 Seneca's consolations. We read two of them, three of them survive completely, one of them is not included in this volume at all. And then in the collection of Seneca's letters, there are a couple of consolations. So it's a genre of writing, writing something that is meant to relieve somebody's suffering from some kind of painful emotion, typically grief or distress like over the loss of a loved one. And in this domain, Seneca is the absolutely unrivaled master. If you want to, all consolations written subsequent to Seneca imitate the consolations that he wrote, and that goes down to the present day, because of course they're still being written, and they're still being modeled exactly on Seneca. Now, Seneca however is not totally original, so this genre had already been established before Seneca, but these are the earliest surviving examples of the genre that we have. And in fact, the consolation to Marsha is Seneca's earliest work, we think, written under Caligula, during the reign of Caligula, around 40 AD, maybe a little earlier. And again, it's the earliest full-length example of the genre of consolation to survive. You'll notice that it has a kind of open letter format, so it's addressed to Marsha whose pains he is ostensibly trying to relieve, but it is clearly also intended for a more general audience. So other people suffering from distress or grief should be able to read these consolations and derive some relief from them. That seems to be Seneca's idea. But there are specific details about the person who's being addressed that give it this feeling of a very intimate and specific letter. So Marsha's been in mourning for a long time, over three years, over the death of her son, Metaleus. Before that, her father, an historian named Cordis, had committed suicide, so she was suffering from a lot of painful events. Her father being accused of treason and committing suicide, and then her son dying and all of this coming on very soon, very, very close in time, seems to have totally devastated and emotionally wrecked her. So she's an emotional wreck. She's been grieving for longer than the official grieving period. And Seneca writes his consolation in order to help her. Now, it's a stoic consolation, and I've read things. I was just reading some things online before class and then in some other introductions to this letter that says, oh, it's not very stoic. He's not very stoic in it. For example, he says it's okay to cry at funerals. What kind of stoic would say that? I think that it's actually deeply stoic and totally depends on stoic theory of emotions, and that things like crying when you're distressed because you hear about something bad that's happened doesn't make you not a stoic. It doesn't make you not a rational person. It doesn't even mean that you're not wise. It's sort of like blinking when somebody flicks their fingers in your face or something like that. It's part of this pre-emotional state that using this stoic therapy you can, in theory, arrest before it becomes an out of control emotional state, which is what Marcia is suffering from. So in order to make my case out here, I'll remind you of the general contours of the stoic theory of emotion. We have this grid. Emotion is a cognitive matter. It depends on having a belief about a good or an evil thing either being present to me now or being a prospect in the near future. The one that we're specifically concerned with today is the idea that there is some evil thing that's present to me. For example, the loss of my son or the loss of my father, and that causes me distress. And we want to remove that distress. So again, this is the view from the standpoint of defining the emotions according to their generic kinds or their genus. We also, as I've shown you, can define these emotions according to the species of each emotion, so we can break each emotional category down into several different kinds. Last time, we were dealing with the emotion of anger, and in the stoic view, that is a species of desire, because anger is a desire to repay pain for pain or a desire for vengeance. Distress is, in general, the belief that something bad is present to me, which is not in fact bad if you have the correct, i.e., stoic value theory, and grief is the specific name of an emotion where I have that distress due to an untimely death. So I think that there's this bad thing present to me, which is that I'm suffering through the untimely death of my child or my father, and therefore I have this painful, distressing mindset, all of this just background. Now, because this is a cognitive theory of the emotions, we can represent the process that the mind goes through, the conclusion of which is experienced by the subject as suffering from an emotional state. And I'll represent the syllogism as being something like this. First premise, if some bad object is present to me, then it is appropriate to contract my psyche, i.e., feel distress. This strange notion of contracting my psyche has to do with their physical and psychological account of the psyche and how the psyche undergoes changes when the tone or tenor of it changes, and some of these cause the mind to sort of retract and grow smaller in and of itself, distress in general is an example of this. Others are characterized