Thus it comes about that all of the following are for the Stoics indifferent: life health pleasure beauty strength well-functioning sense organs wealth reputation and their opposites death disease pain ugliness frailty disablement poverty low repute and ignoble birth.⁶ What matters is whether you are virtuous and you can be virtuous while starving.

Admittedly life health and the rest are natural objectives (‘in accordance with nature’).⁷ Admittedly they are naturally preferred (they are proēgmena Latin commoda).⁸ They excite our impulses and are not indifferent in relation to that.⁹ Admittedly we select them (eklegesthai seligere) and they are normally to be taken (lēpta) although it would do them too much honour to say that they are to be chosen (haireta expetenda).¹⁰ Admittedly they are regarded by most Stoics as having some value or more exactly selective value (axia eklektikē)¹¹ although the Stoic Aristo denies them any value at all¹² and in Epictetus it is their indifference that is stressed rather than their value.¹³ Selective value is such that we should select them only with the reservation ‘if circumstances permit’¹⁴ an attitude explained in Chapter 2. All in all I think we have to take seriously the Stoics’ refusal to say that the natural objectives are actually good (agatha) or a benefit (ōpheleia) or their opposites bad.¹⁵ I have discussed in Chapter 6 to what extent Panaetius (c. 185–c. 110 BC) and Posidonius (c. 135–c. 50 BC) might have qualified the theory of indifferents.

Despite the thesis of indifference the Stoics do not wait passively for things to happen. To see this we must take into account their view of the goal or end (telos) of life. The early Stoic definition of the goal as ‘living in accordance with nature’ is refined by Diogenes of Babylon and his successor Antipater. Diogenes defines it as being rational in your selection of natural objectives i.e. the preferred indifferents Antipater as doing everything in your power (pan to kath’ hauton) to obtain these natural objectives.¹⁶ The point of both definitions is that actual success in hitting on the natural objectives does not matter. The telos is to aim right whether or not you hit. The comparison with an archer is explicit¹⁷ and it has been conjectured that it was introduced by Antipater although one of our two sources introduces it only in order to ridicule it. In fact the Stoic idea that the aim's the thing is parallel to what the English are taught about cricket: ‘The game's the thing.’ The idea is also transatlantic. For Grantland Rice speaking of American football wrote:

This brings out the Stoic attitude to preferred indifferents. You should do everything in your power to secure them for yourself and others. But whether you do secure them should matter no more than whether you win at cricket. The only question that matters is whether you aimed aright. The natural objectives are merely the subject matter (hulē materia) of virtuous action.¹⁹

Admittedly certain preferred indifferents may have a special role to play for those who are progressing (prokoptōn proficiens) towards virtue. Seneca allows that such people need some indulgence from fortune.²⁰ They need food and the liberal arts²¹ they need precepts²² and they may need funds²³ if they are to achieve virtue. One possible way for the Stoics to give these preferred indifferents a special value would be to class them as instrumental goods (poiētika not telika) instrumental for approaching virtue. Of instrumental goods the Stoics still insist that rather than constituting a benefit (ōpheleia) they are merely ‘not other than benefit’.²⁴ Sometimes preferred indifferents play a role for people who are not progressives. For example wealth can enable us to exercise a wider range of virtues.²⁵ But here too the Stoics could say that its role is only that of an instrumental good. This perfectly good line of defence is however somewhat jeopardized for the case of aids to moral progress by the view ascribed to the Stoics that moral progress is itself only a preferred indifferent.²⁶

The thesis of indifference may seem to be more clearly compromised by the Stoic view that it is sometimes justifiable to commit suicide. But in fact I think the Stoics have two different rationales for suicide and both respect the idea of indifference. Cicero tells us²⁷ that the decision on suicide should turn on whether one has or even foresees having²⁸ the preferred indifferents indeed a preponderance (plura in maiore parte) of them. It should not turn on whether one has the only thing that is good virtue or the only thing that is evil vice.²⁹ Does this give a new importance to the indifferents? No on the contrary it emphasizes the importance of the act of selection and the unimportance of the things selected including life itself. The point has been made by others. Selecting death can itself be a rational and virtuous exercise while life which is disselected is indifferent.³⁰

I think the attitude manifested by some later Stoics is different. Instead of totting up in a rather calculating way where the preponderance lies they came to list certain rather extreme circumstances that could justify suicide.³¹ Suicide is permitted to save one's country to avoid a disgraceful deed imposed by a tyrant or (these are the relevant cases) to avoid senility incurable disease or poverty. The inclusion of poverty as a reason is dubious:³² Diogenes Laertius omits poverty but adds severe pain and mutilation.³³ We need to ask whether in this list freedom from senility pain disease mutilation and perhaps poverty has gained a new importance and ceased to be a matter of indifference. Seneca gives an answer completely different from the other Stoic one. He might by suicide put an end to senility illness or pain: not however to avoid the pain but only if the pain were an impediment to all that he lived for³⁴ perhaps progressing or in the case of a sage even aiming aright. This rationale provides a different method of making virtue the important thing and treating pain as indifferent.

