort of thing the other things we either can't do anything about or we leave to psycho pharmacology okay so any other questions or thoughts just about the general theory yeah you said previously that stores don't believe that we classify the emotions of animals well they don't believe that animals have emotions in this sense because they don't have cognition and all of these problems are caused by cognition in a letter he reads his whole like how natural is for a person to grieve about one to two days on his observation of animals yes yes so that's right he consoles Marsha by saying you've been grieving for too long we should look at how animals once they've become upset they grieve only so long and then no longer I think that's a great example of Seneca not sticking to the orthodox representation of stoic theory as he says that he doesn't we look at the passage in on tranquil in the soul where he says I'm going to diverge from this view even so far as to accept certain heavy Korean ideas sometimes raises an enormous problem about the coherence of his philosophy with itself and with stoicism that I think makes what's interesting about that piece of advice is that is the way it resembles a kind of oikiosis or cradle like argument that we can look at how irrational animals or infants behave before they become confused by cognition and then we can take that as an indication of how we ought to live in accordance with nature and so the idea is that we ought to live more like these animals do in accordance with nature not suffering or not grieving for extended periods of time but the fact of the matter is that they don't grieve, they don't suffer they don't have cognition none of this therapy could possibly work on them because they cannot possibly be reasoned with so in a technical sense there is a disanalogy between the two and one might argue that this advice misleads one into thinking that emotions are more like the kinds of things that animals suffer when their doctrine cannot permit that animals clearly do suffer pain and pleasure you can do experiments on your own pets I wouldn't recommend it but you can easily show that they can experience pain in the sense that Rawson was wondering if the dogs were really claiming they can eliminate pain like that there's no question about that but what animals don't seem to suffer and this is part of Seneca's point is a further distressed cause by not only having the bad feeling but thinking that the feeling is something bad in a moral sense and you add distress and you add pain on top of something that's inevitable by the way that you're thinking about it whereas humans so these emotions basically are things that ways that humans screw up their lives that animals can't possibly do I mean this is a problem with this wonderful ability to use language and to reason is that it sometimes goes wrong and then people end up making themselves suffer because they're doing it wrong and animals have neither the advantages of being able to reason and use language but they also don't have these disadvantages so if we interpret that as like a kind of cradle argument then in theory it can make some sense but insofar as it suggests that animals are suffering similar kinds of things as what he's trying to relieve there then it is in this leaking characterization okay but that's a good point now let me talk for a second about the approved emotions this is a so-called eupathia because corresponding to three of the four kinds of bad emotion are forms of good emotion that they say it's legitimate to experience so the first, and I put these in parentheses in small type next to each of them so in the case of goods being present to one if I have a correct cognition I think something is present to me and I think that it's good then I might experience joy about it so suppose that I think that courage or temperance I think both of those are quite a stretch in my own case, wisdom no, not that either but suppose I think that courage is a good thing and I rightly believe that I'm courageous well then it would be legitimate for me to experience joy in response to that rational thought now joy is supposed to be a fairly low grade thing it's perfectly consistent with the stoic who never changes his facial expressions before experiencing it and we're supposed to have the idea of a nice control under control emotion as opposed to irrational delight and exuberance in something that I irrationally think is good and that I think is present to me now in the case of a good being absent so suppose I, somebody give me an example of something that is good and really is good and that is absent to them and so that one could have a wish for it and this wish would be a legitimate feeling yeah, probably intelligence okay, right so if I rightly think that intelligence is a good thing and I rightly think I don't have intelligence then it is fully rational for me to experience to have the affection or the passion that wow I really wish I was intelligent and this could motivate me to do something like show up to school and get further education and things like that and that would appear to be fine and that is very different from lusting after things like irrational appetites towards them now the third category of approved emotion is caution so somebody constructs for us the counterpart to fear what would it be rational to have a caution about okay, Robert knowing to avoid doing things that are unjust so as not to violate that virtue okay, for example for funsies that would be unjust okay, so suppose I have the view that murdering innocent people is a bad thing that's presumably correct and yet I have this kind of impulse to go out and murder some innocent people then I might validly experience caution that says wait maybe I shouldn't just go out and do that okay I was thinking something more like intemperance or something where I think that it would be bad if I were to overindulge in alcohol too early in the day and yet I'm tempted to head to the pub right after class but I've got a stoic way of looking at this I realize that would be a bad thing so I'm cautious and I take steps to avoid walking by the pub so that that temptation will occur to me or something like that okay now notice that there is no no legitimate emotion no good emotion, no good feeling that corresponds to the bad feeling of distress or pain when something bad is present