The pathetic syllogism and how to console people in grief

Imagine that a close friend of yours has experienced the loss of a loved one. Understandably, she is in grief. But this has been going on for a while now, and she risks not being able to get back to a normal, functional existence. How do you console her?

Turns out, the answer depends on whether she is a practitioner of Stoic philosophy or not. And a strategy for each case was laid out more than two millennia ago by the second and third leaders of the Stoa: respectively, Cleanthes and Chrysippus.

In his Tusculan Disputations (III.76), Cicero summarizes the two methods. We learn that Cleanthes’ approach relies on reminding the person who is grieving that death is a natural thing, and not really an evil, since the only true evils are our own bad judgments (and the only true goods are our own good judgments). As Cicero puts it, the intention is “to teach the sufferer that what happened is not an evil at all.”

Obviously, this is going to have track with someone who has adopted Stoicism as their philosophy of life, but not with someone who hasn’t. Indeed, I would highly recommend not to use Cleanthes’ method with a non-Stoic. You would come across as callous and insensitive, and your friend may begin to distance herself from you.