PHIL 102 Quiz #3 Content

Making Friends; Grief, Death, and Sadness

Friendships - 2 Main Philosophers

• Aristotle

• Cicero

3 Kinds of Friendships

1. Utility Friendships

2. Pleasure Friendships

3. Virtue Friendships

utility friendships

Just benefits you to have person around

pleasure friendships

Friend whose company you enjoy for your own sake - may drop them when they become boring/unfun

virtue friendships

2 people alike in virtue, wish each other well simply for the other's sake

Perfect Friendship

friendship between people who are good and "alike in virtue" for they wish each other well for that person's sake.

Perfect friendships are ___ and why?

rare - bad people really will only form utility / pleasure friendships

Aristotle’s Obstacles to Friendships

• age - harder for the old and “sour” to make friends

• uneven value/reciprocity - one person is more useful/pleasing/virtuous than the other

• you can only be friends with so many people at once (before you start forming untrue friendships) - being a friend is the “excess of feeling” → only so much of a person to go around

• inequality of position - parent/child, boss/employee →  duties are different in kind, can’t easily form friendships with the other

Advice & Dishonour regarding friendships

• One shouldn't withhold advice from a virtuous place

  • Shouldn't just always tell your friends what they want to hear when what they need to hear is of more virtue

• Should only ask friends to do good things for them, should try to do good by our friends as well

the tyrannical “friend”

People who have great wealth/status are often used by many => can’t be trusted to know what true friendship is

• Person at top has many false friends and sycophants

• How can someone love someone who they fear or feel inferior to?

Boundaries of Friendship

1. We are disposed to a friend exactly as we are toward ourselves

   • False - we should do things for our friend we wouldn't do for ourselves

2. Our goodwill to friends should correspond to their goodwill to us

   • False - reduces friendship too much to calculation of interests

3. We should value our friends as much as they value themselves

   • False - some other people value themselves too little or too much

Aristotle

• people need and desire friends

• we begin w/ the object of love

• although we want what’s best for our friends we cannot wish they become gods

  • perfect virtue & power would ruin the friendship

• Obstacles to friendships

Cicero

• belief in a friend’s virtue is the condition of friendship => being someone’s friend cannot excuse siding w/ their bad actions

• choosing to avoid friends because they are hostages to fortune is cowardice and failure to rejoice in the goodness of others

• people who have great wealth/status are often used by others => can’t be trusted to know what real friendship is

Gried, Death, & Sadness - 7 Main Philosophers

1. Seneca

2. Epictetus

3. Montaigne

4. Mencius

5. Plato

6. Diotima

7. Tolstoy

What makes death bad?

• death is the end of possibility

  • a child’s death may be considered worse than that of an elderly person as the former has more possibility

Montaigne’s view on Fortune

• human affairs are variable and uncertain => Fortune can overturn everything she built over the years in an instant

• regardless of how fortune smiles at someone at the start of their life, that person cannot be called happy until they’ve spent the last day of their life

Montaigne’s view on death

• a noble death can redeem an ignoble life - like in movies when the villain redeems themselves in the end

  • e.g. Star Wars The Rise of Skywalker (2019) - Kylo Ren redeems himself and saves Rey’s life

• nothing more lofty than a man’s ambitions & courageous goals except the interruptions of them by his death

  • example of man who had a death so splendid that he accomplished more in dying than he would have or planned to in life - he could’ve been a bum, or his death could’ve saved many people,… → many reasons

• death is less of a loss, more emphasis on it being an end to one’s life

  • end → an interruption of one’s career, aspirations, power, fame, etc.

  • life → death marks the point where you can weigh what kind of life someone lived

Diotima - what outlives us

• Love leads people to reproduce

• People leave their legacy in children, artistic works, deeds, etc.

• **Means there are things that outlive us and persist after death => implies that there are some things death can't take away from us

Tolstoy - what outlives us

• Thinks no matter what you create, it too will pass

• Children die, works will be forgotten

** OPPOSITE of Diotima

Seneca - a well-lived life

• One benefit of not wasting your time/life is that you can look back on it satisfied that it wasn't wasted

• Avoid wasting your time => avoid misliving => had a well-lived life

• So if you avoid misliving, there shouldn't be any fear in death

• Death is end of possibility, but you squeezed everything possible out of life

which 2 philosopher say to rehearse your death?

Seneca and Epictetus

Rehearsing for death

• rehearse your death by contemplation

• accomplishes 2 things

  • helps you prioritize the important things in life

  • emotionally prepares you for the inevitability of your death

• Preparedness for death dovetails with prioritization

  • Think about death => invest time in worthwhile endeavours => prepared for death

Stoic dispostion to do with rehearsing for death

Epictetus

3 types of control over the world:

• Complete control - e.g. the goals you set for yourself

• Partial control - e.g. whether what you do/say is well received

• No control - e.g. whether the sun rises in the morning

2 things that can’t be taken away from you by death

• Virtuous Actions

  • The past is unalterable → your good deeds are etched into the fabric of the universe forever

  • Implies it will always be the case that you took those actions

  • Even if at the end you do something just as bad as your previous actions were good, the goodness of those actions is forever

• Virtuous Character

  • Character is within your own control → cannot be taken away

Aging and One’s Inner Life

• **Acquiring ethical knowledge necessitates philosophical inquiry → intellectual activities that are necessary to pursue the worthwhile end of cultivating a virtuous character

• Aging makes physical activities difficult or impossible for the elderly, but intellectual pursuits still available

Dementia’s impact

• Can preclude being able to engage in intellectual pursuits

• We only have partial control over how aging affects our tools we need to engage in intellectual pursuits

• However, having been a good person cannot be taken away by becoming old

Aging in Continuity with Life

1. Continuity: conception of aging and death must be understood in continuity with a person's overall life

2. Contemplation: rehearsing death through contemplation one can priotize and prepare for old age by living well

3. Preparedness: contemplating aging and death and seeing how it stands in continuity with your present life can help you prepare for it

4. Virtuous Living: virtuous actions you pursue and character you develop can't be undone in the way that Montaigne worried a life can

what is a belief?

mental state containing proposition asserted to be true

emotions

Mental states that do not have propositional contents taken to be true.

