A rebuttal on Stoicism and Seneca

              One of the benefits of being a member of a blogging community is that you get to read the opinions of your peers on a subject. Reading this blog and it comments has changed my opinion on some issues due to other people new insight on  the discussed topic. Which is a good thing because it increases your knowledge of the material and shapes your stance on an issue. Although there are some arguments which I have read and still disagree with them ; even though they well articulated and backed up with evidence.
             An example of this would be Snowden “Grief and Selfishness”,in which he backs up Seneca claim that excessive grief is foolishness that is used to condone bad behavior. He gives an example of a drug addict going back to drugs after the death of his father using it as a justification for his self-destructive behavior. Which we all can agree on that is a rationalization of a bad decision which can have a severe impact on other people.My problem with this thesis is that not many people fits this stereotype and there is not an epidemic of grief nurturers. As Cholbi said some human beings maybe masochists who derive some form of pleasure from pain but that does not translate to the general population. Instead of thinking cynically that people use grief as a hall pass to do bad deeds or believing that they are actors;while don't we just accept the fact that human beings are messy. Ascribing bad faith to emotional process like grief closes people from your argument which makes them ineffective, Therefore, Seneca is better off telling the drug addict that he should remembers his father efforts to get him sober and should live up to his legacy, 

Comments

  1. Ashley SarkodeeFebruary 25, 2019 at 10:08 AM

    It is true that some people use the grieving process as an excuse. These are one of the reasons way Seneca said we parade our sorrow rather than let it happen normally. I understand where you are coming from on your statement about how if one person does something does not mean that everyone does it, that is a generalization. Unfortunately, at times the apple does not seem to fall too far from the tree. In this case of a drug addict and his father were both using drugs. But his father wanted to sober up meanwhile his son did not see anything of it.

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