as the mind kind of expanding, for example in the emotion of delight or excessive pleasure. But we can just replace that talk of contracting or expanding my psyche with the idea of feeling or not feeling distress. And so the first premise is that if some bad object is present to me, it's appropriate for me to feel distress. Seems pretty reasonable. The second premise is that objects of a certain type, called a T, are bad. So for example, let's suppose that untimely deaths are a bad thing, like when a parent is made to experience the death of their child, or when at an early age a parent commits suicide, then you might think that's a bad thing. Third premise is that a certain object, called an O, being of type T, is present to me. So for example, my son's death is present to me. I'm aware of, I'm thinking about, I'm dwelling on my son's death. Now, if we combine all of those premises, we are forced to the conclusion that it is appropriate for me to feel distress. After all, if a bad object is present to me, it's appropriate to feel distress. Objects like untimely deaths are bad things, and such an object is present to me. Therefore it is appropriate for me to feel distress. Now, this is a kind of analysis we can give of what's happening in the mind when somebody suffers distress. And since this argument is valid, there's no point in just disagreeing with the fourth premise. There's no point in saying, well that's all true, but it just isn't appropriate to feel distress. Stop feeling distress. And I have to think of, by the way, there's good consolations and there's bad consolations, meaning there's good ways to console people and there's bad ways to console people. A bad way to console someone is saying, you're acting really stressed out and distressed, stop doing that. It bothers other people or we don't want to see that or that isn't fitting for a person like you. That would be to ignore all of the reasonable, seeming causes in the person's mind that they're suffering distress, just telling them not to feel it at all. So we have to accept that if those premises are true, that that conclusion is true. And we can't just reject the conclusion. So again, on a side note about bad consolations, there are really bad ways that you can try to console someone. Like for example, somebody's suffering from a bad disease, a terminal illness, or even just an illness that looks like it's threatening to them. And your friend, this is happening to a parent of your friend, and you say, oh don't worry, they'll get better, I just know that they're going to pull through. This is the most obvious way we try to console people. Or something bad happened to you, you failed a couple of classes, and now it looks like you're not going to be able to have that major. Oh don't worry, I'm sure it'll be fine in the end. Just keep trying the same thing, keep taking the same classes and so forth. That's all horrible advice. Because then what happens is, in the first case, the person dies. Or the disease gets worse. And so your consolation totally fell flat, the person now feels worse. You told me it was going to get better, it's getting worse. So you've got to be really careful when you're trying to console people. You're manipulating their emotions, you're deliberately manipulating their emotions because you're trying to improve their emotions. But not everything that we can say in these situations, and not even the most obvious things, are going to be effective at doing that. So the Stoics really try to think this out. What would be the effective way to actually console someone? Yeah, question? In Seneca's consolation to Polobius, where he mentions... Yeah, so the one we didn't read? You mentioned bad consolations. He said that at a point, unless reason puts an end to our tears, fortune will not do so. Would that be considered a bad consolation? No, that's a great consolation. We need to use reason to eliminate these emotions. So unless you can reason through specific emotions, they will never subside? Right. Yeah, what's a bad consolation is to say, oh, that feeling will just go away. I know you're really distressed about that, but don't worry, it'll just take care of itself. That's another typical way we try to console someone. Not true. They might just keep dwelling on it and feeling bad about it. That's not a good thing to say to somebody. It gets us out of the awkwardness of the immediate situation. Just like saying, oh, I know that they're going to pull through. I know it's going to be okay. I know he's going to recover from alcoholism and so forth. Those are all bad ways to do it. They end up making people feel worse. So if we actually care about how they feel, we need to find some other way to console them. In a stoic view, it totally has to do with how we use reason. Because they think that what's causing the emotion is a failure of reason at some point. It's actually that they've got the wrong value system. Not that they have the wrong logic. If all of those premises are true, it is right to feel distress. So what we've got to do is show that one or more of those premises is not true. Alyssa, were you raising your hand? I was. I tried to show. He condemns anger fully. And with grief, it seems that he allows grief because of the use of