7.3.2009
This is a review of Margaret Graver's Stoicism and Emotion[1],
a book which I have referred to in several of my previous postings.
1) First of all a short remark for those not so familiar with the
history of philosophy: when we call someone 'stoic' today, we usually mean
to attribute a cold, unemotional manner to them, an attitude of suppressing
all feelings. Stoic philosophy, which this book (and consequently, this
review) is about, is different. Like much ancient Greek philosophy, the
Stoics were concerned with ethics: questions about how to live a good life,
and how to develop a character that enables you to do so. Emotions are part
of our lives, and thus we have to be able to understand them. Of all ancient
philosophical schools, the Stoics did recognize this most clearly, and their
insights about what emotions are and how they can shape our lives were
deeper and better integrated with other areas of philosophy than in other
philosophical schools. (Having said that, the Stoics had strict views about
which emotions count as good and which don't, and they advocated getting
rid of the latter sort. So there is some continuity between their views and
our modern usage of the word. But it's not simple; and the Stoics certainly
didn't think that people should be unfeeling monsters.)
One of the sad facts of history is that most of Greek Stoic philosophy is
lost, i.e. the works written by the main figures of the school in Greece
(such as Zeno of Citium and Chrysippus of Soli) are not preserved. All that
we have are some quotes from these works, or summaries and interpretations,
usually in later Greek and Roman texts. Reconstruction of Stoic philosophy
is therefore a complicated task, really a kind of detective work. Over the
last two or three decades, however, there has been some real progress. This
progress in itself is a remarkable achievement of today's scholars in
ancient philosophy. Stoicism and Emotion is one of its most recent
highlights. I was much impressed with the coherence of the picture that
emerges here, from what is literally a mere collection of snippets
of text.
2) In her book, Graver maps out the territory of human feelings,
thoughts and actions, and clarifies how the Stoics saw them constituted and
shaped by the various elements of the psyche. She starts with a brief
discussion of the material basis of psychological events (chapter 1).
Similar to our modern view, the Stoics thought that all psychological events
must have a physiological basis, which integrates them in the overall connex
of causes and effects in the universe (though of course their physiology was
quite different from ours; for instance, they thought that the seat of the
psyche was in the chest — something they would have corrected nowadays
to locating it in the brain). From this it can be explained how emotions
'feel'; but on the other hand it poses a problem for explaining how we can
be able to control (or at least influence) some of our emotions. The key to
dealing with this lies in a distinction between 'feelings' (any stirrings
of the psyche that we are aware of) and 'affective responses', a much more
restricted group of phenomena which includes the 'emotions'. Graver explains
(chapters 4 and 5) that the Stoics kept some phenomena out of the definition
of 'emotion': involuntary 'pre-emotions' (e.g. when one starts to tremble in
a dangerous situation — which is definitely some feeling, but not yet
an 'emotion', though it might become one) and irrational, 'brutish' or
'melancholic' states attributed to disturbed or mentally ill persons. These
do not count as affective responses, and that's because they lack a
particular ingredient: an affective judgment.
Affective responses proper have not only a physiological component, but
include also a judgment, namely an ascription of value (chapter 2). Based
on the content of this judgment, affective responses can be classified in
various ways. Those which conform to the Stoic ethical stance, in a person
of ideal rationality, would count as 'eupathic responses'
(eupatheiai), all others are called 'emotions' (pathe). They
can also be divided up along two dimensions: whether they are
future-directed or directed at the present, and whether they are directed
at something thought as good or bad. So for example, emotions that are
future-directed and directed at something perceived as bad fall under the
emotion-genus of 'fear' (phobos), if they are present-directed
instead of future-directed, their genus is 'distress' (lupe). How
the content of that sort of value judgment plays its part in affective
episodes, i.e. in our thinking and acting, is detailed out by
Graver with the helpful model of a 'pathetic syllogism'. Based on this,
an explanation follows (chapter 3) of the Stoic account of the voluntariness
of emotions.
An especially interesting portion of the book is about character: the
Stoic view of character traits (chapter 6) and their account of how
character develops in persons, and when and why that development can go
wrong (chapter 7). This is followed by a discussion of two rather
problematic areas for Stoic thought: social relationships, such as love
and friendship (chapter 8), and affective responses towards one's own
moral failures (chapter 9). I'm not going to summarize all of this; instead,
in the remainder of this post, I'll have a closer look at one of the types
of character traits discussed: proclivities.[2]
3) A classification of (faulty) character traits could be roughly
made like so: on the one hand you can get (wrongly) emotional about a range
of different objects, but always the same way; on the other hand you get
emotional in different ways, but about different objects. So for example,
on the one hand if you get angry easily, it might happen in all sorts of
situations: when you think someone has talked slightingly of you, when
you've lost money, when you realize you'll have to work longer hours
again, and so on. The objects of the emotions (what you get emotional
about) are different, but you always get into the same emotion
(anger). On the other hand, you might get easily emotional only when money
is involved: when you've lost some, you get angry, when you might lose some,
you're afraid, when you receive a substantial amount, you become excited
— but nothing of the sort happens with other objects (e.g. your
reputation), you're not getting emotional about anything else but money.
The first sort of cases are what is called 'proclivities' (142-145), the
other sort is further subdivided into 'fondnesses', 'aversions' and
'infirmities' (138-142), but I'll not go deeper into that. Proclivities thus
are tendencies to fall into particular emotions on a wide range of
occasions. Examples given include enviousness, irascibility, timorousness,
and desirousness (143).
A consequence of Graver's interpretation of the Stoic theory of emotion
on the model of a 'pathetic syllogism' (see 44, and generally chapter 2) is
that she has an elegant way to map the proclivities to a specific class
of wrong beliefs, namely beliefs about the appropriateness of some emotional
response to a given situation. ("A person with this commitment would not be
very concerned about any one object type; rather, his belief would be that
his favored response, [e.g.] the fear response, is appropriate in an
unusually wide range of situation types", 144.)
4) As already said, this is a great book, both for its systematicy
and coherence, and the wealth of detail that it provides; Graver's style is
also very clear and precise. It's one of the most recommendable books on
the philosophy of emotion (and of course Stoicism) I know.
__
[1] Margaret Graver, Stoicism and Emotion, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press 2007. All references to the book are given
by page numbers in the text.
[2] I'm interested in this particular aspect because I'll be
trying to use this on a topic I've already posted about, in the
interpretation of the
main character in Kafka's Trial. Stay tuned and watch out for
it! ;-)
