Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 2.12

M. But why are we angry with the poets? We may find some philosophers, those masters of virtue, who have taught that pain was the greatest of evils. 

 

But you, young man, when you said but just now that it appeared so to you, upon being asked by me what appeared greater than infamy, gave up that opinion at a word. 

 

Suppose I ask Epicurus the same question. He will answer that a trifling degree of pain is a greater evil than the greatest infamy; for that there is no evil in infamy itself, unless attended with pain. 

 

What pain, then, attends Epicurus, when he says that very thing, that pain is the greatest evil! And yet nothing can be a greater disgrace to a philosopher than to talk thus. 

 

Therefore, you allowed enough when you admitted that infamy appeared to you to be a greater evil than pain. And if you abide by this admission, you will see how far pain should be resisted; and that our inquiry should be not so much whether pain be an evil, as how the mind may be fortified for resisting it. 

 

The Stoics infer from some petty quibbling arguments that it is no evil, as if the dispute were about a word, and not about the thing itself. Why do you impose upon me, Zeno? For when you deny what appears very dreadful to me to be an evil, I am deceived, and am at a loss to know why that which appears to me to be a most miserable thing should be no evil. 

 

The answer is, that nothing is an evil but what is base and vicious. You return to your trifling, for you do not remove what made me uneasy. I know that pain is not vice—you need not inform me of that: but show me that it makes no difference to me whether I am in pain or not. 

 

It has never anything to do, say you, with a happy life, for that depends upon virtue alone; but yet pain is to be avoided. If I ask, why? It is disagreeable, against nature, hard to bear, woeful and afflicting. 

—from Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 2.12

 

We shouldn’t be too hard on the poets: they only magnify what is already good or bad within us. It’s the philosophers, so caught up in their abstractions, who too easily confuse our priorities. 

 

The professional academics long ago discarded their authority to tell us about right and wrong; we are now left with celebrities and politicians to show the way. This is not a good thing. 

 

These next few chapters have given me so much to think about, and I must resist the temptation to turn a brief and informal reflection into a massive tome on the proper definition of evil. 

 

Here is the simplest version of what I am learning: be careful how you categorize anything, for the slightest ambiguity will make a world of difference. I regularly tell my poor students that unclear definitions account for the vast majority of logical problems, and this part of the text only confirms the point for me. 

 

Cicero rightly objects to the Epicurean claims that pleasure is the greatest good and pain is the greatest evil. Even the Auditor understands how this is mistaken, for he has enough of a conscience to quickly recognize how a moral corruption within us is far worse than any suffering we might have to endure. Instead of looking to what stands behind the pleasure or the pain, Epicurus is wrapped up in the effects instead of the causes. 

 

But just in case I thought that Cicero was going to toe the Stoic party line, he also expresses a frustration with their claim that pain isn’t an evil at all. Just as Epicurus must bumble his way through the reduction of all value to feelings, so Zeno must cling to an awkward insistence that there is nothing negative to suffering. 

 

The philosophers can build up their elaborate theories as much as they like, but in practice we all know that pain should neither be treated as the gravest of ills, nor should it be casually dismissed as harmless. 

 

The simple fact is that when something hurts, we say that it feels bad. No, pain is not a moral evil, though it is most certainly distressing, and even the Stoic will seek to avoid the discomfort of pain, as long as he must not violate his character to do so. 

 

I understand why Cicero wishes to define evil more broadly, as anything that is disagreeable or offensive, for that is why we regularly speak about struggles or obstacles that hinder us as “bad” things. 

 

Nevertheless I also understand why the Stoics wish to define evil more narrowly, as the absence of virtue and the presence of vice, for otherwise we will be deceiving ourselves about the true nature of the human good. 

 

I am not sure if Cicero is right to accuse Zeno of being unsympathetic about the reality of pain; at worst they are appealing to different scales of good and evil, and at best they need to work out precisely how they are employing certain terms. 

 

In my own thinking, I make use of the distinction by Thomas Aquinas between evil as suffering and evil as fault, with the clear awareness that there is a fundamental difference of kind here, not just of degree, which reflects the contrast between what happens to us and what we choose to do. 

 

In the next chapter, however, such concerns may appear purely academic, as Cicero ends up arriving at a rather Stoic sort of conclusion, even as he come to it by a different set of definitions and premises. 

 

I am grateful to Cicero for keeping me from falling into a blind conformity to Stoic teachings, and reminding me why my philosophy should always be eclectic, taking the true and the good wherever I may find it. 

—Reflection written in 7/1996 

IMAGES: Epicurus of Samos and Zeno of Citium