Five questions that will change your life

A brief discussion of practical ethics inspired by Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations

Roman theater at Tusculum, image from aroundrome.it.

These days I spend a significant amount of time reading ancient Greco-Roman ethical philosophy. That’s because I think those authors got a lot of things right, and that for a variety of reasons their approach to ethics—broadly construed as being concerned with how to live a good life—is superior to the post-Enlightenment stuff (Kant, Mill, and so forth) that has shaped the modern conception of moral philosophy.

This year in particular—which I’m lucky enough to spend on a sabbatical leave from my university—is devoted to reading and writing about Marcus Tullius Cicero, the Roman advocate, statesman, and philosopher who lived near the end of the Republican period and almost single handedly brought philosophy from Greece to Rome.

One of Cicero’s books that is on my list to re-read is his Tusculanae Disputationes, or Tusculan Disputations, which he wrote around 45 BCE, at age 61, two years before he died. His daughter Tullia had recently passed away, on top of which things were perilous in Rome in terms of politics. So Cicero retired to his villa in Tusculum, on the Alban Hills south-east of Rome. He wanted to make good use of his time away from the capital, as well as to employ writing as a source of distraction and self-consolation for his grief.

But this essay is not about Cicero’s writings. At least, not directly. As an experiment in developing my own thoughts I am going to try to address the same five questions that structure the Tusculan Disputations before I re-read the book. In other words, I want to see what comes out of my own keyboard if I tackle the same issues that concerned Cicero without having the benefits of a fresh and recent reading of his work.

The five questions, I think, are still very much of concern to all of us. Each one is treated in one of the chapters (“books”) of the original Disputations. Here they are:

1. What should our attitude be toward death?

2. How do we bear pain?

3. How do we deal with grief?

4. How do we handle emotions more generally?

5. What is the source of a happy life?

Of  course, the ideas expressed below are very much informed by my interest in Greco-Roman philosophy, as well as by my practice of Stoicism. That said, are you ready? Let’s go.

What should our attitude be toward death?

Death is a universal human preoccupation. That’s because we are blessed and cursed by the biological phenomenon of self-consciousness: we are aware of our mortality and we know that one day we will no longer exist as individual entities capable of thinking. For some reason, this bothers the hell out of us, even though there are plenty of good arguments to show that such preoccupation is misguided.

Two such arguments, endorsed by the Stoics, actually trace back to the Epicureans. The first one is the notion that wherever death is we are not, and vice versa (Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus). In other words, since death is the permanent loss of consciousness, “we” will simply not be there to experience it. There is nothing that it feels like being dead, and therefore nothing to fear from being dead. There is no hell (or heaven), no continuation of anything. It is even misleading to say that being dead is like being in a deep and dreamless sleep. It is, much more simply, nothing. So why the fear?

The second argument plays on a symmetry that, though obvious, is often not appreciated by people. While it is true that we will not exist for eons after we die, it is just as true that we did not exist for eons before we were born (Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, III.972-977). Yet, the latter observation doesn’t seem to bother anyone. Why, then, be bothered by the first one? The difference between the two cases is not one rooted in objective facts, which are identical, but rather in flawed human judgment. As if somehow prolonging our existence in one direction would have much more value than prolonging it in the other direction. Why?

I find these two arguments to be very persuasive, and they go some way toward assuaging my own fear of death. But of course there is an unrelated, and significantly more well founded fear: that of the process of dying. At the very least, it’s unlikely to be pleasant, and in some cases it is both painful and prolonged.

There too the Greco-Romans have something useful to say, however. First, even a prolonged and painful death—not something a lot of people in medically advanced countries are likely to experience—still represents but a fraction of our entire existence. So, in the great scheme of things, we are talking about a relatively brief instance that can be endured.

Second, and more convincingly for me personally, the door is open, as Epictetus famously put it (Discourses I.9). The “door” being the option of committing suicide, of leaving this world on our own terms, ideally aided by family, friends, and a competent doctor. The mere option of suicide is, for the Stoics, the very root of our freedom. It is precisely because we can walk through the open door at any time of our choosing that we are free to stay and deal with life’s hurdles. Should such hurdles become unbearable we can leave. Accordingly, I am a very strong proponent of physician assisted suicide, and I look forward to a time where the majority of places in the world will be sufficiently enlightened to allow such an option for those who wish it. Short of that, of course, there are ways.

The above are “negative” considerations, that is, arguments for why death, or even dying, is not bad or unendurable. But there is a fundamental positive argument to accept death: it is what gives meaning to our lives. This is generally accepted by philosophers, and yet stubbornly resisted by many in the general public.

The point is made in dramatic form in The Makropulos Affair, an opera by Leoš Janáček based on a play by Karel Čapek. The main character is Elina Makropulos, born in 1575 and who has been given a life extension potion that has allowed her to live for centuries. When the effects of the potion began to wear off she naturally sought a way to prolong them. But eventually she realizes that living that long has gradually eviscerated meaning from all she has done, including her relationships with others. If one lives forever then nothing is important and meaning disappears from human life, replaced by boredom and then despair.