Five questions that will change your life
A brief discussion of practical ethics inspired by Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations
These days I spend a significant amount of time reading ancient Greco-Roman ethical philosophy. That’s because I think those authors got a lot of things right, and that for a variety of reasons their approach to ethics—broadly construed as being concerned with how to live a good life—is superior to the post-Enlightenment stuff (Kant, Mill, and so forth) that has shaped the modern conception of moral philosophy.
This year in particular—which I’m lucky enough to spend on a sabbatical leave from my university—is devoted to reading and writing about Marcus Tullius Cicero, the Roman advocate, statesman, and philosopher who lived near the end of the Republican period and almost single handedly brought philosophy from Greece to Rome.
One of Cicero’s books that is on my list to re-read is his Tusculanae Disputationes, or Tusculan Disputations, which he wrote around 45 BCE, at age 61, two years before he died. His daughter Tullia had recently passed away, on top of which things were perilous in Rome in terms of politics. So Cicero retired to his villa in Tusculum, on the Alban Hills south-east of Rome. He wanted to make good use of his time away from the capital, as well as to employ writing as a source of distraction and self-consolation for his grief.
But this essay is not about Cicero’s writings. At least, not directly. As an experiment in developing my own thoughts I am going to try to address the same five questions that structure the Tusculan Disputations before I re-read the book. In other words, I want to see what comes out of my own keyboard if I tackle the same issues that concerned Cicero without having the benefits of a fresh and recent reading of his work.
The five questions, I think, are still very much of concern to all of us. Each one is treated in one of the chapters (“books”) of the original Disputations. Here they are:
1. What should our attitude be toward death?
2. How do we bear pain?
3. How do we deal with grief?
4. How do we handle emotions more generally?
5. What is the source of a happy life?
Of course, the ideas expressed below are very much informed by my interest in Greco-Roman philosophy, as well as by my practice of Stoicism. That said, are you ready? Let’s go.
What should our attitude be toward death?
Death is a universal human preoccupation. That’s because we are blessed and cursed by the biological phenomenon of self-consciousness: we are aware of our mortality and we know that one day we will no longer exist as individual entities capable of thinking. For some reason, this bothers the hell out of us, even though there are plenty of good arguments to show that such preoccupation is misguided.
Two such arguments, endorsed by the Stoics, actually trace back to the Epicureans. The first one is the notion that wherever death is we are not, and vice versa (Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus). In other words, since death is the permanent loss of consciousness, “we” will simply not be there to experience it. There is nothing that it feels like being dead, and therefore nothing to fear from being dead. There is no hell (or heaven), no continuation of anything. It is even misleading to say that being dead is like being in a deep and dreamless sleep. It is, much more simply, nothing. So why the fear?
The second argument plays on a symmetry that, though obvious, is often not appreciated by people. While it is true that we will not exist for eons after we die, it is just as true that we did not exist for eons before we were born (Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, III.972-977). Yet, the latter observation doesn’t seem to bother anyone. Why, then, be bothered by the first one? The difference between the two cases is not one rooted in objective facts, which are identical, but rather in flawed human judgment. As if somehow prolonging our existence in one direction would have much more value than prolonging it in the other direction. Why?
I find these two arguments to be very persuasive, and they go some way toward assuaging my own fear of death. But of course there is an unrelated, and significantly more well founded fear: that of the process of dying. At the very least, it’s unlikely to be pleasant, and in some cases it is both painful and prolonged.
There too the Greco-Romans have something useful to say, however. First, even a prolonged and painful death—not something a lot of people in medically advanced countries are likely to experience—still represents but a fraction of our entire existence. So, in the great scheme of things, we are talking about a relatively brief instance that can be endured.