reason. So an anger, one cannot be rational, but in grief, one can be rational. Well, I'm going to explain. It's a complicated reason why he seems to take certain strategies and address certain things and not others or certain things in certain order before addressing others. And it has to do with the strategy of dealing with somebody who's suffering from grief. Now, and I think anger is a useful comparison because once somebody is angry, it's already out of control. Everything must be put in trying to stop it from initially arising. Grief, however, is already going by the time the person apprehends the object, like that my child has died in a car accident or something. But there is no, you can't really, there's a way that you could, if they had enough preparation and enough education as a stoic, that you could have prevented them from thinking that's bad in the first place. You know, if they were a sage, they could be undergoing these disasters and there wouldn't be a problem. But generally, the person's already suffering from grief and so you've got to find a way to cope with grief. So I'm going to address it. It's a good question. I'm going to address it. So let's talk about which premises. Let's hold this discussion in the context of which premises it makes sense to contradict. Okay? Does it make sense to contradict the premise that the object is not present to the person? Like say, oh, your son didn't die. He's probably still alive. Right? Yes, there was a horrible car accident and it was on fire and they're staying on the news that nobody survived, but he's probably still alive somewhere. Right? That would be a bad thing to do. In fact, that's just a non-starter. So we cannot deal with the third premise. We're going to have to look at the other two. Okay, what about the second premise? Objects of type T are bad. Untimely deaths are bad. It may be difficult to deny this premise. Technically, Stoics do deny that premise because death, like life and like health and disease and so forth, is not a good or bad thing, but is indifferent. In this case, death is a disperfered indifferent. So they aren't actually bad. But by the time somebody is suffering grief, it's probably not going to work to say, look, I know your son died, but it's not actually a bad thing. Yes, he died painfully in a horrible car accident, but that's not really a bad thing because Stoic philosophers have shown us that death is nothing and that suffering massive amounts of pain right before your died, nobody cares. The sage can be happy while being tortured on the rat. That is not going to be an effective consolation. That's going to shut the person down from being able to even be receptive to an effective consolation. So this is why we will not immediately attack the issue. We won't have the consolation immediately focus on just rehearsing our hardcore Stoic doctrine about what's good and bad and let's start working right away to get their value system totally overthrown so that they won't be feeling this pain. So if that isn't going to be the most effective way to go, then what we need to do is actually dwell on this first premise. Focus the consolation on this premise that if a bad object is present to me, then it is appropriate to feel distress, that I should feel distress about it. And what we want to do is try to undermine the person's belief that distress is the right kind of reaction to be having to that bad. Not deny that the thing is bad, again, or not deny that it didn't happen. But to deny that they should feel distress as a result of it happening. Still the difficult thing to show, but it is possible to show that and to argue on that premise. And so this is what we find Seneca doing in the consolation to Marsha. The first several arguments he makes focuses on the idea that this bad object is present to you, but you should not feel distress as a result of it. And so his strategies for arguing that, for example, involve presenting these paradigms of look at how Octavia responded to a certain death and look at how Livia responded. And Octavia is miserable and she dwelt in her suffering for years and years and it just made everything worse and made everybody around her miserable. Or Livia, who really put a limit to the amount of grief that she was suffering, didn't eliminate it completely but had the appropriate amount and served as a model to help her other family members cope with this crisis and then other people took inspiration from how strong she was in dealing with it and which one do you want to be like, right? Now, and he does the same thing in section three with the example of Julia Agusta. Now in several sections, two, six, and eleven, as far as I can tell, Seneca does not dispute and actually uses language that appears to concede that the death is a misfortune and that the death is a bad thing. His only argument is that one should not compound that bad thing with further unnecessary suffering in the form of distress. So I marked a couple of those passages. Let's see if I can find the one in the six. So this is quoting from section six. I am not trying to bring you ease and I do not seek to minimize the disaster you suffered. Let sorrow which runs its course, etc. So that's an admission. I am not trying to minimize that this appeared