We all experience loss

Sooner or later (and probably sooner than later), you’re going to experience loss of something important to you and feel the emotion of grief. That was as true in the times of the classic Stoics as it remains today. Unless the world changes in really radical ways in the future, humanity will face loss and grief then as well. If you’ve been reading Stoic texts and thinkers, and perhaps even more so if you’ve been getting your “Stoicism” thirdhand from other more dubious places, you’ve no doubt gleaned some ideas about what the Stoics teach about emotions, and more specifically about grief. 

‘Stoic’ ideas that aren’t

Those ideas you have might be accurate or not, systematically connected or just piecemeal, well-understood, or perhaps misunderstood. A prime example of this is the error some people fall into thinking that Stoicism counsels practitioners to simply repress their emotions. You could get this from shoddy not-really-Stoic contemporary sources, but you might also go wrong by misreading actual classic Stoic writings, adding assumptions and opinions of your own that Stoics didn’t endorse. This can easily happen with some classic Stoic passages discussing grief.

And that should not be a surprise, given the Stoics’ overall approach to the emotions. Grief is one of the many different specific kinds of the general passion of pain or disturbance (lupń in Greek), which is one of four main kinds of affect the Stoics distinguish (a classification which, by the way, non-Stoics ranging from Cicero to Augustine will adopt from them and use). And unlike the case with the other three main kinds of emotion, pleasure, desire, and fear, according to standard classic Stoic doctrine, there is no good emotional state (euphatheia) corresponding to pain. So grief, from a Stoic perspective, is as an emotional response, always going to be something bad. As a side note, that this doesn’t mean that actions and attitudes associated with grief are always bad. So, for example, Epictetus can suggest that when another is grieving, we groan outwardly with them, but not inwardly (Encheridion, 16).

Even sages grieve

It's quite possible that the Stoics go too far with their views on this, that perhaps some grief and grieving might be right, reasonable, or good. But that’s a matter to analyze and explore another time. We can certainly say, looking particularly at Seneca’s letters of consolation, that the Stoics did think it was natural that when we experience a loss, for example, through the death of a loved one, that non-sages (and that’s all of us) will feel and exhibit grief, perhaps for quite a while. And even sages will feel that “bite” or “jolt” associated with the beginnings of a passion, when they lose someone. Keeping in mind those sorts of discussions might help us avoid falling into some mistakes about grief a grieving person might make if they are aspiring to also be a Stoic.

One of those would be thinking that because death is supposed to be an indifferent, and relationships are not something within the scope of our control (ouk eph’hńmon) or our faculty of choice (prohairesis), it would not be Stoic to feel grief. So rather than allowing oneself to actually feel it, one might imagine that one ought to repress that grief, to pretend that one doesn’t have it, to talk oneself into “looking on the bright side”, or any other similar emotion-denying response. That’s never really going to work, and is likely going to lead to all sorts of side-effects that will actually make one worse off in the long run.

Acknowledge the grief

It's far more productive, when one is experiencing any sort of problematic emotion, whether it be grief, remorse, anger, envy, or the like, to acknowledge that one is actually feeling it. This doesn’t mean that one needs to wallow in it, or make a spectacle of one’s feelings to others, but it might be helpful to admit what one is feeling not only to oneself but perhaps to one or a few others. If you’re feeling grief, let yourself actually feel it. 

Don’t force yourself to be a “good Stoic”

And then, if you want to approach it in a Stoic manner, you can do the next thing, which is to start examining, uncovering, unravelling your quite likely complicated thought-processes that lead you to feel that emotion. Again it will be helpful to resist the temptation to force yourself to be the “good Stoic” that you’re finding yourself not to be by immediately criticizing the assumptions, inferences, judgments, assents, desires, and aversions you uncover.  Instead, figure out what is really going on with and in you in your grief. And then, as with any other emotion you would want to work on as a Stoic, you can determine whether you want to work away at it, to try to erode it over time, to bring that feeling within the scope of a proportionality of response. Or whether you want to keep feeling it. After all, that is indeed something up to you.

Greg Sadler is the president of ReasonIO, a member of the Modern Stoicism Team, an APPAcertified philosophical counselor, and teaches at Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design.

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