Second, and more convincingly for me personally, the door is open, as Epictetus famously put it (Discourses I.9). The “door” being the option of committing suicide, of leaving this world on our own terms, ideally aided by family, friends, and a competent doctor. The mere option of suicide is, for the Stoics, the very root of our freedom. It is precisely because we can walk through the open door at any time of our choosing that we are free to stay and deal with life’s hurdles. Should such hurdles become unbearable we can leave. Accordingly, I am a very strong proponent of physician assisted suicide, and I look forward to a time where the majority of places in the world will be sufficiently enlightened to allow such an option for those who wish it. Short of that, of course, there are ways.
The above are “negative” considerations, that is, arguments for why death, or even dying, is not bad or unendurable. But there is a fundamental positive argument to accept death: it is what gives meaning to our lives. This is generally accepted by philosophers, and yet stubbornly resisted by many in the general public.
The point is made in dramatic form in The Makropulos Affair, an opera by Leoš Janáček based on a play by Karel Čapek. The main character is Elina Makropulos, born in 1575 and who has been given a life extension potion that has allowed her to live for centuries. When the effects of the potion began to wear off she naturally sought a way to prolong them. But eventually she realizes that living that long has gradually eviscerated meaning from all she has done, including her relationships with others. If one lives forever then nothing is important and meaning disappears from human life, replaced by boredom and then despair.
If you don’t like opera or plays, then think of the superb movie Groundhog Day, with the character played by Bill Murray stuck in an endlessly repeating 24-hour period. He is for all effective purposes immortal, but is soon driven to desperation when he realizes that not even committing suicide will free him from the nightmarish cosmic loop in which he got stuck. (It’s a romantic comedy, so it ends well, but I won’t give away any spoilers, just in case.)
The point is not that we wouldn’t like to extend our life a little bit. Probably there isn’t a person old enough who doesn’t think they couldn’t use another year. But sooner or later radical life extension would run into the intrinsic limitations of human psychology. I therefore think the Stoics were right when they said that it is precisely because we know that we are going to die—and that we don’t know when this will happen—that life is precious and meaningful. And therefore worth living.
How do we bear pain?
Absence of pain, both physical and mental, is so important for some that the Epicureans made it the principal goal of their philosophy. But pain of both kinds is a thing of life, pretty much as inevitable as death itself. You may be lucky enough to skip most sources of physical pain, but if you care intensely about anything or anyone you will suffer when you lose them. And loss, of loved ones is guaranteed to happen sooner or later.
That is why the Stoics (and the Buddhists) counseled not to get attached to things or people. Epictetus is pretty explicit about it (Enchiridion 1.3). But as Cicero himself discovered when his daughter died, that sort of advice clashes with the very nature of being human. Even the arch-Stoic Cato the Younger is said to have cried uncontrollably when his brother died (Plutarch, Life of Cato, 11.2).
To be fair, the ancient Stoics had a wonderful source of consolation at their disposal, of which Epictetus makes use multiple times. They believed in a providential universe, a living cosmos of which we are organic parts. Whatever happens to us helps the cosmic being thrive, and we can therefore not just endure it, but positively embrace it. What Nietzsche much later on famously referred to as amor fati, love your fate.
But the modern scientific view of the world is, I think, incompatible with such providential understanding of things. So embracing pain and suffering is not an option. But endurance is still the only rational course of action. I understand that Stoicism often gets caricatured as the philosophy of the stiff upper lip. But, really, what is the point of getting upset or throwing a tantrum about something that is inevitable? It only makes things worse, adding self-inflicted emotional injury to whatever pain we were already experiencing.
In this context I very much admire Cicero’s approach near the end of his life. He had to deal with the emotional pain of Tullia’s death, with the devastation of a recent divorce from his lifelong partner, Terentia, and with the profound disappointment of not only being (temporarily, as it turned out) excluded from political life, but of seeing his beloved Roman Republic falling to pieces at the hand of Julius Caesar. What did he do? He retired to the peace of the countryside, redoubled his correspondence with his lifelong friend Atticus, and focused on writing philosophy. The books he produced in that period of his life turned out to be lasting enough that we still read them two millennia later.
How do we deal with grief?
In a sense, we have already answered this third question: once we are ready to withstand pain and accept death we are also ready to deal with grief, which is emotional pain caused by the death of a loved one.
