The Emotions Are Not Diseases

So if mercy is a distinguished and excellent gift in a human being — and both good men and bad agree in judging it very good — then the philosophers plainly stood a long way off from what is good for a human being. They neither commanded anything of the kind nor practiced it, and they always reckoned as a vice the one virtue that holds almost first place in a person. I am glad to bring forward one topic of philosophy here, so that we can refute more fully the mistake of the men who call mercy, desire and fear diseases of the soul. [a]

They do try to mark virtues off from vices, which is truly an easy business. Who cannot tell a generous man from a spendthrift, as they do, or a thrifty man from a miser, or a calm man from a lazy one, or a cautious man from a coward? These good qualities have their limits, and if they pass those limits they fall into vices. So firmness, unless it is undertaken for the sake of the truth, becomes shamelessness. In the same way courage, if it takes on a certain risk with no necessity forcing it, or for a cause that is not honorable, turns into recklessness. Free speech too, if it attacks other people instead of standing up to those who attack it, is stubbornness. And severity, unless it keeps itself inside the punishments that fit the guilty, becomes savage cruelty.

And so they say that people who look evil do not sin of their own accord, and do not choose evils by preference. They slip because something has the look of good about it, and fall into evils, not knowing the difference between good things and evil ones. That is not false, but the whole of it is referred to the body. To be thrifty, or steady, or cautious, or calm, or serious, or severe — these are virtues, certainly, but virtues that belong to this life, which lasts only for a time. We, though, who look down on this life, have other virtues set before us, ones the philosophers could not so much as guess at. So they took certain virtues for vices, and certain vices for virtues.

The Stoics strip a human being of all the emotions, the impulses by which the soul is set moving — desire, joy, fear and grief. The first two arise out of good things, either still to come or already present; the last two out of evil things. These four, as I said, they call diseases, not so much planted in us by nature as taken on through a warped opinion; and so they think the four can be pulled up by the roots, once the false notion of what is good and what is evil has been taken away. For if the wise man thinks nothing good or evil, he will not be set on fire by desire, or carried away by joy, or startled by fear, or let his spirits draw in under sadness. We will see shortly whether they achieve what they want, or what it is they do achieve. In the meantime the aim itself is arrogant and close to insane: they think they are applying a cure, and that they are able to fight against the force and the whole order of nature.

That these things are natural and not chosen is shown by the nature of every living creature, which is moved by all these same emotions. So the Peripatetics do better. They say the emotions cannot be taken away from us, because they were born with us, and they try to show how providently and how necessarily God — or nature, as they call it — armed us with them. Since the emotions usually turn vicious when they run to excess, a person can profitably keep them in check by applying a limit, so that he is left with as much as nature needs. It would not be a foolish argument, if everything were not, as I said, referred to this life. The Stoics, then, are out of their minds: they do not regulate the emotions but cut them out, and want somehow to rob a human being of powers nature planted in him. That is the same as wanting to take the skittishness out of deer, the venom out of snakes, the rage out of wild animals, or the mildness out of cattle. The qualities that were handed out to dumb animals one at a time were all given to a human being together. And if, as the doctors say, joy is seated in the spleen, anger in the gall, desire in the liver and fear in the heart, then it is easier to kill the creature outright than to tear any of this out of the body; for this amounts to wanting to change the nature of a living thing. [f]

But these clever men do not see that when they take vices away from a person, they take virtue away with them — the very thing they are clearing a space for. If it is virtue, in the middle of a rush of anger, to hold yourself in and pull yourself up, and they cannot deny that it is, then the man without anger is also without virtue. If it is virtue to control the body’s lust, then a man who has no lust to regulate must be empty of virtue. If it is virtue to hold desire back from coveting what belongs to somebody else, then a man who lacks the very thing virtue works on by restraining it can certainly have no virtue. So where there are no vices, there is no room for virtue either, just as there is no room for victory where there is no opponent. And this is how it works out: in this life there can be no good without evil. An emotion, then, is a kind of natural richness in the powers of the mind. Just as a naturally rich field runs to a heavy crop of briars, so a mind left uncultivated is overgrown with vices flourishing on their own, like thorns. But once the true farmer has set to work on it, the vices give way at once and the fruits of the virtues come up.

So God, when He first made a human being, with wonderful foresight planted these movements of the mind in him from the start, so that he could take on virtue as ground takes cultivation. He put the raw material of the vices in the emotions, and the raw material of virtue in the vices. For virtue will certainly not exist, or not be at work, if the things by which its power is either shown or kept in being are missing.