to be a bad thing. I am merely trying to disconnect the emotional reaction you are having from it. And in section eleven, there is another place where a similar point is made that I won't dispute in section three towards the end of section three, what lunacy, what evil it is to punish oneself for misfortune and to increase one's own sorrow. Even in expressing grief, there is such a thing as moderation. He doesn't actually believe that because he doesn't think he should have any grief at all. But he's saying, look, yes, supposing it's a misfortune, I won't contradict that point, but what I've got to stop you doing is dwelling on it even further in suffering this emotional state. And so in section seven to nine, he actually addresses the claim that it's natural to grief and that it's expected by society to grief. You see, because there's also expectations that are at play here that one ought to be grieving, that I ought to look like I'm really sad about the loss of my son or the loss of my husband or the loss of my father. And I ought to be wearing black and I shouldn't look like I'm having any fun or having a good time. That's what society expects. And furthermore, it's natural to feel that way. Everybody seems to feel distressed when this kind of thing happens. So the first thing he does is says, no, it's not natural. And he makes certain arguments that are a lot like the original cradle arguments about how animals behave, how infants behave and so forth to show that it is not a natural condition to grieve or to grieve for an extended period of time. And then he argues that all of the conventions that are built on top of that about how long you should grieve are also false, that it's not a good thing to appear to be grieving. In fact, you should set yourself up as being in the opposite state. And it's only after, that takes us about halfway through the work where as I see it, he's dealing with that initial premise. Then once that consolation is made to sink in, then he goes to the jugular and attacks the second premise, that objects of this kind are bad, that untimely death is bad. So in sections 12 to 15, he says, is it really that bad? Yes, you lost your father, but let's dwell on those who are even worse off. And this is a very good piece of consolation. In fact, this is the most important and most effective form of consolation. You're feeling bad about something that happened to you. Start dwelling on those that have it even worse, right? You're feeling bad that you broke your arm. Dwell on people who were born without arms, right? Or people who got their arms cut off in war or through torture or that are paralyzed for the rest of their life and can't move any of their limbs. You're feeling bad because all of your limbs are paralyzed? Think about all those people who died prematurely or who were in that condition and still tortured for a long time and so forth. We can always come up with cases that are much worse than anything we're suffering. You're feeling really bad about failing this class? I have a friend who just failed out of the whole university, right? You're feeling bad that you lost your son? I just read about a woman who went insane and killed, smothered all of her children because of postpartum depression, right? She's dealing not only with the grief of losing these children but the guilt that she's the one that did it and so forth. You can always come up with someone worse, right? You're feeling bad because you don't have very much money. Think about people living in abject poverty. Think about people plunged into poverty because there's a civil war going on in their country and so forth. You start thinking about people who are actually worse off than you and even better than that, you start thinking about how can I help those people and direct my thoughts and attention of how can I help people that are even worse off than me and your own problems just disappear, just start going away and you don't think they're that bad. You start to think, I've actually got it pretty good compared to where I could have been. Okay, so at that point we really are contradicting the idea that this is something bad although in those initial stages it's saying that it's relatively not bad. Yes, it still might be kind of bad but that impression that it's bad vanishes when compared with the always available worst forms of suffering that exist simultaneously and in the past and will be going on in the future and so on. In 17-18 he offers a thought experiment to show why one should not consider an untimely death to be bad. Then in 19 he directly argues that death is not harmful and here he appears to make use of Epicurean techniques about how death can harm neither the living nor the dead can't harm the living because they aren't dead yet and they can't harm the dead because they don't exist anymore and so on and he uses those general techniques that essentially you should think of as being nothing but then a really crazy thing happens in the later sections of this and this point was brought to my attention by a student who wrote a paper for an earlier version of this class asking whether Seneca is really consistent with himself because he sometimes goes so over the top in his rhetoric about condemning death and not caring