Instead of belaboring the point, I can offer a personal experience. I have, so far in my life, had four major losses: my grandmother, my adoptive grandfather, and my parents. I grew up with the first two, after my father and mother divorced when I was about four years old. I first lost my adoptive grandfather Tino, arguably by far the most important figure in my childhood. Then, a few years later, my grandmother Anita. Several years more passed and my father died of multiple cancers induced by his lifelong habit of smoking.
In all three cases I did not react well. I couldn’t handle the losses that I clearly saw coming, so I did my best to ignore them, pretending with myself that everything was fine and that somehow these people would always be in my life. Mind you, I wasn’t a kid anymore. When Tino passed I was in my early 20s, and when my father Sandro died I had just turned 40! I should have known better.
As a result of my inability to deal with reality I harbored regrets for a long time. Regret for not having been closer to these people in their last months (or, in the case of my father, the five years it took for his several cancers to finally get the better of him). Regret also for not having been a better support to my surviving relatives, beginning with my brothers and sister, but also my father’s second wife, Giuliana.
By the time my mother Elena began to show signs of sickness (also cancer, also a big smoker), however, I had finally made what I think of as my “philosophical turn” in life. It’s not just that I was studying philosophy in pursuit of a PhD in the technical field of philosophy of science. It’s that I was beginning to practice philosophy as a way of life, in a manner similar to how, many years earlier, I had practiced Catholicism. But with far more conviction than I had ever had about what the Pope and my priest were saying.
The result was clear to see and highly beneficial. I took my mother’s decline very seriously, immediately. No beating around the bushes, no pretense that things were not happening. I went to Rome more frequently than usual to visit her, and I made a concerted effort to be there for my brothers and for her husband, Vito. And, of course, for her. I think I succeeded, and I feel no regret for how things went. Of course I still miss all four of these people, but I have come to accept the reality of things and, as Epictetus says (Discourses III.24), that it is foolish to wish for figs in winter. You have to enjoy the figs during the proper season, summer.
How do we handle emotions more generally?
Here I am happy to buy into a modified version of Stoic psychology, modified on the basis of advances in modern cognitive science. For the Stoics, fully formed emotions have a cognitive component, which means that we can, in a sense, either “assent” to our own emotions or challenge them (not suppress them!).
For instance, if I get angry because someone is insulting me during a discussion on social media I am capable of articulating why I’m getting angry: because I think insults are an awful thing and the bastard has no right to attack me in this way in public! But if that is the case, I can also challenge the reasoning underlying the emotion itself. As Epictetus remarked an insult is just someone opening their mouth and causing the movement of air. It doesn’t actually hurt me (Enchiridion 20). Indeed, either the other guy is right in pointing out some deficiency of mine, in which case why get upset?, or he is wrong, in which case the joke’s on him! Either way, my anger is unwarranted. It is, as the Stoics put it, an unhealthy emotion because it goes against reason.
By contrast, consider the case of a healthy emotion, one that is in alignment with reason. I love my daughter and want to do what I can to help her live a eudaimonic life. I am describing an emotion, but—again—I can also articulate why I feel that way. That feeling is justified and therefore need not be challenged (like my anger above), but rather nourished.
So the general picture that emerges from this way of looking at emotions is that some of them need to be challenged (those that are against reason) while others are to be encouraged (those in alignment with reason). And such challenges or encouragements are made possible by the fact that emotions have a cognitive component. This, incidentally, is also the base of modern cognitive behavioral therapy, one of the most successful evidence-based forms of psychotherapy.
Of course to challenge a powerful emotion like anger while we are in the midst of it is not easy. Which is why Seneca recommends training ourselves to pay attention to the first signs of an unhealthy emotion and immediately disengage from the ongoing situation. Go for a walk, retire to the restroom, do something that will help you put some distance between you and your emotional response. Once you are calm again and in control of your actions you can begin the process of analysis and reflection of what triggered the initial response, after which you can proceed to challenge the emotion itself. It takes practice and a lifelong commitment, just like going to the gym to develop your muscles and aerobic capacity. It doesn’t happen in an instant.
