Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Nussbaum)

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Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Nussbaum)

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____________

Excerpts from:

The Therapy of Desire; Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics
Martha C. Nussbaum

  • Contents
  • Introduction
  • CHAPTER 13 - The Therapy of Desire

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CONTENTS


Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 1 - Therapeutic Arguments
CHAPTER 2 - Medical Dialectic: Aristotle on Theory and Practice
CHAPTER 3 - Aristotle on Emotions and Ethical Health
CHAPTER 4 - Epicurean Surgery: Argument and Empty Desire
CHAPTER 5 - Beyond Obsession and Disgust: Lucretius on the Therapy of Love
CHAPTER 6 - Mortal Immortals: Lucretius on Death and the Voice of Nature
CHAPTER 7 - "By Words, Not Arms": Lucretius on Anger and Aggression
CHAPTER 8 - Skeptic Purgatives: Disturbance and the Life without Belief
CHAPTER 9 - Stoic Tonics: Philosophy and the Self-Government of the Soul
CHAPTER 10 - The Stoics on the Extirpation of the Passions
CHAPTER 11 - Seneca on Anger in Public Life
CHAPTER 12 - Serpents in the Soul: A Reading of Seneca's Medea
CHAPTER 13 - The Therapy of Desire
List of Philosophers and Schools
Bibliography
Index Locorum
General Index


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INTRODUCTION


THE IDEA of a practical and compassionate philosophy-a philosophy that exists for the sake of human beings, in order to address their deepest needs, confront their most urgent perplexities, and bring them from misery to some greater measure of flourishing-this idea makes the study of Hellenistic ethics riveting for a philosopher who wonders what philosophy has to do with the world. The writer and teacher of philosophy is a lucky person, fortunate, as few human beings are, to be able to spend her life expressing her most serious thoughts and feelings about the problems that have moved and fascinated her most. But this exhilarating and wonderful life is also part of the world as a whole, a world in which hunger, illiteracy, and disease are the daily lot of a large proportion of the human beings who still exist, as well as causes of death for many who do not still exist. A life of leisured self-expression is, for most of the world's people, a dream so distant that it can rarely even be formed. The contrast between these two images of human life gives rise to a question: what business does anyone have living in the happy and self-expressive world, so long as the other world exists and one is a part of it?

One answer to this question may certainly be to use some portion of one's time and material resources to support relevant types of political action and social service. On the other hand, it seems possible that philosophy itself, while remaining itself, can perform social and political functions, making a difference in the world by using its own distinctive methods and skills. To articulate this relationship, and the conception of philosophy that underlies it, is a central preoccupation of Hellenistic thought, and an area in which Hellenistic thought makes a major contribution to philosophical understanding.

The Hellenistic philosophical schools in Greece and Rome-Epicureans, Skeptics, and Stoics-all conceived of philosophy as a way of ad-dressing the most painful problems of human life. They saw the philosopher as a compassionate physician whose arts could heal many pervasive types of human suffering. They practiced philosophy not as a detached intellectual technique dedicated to the display of cleverness but as an immersed and worldly art of grappling with human misery. They focused their attention, in consequence, on issues of daily and urgent human significance-the fear of death, love and sexuality, anger and aggression-issues that are sometimes avoided as embarrassingly messy and personal by the more detached varieties of philosophy. They confronted these issues as they arose in ordinary human lives, with a keen attention to the vicissitudes of those lives, and to what would be necessary and sufficient to make them better. On the one hand, these philosophers were still very much philosophers-dedicated to the careful argumentation, the explicitness, the comprehensiveness, and the rigor that have usually been sought by philosophy, in the tradition of ethical reflection that takes its start (in the West) with Socrates. (They opposed themselves, on this account, to the methods characteristic of popular religion and magic.) On the other hand, their intense focus on the state of desire and thought in the pupil made them seek a newly complex understanding of human psychology, and led them to adopt complex strategies-interactive, rhetorical, literary-designed to enable them to grapple effectively with what they had under-stood. In the process they forge new conceptions of what philosophical rigor and precision require. In these ways Hellenistic ethics is unlike the more detached and academic moral philosophy that has sometimes been practiced in the Western tradition.

Twentieth-century philosophy, in both Europe and North America, has, until very recently, made less use of Hellenistic ethics than almost B.C.E. any other philosophical culture in the West since the fourth century Not only late antique and most varieties of Christian thought, but also the writings of modern writers as diverse as Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Adam Smith, Hume, Rousseau, the Founding Fathers of the United States, Nietzsche, and Marx, owe in every case a considerable debt to the writings of Stoics, Epicureans, and/or Skeptics, and frequently far more than to the writings of Aristotle and Plato. Especially where philosophical conceptions of emotion are concerned, ignoring the Hellenistic period means ignoring not only the best material in the Western tradition, but also the central influence on later philosophical developments.