As I said I am against the Stoic thesis of indifference and I find this an unattractive side of their philosophy. It is better to treat the welfare of our loved ones as something very much more than rightly preferred even though the Stoics are right that this means incurring the risk of loss and desolation. Bernard Williams has interestingly commented that the concern of the Stoics and a number of other Greeks for self-sufficiency seems alien to us in the light of Christianity and Romanticism:

None the less as already remarked we can learn from the Stoics in treating unwanted emotions without agreeing that none should be wanted. Not only are emotions quite often unwelcome: they are also quite often counter-productive. Anger or anxiety may be what is preventing us from getting what we want.

There is a further point. There are tight corners in which it can prove useful after all to follow the Stoic view that what matters in a given situation is character. It is better to seek justice for others because you positively want them to be fairly treated. But what about those rare occasions on which you can achieve justice only at great personal cost? Suppose you find it beyond you positively to want fairness for everyone at that cost? Then it is useful to fall back on the Stoic perspective and secure justice because you want to be a just person.

There are also areas in which an attitude of indifference can profitably be practised. The clearer a person is about what they really want the more likely they are to see that it can come about in different ways and so be indifferent to the chance closing and opening of alternative routes.

The objection may reasonably be felt that the doctrine of indifference is incompatible with fellow-feeling. Yet in a way fellow-feeling is a centrepiece of Stoic moral theory. For the Stoics argue that it is in accordance with nature and is right to treat all human beings even slaves as belonging metaphorically speaking in the same household (oikos) because all humans are rational. The process of coming to treat others as so belonging is called oikeioēis. The naturalness of the process can be seen in the love of parents for children.³⁶ No doubt such untutored love is an emotion which the Stoic sage would transcend precisely because it does not exemplify an attitude of indifference. But the sage is allowed to have a corresponding eupatheia of good will (eunoia) defined as willing good to another for the other's sake. Its species include affection (aspasmos) and love (agapēsis).³⁷ The goods which the sage wishes for others will not I think be indifferents like life and welfare but goods of character. On the other hand he or she will think it a duty energetically to pursue such indifferents as life and welfare for other people so long as God wills these and so long as they are recognized as indifferents.

Such an attitude may still seem self-centred because the sage's pursuit of life and welfare for others is treated as important while their actual life or welfare remains indifferent. But Epictetus tries to argue the other way as will be seen in Chapter 13. Not only is an attitude of indifference compatible with fellow-feeling: it is essential for it. For without this we shall be driven to squabble over indifferents in competition with those we imagine we love and shall find one wishing the other dead. We shall not truly love them (philein). True love for others on this view requires a certain detachment from things other than our own character and proairesis.³⁸

In a magisterial phrase Bernard Williams has described the thesis of indifference as one of lethal high-mindedness:

On the ‘high-mindedness’ I rather agree; what interests me is the further objection that we cannot recognize the thesis of indifference as the materials or goal of a therapy.

Let me start with the materials for therapy. The point was already made by the Stoics themselves that the thesis of indifference could not be used as materials. The only early Stoic who thought it could be was Cleanthes so Cicero tells us;⁴⁰ but Chrysippus disagreed. The thesis of indifference attacks the first of the two judgements involved in emotion the judgement that good or bad is at hand. But Chrysippus we are told thought the main thing in consoling people was to attack the second judgement the judgement that it is appropriate to react.⁴¹

We have seen there are plenty of techniques for attacking the ‘appropriate to react’ judgement. One borrowed by Seneca from the Pythagoreans was to counter anger by looking in a mirror to see how ugly it made you.⁴² Another was to remember that you too had committed the offence you are complaining of.⁴³ Seneca consoles Marcia by reminding her she is neglecting the living.⁴⁴

Cicero raises three objections to Cleanthes’ strategy of using indifference as the material for therapy. First you could only recognize the indifference of things by becoming a wise person and a wise person needs no consolation. Secondly it is the wrong time to preach indifference. Thirdly it is not in every case true that the cause of distress is a matter of indifference. Alcibiades’ distress was caused by Socrates showing him that he lacked a good character⁴⁵ the thing which really does matter to the Stoics. So Cleanthes cannot show why Alcibiades should not indulge in distress. The solution to both problems turns on the fact that there is in emotion a second judgement about reaction being appropriate. It is the second judgement that is the target of Chrysippan therapy thus obviating an appeal to indifference.