now can anybody think of why they so this looks like a strange thing in their theory they don't have anything in that category why not why is there not an approved emotion in that particular category well you and I are having a dialogue today I guess because bad things being present are necessarily irrational the only things that are rational are the virtues okay but couldn't I legitimately think something is bad and think that it's present to me is it just a bunch of indifferences well I think they do have some things that are bad these little things called vices like being unjust, being intemperate, being cowardly being unwise, foolish, stupid all those are really bad things okay but there's no emotional state that can correspond to that because well the easiest way to think of it is imagine the condition of the sage the sage doesn't have any bad things present to him because the only things that are truly bad are vices but a sage doesn't have any vices because the sage thinks correctly about these things so there's no possibility of experiencing something good in that category it doesn't occur to the one who has their emotions under control and has a rational way of thinking about these things so to a person that's purely rational there are no present things that are truly bad in the strict axiological sense of their ethical theory okay and similarly the approved UPathia or good feelings admit of several different kinds and each of these has its own definition and so forth so in wish we can have rational appetency, goodwill, kindness, acceptance, contentment all of those are perfectly legitimate and all of those have their own different individual objects that involve me correctly evaluating the goodness or badness of that thing and me correctly understanding whether or not it is present to me and similarly for caution rational avoidance, respect and sanctity you know caution is how stoics avoid getting into a condition like puro or something where you don't even exhibit caution towards oncoming cars or when you're walking over on the cliffs yeah isn't it possible like for something that is bad which is bad and is present like for example say I'm not wise I don't have wisdom isn't it possible like we can have a proper judgment in that I want to be wise yeah and that's called wish that's where wisdom is not present to me okay so it's absent to me and it is something good and I correctly judge all of those things so having a wish to be wise is a legitimate and fully rational emotion that I hope all of you are constantly experiencing so in that respect like the judgment has to be in fact notice that it would be there would be a problem of not experiencing that it would be a sign of stupidity or irrationality if you didn't have that wish to become wise it would mean either that you didn't realize that wisdom was a good thing or what's even worse you were confused and thought that good thing was present to you when it actually isn't okay so these aren't just happy good emotions to have these are things that the sage necessarily has and that if you're doing well and living correctly you necessarily experience this kind of joy and wish and that sort of thing so in this example, for example like that judgment is on the wisdom itself not the vice of like not having wisdom okay well let's take the vice of not having wisdom which we also call foolishness or ignorance or stupidity I mean there's a bunch of varieties of these and trust me the show has definitions of each of them okay so ignorance now suppose that ignorance is a bad thing we agree that it is suppose that it's present to me okay well then I necessarily suffer pain and distress about that or no I don't right because pain and distress are caused by something irrational whereas that set of thought seems to be rational ignorance is present to me and it's something bad okay so it looks like there isn't there isn't an approved emotion that corresponds to that conjunction of rational thoughts that has to be translated according to a logic of opposites into the absent thing that would be good wisdom and the fact that it's absent to me instead of its negation, ignorance being present to me okay now I mean that's there is a rough and ready solution to the problem but I don't know if you're getting at the idea that there's something more deeply problematic about how they've set these up that kind of asymmetry would suggest that there might be because this should all symmetrically work out in theory, right? Yeah, Robert? In the extreme, does the sage not experience any wishes because they've achieved everything that's good? Well no, I think they that it's still rational for them to wish for certain things I mean I think I like the thought experiment you're setting up the sage already has everything that's good because by virtue of being a sage they are rational and have all of the and by virtue of being rational have all of the virtues therefore all of the virtues are present to them none of them are absent and therefore there doesn't seem to be any rational appetency there now except things like goodwill, kindness, acceptance, contentment that's where we have to see what those things really mean and if there's a sense there of course is a sense in which the sage has goodwill or might you know might think that things could be improved in society and other people and so forth and they might they might want that I think that's kind of problematic because it's focusing on things outside of your control exposing yourselves to fortune and that sort of thing and so they have to be really careful here I think it's a good question of it again raises questions about the coherence of the theory okay but this this theory is the background of the idea that you can relieve people suffering by reasoning with them yeah so if the sage is constantly acting virtuously would they constantly be in a state of joy? yes that's the idea so who wrote on the ancient art of stoic joy the William Irvine book? right so that's part of this is that you really enjoy being a stoic if you reach that certainly if you reach that stage you're just constantly experiencing joy that person has a constant experience of joy they know what's good they know it's present to them it's completely steady it's not going anywhere and so forth and that's the essence of joy to believe rightly that you have everything that's good