Body and Soul in Ancient Philosophy

426
Martha C. Nussbaum
the damages of anger to the body politic are repeatedly offered as a central
motivation for taking up the program of extirpation. Seneca’s treatise
On Anger, for example, is full of recent Roman history, as he shows
how diseased the state has become, through people’s addiction to greed,
anger, and hope, their unwillingness to cultivate a correct sense of what
has value.
When we look around us, it is difficult not to find the Stoic program
attractive. Political life, now as then, is deformed by all sorts of
emotions that seem to involve the overvaluation of things like
money, honor, and the victory of one’s own side, and it does seem attractive
to imagine a politics of reconciliation that would rise above
these divisions. Marcus Aurelius, Stoic philosopher and Roman emperor,
moves us when he says that when he goes out in the morning every
day, he fully expects to meet people who hate him and who will try to
involve him in shame. Yet, he tells us, he avoids anger against them, by
thinking that they are fellow human beings, bearers of human dignity,
and that they have a common task of improving human life (M.Ant.
II.1). (Bill Clinton once said that he reads Marcus every year, and
one can see why he would have needed this passage. 1 ) Surely the gentle
attitude of Marcus toward his enemies and his determination to work
calmly for the common good, rather than for partisan victory, are attractive
attitudes – far more attractive than the anger of more or less everyone
depicted in Seneca’s treatise On Anger, including Seneca’s own, as
he responds with unattractive bile to a minor slight (Ir. III.36–7). We
therefore read with sympathy Seneca’s remarkable account, in that
same treatise, of his own nightly process of self-examination, as he attempts
to undo in himself the bad evaluations that are the basis for his
all-too-ready anger (Ir. III.36). We are likely to feel, reading, that it
would be very good if our political leaders could follow that example.
Maybe there would be fewer cowboy wars, fewer crooked pardons,
and so on.
One might wonder, however, whether the Stoic program does not
go too far when it asks us to extirpate all emotions from politics. What
about the passion for justice? The love of decent political institutions?
Fear for their corruption or demise? Should we really say that all of
these emotions are based upon overvaluation of worldly goods? And
can we really imagine a decent political life without at least some of
them? When we read on in Marcus Aurelius, we come upon passages
1 New York Times 1992.