Cicero tells us in another passage that it is the second the ‘appropriate to react’ judgement that is withheld by philosophers who are progressing towards wisdom when they contemplate the fact that they have not attained it. This provides their rationale for avoiding distress. The passage runs as follows.

I believe that this excerpt is part of a larger passage (Tusculan Disputations 3. 64–71) in which Cicero focuses his attack on the judgement that it is appropriate to react although the text has been taken differently.⁴⁷ The example just given is one in a long series in which the ‘appropriate to react’ judgement is inhibited. I think Cicero's purpose in giving these examples is to show that the ‘appropriate to react’ judgement can be shed and hence that emotion is voluntary rather than natural.

It is worth quoting Cicero's main discussion of alternative therapies for grief in full. It is particularly poignant because he himself had tried them in a state of extreme distress. He describes how when already driven from public life by the civil war he lost his daughter. He found himself sobbing uncontrollably alone in the woods. He read all the philosophical advice he could and composed a Consolation to comfort himself.⁴⁸ The Consolation itself is lost but in book 3 of the Tusculan Disputations he describes the therapies he tried and offers a summary which includes the comparison of Chrysippus’ preferred technique with Cleanthes’:

The advice of Cicero set out in a theoretical way here is brought to life in the Consolation which in the next century Seneca addressed to Marcia on her bereavement. Seneca repeatedly attacks the second judgement. Like Chrysippus he argues that Marcia is ashamed to end her mourning and would think the loss of tears a second bereavement.⁵⁰ Like Chrysippus he argues that at least after three years⁵¹ the mourning is on the contrary a wrong reaction. As already mentioned it makes her neglect the living.

It is important that therapy can attack the second judgement that it is appropriate to react because that makes a wider range of therapeutic techniques available including techniques borrowed from other schools as will be illustrated in Chapter 15. Moreover since therapy does not have to fasten on the peculiarly Stoic doctrine of indifference Stoic therapies are available to members of other schools. Because of this Chrysippus himself offered to treat the emotions of people who did not accept the fundamental Stoic tenets about what was good bad or indifferent.⁵²

Therapy has a further resource. It can attack not only the ‘appropriate to react’ judgement but also any supplementary judgements there may be. In anger the supplementary judgement is involved that the harm you have suffered is undeserved. And this judgement as well as the ‘appropriate to react’ judgement can be attacked by the reflection suggested by Seneca that you often behave the same way yourself.⁵³

But now I want to come back from the materials to the goal of therapy. For there is a way in which Stoic therapy takes an attitude of indifference as its goal without being high-minded at all. It sometimes attacks the judgement of good or bad not with a view to producing a generalized attitude of indifference but in particular cases and retrospectively after some disturbing event has happened. Fuller illustrations will be given in Chapter 15. Epictetus says if you are stuck in a crowd think of it as a festival. This is not high-minded but an everyday relabelling technique. Ovid we shall see uses it amusingly advising you to redescribe your beloved according to whether your aim is seduction or falling out of love. In another example Admiral Stockdale freed his fellow prisoners of counter-productive guilt at having given information away by making Epictetus’ point that nothing is evil if it is not under the control of the will. Again in grief you can reflect that you are not the only one that others coped or are worse off than you. In anger you can delay your decision. In each case an attitude of indifference is the goal but as it is a particularized and retrospective attitude there is nothing lethal about it. And an arsenal of everyday techniques was assembled many of them shared among the schools to make this goal achievable.

Let me now finish with a concession. Whether the idea of indifference features as the material or goal of therapy depends in the end on the addressee. It may after all do so if the addressee is a committed Stoic trainee. Seneca's Letters unlike say his On Consolation to Marcia are addressed to someone who really does want to progress in Stoic ways of thinking. So sometimes Seneca illustrates to him what it would be like to have reached the ideal Stoic attitude of indifference⁵⁴ even though much of the time he confines himself to dealing with particular anxieties. Epictetus is more severe. He is talking to trainees who have come to the school he held in exile precisely to learn Stoicism. Not all of them would necessarily survive the course to judge from Epictetus’ severity. But those who did might well have been brought much of the way towards an attitude of indifference.⁵⁵ In Chapter 15 I shall describe how Epictetus’ trainees will have practised dismissing what they saw on their early-morning walk as of no concern if it was not under the control of their will. They will have reminded themselves as they kissed their family that all of them were mortal. Unlike the progressives described by Cicero they will have experienced agony (agōnia algein) at their state of character.⁵⁶ Without that the lesson will have been a failure-a criterion not yet used in present-day assessment of teaching quality. Here the attitude of indifference is indeed the goal of the therapy. That it is an undesirable goal I would agree. But as to whether it is unattainable I fear that Epictetus’ methods might go a long way.