What is the source of a happy life?
Finally, we come to happiness itself. Notoriously, the term is rather slippery and of little use even to modern psychologists. I prefer the Greek word eudaimonia, which I translate as broadly as possible as “a life worth living.” (The common translation as “flourishing” is biased in favor of the particular Aristotelian view of eudaimonia.)
What makes a human life worth living, then? I think the Stoics had some excellent points here, but also a bit too limited of an answer. For them it all came down to virtue: live a virtuous life and you will be eudaimon, regardless of external circumstances like health, wealth, reputation, career, and relationships.
Why virtue? Because everything else can be used for good or bad, and it is virtue that allows you to make a good use of externals. If you are unvirtuous, you will use wealth to corrupt, your health to make others miserable, your reputation to influence things negatively, and so forth. If you are virtuous, by contrast, all those externals will produce net positives for you and for the human cosmopolis at large.
There is a profound logic at play here, and the upshot is that anyone, regardless of circumstances, can have a life worth living, if not necessarily a flourishing one. So I agree with the Stoics that virtue (or the virtues, plural: prudence, courage, justice, and temperance) is indeed the chief good on the grounds that it is the only thing that is unquestionably good and cannot, by definition, be used to do bad things.
I also agree with the Stoics that we ought to live in agreement with Nature (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, VII.87-88). This means to take seriously what sort of animal Homo sapiens is and act accordingly. As a species, we are characterized by being highly social and capable of reason. So a good human life is one in which we live prosocially and reason our way through our problems.
But Aristotle had a point when he said that in order to flourish human beings need something else. Your life may be worth living even if you are unjustly stuck in prison and tortured, as happened to Nelson Mandela for 28 years. But it would be nicer not to be imprisoned or tortured and instead being able to enjoy some of those externals that the Stoics classify as “indifferent,” in the sense that they literally do not make a difference to our virtue.
In fact, modern research on happiness finds that there are three components to it. In decreasing order of importance: relations, meaningful activities, and—a distant third—pleasure. We could refer to these components, respectively as agapic (from one of the Greek words for love), eudaimonic, and hedonic.
Precisely because we are social animals, it is hard to imagine a good human life without the agapic component. We need to love someone, and we need friendships. This is why a major modern cause of depression is the feeling of loneliness, that is, the perceived lack of social relations.
The eudaimonic component, in turn, pushes us to engage in activities that we find meaningful. For some this may include hobbies, like stamp collecting. But for most people an activity is meaningful if it is other-regarding: writing, teaching, painting, making music, and a lot of other things that human beings do are done with and for others. Which of course tightly connects the agapic and eudaimonic aspects to each other.
Finally, there is the hedonic component. Pleasure, both mental (reading a book, listening to music, etc.) and physical (a good meal, sex, and so on) are the spice of life. Just like a spice, they are not strictly necessary to enjoy the main meal, but they do significantly enhance it. And, again like a culinary spice, too much of it actually ruins the meal. A life primarily devoted to hedonism is, in my mind, a wasted one, because it is not other-regarding and it does not include meaningful activities.
So here you have it! The above is my own version of Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, written from bustling Brooklyn, New York instead of that small and lovely village in the Alban Hills near Rome. I hope that what I wrote here will make you reflect and spur you into action just like reading Cicero made me reflect and changed my life. That’s what philosophy is for.
Thank you for your hard work, your clarity of thought, lack of verbosity, and unfailing ability to illuminate the crux of an idea. Your writings "do make me reflect and spur me into action", but most importantly they help guide and focus my actions. A lot of work still left. Thankfully it's a fascinating journey. Thanks again! You've been a lot of help so this old quadriplegic:-)
I appreciated you defining eudaimonia as “a life worth living.” And for explaining that the common translation as “flourishing” is "biased in favor of the particular Aristotelian view of eudaimonia."