Why Stoics Think Schadenfreude is Treacherous (Even if The Person is Evil)

On the Ethics of Ambiguous Practices

At best schadenfreude, a German term for taking pleasure in another person’s misfortune, feels like a guilty pleasure. You feel it when your annoying coworker falls out of their chair, or when that jerk of a classmate scores poorly on a test. It also has a tinge of righteous indignation, since it picks up on a feeling of justice.

The (uncommon) English word “epicaricacy” is from the Greek epichairekakia, and both also mean to take pleasure in another’s misfortune. Their existence indicates that the notion is quite old in the “West,” and so it’s not surprising that the Stoics could guide us in thinking about it.

Other things being equal, Stoic philosophers would agree that good people should applaud the downfall of the bad. Yet, as far as I can tell, Stoic philosophers would hold that there are two good reasons to think that schadenfreude is a bit like playing hopscotch over thin ice.

• The first turns on the way that initial feeling of joy can morph into a passion.
• The second centers on the way that such focus takes your attention from the positive dimensions of life.

In brief, taking joy in another’s misfortune elevates the presence of what is negative in your life and diminishes your prospects for positive human connection.

To put the Stoic’s headline concerns memorably: tranquility does not grow from the seeds of anger, nor freedom from bondage to past events.

Let’s start with the topic of the passions.

Why Reason and Emotion Are Not Opposed

Perhaps the most puzzling feature of Stoic philosophy for modern, “Western” readers is the denial of our contemporary distinction between reason and emotion. Our view hails from philosophers of the Enlightenment in the 1600s — 1700s, but the Stoic view on the human soul was announced centuries earlier.

Rather than divide cognition into separate parts, like reason and emotion, the Stoics focused on the stages of what rational cognition looks like. I wrote a whole piece on Stoic Logic a bit ago, but to give you a different approach, consider this story. It is from the Stoic philosopher Epictetus’ (now lost) fifth book of his Discourses.

The Latin author Aulus Gellius tells of a time that he was traveling by ship in the company of a Stoic philosopher. Their ship encountered a fierce storm and fear spread like fire through kindling among the men. He turned to see if the Stoic philosopher would react differently. Instead, the Stoic man was equally as afraid as anyone else.

After the storm passed, Gellius asked the philosopher to explain himself, and Stoic replied by pointing to a passage in book five of the Discourses that demonstrated that the impressions we first receive are not under our control. We have no power to choose them and our mind is often initially disturbed. But we do have a choice about whether we give in to the impression (NA 19.1.1–21).

To explain, we have a first, fast thought that we usually call an emotion. It presents us with an impression something like the following:

This wave is crashing over me and this is terrible!

But we don’t have to accept that impression. On reflection, in the second stage, we can modify our thinking to:

This wave is crashing over me.

After that, we can even deliberate further whether a wave crashing would harm what is of value to us as human beings.

There is another possibility though. Rather than pausing to delete the unexamined evaluation, we could instead give into it. In that case, we are left with the following thought:

This is terrible!

At that point, our initial fear has transformed into a passion, namely terror. And you have no hope of a rational and reasonable response when you are in this state.

So rather than divide our cognition into a supposedly good rational part, and a supposedly bad irrational part, the Stoics divided cognition into stages: first impression, first response, further deliberation.

We usually call that first impression, the fast and immediate thought, an emotion, and the first response (with later deliberation) reason. But that way of thinking about thinking doesn’t help you to identify how you lose your way.

What matters is whether your first response is to pause the implicit evaluations of your impressions or whether to give into them — whether to be rational or to act on a passion.

Schadenfreude and Anger

With this clearer view of your own mind’s stages at work, it becomes easier to understand what’s so troubling about schadenfreude for Stoics: it often strays onto the path of passion.

Even if we are right that the person whose misfortune we are enjoying is a bad person, part of the joy you and I experience is a sense of righteous indignation. We think: “They got what was coming to them!”

But what you are doing when you are enjoying the feeling of comeuppance is giving into that evaluation. Just as the man on the ship can give into his initial impression so that all that remains is “this is terrible!”, so you are giving in to your feeling of righteousness.

In short, you are allowing your mind to be transformed into a passion. Writing on anger, Seneca the Younger, a Stoic philosopher from Rome, observes:

the mind is not a separate member, nor does it view passions objectively, so that it can forbid them to advance farther than they ought, but it is itself transformed into the passion and is, therefore, unable to recover its former useful and saving power. — On Anger

Even if you’re only indulging a little, this is a treacherous path.

Your best bet, then, is to develop the ability to notice your mind’s changes and cultivate the capacity to pause your thoughts before you reach the stage where you give in to an irrational evaluation of the situation.

You need to learn to practice prosochē, attention.

How To Practice Prosochē

Explaining the importance of attention, Epictetus states:

Do you not realize that once you let your mind go wandering, it is no longer within your power to recall it?

