I learned alot about Stoicism both in preparing for yesterday's episode and from our guestJohn Cooper. Fortunately, although John Cooper knows a great deal about the stoics, he wasn't very stoical in his discussion of them. He was lively, impassioned, and engaging. It was, I thought, a very good episode. If you didn't hear it, check it out. (I can't yet link to it, though, since the episode usually goes up on the web only after it's also aired on OPB.)

我并不完全理解斯多葛主义。我以前从没读过多少斯多葛哲学。我读大学时读过爱比克泰德的《恩基里迪翁》，但坦白说，那时候我对它很冷淡。我完全无法理解。也许这是因为作为一个年轻人，我很不坚忍。在我看来，我很容易陷入深深的存在主义焦虑，很容易深深地、彻底地爱上那些几乎无法实现的异性，很容易在终于和某个梦寐以求的梦中情人约会时，被喜悦和期待席卷。

In my advancing years, I wouldn't say that stoicism leaves me cold in the same way it did when I was a n angst-ridden, romantic youth. It probably takes some maturity and life experience to appreciate what is right about stoicism. As one ages, life hands one many surprises, often quite dismaying ones at that. Life will surprise you about your own abilities, your own character, about the people you admire, trust or love and about what human beings at large are capable of. All the hard truths and harsh realities that one tries one's best to ignore as a youth can strike you with force and vividness as one ages. In the face of life's disturbing surprises, one needs to find a way to go on, to live one's life still on one's own terms. So it's not surprising that experience and maturity make us more receptive to stoic teachings.

They sometimes say that philosophy is wasted on the young. I know the Stoics were on me.

Despite the fact that I see more clearly than I did as an angst-ridden overly romantic youth that there are certain deep truths about human life to which stoicism is a reasonable response, I think I still ultimately reject stoic views about the passions, at least as I understand them. The stoics thought that the emotions, at least the intense ones that most of us experience, rather than the calm ones that apparently only the stoic sage is able and entitled to experience, are a species of evaluative judgment. They thought, moreover, that those judgments arealwaysfalse. Now I think there is something right that in having an emotional response to a person or situation we thereby represent it asmattering. So emotions really areevaulative至少部分如此。But I'm not quite sure that I'd call such representations of persons and/or situations as mattering a species ofjudgment.That's because there is both more and less to emotion than there is to judgment. Less, because emotions seem apt or inapt, but not really true or false. More, because emotions seem to have both intrinsic motivational powers and intrinsic phenomenological characters not shared by judgments. But I won't dwell on these points of dispute with the stoics here.

What I really want to focus on is the stoic view that our "intense" emotions are alwaysfalse or inapt大概是因为它们歪曲了它们的物品对我们生活质量和性格的重要性。如果我为失去一个所爱的人、一段婚姻的终结、一段友谊的结束而深感悲痛，我就会把我所爱的人、朋友或伴侣的离去看作是在某种程度上削弱我自己的幸福。禁欲主义者似乎认为，如果我的幸福会因另一个人的得失而减弱或增强，那我就成了某种次要的存在，一个依赖他人的、不完美的、脆弱的存在，所以肯定不是完全的美德。如果一个人是完全善良的，那么他对自己就是一个完美和完整的人，这样，别人的得失对他的基本幸福不会有任何影响。

On this picture, what makes emotions always false, I guess, is that an emotion always wrongly represents the subject of the emotion as dependent and vulnerable and represents the object as having the power to augment or diminish the subject's well being. I'm not sure I've exactly got this right. I guess it supposes that all of us, even schmucks like me who are not fully virtuous stoic sages , have it as our inner telos to be complete and perfect onto ourselves. If qua human being we all share the same telos, even if we haven't achieved that telos, there is still a sense in which our intense emotions misrepresent their subjects (us) in relation to their objects (the people and situations to which we respond emotionally). Or something like that.

Where I disagree with the stoics fundamentally, I guess, is in their assessment that the telos of a human being is to be a complete and perfect thing onto itself, invulnerable and morally impenetrable, as it were. I'm not sure it makes sense to talk about the telos of human life. But if it does make sense to do so, it strikes me that our telos is rather that of a deeply needy and highly vulnerable creature, a creature for whom living well and doing well require a great deal from others and from the external, physical world. Not just because of our bodily frailty but because of the very structure of our minds, we are creatures who hunger for union and community with others, for attachment and engagement. Indeed, I think we are designed for loves that grip our souls, designed to march under shared banners that help shape and define who and what we are in the world. The parts of our psyches by which we manage what I elsewhere call normative and affective communities of both small and large scope are, I think, what is most distinctive and characteristic of the human mind. The loss or gain binding attachments greatly enhances or dimishes our sense of well-being and well-doing, I would submit. Our capacity for emotional reaction is part and parcel of the psycholgoical machinery by which we manage this all. Our emotions are exquisite devices for helping us to coordinate our lives with a host of others, who are, in turn, as hungry for attachment and engagement as we ourselves are.

想想愤怒在协调与他人共享生活中可能发挥的强大作用，尤其是当愤怒表现为对他人轻视的正义回应时。愤怒是一种必须要做的事情——要么是愤怒的主体，要么是愤怒的客体。忽视或不加以安抚，它会导致自我、婚姻和社会的破碎。解决和安抚它可以带来和解和复兴。关键是，愤怒给了一个时刻，在这个时刻，违约可能是一种紧迫感，一种“待解决的问题”，这仅仅是超然的判断所不能提供的。你们不可把这事留到明日或改日，免得忿怒发酵，免得我们之间的距离越来越远。

It hardly needs acknowledging that sometimes anger is out of proportion to the slight. Sometimes, it leads us to do things we later deeply regret. But that anger sometimes leads us astray gives us no reason to believe that anger isalwaysfalse or inapt, that it will always lead us astray. What that fact does give us, however, is good reason tomanage我们的情感。它并没有给我们充分的理由去剥夺我们的情感在支配我们生活中的任何作用。至少在我看来是这样。

我认为，情绪是需要管理和调节的事物，而不是完全的“自我调节”，这一事实确实反映了一个关于人类心理和意志结构的深刻真相。这是一个事实，斯多葛学派也许部分是对的，但我认为是被误解了。深刻的事实是，我们似乎确实有能力远离我们的情绪，反思它们，并支持或不支持它们。但这并不意味着我们的情绪只是发生在我们身上的事情，我们永远不能屈服。更确切地说，我们的情绪为我们提供了建议，让我们知道事情对我们的关心、担忧和价值观有何意义。他们也经常向我们推荐行动。Both the recommended representations and the recommended actions are at leastcandidatesfor our reflective endorsement. When we accept an emotion's recommendation through reflective endorsement, we have made the relevant emotion, or at least its recommendations, fully our own, in a sense, and we have for a period given the emotions and its proffered up representations and actions temporary hold of the reins of our lives.

I see no reason for supposing that such endorsements arenever everwise, prudent or rational. Of course, it does mean that merely having an emotion or merely being moved to act by an emotion is not yet as such a fully rational response. But you don't need to go all the way over to stoicism to admit as much. Emotions may not deserve to be commander in chief of our souls. About that perhaps the Stoics were right. But what they failed to appreciate, I think, is that the emotions have a strong claim to be perhaps the captiains or majors of our souls.

至少在我看来是这样。