4. On pain: Ignorance of the Virtuous

Of course we are never fully virtuous beings but there may be some unethical acts that we have never done and can never imagine doing.

Part of forgiveness must arise from understanding and coming to terms with the inner motivations of the perpetrator.

But if we are virtuous in that aspect, can we ever really know of that angle of human motivation? Perhaps we can never imagine it. Thus perhaps we can never forgive it and never transcend the scars with which the act has etched upon us.

Seneca supports me here. He defines frustration as the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality. We are then hurt mot by those we least expected and cannot fathom. So the task is here to prepare for our wishes the softest landing possible on the adamant wall of reality.

Wisdom is then learning not to aggravate the world's obstinacy through our own responses, through spasms of rage, self-pity, anxiety, bitterness, self-righteous and paranoia.

Seneca states that what makes us angry are dangerously optimistic notions about what the world and other people are like. This is critically determined by what we think of as normal. We are only angry when we are denied an object that we think we are rightfully entitled to. The sad fact of reality for the Virtuous is then that we cannot always explain our destiny by referring to our moral worth. All that transpires is often a cruel but morally meaningless by-product of random elements.

To him: Happiness is a productum, something preferred.