about death that he actually starts talking about death being a good thing sometimes and how it's actually great and death's the best thing and this whole life should be about practicing your death and getting ready for it and everything and she pointed out that by going to this extreme it seems that Seneca actually contradicts orthodox, stoic doctrine that death isn't indifferent and in fact the official doctrine is that it's a preferred, dispreferred indifferent Seneca at least makes it out to be a preferred indifferent he says we should all want death, we should all be so happy and so overjoyed that we get to die life would be so miserable if we couldn't but then he actually goes on to saying that it's good or that it seems to be good for the person who's died which to some extent contradicts the kind of Epicurean rhetoric about how it's nothing and can't affect them whatsoever in section 21 he specifically contradicts the idea that an untimely death is bad he says nothing is untimely because everything is determined by fate and everything happens exactly when it should and when it must and there's no alternative to when any of it happens but in 22-25 is when he really goes off the rails and does a rather non-stoic thing and arguing that death is good because it freezes from the bounds of the body and that sort of thing first of all that isn't consistent with stoic physics because nothing freezes from bodies although our bodies, the soul is a body or is rather a condition that bodies are in but he uses platonic arguments familiar from dialogues like the Fido to argue that death is liberation that we get rid of this horrible body, this horrible corpse that we're sort of carrying around with us and now we're free to experience heaven which he describes as a kind of astral projection where we get to survey all of nature and all of the stars because we were unhindered by this heavy earthly existence and so forth now one might ask as Ashley had done earlier in that paper what are the consequences of him taking a non- or anti-stoic position about death being bad there's also the issue of what are the implications of him adopting a metaphysical view totally inconsistent with stoicism but if we keep in mind that this is a piece of practical philosophy and that at least on the surface of it is aimed at relieving a particular person's distress a person who we have no reason to think is an educated stoic or is convinced of stoic physics and stoic logic and so forth then perhaps this makes sense we should use whatever means are available in order to eliminate this kind of distress and this suffering so if there are effective platonic arguments that we can give about how oh don't worry your son or your father is now enjoying a better place and is free from all the suffering in this world and so forth then perhaps that is justified in this context and perhaps the argument that death is actually good is not meant to show the death really is a good thing or even a preferred indifferent but when somebody is dwelling on an obsessed with the badness of death and so the stick is sort of really bent in one direction very far then we have to bend the stick all the way in the other direction in order to straighten it and so we have to give them a bunch of reasons to think maybe it's actually good and then that will return them to a neutral state of being indifferent about it thinking maybe it's good maybe it's bad nobody knows or maybe these stoics have a point about this and so I shouldn't be getting so upset about that and then in the very end he seems to want to restore his stoic bonafides and so he uses stoic cosmology and the theory of conflagration to show that death is inevitable natural universal the entire after all the entire universe dies remember the entire universe is a living thing but it undergoes this cyclical conflagration and then sort of rebirth and so on and so that is a bit more of kind of orthodox stoicism but if one were to sit down and really try to work out the metaphysics of what he's saying in these consolations and it does the stoic theory of conflagration work for example with the platonic theory of immortality of the soul you would rapidly find that there are lots of contradictions there that probably can't be sustained but that's okay because the point of this isn't to give a theoretical metaphysical treatise it's to relieve an individual person's suffering so to summarize we attacked first the first premise that one opts to feel distress in response to having a bad object present and then once we'd got an initial consolation going about that then we argue that the thing isn't actually so bad wiping out both of those premises destroys the conclusion even though it's a valid argument it's not sound because the premises aren't true therefore it's not appropriate to feel distress and we will have short circuited this process in the mind which keeps leading one back to the conclusion that I'm in distress and we are left only with the undeniable fact that yes your son died but we don't have the corresponding emotional state along with it okay so why don't I pause there questions or comments about the strategy yeah well you said grievance what what is what is grievance why is being in distress not natural well