970x125
Philosopher Scott LeBarge has pointed out that ancient thinkers understood that viewing the natural order as well-designed has a tactical, therapeutic value: a world that is too harsh would be unexplainable.
Accordingly, the Stoic Epictetus asks: Has rationality been given us by the gods for misery and unhappiness, for us to spend our lives in sorrow?
He prods us to answer “no.”
But if we were not designed for suffering, then why are so many of our lives full of the deaths of our closest loved ones? Our children? Our spouses? What kind of design is that?
The Stoics took it upon themselves to answer, but their effort at explanation stops short of others. They do not suggest we should rejoice in the idea that loved ones might make it to heaven; they do not offer a cosmology in which our loved ones return to the world over and over.
Instead, the Stoics emphasize that loss is part of nature’s order. It is capable of devastating us, but it is not evil. We are not made mortal due to some fault of ours or cruel intention of someone else; it is simply the way we are. If we focus on this distinction—that this loss is not evil but natural—the Stoics think we might be able to mitigate the worst of our grief (which we should not deny can be destructive).
Beliefs shape grief, the Stoics argue. With some work, we might be able to change these beliefs. Grief itself can help us identify them—as these beliefs previously went unnoticed, we struggle with them after loss. These beliefs are as common as other flawed assumptions about what we need.
The Stoics criticize us for how often we believe conventional goods are essential: wealth, power, a nice car. But we also believe we need the presence of someone we love. When we lose that, we think: My life is over without them. I could never go on. Nothing will matter again. I only wanted to be happy with him there. Thinking this way creates our grief, the Stoics argue. If we did not have beliefs like these, it would feel more like it does when a person we know only faintly passes away—sad, but not the focus of the next years of our lives.
Deep grief, as Epictetus wrote, involves experiencing physical shocks, and we do not have direct control over those. In deep grief, even our imagination can “plague” us. We have to fight those images back with reason and not let them “prevail” (Discourses 3.24).
Modern therapies like CBT incorporate a Stoic kind of approach: We examine the beliefs that generate unpleasant emotions, question them, and consider whether they truly matter. For example, you might feel uneasy after a meeting. You think no one liked you. But even if that’s true, so what? Stoics teach us to turn “musts” into preferences: Being liked is desirable, not necessary. By rooting out false beliefs, we act more in line with virtue rather than chasing approval. And if we apply this method to grief, we are working at the highest level of difficulty.
But the kind of affliction of which I have treated is that which is the greatest; in order that when we have once got rid of that, it may appear a business of less consequence to look after remedies for the others. (Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 3.81)
And so with grief, the goal is not to suppress emotion but to reason through it, to uncover the beliefs that intensify pain, and to focus on what we have been given rather than what we have lost.
There are good summaries of the physical and psychological aspects of grief, such as in The Grieving Brain by Mary-Frances O’Connor. But I wonder if Stoic ethics might be a useful supplement to how we think of grief today, even as we come to understand it better biologically.
Here is a quick sketch of some potential benefits if we consider the Stoic view on grief:
- The Stoics do not rely on conventional measures of what makes a life good. This means they do not judge a griever as now having a worse life. This is some comfort, I think, to grievers who feel they have lost every conventional good.
- Stoics are not encouraged to pity grievers but to see them as needing to be incredibly strong. The awkwardness with which we treat grievers, pitying them as we do, evaporates in a Stoic framework. Loss is to be expected, and the griever needs as much support for this harrowing experience as they can get. A Stoic would lean in if a friend were grieving.
- You certainly have lost something (it feels like everything) when you lose a person you love. You just have not lost your integrity. The Stoics balance these two conclusions by introducing two different measures of value. One concerns factors outside our agency. This kind of value certainly exists—we often make decisions based on it—but it remains “indifferent” to our virtue. The other measure of value is our virtue itself, or the integrity of our agency. So you are left with that—the very thing that might make you strong enough to handle a tragedy.