• Class of feelings caused by certain stimuli - can be fitting or not

Montaigne’s view on sadness

• sadness is a way of representing/expressing grief

• despises sadness, finds it:

  • Harmful: the experience itself is painful and unpleasant

    • People don't desire to feel it

  • Insane: can inhibit reasoning

    • If you're too distraught to think, it can cause further problems to pile on you

  • Cowardly: failing to act when you should

    • The intensity of sadness paralyzes you - causes you not to take action

Montaigne’s view on grief

• true grief surpasses any power of expression

• stuns the soul, impedes its freedom of action, paralyzes

  • why some people appear to have little or no initial reaction at a great loss

  • e.g. prince who heard his older brother died, a few days later his younger brother died, then one of his men dying soon after tips him over the edge

• passions that can be "digested" or processed are less powerful

• says you can manage the impact with reason

Seneca - grief, sadness, emotion

• grief is a reflexive emotion - immediate response to certain stimuli

• we can’t and shouldn’t expect to do away with it altogether

• proper grief - balance between indifference & madness is ability to show affection to grief and act reasonably

• 2 proposed weapons against grief

• “Light cares can speak, but heavy ones are dumb.”

  • true grief is beyond expression - agrees with Montaigne

Seneca’s proposed weapons against grief

• Reason is best weapon against grief - puts an end to our tears, Fortune will not do so

• Rational persuasion can cure excessive grief - person you’re grieving would want you to either suffer or not suffer over their death

• these things may not be enough in extreme grief - better to help person understand how their intellect is capitulated to their emotions

What Seneca and Epictetus agree on

• both Stoic philosophers

• both say to rehearse death

What Seneca and Montaigne agree on

• final “master” day

• true grief is beyond expression - “Light cares can speak, but heavy ones are dumb.”

Combat Theory of Emotions

Exercising willpower to keep emotions under control.

• Mencius: the will is meant to keep the qi controlled & in-check

• Plato: philosophy of mind - soul has 3 parts

Reason to practice the Combat Theory of Emotions regarding grief/sadness would be to shepherd the emotion in the right way to avoid it causing problems

Plato’s philosophy of mind

Soul has 3 parts

1. Logos - reason

2. Thymos - spirited

3. Eros - desire

In a healthy soul, Thymos assists Logos in guiding and ruling Eros.

Epictetus

• radical acceptance of things outside your control

• 3 Types of Control over the world

• grief is a negative emotion - avoid feeling it at all costs

• take care not to catch grief of others - don’t internalize sympathy

Criticism to Epictetus’ view on grief & his response

criticism: we shouldn’t just pretend to sympathize - we should actually feel their losses and grieve ourselves.

response: we wouldn’t help someone who is poisoned by poisoning ourselves

• goal should be to help friend overcome grief - catching it won’t help them if it hurts us

Montaigne’s view on happiness

Happiness of our life depends on:

• Tranquility and contentment of a well-born spirit

  • Means being content/at peace with no matter the life you're born into

• Resolution and assurance of a well-ordered soul

  • Not quitting when there's obstacles and having certainty in your own judgements and abilities in that you are a good person

Stoicism

Emotions such as grief are reflexive to some extent - same as physical reflex when there's a loud noise

• Unexpected loss of a loved one is an emotional reflex

Advocate that we should sometimes feign (pretending to or having the appearance of a particular feeling with the intent to deceive) emotions and sometimes take steps to extinguish the genuine emotions within us

Stoics’ Primary Grief-Prevention Strategy

engage in negative visualization - contemplate the deaths of loved ones

• Prospective negative visualization: imagining losing something we currently possess

• Retrospective negative visualization: imagining never having had something that we have now lost

Prospective negative visualization _____ grief

prevents

• removes some of shock we’d experience

• likely will take more advantage of our relationships with them while they’re alive  => won't be filled w/ regret of what we could've done with/for them while they were alive

Retrospective negative visualization _____ grief

extinguishes

• Rather than mourning the end of a lost loved one's life, we should be thankful they lived at all

• Instead of thinking about the happiness we are now deprived of by a loved one's death, we should think about how much worse off we would be if we had never been able to enjoy their company while they were alive at all

• Able to replace our feelings of regret at having lost something with feelings of thanks for once having had it

Feelings reaching out beyond us and commonest of human errors

• Commonest of human errors: always gaping after future things

• We must lay hold of present goods and settle ourselves in them since we have no grip on what is to come

• ***Fear, desire, and hope project us to the future => they steal from us the feeling and consideration of what is, busy us with what will be, even when we shall no longer be

Montaigne and Seneca agree this is the commonest of human errors