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- Stoic Empathy
Welcome to The Stoa Letter, the newsletter on Stoic theory and practice.
🏛️ Theory
One of the most difficult Stoic teachings for me to internalize is Socratic intellectualism.
The simple idea is that no one intentionally does wrong. People do wrong out of ignorance, not evil.
Epictetus summarizes it perfectly in his Discourses:
When then any man assents to that which is false, be assured that he did not intend to assent to it as false, for every soul is unwillingly deprived of the truth, as Plato says…Can then a man think that a thing is useful to him and not choose it? He cannot.
In other words, everyone does what they believe is best. No one desires evil for its own sake.
This opens up space for empathy.
Stoic empathy means understanding of the human condition. We’re confused and imperfect creatures. We can’t expect people to do what we believe is right. We should sympathize with others – even those who treat us poorly. They are not happy.
Like Marcus Aurelius reminding himself in Meditations 2.1 we must be prepared to meet with ignorant people. They don’t know how to do good. Nonetheless, we’re made to live with them.
This doesn’t mean we should fail to be assertive or just. Rather, it means that our actions should begin from gentleness, not anger. Other people do not deserve to be harmed because they harmed us. Instead, our immediate reaction should be one of kindness, resourcefulness, and wisdom. This is what a virtuous disposition looks like.
After all, we can remember that we also do wrong because we’re often mistaken too. We aren’t much better than other people. We shouldn’t be angry with them or ourselves. Instead, work to improve.
🎯 Action
If you notice anger at others or yourself, pause. Remind yourself that so many mistakes are the result of ignorance and then do what you know is right.
đź”— Resources
📺️ Check out our video animation of today’s letter:
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🖋️ Here’s the famous lines from Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations 2.1:
When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own — not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands, and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are obstructions.
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