RESUMEN Y REFLEXIONES FINALES

Here, then, is our first building block, central to Stoic philosophy and to the tranquil life:

1. If you are pained by external things, it is not they that disturb you, but your own judgement of them. And it is in your power to wipe out that judgement now.⁸

These are the words of Marcus Aurelius, one of the greatest Roman emperors, taken neither from a public speech to motivate the masses, nor from philosophical teachings to be bestowed upon pupils. They come from his private journals and stand as a note to self from the most powerful man on Earth. Marcus ruled from ^AD 161 to 180, a time of near permanent conflict. His empire fought and defeated the Parthians in the east, as well as threatening Germanic tribes during the long Marcomannic wars. This great leader was known in his lifetime – and has been since – as a philosopher-king, and his ‘blameless character and temperate way of life’ were praised by the historian Herodian as evidence of his erudition. His collection of notebooks, known as the Meditations and composed while out on campaigns, remains one of the most abiding and touching sources of Stoic thinking.

Problems are created, Marcus is saying with the Stoics, not by events in the world but rather by how we interpret those events. That interpretation might involve a snap judgement or a more complex narrative that we tell ourselves, but it is this

stage in the proceedings that leads to our problems. Hence the same event ‘out there’

in the world might affect someone else very differently from how it affects us.

Likewise, our judgements about people are in truth responsible for how they seemingly ‘make’ us feel. Nobody, and nothing save our own judgements, truly

‘makes’ us feel anything.

When we think of the variety of anxiety disorders that abound, as well as the debilitating, often bizarre phobias that cripple otherwise very balanced people;

when we consider the triggers in our own lives that can flip us into an angry or even depressed state with the reliability of a light switch, it would be understandable to hold out little hope for harnessing the level of control over our emotional lives that Marcus is suggesting. Yet we might also ponder how rapidly we can correct an unhelpful emotion in life when, say, new information comes to light. We might be miserable that our partner seems coolly indifferent to our upcoming birthday, until on the night in question we return home to find a surprise party has been thrown in our honour. Following the initial shock, the feeling of hurt that had haunted us for days is transformed into something very loving. Similarly, we might feel rejection following what appears to be uninterested behaviour of a friend, partner or work colleague, only to discover later that their behaviour was explained by the fact they had received terrible personal news. Our self-pity and resentment would quickly turn to sympathy and probably an embarrassed acknowledgement of how oversensitive we can be. In these cases and countless more, we are correcting our beliefs about the target of our emotions (our partner, our friends, their behaviour) by allowing for new information to join the mix; a shift at the intellectual level has a near automatic effect at that of the emotions.

It is tempting to say that that so-and-so or such-and-such is responsible for the emotions we feel. The insulting way our boss treats us is the reason for our unhappiness at work. The fact we’ve lost our phone is the reason for our anger. And likewise, we are elated because our team has just won the match, or we’ve got a hoped-for promotion, or we’ve received triumphant examination results. Surely we are at the mercy of external events to produce our emotions? Our friend, to return to the example above, ignores us; surely it is right to say that he makes us feel bad.

When his girlfriend tells us why he’s been so taciturn of late, and we experience relief and sympathy, surely it’s her that creates that shift of emotion.

But is that right? Another person in our place may not have been offended in the first place by our friend’s nonchalance. Likewise, he might not be particularly angered by the loss of his phone or elated by the news of his promotion. He might even be disappointed by the promotion, if he had hoped for a different one. We cannot honestly state that events in the outside world cause the emotions we feel.

We each react in our own way, and we do so according to a quality we all share, which takes us back to the beginning of this book. We tell ourselves stories.

If we are treated coolly or let down by a close friend, we might experience rejection or anger, or a mixture of both. Has the friend’s behaviour automatically triggered that? Not quite. To move from perceiving the behaviour to feeling the emotion, we

have to do a bit of work ourselves. We engage in a little internal storytelling first. We might quickly bring to mind a series of previous cases where the friend has acted in a similar way. We’ll be sure to form that pattern in the way most likely to infuriate ourselves. We might imagine having a conversation with him, and we’ll play that conversation out in such a way that he is as annoying and true to form as possible.

Moreover, the harshness with which we make these representations to ourselves will depend on our mood at the time. If we are already irritated by some other event, we will feel particularly unforgiving towards this one. Another time, another day, when we’re in a better mood, our friend’s behaviour might be forgivable, even delightful.

We’re barely aware that we’re forming this ‘he’s always like this and it drives me mad’ story ourselves. We are so focused upon the unreasonableness of his actions that we won’t think of looking at our own role in the proceedings. Moreover, there is likely to be a deeper, entirely unconscious story also being told, of which we won’t be aware at all. Our friend’s behaviour makes us feel small, or rejected, or unconsidered.

