3. Comparisons. The Stoics claim that our reactions to all things are created by the thoughts or subtler judgments that we have about them. They seek to show this, first, by asking us to look at ourselves more carefully. Some of our reactions, when viewed in a dispassionate mood, seem obviously to be the results of our own sensitivities.
When pleasures have corrupted both mind and body, nothing seems to be tolerable – not because the suffering is hard, but because the sufferer is soft. For why are we thrown into a rage by somebody’s cough or sneeze, by negligence in chasing a fly away, by a dog that gets in the way, or by the dropping of a key that has slipped from the hands of a careless servant?
Seneca, On Anger 2.25.3
But sometimes the conclusion isn’t so obvious, and in that case the Stoic’s favorite way of proving the claim of this chapter is by use of comparisons. If a reaction that seems natural isn’t found elsewhere, maybe it isn’t so natural; perhaps it is up to us. The Stoics start by comparing our own reactions to similar things in different circumstances, thus demonstrating that the reactions aren’t inevitable even in ourselves. They especially like to consider our strong but inconsistent responses to whatever we find annoying. The inconsistency shows that those responses reflect more on us than on the things we curse.
These same eyes of yours – which at home won’t even tolerate marble unless it is varied and recently polished … which don’t want limestone on the floor unless the tiles are more precious than gold – once outside, those same eyes look calmly at the rough and muddy pathways and the filthy people they mostly meet, and at the walls of the tenement houses that are crumbled, cracked, and crooked. What is it, then, that doesn’t offend your eyes in public but upsets them at home – other than your opinion, which in the one place is easygoing and tolerant, but at home is critical and always complaining?
Seneca, On Anger 3.35.5
Cicero’s account of the Stoic view used the same general approach, comparing how the same people react to identical things in different ways when they bring different judgments to them.
The mere fact that men endure the same pain more easily when they voluntarily undergo it for the sake of their country than when they suffer it for some lesser cause, shows that the intensity of the pain depends on the state of mind of the sufferer, not on its own intrinsic nature.
Cicero, On the Ends of Good and Evil 3.13
Or as Montaigne put it more concretely:
We are more sensitive to a cut made by a surgeon’s scalpel than to ten wounds by sword in the heat of battle.
Montaigne, That the Taste of Good and Evil Things Depends in Large Part on the Opinion We Have of Them (1580)
Next, the Stoics suggest that we think of others who react more strongly than we do to an event or any other provocation. From our vantage point, those others look hypersensitive. But we seem different to ourselves – not hypersensitive – only because we take our own sensitivities for granted. When everyone shares a weakness, it no longer looks like a weakness. It looks like the state of nature.
Those things with respect to which everyone is weak, we regard as hard and beyond endurance. We forget what a torment it is to many of us just to abstain from wine or be made to get up at daybreak. These things are not essentially difficult. It is we who are soft and slack.
Seneca, Epistles 71.23
To someone with jaundice, honey tastes bitter; to one with rabies, water becomes terrifying; to small children a little ball is a wonderful thing. Why then am I angry? Do you suppose that mistaken thinking has any less effect on us than bile has in a man with jaundice, or than the poison has in someone bitten by a mad dog?
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 6.57
In the same way that studying is a torment to the lazy, so is abstinence from wine a torment to the drunkard, frugality a torment to the extravagant, and exercise a torment to the delicate and the idle; and so it is with all the rest. Things are not that difficult or painful in themselves. Our weakness and cowardice make them so.
Montaigne, That the Taste of Good and Evil Things Depends in Large Part on the Opinion We Have of Them (1580)
This style of thought can be applied not just to the sensitivities that others have to suffering and annoyance, but also to the behavior (and especially the extremes) to which their beliefs drive them—beliefs that may seem strange to us, but no stranger than ours would seem to them.
Any opinion can seem important enough for someone to die for. The first article of the fine oath the Greeks swore and defended in their war against the Medes was that everyone would sooner exchange life for death than their own laws for those of Persia. How many people, in the wars between the Turks and the Greeks, accept cruel deaths rather than reject circumcision for baptism!
Montaigne, That the Taste of Good and Evil Things Depends in Large Part on the Opinion We Have of Them (1580)
Or think about those who react less strongly than you do to something. If you see them putting up with things that you can’t, it makes your reaction seem more clearly to be your own doing. Thus Seneca’s conversation with his own pain, which he belittles by thinking of people who endure the same or worse without complaint:
In truth you are only pain – the same pain that is despised by that wretch who is ridden with gout, that the dyspeptic endures for his fancy foods, that a girl bears bravely in childbirth.
Seneca, Epistles 24.14
In this passage and others, the Stoics often are shown to speak of despising pain or other externals or as having contempt for them. In English the words “contempt” and “despise” are often used to suggest varieties of hatred. In this book they do not necessarily have that shading. They usually suggest viewing a thing as small, as unimportant, as something to which we should rise superior; and one can have any or all of this without the overtones of vituperation and dislike.
When you have seen children at Sparta, and young men at Olympia, and barbarians in the amphitheater, receive the severest wounds, and bear them in silence – will you, if some pain happens to brush against you, cry out[?] …. Will you not rather bear it with resolution and constancy? – and not cry, “It’s intolerable! Nature cannot bear it!” I hear what you say: boys bear this because they are led on by the wish for glory; others do it out of shame, many out of fear – and yet are we afraid that nature cannot bear what is borne by so many, and in such different circumstances?
Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 2.20
We cope with the pains of childbirth, deemed to be great by doctors and by God himself, through our many rituals; yet there are entire nations that make nothing of them. Never mind the Spartans; among the Swiss women who walk among our foot soldiers, what difference does childbirth make except that, as they trot after their husbands, they carry on their backs the infants that just the day before they carried in their bellies?
Montaigne, That the Taste of Good and Evil Things Depends in Large Part on the Opinion We Have of Them (1580)
As these examples suggest, Stoics are known to engage in casual anthropology – sometimes very casual; the reader may not be impressed by the sophistication of their discussion of childbirth. But the important point is the spirit of these inquiries. Convention and habituation have a remarkable power to affect our judgments. What we are used to seeing others do, and what we are used to doing or feeling ourselves, can make anything seem normal or strange, inevitable or a matter of choice. And those forces tend to do their work invisibly. Once we take in a custom or habit, the judgments they produce feel as though they are strictly our own, not anything that was