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Last time we finished up with the example that if you get ‘angry’ about your mom complaining about your driving, the Stoic view would be that you are misunderstanding the situation. You are choosing to believe you were slighted or violated by your mom’s comments, even though in reality, given that moms are supposed to care deeply about their children’s safety, you should expect such comments. It’s part of the parent-child relationship. And if you understand that, then it should eliminate the idea that you’re somehow being hurt by the comments. So you can and should choose to stop being angry. And when you do so, you will cease to be angry.
Epictetus goes even further than that in §42 of Enchiridion when he recommends that when a person “treats you ill or speaks ill of you” we should be ‘mild in temper” and say to ourselves “it seemed so to him”. The idea being that their opinion of you can’t hurt you unless you decide it is really a hurt and that in cases where they really are wrong about you they are the ones who get hurt because they are deceived and it’s bad to believe false things.
This can probably be summed up by the later Christian idea of “turning the other cheek”. You won’t find recommendations like that from the line of thought extending through Plato, Aristotle and Lucretius (which I’ve been calling P-A-L).
In fact, in the very first chapter of the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle hits on a key problem with the idea of the weight of relationships in ethics. He advises that you can’t judge whether a person’s life was virtuous or happy until they have passed away because there is so much unpredictable stuff that can happen that could ruin the life or the person. Like a parent losing a child: A vivid example of this is in the classic movie Ordinary People.
The underlying idea here is that specifically because of the intimate, fundamentally important relationship you have with your family, your emotional well being is not totally in your hands. To form those types of bonds and gain all that they can give you requires being vulnerable to the possibility of ruin. And the kicker is, as the heading above indicates about me, we can all be described by quite a few different relationships, we all wear many hats. And each of them works to change our frame of reference.
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