Our anger is a frightened, defensive reaction against the way such feelings resonate with our history of analagous experiences. These low-level stories set the scene for our emotional lives, greatly affecting the way we join up the dots when we react to day-to-day events.

So let’s acknowledge that when we find ourselves infuriated with people, irritated by our partners, annoyed, embarrassed, sad or scared, those feelings are in truth provoked by an exhausting little voice inside our head, and/or from the exaggerated pictures we show ourselves. The pictures or voice might refer to the past (if we’re feeling bad about something that has happened, even a split second ago), or the future (if we’re frightened of something that might happen, like a conversation or meeting we’re dreading). These intermediary thoughts step in and interpret external events as a good reason to feel bad, mad or scared. In essence, we make a judgement about the event and then react to that verdict.

That judgement might be negative, in the way I’ve described above, but it might also feel very positive: we might see a picture of the latest incarnation of our phone or car and feel a pleasant sense of desire for a new one. We might buy the car and feel a huge amount of delight. Although we know from the notion of the hedonic treadmill that these pleasures tend to be short-lived, nonetheless at the time, that internal voice might pipe up with, ‘Oh God, that’s amazing, I have to have one of those’ when we see an advertisement. Proud mental images might abound of ourselves sporting the new phone or driving the new car: pictures that show us looking tall and rather luminescent, and people around us appearing very impressed.

Again, we make a judgement: we create for ourselves a little narrative and respond to that. We work ourselves up, or indeed down.

This fights against a very different but well-received view of emotions, which is that they arise from some deep, animal, irrational place within us, quite separate from our intellectual faculties. This school of thought says that intellect is of the mind and emotions are of the body. We are born with our capacity for grief and anger and despair in place, whereas we learn reasoning through the society in which

we live. This kind of thinking, while no longer exerting a strong influence in the field of psychology, nonetheless deeply affects the way we tend to talk of our emotions as very separate from reasoning. The Greeks, however, were not of this opinion, and their preferred model – that emotions stem from how we interpret events – now once again has the upper ground in modern clinical understanding.

For if, as the Greeks believed, our emotions are tied up with our thoughts and beliefs, if they are in essence ‘cognitive’ and will change and shift as those beliefs are modified, then we can see them as fundamentally rational. We can in fact delve deeper and decide if certain emotions are reasonable or unreasonable, true or false and so on, depending on their logical relation to the belief being held. If on the other hand we adopt the model that separates intellect and emotion, then when David insults Jane, we would say that a primal response called anger is directly triggered in Jane and that her anger comes from a very different place to her rational thinking.

Let’s instead understand the anger as a response to Jane’s own judgement or interior narrative about what David said.

Epicurus knew of these intermediary internal judgements when he spoke of changing our desires. This is why he cut to the chase and gave his followers slogans to memorise (such as ‘He who is not satisfied with a little, is satisfied with nothing’⁹), making sure they had quick and easy techniques at hand to deal with the lure of unhelpful attachments. The key was to deal effectively with that internal voice as and when it arose, by habituating his followers to interject antithetical thoughts into their own internal narrative. Cognitive spanners could be thrown in the works.

Epicurus might have introduced it, but it was the Stoics who really embraced and developed this notion that emotions spring from rationally based judgements. They, the Epicureans and the Aristotelians, all shared this common ground of understanding, but the Stoics concerned themselves more than any other school with radically reappraising the role of feelings in order to create a life of increased tranquillity. Their starting point, as with the Epicureans, was the leverage gained by understanding that our emotional life was susceptible to reason. Chrysippus, the third and probably greatest head of the Stoic school, asked, ‘Where do we place our emotion?’ Should we say it’s in our stomach, in a mere flutter, and therefore equate our feelings with those of the animals who share such things with us? Surely not, he says; it must be located somewhere far more complex and uniquely human, a part worthy of the subtle and tangled feelings I have while, say, grieving. This emotion is clearly able to evaluate and select: reason looks like the right place to put it.

Whether or not Chrysippus’s logic strikes us now as quaint, modern psychotherapeutic thinking has in a sense caught up with the presumptions of the ancients, and it is to the Stoics more than any other school that the debt is owed.

In Marcus Aurelius’s world, wracked by violence and turmoil, this thought would have been a comfort. You may be at war and every day facing life-threatening situations, but it is ultimately up to you how you respond to those pressures.

Stoicism emerged from troubled times, and the perennial conflicts of that era go

some way to explaining its enduring popularity. Yet in our rather more peaceful age, we are no less aware of disturbances to what could be a very tranquil existence. Most of us may not regularly face physical attack, but we might still meet any number of very painful situations in our lives and find our fear or anger expanding to fill the same space. Stoicism remains a potent remedy for our modern lives and the myriad stresses and tragedies they may bring.

