The Invited Philosophers
Anna & Ben
This was the 18th dinner, a vegetarian dinner at my house.
Menu
- Appetizer: Boursin Garlic & Fine Herbs with Multigrain Bread from the Marie Blachère Bakery
- Main course: Sicilian Fettuccini with Zucchini, Mushroom, Tomatoes, and Beyond Meatballs Italian Style Plant-Based Meatballs
- Drinks: Apple Cider London Dry by Schilling Hard Cider
The Philosophies
Stoic Philosophy started in Greece in 300 BC with Philosopher Zeno but it was the Romans during the Roman Empire who developed it into what it is known today. It emphasizes living virtuously and finding inner peace by accepting what is beyond our control. In another continent, the three guṇas, sattva, rajas, and tamas, are now a key concept in nearly all schools of Hindu philosophy and refer to the interplay of the guṇas in defining the character of someone and determining this person’s progress in life. We focused on Sattva for its similarities to Stoic philosophy. “Sattva” describes a personality that exudes goodness, calmness, harmony. “Rajas” describes a personality that exudes passion, activity, movement. “Tamas” describes a personality that exudes ignorance, inertia, laziness.
The Summary
In Hindu philosophy, a human can have a personality that is a mix of the “attributes, tendencies, qualities” that describe the three gunas: sattva, rajas and tamas. Among them, sattva is the guṇa of balance, harmony, goodness, purity, universalism, holism, construction, creativity, positivity, peacefulness, and virtue. These attributes are similar to the Stoic attributes. A good summary of stoicism lists the 4 virtues of stoicism as:
- Courage: The world will challenge you. In those situations, ask yourself: Do I have cojones? Am I brave? Am I going to face this problem or run away from it? Will I stand up or be rolled over?
- Temperance: Doing nothing in excess. Finding the right balance, the right amount.
- Justice: Doing the right thing.
- Wisdom: Knowing the answer to: What situations call for courage? What is the right amount? What is the right thing? In order to find the answers, you need to become a student of life. You need to keep your mind open because, as Epictetus said, “It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.”
Stoic behavior can then be summarized as: Doing the right thing in the right amount in the right way. Hindu philosophy and Stoic philosophy agree in their vision of a more developed stoic or sattvic human being who embraces a life of virtue and wisdom. Our discussion centered on the question: Is being Stoic or a Sattva really desirable? Aren’t they forgetting something? Some argue that there are desirable tamas and rajas traits, but ultimately, in Hindu and Stoic philosophy the goal is to achieve a mental state of balance and harmony.
Analysis
Repressing Emotions
Ben is a proponent of Stoicism and lives his life according to those edicts. It does appear, however, that stoicism proposes that humans should not have or express bad emotions. Anna argued that it is natural for humans to feel all kinds of emotions including anger and that it causes harm to oneself to repress these emotions. I had similar thoughts 14 years ago when I started to look into meditation as a method to calm my emotions and pacify my mind. As I noticed more men than women meditating, it seemed to me that it was a method invented by men to suppress their emotions. My initial opinion did not last. Today I meditate daily in the mornings. I do it to transcend a busy, unfocused or troubled mind that often evaluates situations based on preconceived notions, instead of looking at life through a fresh, harmonious and inspirational lens, which is what I get after a good meditation. Without meditation, sometimes I will find myself acting in tamasic and rajasic ways. With meditation, I act like a sattva, like a stoic, and life feels right.
Anna gave an example of problematic relationships that involve dealing with difficult people who are never grateful, always complain or act like a victim. What is interesting is that Anna will act or respond to the situation like a stoic and will do the right thing and be patient and forthcoming with difficult people, but internally, she will wonder if the effort is worth it. I told her that before I learned about meditation, Buddhism, Hinduism, or Greek Philosophy, I was the opposite of a stoic and if I got angry, because I convinced myself that as a “Latina” it is natural to express anger, I just let it out. Yet, Stoicism isn’t about suppressing emotions but managing them rationally. It is natural to get frustrated in difficult situations. It is natural for most people, like me, for example, but a few humans throughout history have transcended that “natural” state of being rattled by events or people in their lives. Those are the true Stoic or Sattvic people.
In every frustrating situation, we have three options that when repeated can become habits: (1) When we allow ourselves to be carried away by an emotion, we practice a “rajastic” habit. (2) When, instead, we take a few deep breaths to calm ourselves, stop judging the situation as good or bad, and allow that inner state of agitation to dissipate and act calmly, we will practice a sattvic or stoic habit. And then there is the in-between: (3) feeling upset internally but expressing “nice” behavior externally, which becomes a painful habit.