generally because it isn't rational and it's a form of suffering it's not natural for us to suffer our natural condition should be to enjoy life that's that's what's natural okay if distress was natural why do we have psychiatrists why do we care if people are going around being distressed all the time right it's natural they're just doing what's natural with them now that doesn't make any sense somebody suffering distress they're suffering illness right and it can become so severe that it's kind of mental illness that now we tend to treat even with psychotropic drugs and psychopharmacology so convinced are we that this is actually an illness and an unnatural and a bad thing and that we need to restore the mind to a more healthy condition so I don't know why somebody would think that it's that it's natural you might think it's natural because a lot of people are in distress but the fact that a lot of people are in a certain condition doesn't show that it's natural a lot of people are in a condition obsessed with having a bigger car than their neighbor but that doesn't mean having a bigger car than your neighbor is a natural condition slavery was a widespread phenomenon universal at some point in antiquity it didn't mean it was a natural thing it didn't mean it was a good thing in fact it was an evil bad thing that took centuries to destroy and so forth but what if we just said hey everybody's doing it so it must be natural can you give me an argument why it's not natural so that's one thing but the arguments that he actually goes through is to look at other animals animals experience death of their relatives death of their children death of their parents death of other animals of their kind and he even describes some of them sort of grieving for a little bit of time like a cat grieving over its what one of its literally didn't make it or something grieving over a definite and limited period of time and then they move on and it's not like oh god these cats and these birds are so insensitive and jeez don't they care about all this death that's everywhere around them jeez they're just acting crazy why don't they act more natural and suffer like humans do and dwell on this stuff and dress up in black and cry at funerals and so forth oh if we look at what animals do animals do not have unlimited periods of distress that actually become harmful to them so he says and here is where he admits yes we feel an inevitable tang it is natural to feel something when you find out that somebody dies just as it is natural to blink when somebody tries to punch you in the face or it's natural to have an erection if you see an attractive body or something yes that's natural but the question is what is in accordance with nature after those involuntary things happen doing everything you can do to seduce them and get them into bed is that a natural thing or an unnatural thing in this view that's unnatural that stems from an actual unnatural unreasonable irrational thing to do he also claims that certain people there's a huge differentiation between the amount of distress that people feel so if feeling distress was natural then every time somebody experiences the same object of distress like an untimely death they would suffer for the same amount of time the natural period of time but some people go on and on for months and even years or they never get over it whereas other people get over it rather quickly but if it was natural we wouldn't find that we would find that everybody suffers for a natural determinant period and there would be a natural pattern that would be reoccurring here but actually we find a sort of random pattern he also argues that if it was natural it wouldn't naturally dissipate it wouldn't dissipate of its own accord it would sort of be present and that would be the condition whenever the object was reflected on but in fact people whose children died 20 years ago when they think about the fact that my child died 20 years ago does not have the same impact on them then as it did when it initially happened but if it was a natural thing to feel that why would that have been dissipated simply with time and he makes several other arguments along those lines starting in section 7 where we notice this kind of again the dialogue aspect comes in some unnamed interlocutor it's not Marcia herself but somebody says it is natural to mourn for our loved ones and then he responds to that or at the beginning of 9 why then do we show such persistence in mourning for one we love if it doesn't come about as nature is bidding and so he answers those times so those are all reasons to think it's not natural but what are those arguments in the service of those arguments are in the service of rejecting the first premise that it is not appropriate to feel distress and response to it notice that none of those arguments address the question of whether it's the thing is bad or not and so there's actually a more general reason why it's not natural that I alluded to and that's that in their view it has this kind of logical structure but these premises are false and it's never natural to ascent to a false proposition and so be led to a false conclusion that's exactly the opposite of nature because nature is equivalent to reason and rationality and so on