‘Get rid of the judgment, get rid of the “I am hurt,” you are rid of the hurt itself,’¹⁰ Marcus notes. Is it so simple? At first glance it seems a dangerous recipe for repressing painful feelings. Just tell yourself you’re fine and the pain will disappear?

This does not tally with our modern preoccupation with expressing our negative emotions. If we are angry, we should talk about it or ‘take it out’ in some harmless way such as pillow-beating; certainly we shouldn’t seek to pretend we feel fine.

The metaphor of ‘letting off steam’ comes from, not surprisingly, the time of the locomotive engine. Freud was fascinated by this invention, and for him it was a powerful metaphor for human emotion. By comparison today, our language for the brain is rooted in computer-talk and its language of ‘reprogramming’. In Freud’s time, too much built-up steam, not allowed to escape in some harmless way, was believed to create a neurosis. Today, it feels more ‘modern’ to talk about someone’s brain ‘processing’ messages in a certain way or needing ‘rewiring’. Steam and computer metaphors amount to the attempts of different eras to come to grips with something beyond their understanding by using a model of a technology dazzling and complex but just about graspable. The science fiction master Arthur C. Clarke gave us the law ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’¹¹, and these models have helped us form some comprehension of the endlessly bewildering complexities of the brain and its relationship to our emotional life. Yet the inevitable limitations of each metaphor mislead us in their own way.

Electronic- and computer-speak encourage us to see our brains (and therefore each other) as reliable machines that must necessarily produce predictable results if certain data are inputted correctly. This may be no more helpful than the correlative analogue model of the motion-producing steam engine, as revolutionary to the nineteenth-century mind as the computer has been to ours.

‘Venting’ does not solve emotional problems as the metaphor of pipes, valves and steam suggests. In the mid-twentieth century, the human-potential movement encouraged us to cry, scream and beat ‘boffers’ (cushioned pads) to release our pain.

The therapy rooms and encounter groups of the 1970s reverberated with the thwump of fist meeting cushion. More recently, Brad Bushman and team at Iowa State University effectively demolished the myth that this kind of activity helps us to feel better. In fact, their research shows it actually tends to make us more aggressive. Beating a pillow might legitimise our feelings of anger, encouraging us to relive them later, and we may become too attached to a venting activity that we feel should bring us catharsis and find ourselves searching for an assuagement that never comes.

There is much to be said about the Stoic approach to anger, so we will save it for a

There is much to be said about the Stoic approach to anger, so we will save it for a later chapter. But for now we can see the clear contrast between the discredited human-potential approach to emotional release and the Stoic position. The last thing the Stoics – or for that matter the Epicureans – would wish to do is legitimise negative emotions. Instead, we should acknowledge that it is our judgements, not the external event, which is creating the anguish. In taking responsibility for it, we can look for a way out of the pain.

Perhaps, as you read this, you might question the word ‘external’. What about

‘internal’ events? What if we are injured? Or debilitated by physical or mental illness? Surely such a condition can cause all levels of suffering, but are we really then reacting to something ‘out there’, as we are when, say, we make a judgement about how to deal with damage to our property or a missed promotion? The Stoic response would be to still treat these events as externals, even if we feel that their point of origin is within us. We can still choose how to respond to an injury in the same way we can choose how we deal with a house fire. When the thick mire of clinical depression debilitates us, Stoicism may for some feel far from their grasp.

While it may help a person deal with many of the anxieties that could encourage a downward spiral, I imagine it would be very tough to find the cognitive distance needed to acquire the necessary leverage when stuck in the thick of it. However, absorption of Stoic principles into life can still be of huge benefit to the uni- or bipolar sufferer, even if they are of limited use when, despite all efforts, the worst times descend.

It is, as Marcus tells us, always in our power to represent events to ourselves in such a way they give us an advantage. Two thousand years later, we think of this as

‘reframing’: the reinterpretation of a negative event as something positive. Seeing the silver lining. Once again, the insipidness of the cliché robs the principle of its power. We tend to associate ‘always looking for the positive’ with a kind of smiling, Pollyanna vapidity (which might point to a neurotic refusal to acknowledge the disappointments of life). For that reason, perhaps, it tends not to strike us as something worthwhile we might employ to benefit ourselves but more as a kind of social lubricant, a way of avoiding difficult topics in discussion and appearing helpful and friendly. If we touch on a problem in conversation and are met with something that begins ‘Oh well, never mind, at least …’, we are likely to feel that the other person has little interest in what we’re going through.

Likewise, if we see Marcus’s instruction as an encouragement to merely ‘look on the bright side’, we also miss its potency. Marcus is reminding himself – and

Likewise, if we see Marcus’s instruction as an encouragement to merely ‘look on the bright side’, we also miss its potency. Marcus is reminding himself – and