SOURCE: “Marcus Aurelius” in Four Reasonable Men, Wesleyan University Press, 1984, pp. 3-53.

In the following excerpt, Blanshard analyzes Aurelius's Stoic philosophy and discusses problems with its ways of dealing with emotion, pain, death, and pleasure.

… the Stoic War on Emotion

No one would now deny that reasonable living requires the control of emotion by thought. Unfortunately the Stoics tried not merely to control feeling but to annihilate it. Anger, fear, grief, pity were for them not the allies but the enemies of reason, and it was better to get rid of them altogether than to try to tame and harness them. That so extreme an attitude should be regarded as conformable to human nature is not easy to sympathize with or to understand. It is true that anger often leads to the unleashing of tongue and fists and to vindictive forms of punishment, which the Stoics rejected in...