On the positive value of pity in Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius
The Stoics are still today accused of heartlessness. A figure as renowned and learned as Martha Nussbaum has situated the Stoics as the key progenitors of an ancient “anti-pity” tradition, leading up to the fierce hostility to anything like pity we find in Friedrich Nietzsche.
One way to assess the Stoic stance concerning pity, and to see whether this popular, simple story is also true, is to look at the key texts, to see how this subject is developed.
The hostility to pity is for instance quite a central theme in Nietzsche, and it is tied to his radical aristocratic opposition to forms of egalitarian politics. Is opposition to pity in the Stoics such a central preoccupation? Should we really be aligning the Stoics with a philosopher like Nietzsche, who claimed that reflection on pity should lead us to
a tremendous new prospect …, a new possibility … like a vertigo, [where] fear leaps up, [and] … belief in morality, in all morality, falters … (Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, “Preface”, 6)?
Clearly, if Nussbaum’s assessment holds up of the Stoics as the philosophers in whom “the assault on pity finds its most sustained and careful philosophical development”, we could expect pity to feature alot, and to feature highly negatively, in Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius.