M. This is the point which Theophrastus was unable to maintain; for after he had once laid down the position that stripes, torments, tortures, the ruin of one’s country, banishment, the loss of children, had great influence on men’s living miserably and unhappily, he dared not any longer use any high and lofty expressions when he was so low and abject in his opinion.
How right he was is not the question; he certainly was consistent. Therefore, I am not for objecting to consequences where the premises are admitted. But this most elegant and learned of all the philosophers is not taken to task very severely when he asserts his three kinds of good; but he is attacked by everyone for that book which he wrote on a happy life, in which book he has many arguments why one who is tortured and racked cannot be happy.
For in that book, he is supposed to say that a man who is placed on the wheel (that is a kind of torture in use among the Greeks) cannot attain to a completely happy life. He nowhere, indeed, says so absolutely; but what he says amounts to the same thing.
Can I, then, find fault with him, after having allowed that pains of the body are evils, that the ruin of a man’s fortunes is an evil, if he should say that every good man is not happy, when all those things which he reckons as evils may befall a good man? The same Theophrastus is found fault with by all the books and schools of the philosophers for commending that sentence in his Callisthenes,
“Fortune, not wisdom, rules the life of man.”
They say never did philosopher assert anything so languid. They are right, indeed, in that; but I do not apprehend anything could be more consistent, for if there are so many good things that depend on the body, and so many foreign to it that depend on chance and fortune, is it inconsistent to say that fortune, which governs everything, both what is foreign and what belongs to the body, has greater power than counsel.
Or would we rather imitate Epicurus? Who is often excellent in many things which he speaks, but quite indifferent how consistent he may be, or how much to the purpose he is speaking.
He commends spare diet, and in that he speaks as a philosopher; but it is for Socrates or Antisthenes to say so, and not for one who confines all good to pleasure.
He denies that anyone can live pleasantly unless he lives honestly, wisely, and justly. Nothing is more dignified than this assertion, nothing more becoming a philosopher, had he not measured this very expression of living honestly, justly, and wisely by pleasure.
What could be better than to assert that fortune interferes but little with a wise man? But does he talk thus, who, after he has said that pain is the greatest evil, or the only evil, might himself be afflicted with the sharpest pains all over his body, even at the time he is vaunting himself the most against fortune?
And this very thing, too, Metrodorus has said, but in better language: “I have anticipated you, Fortune; I have caught you, and cut off every access, so that you cannot possibly reach me.”
This would be excellent in the mouth of Aristo the Chian, or Zeno the Stoic, who held nothing to be an evil but what was base; but for you, Metrodorus, to anticipate the approaches of fortune, who confine all that is good to your bowels and marrow—for you to say so, who define the chief good by a strong constitution of body, and well-assured hope of its continuance—for you to cut off every access of fortune! Why, you may instantly be deprived of that good.
Yet the simple are taken with these propositions, and a vast crowd is led away by such sentences to become their followers.
How right he was is not the question; he certainly was consistent. Therefore, I am not for objecting to consequences where the premises are admitted. But this most elegant and learned of all the philosophers is not taken to task very severely when he asserts his three kinds of good; but he is attacked by everyone for that book which he wrote on a happy life, in which book he has many arguments why one who is tortured and racked cannot be happy.
For in that book, he is supposed to say that a man who is placed on the wheel (that is a kind of torture in use among the Greeks) cannot attain to a completely happy life. He nowhere, indeed, says so absolutely; but what he says amounts to the same thing.
Can I, then, find fault with him, after having allowed that pains of the body are evils, that the ruin of a man’s fortunes is an evil, if he should say that every good man is not happy, when all those things which he reckons as evils may befall a good man? The same Theophrastus is found fault with by all the books and schools of the philosophers for commending that sentence in his Callisthenes,
“Fortune, not wisdom, rules the life of man.”
They say never did philosopher assert anything so languid. They are right, indeed, in that; but I do not apprehend anything could be more consistent, for if there are so many good things that depend on the body, and so many foreign to it that depend on chance and fortune, is it inconsistent to say that fortune, which governs everything, both what is foreign and what belongs to the body, has greater power than counsel.
Or would we rather imitate Epicurus? Who is often excellent in many things which he speaks, but quite indifferent how consistent he may be, or how much to the purpose he is speaking.
He commends spare diet, and in that he speaks as a philosopher; but it is for Socrates or Antisthenes to say so, and not for one who confines all good to pleasure.
He denies that anyone can live pleasantly unless he lives honestly, wisely, and justly. Nothing is more dignified than this assertion, nothing more becoming a philosopher, had he not measured this very expression of living honestly, justly, and wisely by pleasure.
What could be better than to assert that fortune interferes but little with a wise man? But does he talk thus, who, after he has said that pain is the greatest evil, or the only evil, might himself be afflicted with the sharpest pains all over his body, even at the time he is vaunting himself the most against fortune?
And this very thing, too, Metrodorus has said, but in better language: “I have anticipated you, Fortune; I have caught you, and cut off every access, so that you cannot possibly reach me.”
This would be excellent in the mouth of Aristo the Chian, or Zeno the Stoic, who held nothing to be an evil but what was base; but for you, Metrodorus, to anticipate the approaches of fortune, who confine all that is good to your bowels and marrow—for you to say so, who define the chief good by a strong constitution of body, and well-assured hope of its continuance—for you to cut off every access of fortune! Why, you may instantly be deprived of that good.
Yet the simple are taken with these propositions, and a vast crowd is led away by such sentences to become their followers.
—from Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 5.9
I was immensely relieved to read this chapter, because I had a nagging question about a troublesome detail in the Aristotelian view of happiness.
Years ago, when I asked my professors, they would assure me I was making a mountain out of a molehill, and yet I still found myself stumbling over a tension in the claim that we are indeed perfected by the content of our character, with the provision that we nevertheless require certain favorable circumstances.
If the presence or absence of fortune can make our break our lives, then the virtues become just one component among many, and so we aren’t quite the masters of our blessings as much as we would like to think.
In everyday, non-egghead terms, it reminds me of when people say how “being a good person is really important,” only to quickly add that a comfortable amount of money, good health, a circle of loyal friends, and a rewarding career “are sort of important too.”
Pray tell, which one of these is the most important? If one gets in the way of the other, how do I pick between them? If I can’t be happy with my conscience after being thrown in the gutter, I’m afraid my real priorities are showing.
I in no way wish to oppose Aristote, since I find his argument sound, and I suspect that I was initially drawn to Stoicism by the way this school actually took such premises to their natural conclusions. If we are to define man as a rational animal, then it follows that we fulfill our proper end when we act through the excellence of our judgements. The Stoic is simply making certain that we do not stray from this measure of our highest good.
We do not live in a vacuum, of course, so our choices are always made under certain conditions, providing the material causes upon which we work as efficient causes. Now what sort of conditions must those be? The Stoic proposes that any sort of situation, however pleasant or unpleasant, can be an occasion or virtue, while those on the fence believe we can only thrive when the situation is convenient.
I will be so bold as to contend that this is far more than a technical distinction. It is the difference between a man who finds peace by always acting with conviction, regardless of the weather, and the man who will only be happy on a warm, sunny day. One makes his fate, the other submits to a roll of the dice.
I was immensely relieved to read this chapter, because I had a nagging question about a troublesome detail in the Aristotelian view of happiness.
Years ago, when I asked my professors, they would assure me I was making a mountain out of a molehill, and yet I still found myself stumbling over a tension in the claim that we are indeed perfected by the content of our character, with the provision that we nevertheless require certain favorable circumstances.
If the presence or absence of fortune can make our break our lives, then the virtues become just one component among many, and so we aren’t quite the masters of our blessings as much as we would like to think.
In everyday, non-egghead terms, it reminds me of when people say how “being a good person is really important,” only to quickly add that a comfortable amount of money, good health, a circle of loyal friends, and a rewarding career “are sort of important too.”
Pray tell, which one of these is the most important? If one gets in the way of the other, how do I pick between them? If I can’t be happy with my conscience after being thrown in the gutter, I’m afraid my real priorities are showing.
I in no way wish to oppose Aristote, since I find his argument sound, and I suspect that I was initially drawn to Stoicism by the way this school actually took such premises to their natural conclusions. If we are to define man as a rational animal, then it follows that we fulfill our proper end when we act through the excellence of our judgements. The Stoic is simply making certain that we do not stray from this measure of our highest good.
We do not live in a vacuum, of course, so our choices are always made under certain conditions, providing the material causes upon which we work as efficient causes. Now what sort of conditions must those be? The Stoic proposes that any sort of situation, however pleasant or unpleasant, can be an occasion or virtue, while those on the fence believe we can only thrive when the situation is convenient.
I will be so bold as to contend that this is far more than a technical distinction. It is the difference between a man who finds peace by always acting with conviction, regardless of the weather, and the man who will only be happy on a warm, sunny day. One makes his fate, the other submits to a roll of the dice.
Aristotle said that happiness “needs the external goods as well; for it is impossible, or not easy, to do noble acts without the proper equipment.” I maintain that it may be difficult, but hardly impossible, to act with virtue in the face of misfortune, and that the proper equipment is whatever Providence has decided to offer us. You may, if you will, call it a radically Stoic reading of the Nicomachean Ethics.
I do not know, of course, precisely what Aristotle intended, but I have a sneaking suspicion that his student, Theophrastus, got himself tangled up in this very problem. We must be careful when we employ a term too loosely, or we add so many qualifications and footnotes that the original principle has become lost in the confusion.
Though Theophrastus began with the seemingly sensible contrast between external goods, goods of the body, and goods of the soul, a failure to clarify the causal order between them must inevitably result in a mash-up. When circumstances are not completely subject to the virtues, we surrender ourselves as slaves to fortune.
Yet to his credit, at least Theophrastus was consistent in his thinking, a quality which Cicero finds sorely lacking in the Epicureans. At one moment, they praised a strictly virtuous life, and at the next moment they explained how the good life can only be determined by the greatest possible pleasure and the least possible pain. A philosophy cannot rest on equivocation, even as it makes for engaging soundbites.
To be fair, I do not imagine that Epicurus and Metrodorus intended to deceive; perhaps they observed how the contented man was able to balance his desires, and so they unwittingly treated a consequence of happiness as if it were the cause. In any case, Cicero here agrees with the Stoics, that a man who tries to serve both virtue and pleasure will sadly find himself in possession of neither.
To be fair, I do not imagine that Epicurus and Metrodorus intended to deceive; perhaps they observed how the contented man was able to balance his desires, and so they unwittingly treated a consequence of happiness as if it were the cause. In any case, Cicero here agrees with the Stoics, that a man who tries to serve both virtue and pleasure will sadly find himself in possession of neither.
—Reflection written in 2/1999
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