Stoic Guides
A Stoic Guide After a Loss
Make room for grief while examining love, possession, memory, and the next duty.
Begin with the distinction
Make room for grief while examining love, possession, memory, and the next duty.
The relevant primary texts approach this through Cicero, On Ends, Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, and Epictetus, Discourses. Read the excerpts as parts of arguments, not as slogans.
How to examine it
Name the event in plain observable language. Then name the judgment, prediction, demand, or appetite added to it.
Separate what belongs to choice—attention, assent, refusal, intention, and action—from another person, the past, chance, and the final outcome.
A practical method
Use Grief: Loving the Mortal: Allow the natural grief without adding a verdict against reality. The practice supplies a fixed sequence so the idea is tested in experience rather than admired in the abstract.
Claim only the practice and the felt experience of doing it. Do not turn a philosophical exercise into a promise that an emotion, relationship, or circumstance will be cured.
Common confusion
Stoic practice does not require pretending that pain, fear, grief, or anger never appeared. The first movement can arrive before deliberate choice.
The work begins with the use made of that movement: whether it is accepted as a command, enlarged by a story, examined, delayed, or answered with character.
Primary-text evidence
These excerpts are shown with their exact work locators. Read them as evidence for study, not as detached slogans.
“And this also is evident, that in these natural things the wise man is not altogether inactive. He therefore, when he acts, judges that that is his duty; and because he is never deceived in forming his judgment, duty must be classed among neutral things; and this is proved also by this conclusion of reason. For since we see that there is something which we pronounce to have been rightly done (for that is duty when accomplished), there must also be something which is rightly begun: as, if to restore what has been justly deposited belongs to the class of right actions, then it must be classed among the duties to restore a deposit; and the addition of the word “justly” makes the duty to be rightly performed: but the mere fact of restoring is classed as…”
“Enviousness (invidentia), they say, is a grief arising from the prosperous circumstances of another, which are in no degree injurious to the person who envies: for where any one grieves at the prosperity of another, by which he is injured, such a one is not properly said to envy,—as when Agamemnon grieves at Hector's success; but where any one, who is in no way hurt by the prosperity of another, is in pain at his success, such an one envies indeed. Now the name "emulation" is taken in a double sense, so that the same word may stand for praise and dispraise: for the imitation of virtue is called emulation—(however, that sense of it I shall have no occasion for here, for that carries praise with it);—but emulation is also a term applied to grief at…”
“What a man applies himself to earnestly, that he naturally loves. Do men then apply themselves earnestly to the things which are bad? By no means. Well, do they apply themselves to things which in no way concern themselves? not to these either. It remains then that they employ themselves earnestly only about things which are good; and if they are earnestly employed about things, they love such things also. Whoever then understands what is good, can also know how to love: but he who cannot distinguish good from bad, and things which are neither good nor bad from both, how can he possess the power of loving? To love then is only in the power of the wise. How is this? a man may say, “I am foolish, and yet I love my child.”—I am surprised indeed that…”