Like every habit we want to lose it starts by being convinced that the habit does not serve us well, that it makes us unhappy. Each of us has to find that conviction. We are free to be convinced or not. If we are convinced that negative emotions and impulses are not useful, in time we will not generate those emotions and thus, we will not need to suppress them. That state of equanimity, of perfect mental calmness, composure, and evenness of temper, which creates a perfect balance between actions and inner thoughts and feelings, is the desired state of the stoic and sattva and is the happy state of a human being.
What about Love?
Anna pointed out that the Stoics left one important factor out of Stoicism: Love. The expression of love towards others is not a focal point of Stoic philosophy. Being motivated by love is a romantic view of love that is considered in modern psychology but rarely in philosophy. Anna defined love based on a previous dinner topic as: “Love is a commitment to do what is best for others.” Ben thought that we do not always know what is best for others. As an example, sometimes it is difficult to understand other people, even our kids, especially when they are teenagers and are not as communicative as when they were younger. As a parent, it is not easy to get through to them. It is a good point, but the role of a parent is to attempt to get his or her teenagers to open up. A parent’s role is to use wisdom and love to guide them.
Let’s use that definition of love and look at a great Stoic, Marcus Aurelius, who might not have shared his wisdom with others. He wrote them down as private notes for himself in a journal. Some scholars opine it was written for his son, yet his son, Lucius Aelius Aurelius Commodus, was reported to have been a spoiled child, and later grew up to become a cruel emperor, one of the worst. (Marcus Aurelius lived from 121 to 180, and his notes were published with the title of “Meditations” much later, around 900-1000)
Based on the definition of love by Ana, one could say that Marcus Aurelius failed to teach his son the merits of Stoicism, but perhaps in those days, it was believed, that parents could not influence the character of their children. It is more probable, however, that Marcus Aurelius was simply too busy being an emperor and fighting and winning the big battles away from home. We did not discuss this but it is a good question to leave for the next dinner: “How can we be stoic, sattvic and loving with all people and at all times?” Perhaps the time we dedicate to be there for those we love is of greater merit than winning the big battles, even greater than embodying the 4 virtues of stoicism just for oneself as Makus Aurelius did.
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”
― Aristotle
Have your say
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6 comments
Anna - February 25, 2024 2:54 pm
Let me see if I can clarify my concerns about the treatment of anger in these philosophies, or perhaps our (my) limited understanding of them.
In everyday (civilized) life, I think it is a good guiding principle to look for peace, not react on our first impulse, take a breath before lashing out angrily. In practice, I think that people have a way of taking an ideal and implementing it badly. Exhibit A: Repression. We discussed that at our meeting. I contend that people trying to follow sattvic advice will often try to repress anger because they understand anger as bad. Exhibit B, Avoidance: scared of the anger one feels, or worried about acting on anger inappropriately, one may shrink away from certain situations or from certain problematic loved ones altogether (e.g. “cut out toxic people”). I think inappropriate anger is often rooted in early life trauma, and the advice to not lash out angrily in itself will not bring the person closer to resolving that trauma yet it can saddle the person with guilt for having angry feelings and/or acting on them and can push the person to avoid situations that could trigger anger altogether. Avoidance doesn’t seem like a good strategy for life, and it would be a very harmful strategy towards close relationships, crucially towards one’s children. (However, it’s possible that avoidance is still better than uncontrolled anger.)
If we look at less civilized life, extreme situations like abuse or war, anger I think may be essential in order to drive survival. (Is survival so desirable? [As Ben has told me, quoting Ram Dass, “Dying is perfectly safe.”] Maybe survival isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be, but it is the most basic tenet of life. Fighting for it should be given up only in special circumstances, in my opinion.) It is the passion of anger that leads to revolution, not sattva or tamas. (We could look at Martin Luther King and his nonviolent resistance as a potential ideal counter example.) There are people who look to do us harm or who have no respect for (our) life. If we accept them as “beyond our control,” we may be passive when we should be fighting passionately.
So the real difficulty is knowing what situation is beyond our control, and no philosophy is very good at telling us that. American culture seems to say “fight all the time; don’t give an inch; what you got is yours, etc.” And sattvic philosophy would say, “let it go,” nearly all the time. But real life is “the weeds” where it is hard to decide when to fight and when to let go.