To start paying attention, you need to pause your thoughts. To do that, some temporal and spatial distance can help. Let me give you a personal example of what I mean by temporal distance.

I’ve long been a nerd — typical for professors I suppose — so it’ll come as a surprise to no one that when I was a senior in high school, I was cut from the varsity soccer team. Mostly, I think it had to do with the fact that I just didn’t like to head the ball. However, a loose childhood friend, let’s call him C., did make the team and he was not particularly kind to me about it.

At the time, I was crushed. My initial impression was:

I got cut from the team and this is terrible!

But rather than pausing to examine that thought, within moments that impression had morphed into:

This is terrible!

And by the evening I had moved onto:

Everyone on the team, they’re all terrible! Especially my friend C.!

Yes. Blaming others is a feature of passion in action. And by choosing the path of blaming others, I prevented myself from addressing the situation in any reasonable way.

That’s why, when my friend C. only made it into a local university at the end of high school, and I moved across the country for my education, I experienced schadenfreude. I thought:

Serves him right!

There’s a lot mixed into that thought. Jealousy and my bruised ego for one. The fact that he was also not kind to me (or many others) was another. And a feeling of being vindicated — my focus on my studies paid off — was a third.

But as I aged, gaining temporal distance from those events, I was able to recognize that nothing significant about my life hung on them. As a result, my sense of schadenfreude melted into something else: pity and compassion.

Watching my friend’s life unfold poorly was no longer satisfying. He had been unkind to me and others because he had been restarting a path of addiction. And soon after graduation, he slid specifically into alcoholism, unable to complete school or hold down a steady job.

To be clear, time doesn’t help you grow. What it can do is lessen the intensity of those unexamined evaluations so that you can redress them. At that point, you have the opportunity to take a different path and practice Stoic “attention.”

Until I took that step, a totally inconsequential series of events had power over me. That’s why Epictetus said that what he teaches is “tranquility and freedom.”

Why Mercy is Next To Godliness

There is another side to this story: the positive side.

Seneca, in his letters to the young Nero, hoped to show the emperor a path to become godly. It had nothing to do with force, might, or wealth. Rather, it concerned mercy, since “no one of all the virtues is more seemly for a human, since none is more humane” (On Mercy).

Mercy, for an emperor, requires that one pardon those who have done wrong. For you and I who are ordinary souls, it requires us to forgive and not seek retaliation. In both cases, it comes from a place of strength but acts gently.

In acting this way, Seneca goes on, we display our greatness of soul, magnanimitas, which is a sort of crown to all the best qualities of a human.

How To Practice Stoic Mercy

To teach Nero how to act mercifully himself, Seneca tells the story of Caesar Augustus when he learned of Lucius Cinna’s plot to kill him.

Augustus first raged and exclaimed in his chamber all to himself. Then he thought on the topic and slept the night. In the morning, he concluded that the man was young and otherwise of good character. It seemed likely, as a result, that he could be bettered if given the chance.

Augustus gave orders to bring the man to him, but rather than kill him, he spoke to him for two hours. In the end, he concluded, “Cinna … I grant you your life … [and] from this day, let there be a beginning of a friendship between us.” And because of this mercy, Cinna became his most loyal follower.

In short: pause your initial impression, weigh the evidence about a person, test it a bit, and if they can improve, choose to forgive. Never forget that the bonds of solidarity are born from compassion, not anger and glee.

Philosophy As A Way of Life

In a memorable quip, Seneca recalls that “Philosophy teaches us how to act, not how to talk.” If there is one reason Stoicism has seen such a resurgence of interest, it is because of its insistence on the practical nature of philosophy.

Other traditions of the world have had a similar insistence on practice, which is why I wrote recently about Aztec philosophy’s counter-intuitive method for improving your life without becoming better.

The present advice is similarly counter-intuitive: pause your joy in another person’s misfortune, even if that person is evil. Learn instead to show the strength of mercy, so that your thoughts are not transformed for worse, and so you may lead a greater life in a better world.

To grasp the value of these lessons, you only have to ask: how much would you be willing to pay for tranquillity even in hard times?

Interestingly, every philosopher quoted here was sought out for council by an emperor. Nero made Seneca fantastically wealthy for his advice, and the emperor Hadrian traveled some distance to learn Epictetus’ thoughts. Those who had money to buy anything at all, then, spent their wealth on lessons for this path.

What good is all the money in the world if you lack tranquility and freedom?

I’ll leave you with a final quote from Seneca about human relationships and how to make them prosperous. It doesn’t involve joy at misfortune, but quite the opposite.

“I can teach you a love potion made without any drugs, herbs, or special spell: if you would be loved, love.”

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Sebastian Purcell’s research specializes in world comparative philosophy, especially as these ancient traditions teach us how to lead happier, richer lives. He lives with his wife, a fellow philosopher, and their three cats in upstate New York.