Now let us see what those men have achieved who do away with vices altogether. There are those four emotions they suppose arise out of an opinion about good and evil things, and by pulling them up they think the wise man’s mind is to be healed. But since they realize the four are planted by nature, and that without them nothing can be set in motion and nothing done, they put certain other things into their place and room: for desire they substitute inclination, as though it were not much better to desire a good thing than to feel an inclination toward it; and in the same way they substitute gladness for joy, and caution for fear. But with the fourth they are at a loss for a way of swapping the name. So they have taken grief away outright — that is, sadness and pain of mind — which simply cannot be done. Who could help grieving if a plague has emptied his country, or an enemy has overthrown it, or a tyrant has crushed its freedom? Could anyone help grieving who has watched freedom put down, and neighbors, friends or good men driven into exile or butchered in the cruelest way? — unless a man’s mind were so stunned that all feeling had been taken out of him. So they ought either to have taken the whole set away, or else to have finished off this maimed and feeble argument; that is, something ought to have been put in the place of grief, since once the other three were arranged that way, this followed naturally.

For just as we rejoice over good things that are present, so we are galled and grieved by evil ones. If they gave joy another name because they thought it vicious, then it was fitting that grief should be given another name too, since they thought that vicious as well. From which it is clear that what they were short of was not the thing itself but a word; and for want of a word they wanted to take away — against what nature allows — the strongest emotion there is. I could have gone on refuting these changes of name at greater length, and shown that many names get attached to the same things, to dress up the style and make it fuller, or at any rate that the words do not differ much from one another. Desire takes its start from inclination; caution comes out of fear; and joy is nothing but gladness showing itself.

But let us grant that they are different, as they themselves insist. They will say, then, that desire is inclination kept up without a break; that joy is gladness carrying itself beyond measure; and that fear is caution gone to excess and past the limits of moderation. So it turns out that they do not take away the things they think ought to be taken away; they regulate them. Only the names have changed. The things themselves remain. Without noticing it, then, they come back to the very point the Peripatetics reach by argument: that vices, since they cannot be taken away, are to be kept within measure. So they are wrong, because they never manage what they are aiming at, and by a roundabout way, long and rough, they come back to the same road.

But in my judgment the Peripatetics did not even come near the truth, since they allow that these are vices and then merely keep them within measure. We have to be free even of moderate vices; or rather, it should have been settled at the start that there are no vices here at all. Nothing can be born vicious. If we make a bad use of the emotions they become vices; if we use them well, they become virtues. So what has to be shown is that it is the causes of the emotions that must be held in measure, and not the emotions themselves. We must not rejoice with excessive joy, they say, but moderately and with restraint. That is as if they said we must not run fast but walk quietly. Yet a man who walks may go astray, and a man who runs may keep to the right path. And what if I show that there is a case where it is vicious not only to rejoice moderately but even in the smallest degree, and another case, on the contrary, where even leaping with joy is not the least bit at fault? What good, then, I ask, will this middle measure do us? I ask them whether they think a wise man ought to rejoice if he sees some harm happening to his enemy; or whether he ought to rein his joy in when enemies have been beaten, or a tyrant thrown down, and his countrymen have gained freedom and safety. [j]

Nobody doubts that in the first case to rejoice a little, and in the second to rejoice too little, is a very great wrong. The same can be said about the rest of the emotions. But, as I have said, wisdom’s business does not lie in the regulating of these but of their causes, since the emotions are acted on from outside. Nor was it fitting that the emotions themselves should be reined in, since they can be present in a slight degree with the greatest guilt, and in the fullest degree with no guilt at all. They ought instead to have been assigned to set times, occasions and places, so that they are not vices, since we are permitted to make right use of them. For just as it is good to walk in the right course and bad to wander off it, so it is good to be moved by the emotions toward what is right, and bad to be moved toward what is corrupt. Sexual desire, if it does not stray from what is lawful to it, is without fault however hot it is. But if it wants what is not lawful, then however moderate it is, it is a great vice.

So it is not a disease to be angry, or to desire, or to be roused by lust. The disease is to be a hot-tempered man, a greedy man, a debauched one. The hot-tempered man is angry even with someone he ought not to be angry with, or at times when he ought not. The greedy man wants even what he has no need of. The debauched man chases even what the laws forbid. The whole matter ought to have turned on this: that since the rush of these things cannot be held back, and it is not right that it should be, because it was necessarily planted in us for keeping up the duties of life, it should rather be steered into the right road, where it is possible even to run without stumbling and without danger.