This question is what the “Serenity Prayer” is about, supposedly recited at AA meetings:
“God grant me the serenity/To accept the things I cannot change;/Courage to change the things I can;/And wisdom to know the difference.”
And if anger is an acceptable emotion, the difficulty is how does one use it constructively.
There are many more thoughts I have and many more tangents to investigate. Maybe another time!
Paty - March 10, 2024 11:50 pm
Anna: Many philosophers and psychologists have discussed and written articles and analyses about the same topic you write about and there are no easy answers: (1) whether it is bad to repress anger and (2) whether anger is ever useful. There is no stoic, sattvic or Buddhist answer to the first question (1). They do not call it “repressing” when they recommend that a person who feels anger abstains from a reaction. They have an answer to the second question (2), and that answer is no, anger is never useful. My personal answer to (1) is the same Eckhart Tolle recommends. He says once anger has arisen, just watch it, notice you are angry, do not repress it, even tell someone: “I am angry”. But internally, ask yourself if it is useful to you. I do exactly that. I love the Serenity Prayer, but it really is about controlling what we do not want. Ideally, we do not have so many “wants” and “needs” and judgments of what we want and what we need. I am currently more interested in controlling my mind without repression, just observing how neurotic it can be, how much it judges, and try to avoid judging other people, although it is hard not to judge. That is my own stoic exercise: learn to not even generate anger in my mind. That way I don’t have to repress it. Here is a nice article that talks about stoicism and anger: https://dailystoic.com/stoic-response-anger/
Paty - March 12, 2024 3:11 am
I just remembered this Buddhist story as being relevant to the questions about anger: “While meditating on his boat in a calm lake, a monk felt a jolt as his boat collided with another. Anger welled up, but upon opening his eyes, he saw the other boat was empty. In that moment, the monk realized his anger had been waiting in him and was just looking for an external trigger.” https://wellnessworks.in/the-empty-boat-story-zen-lessons-on-anger/
Paty - June 4, 2024 3:05 pm
And one more I found in reddit, that actually supports your thoughts Anna and it comes from Nietzsche:
Beyond Good and Evil 9, Stoicism:
Iara - March 10, 2024 7:02 pm
Thank you for inviting me to comment. For starters, the subject of discussion is far too complex to condense in a simple and concise manner. It would take me considerable time and effort to offer a worthwhile analysis, of which I’m not equipped to do at this time.
First, I am not familiar with Hindu philosophy and religion, but in the past I’ve found similarities in Stoic and Buddhist thought.
It is worth mentioning that the sattva or satta is found in Buddhist text, such as the Bodhi-sattva…
Put in simple terms [and I quote]:
“Both Buddhism and Stoicism focus on the elimination of suffering, though through slightly different means. The Stoics aimed to get rid of suffering by accepting what they can’t control and focusing on what they can control, while Buddhists dispel suffering from their lives by detaching themselves from their desires.”
To summarize: “A Stoic is a Buddhist with attitude.”
On the other hand, Romantic love as we know it, has been described as an invention in the literature of the Middle Ages. In other words, the ‘idea’ of romantic Love as a construct is fairly modern and has little to do with logic and critical thinking. I would argue that it is the absence of the latter…
This is not to say that in ancient Greece and Rome there was an absence of fraternal love, or that which the Greeks called ‘virile love’, better known as ‘Greek love’.
To quote a passage on Wikipedia: “Greece as the historical memory of a treasured past was romanticized and idealized as a time and a culture when love between males was not only tolerated but actually encouraged, and expressed as the high ideal of same-sex camaraderie.”
Maybe I digressed, but there’s much to be said on the subject of ancient philosophy coupled with the concept of love, whatever that means for you. It is in the eye of the beholder.
Paty - March 12, 2024 3:22 am
Great summary and the first part is equivalent to the Serenity Prayer that Anna quoted above: “The Stoics aimed to get rid of suffering by accepting what they can’t control and focusing on what they can control, while Buddhists dispel suffering from their lives by detaching themselves from their desires.”
And yes, that is a true statement about romantic love being absent of logical and critical thinking! But I don’t think we were talking about romantic love during our dinner. It was more about the love of our family and close ones. And neither Stoics nor Hindu nor Buddhist philosophies go too deep into that kind of love. Probably because as we discussed in a recent dinner (https://dinnerandphilosophy.com/2023/05/28/15th-dinner-adler-vs-freud-the-courage-to-be-free/), all “problems” are “interpersonal relationship problems”, and the relationships with others can be both loving and problematic!