Epictetus, The Handbook 57: "He Thought It Right."

When a man speaks evil or does evil to you, remember that he does or says it because he thinks it is fitting for him.

 It is not possible for him to follow what seems good to you, but only what seems good to him, so that, if his opinion is wrong, he suffers, in that he is the victim of deception.

In the same way, if a composite judgment which is true is thought to be false, it is not the judgment that suffers, but the man who is deluded about it.

If you act on this principle you will be gentle to him who reviles you, saying to yourself on each occasion, 'He thought it right.'

—Epictetus, The Handbook, Chapter 42 (tr Matheson)

I had already experienced as a child how thoughtless and hurtful people could be. It took time, however, for me to learn that this did not simply arise from a deliberate desire to do bad things. Those bad things, however damaging they may have been, in some way appeared to be good to them. It was not the harm itself that was appealing, but the way in which the harm was falsely perceived to be of benefit.

This hardly makes the ignorance of what is good an excuse, and it hardly removes responsibility, but it does help us to understand why people act as they do, and it does help us to be more forgiving in our own reactions.

I often return to that bugbear of the Stoic, the feeling of resentment. When I feel hurt or wronged, it may appear right to respond in kind. I have observed two primary forms of this, the desire to directly cause hurt to another, or the desire to indirectly ignore and dismiss another. I suppose it is something like the distinction between active and passive aggression. The first can be as simple as a nasty word, the second as simple as looking the other way. We all, of course, know the more severe forms as well.

What all forms of resentment share in common is a false perception of the good, but one that still seems helpful to the one who is angry. I find it rests upon a simple assumption, that if I hurt someone who has hurt me, I have done something good for myself. What this fails to see is that Nature is cooperative, and not competitive. The good for one cannot be at the expense of another, or at the expense of the whole.

Instead of thinking and acting selfishly and vindictively, I could think and act in a way that is mutual and harmonious. I don’t always see it that way at all when I am hurt and angry, of course, since then I can think only of destroying and casting off.

Part of the beauty of the Stoic Turn is this very recognition that those who do evil genuinely believe it to be good. This can help me to understand them, and it can help me from becoming exactly like that myself. Once I see vice as the result of a self-deception, I can perhaps help another to understand, and once I see the offender as someone who is suffering, I can perhaps help him to relieve that suffering.

I need only remember that whenever I am confronted by a hateful or dismissive person, I am seeing someone who is sick, not in his body, but in his thinking. This demands neither false pity nor self-righteous condescension, but a genuine concern for his own health. A doctor should hardly punish his patient, and a good man should never condemn his persecutor.

I tell myself, each and every day, that the only counter for resentment and rejection from another is understanding and compassion from myself. 

Written in 11/2005

Image: Jakob Emanuel Gaisser, Die Rache (Rage) (1899)