Stoicism and Emotion (review)

The Stoics’ account of the emotions may seem a barren and austere landscape. Fortunately, this picture is increasingly being challenged and Margaret Graver’s book is an excellent and eloquent addition to that general approach. The book has many virtues. In addition to a beautifully clear and uncluttered style, it offers a careful and balanced account of the Stoic view of the emotions which pays all due attention to the Stoics’ accounts of psychology in general (especially psychology as a branch of Stoic teleological natural philosophy), education and character development, and moral responsibility. Graver does not shrink from pointing out areas in which the Stoics’ overall view may be a less than attractive option for us now, principally because it is her (perfectly reasonable) contention that their view makes best sense only in the context of Stoic philosophy most broadly. And much of Stoicism would not commend itself to us now, whatever the appeal of their psychological insights.

Graver’s project, therefore, is primarily historical and, in particular, is to try to uncover what the first generations of Stoics may have said and thought. This task is, of course, hampered by the usual problem of evidence, but Graver is a cautious and reasonable guide. Galen, particularly via his work De Placitis Hippocratis et Platonis, figures prominently, but she also makes due use of Cicero, Seneca, Hierocles, and the like, along the way. Most of the minutiae of scholarly dispute are relegated to the endnotes, contributing further to the overall impression of a confident and persuasive account.

Graver’s central claim is that we are wrong to assume that the Stoic sage, despite being entirely devoid of passions (pathē), would be free from emotions or feelings. True, a Stoic sage will never fall into the cognitive errors and mistaken value judgements that characterize passion, but this nevertheless leaves open a range of affective responses, particularly in connection with the famously tricky Stoic eupatheiai, the unerring and accurate counterparts of the mistaken pathē. In this way, the feelings of the sage are imagined to be more familiar to us mere fools than might otherwise appear. A sage remains human, complete with the same psychological equipment as the mere student. But, although a sage’s feelings may in important ways be similar to or indeed occasionally be just like what the rest of us may feel, the sage’s perfect estimation of the value (or lack of it) in the various objects of his judgments ensures that his and my affective lives will be importantly different.

This central distinction between feelings and passions is traced throughout Graver’s account, which makes full use of Stoic explanations of dispositions, character-formation and improvement, and so on. One of the strengths of the book is that it sees how the Stoics can account for particular—often complex—cases of human experience. “The thesis that all causes of emotion are describable in terms of belief proves to have a great deal of elasticity. . . . One does not have to rely on the notorious vagueness of the term ‘cognition’ to make the case. The appeal is rather to the complexity of practical reasoning in many real cases, cases of calm action as well as of emotion” (80).

The framework set out in the early chapters allows Graver to analyze particular stretches of text or tricky situations clearly and persuasively. Two highlights, to my mind, are: (1) her discussion of Seneca’s De Ira 2.4–5 (125–32), which pays close attention not only to the overall line of argument but also to the subtleties of Seneca’s Latin; and (2) her discussion in chapter 9 of cases in which a non-sage feels sadness or despair at recognizing his own moral failings. This is interesting precisely because it is based on a true judgement. Is the remorse therefore appropriate? Here, Graver deploys her previous analysis to illustrate not only the differences between the emotional lives of a sage and a non-sage, but also how Stoic emotional education...