A few examples will help to make this point vivid to the reader. When Christian thinkers write about divine anger, or about mercy for human frailty, they owe a deep debt to the Roman Stoics. When Descartes and Princess Elizabeth correspond about the passions, Seneca is the central author to whom they refer. Spinoza is aware of Aristotle, but far more profoundly influenced by Stoic passion theory. Smith's theory of moral sentiments is heavily inspired by Stoic models, as is his economic teleology. When Rousseau defends the emotion of pity, he is taking sides in a debate of long standing between Stoics and Aristotelians. When Kant repudiates pity, he joins the debate on the Stoic side. Nietzsche's own attack on pity, coupled with a defense of mercy, should be understood-as he himself repeatedly insists-not as the policy of a boot-in-the face fascist, and also not as an innocuous refusal of moral self-indulgence, but as a position opposed both to cruelty and to deep attachment, a position he derives from his reading of Epictetus and Seneca. When we speak of the influence of "the classical tradition" on the framers of the U.S. Constitution, we must always remember that it is, on the whole, Hellenistic (especially Stoic) ethical thought, via the writings of Cicero, Seneca, and Plutarch above all, that is central to their classical education. Thus the neglect of this period in much recent teaching of "the Classics" and "the Great Books" gives a very distorted picture of the philosophical tradition-and also robs the student of richly illuminating philosophical arguments.

Contemporary philosophical writing has begun to undo these wrongs; in both Europe and North America we have been seeing a flourishing of first-rate scholarship on this material, to which the present book owes a large debt. But there is one reclaiming of Hellenistic texts within philosophy-perhaps the most widely known to the general public-that seems to me, though exciting, also deeply problematic. This is Michel Foucault's appeal to the Hellenistic thinkers, in the third volume of his History of Sexuality, and in lectures given toward the end of his life, as sources for the idea that philosophy is a set of techniques du soi, practices for the formation of a certain sort of self. Certainly Foucault has brought out something very fundamental about these philosophers when he stresses the extent to which they are not just teaching lessons, but also engaging in complex practices of self-shaping. But this the philosophers have in common with religious and magical/superstitious movements of various types in their culture. Many people purveyed a biou techne, an "art of life." What is distinctive about the contribution of the philosophers is that they assert that philosophy, and not anything else, is the art we re-quire, an art that deals in valid and sound arguments, an art that is commit-ted to the truth. These philosophers claim that the pursuit of logical valid-ity, intellectual coherence, and truth delivers freedom from the tyranny of custom and convention, creating a community of beings who can take charge of their own life story and their own thought. (Skepticism is in some ways an exception, as we shall see; but even Skeptics rely heavily on reason and argument, in a way other popular "arts" do not.) It is questionable whether Foucault can even admit the possibility of such a community of freedom, given his view that knowledge and argument are themselves tools of power. In any case, his work on this period, challenging though it is, fails to confront the fundamental commitment to reason that divides philosophical techniques du soi from other such techniques. Perhaps that commitment is an illusion. I believe that it is not. And I am sure that Foucault has not shown that it is. In any case, this book will take that commitment as its focus, and try to ask why it should have been thought that the philosophical use of reason is the technique by which we can be truly free and truly flourishing.

Writing about this historical period raises difficult organizational questions. The greatest problem for an author who gives an account of Hellenistic practical argument is one of scope. Hellenistic philosophy is hard to study partly on account of its success. The B.C.E. teachings of the major schools beginning in the late fourth century at Athens, have a continuous Chistory.E. of dissemination and elaboration until (at least) the early centuries at Rome, where some of the most valuable writings in these traditions are produced and where philosophy exerts an enormous influence on the literary and the political culture. This means that one must deal, in effect, with six centuries and two different societies. One cannot deal exhaustively with all the relevant material, copious and heterogeneous as it is. Any treatment must be a sampling. This, then, will not even attempt to be the entire story of Hellenistic ethical thought; nor will it be a highly systematic selective outline. Instead, it will be a somewhat idiosyncratic account of certain central themes, guided by an obsessive pursuit of certain questions-taking as its central guiding motif the analogy between philosophy and medicine as arts of life.

Even with respect to these questions, it is difficult to find principles of selection. If the major works of Greek Hellenistic philosophers such as Epicurus, Zeno, and Chrysippus had survived, one might decide to limit such a study to the Greek beginnings of the schools, thus to a single culture and period. But the evidence does not permit this. From the vast output of these enormously prolific philosophers, only fragments and reports sur-vive for the Stoics and, for Epicurus, only fragments and reports plus three brief letters summarizing his major teachings, and two collections of maxims. For the arguments of the Skeptics, we are almost entirely dependent on sources much later than the school's beginnings-Diogenes Laertius' Life of Pyrrho, and the works of Sextus Empiricus. There is, of course, ample later evidence about the Greek sources; there are also whole original works of Epicurean and Stoic and Skeptic thought from a later period (above all from Rome). The lack of coincidence between early date and textual wholeness makes the task of selection difficult.

But when one turns to later sources, especially to Roman sources, it does not seem sufficient simply to raid them for evidence toward the reconstruction of the Greek sources, as is frequently done. One must face the fact that these Roman philosophical works-works such as the De Rerum Natura of Lucretius and the dialogues, letters, and tragedies of Seneca-are them-selves complex philosophical and literary wholes, whose practice of " therapeutic argument" cannot be well understood without attending to their overall literary and rhetorical structure, their characteristic patterns of language, their allusions to other literary and philosophical texts. And this is not all: one must attend to their Romanness. For Roman philosophy pursues its questions about the relation of theory to practice while standing in an intimate relation to Roman history and politics. Roman therapeutic argument is more than incidentally the therapy of Romans and of Rome; one cannot completely understand its operations without understanding, as well, the character of the implied interlocutors-of Memmius in Lucretius, of figures such as Lucilius and Novatus in the works of Seneca, and, in all such works, of the implied Roman reader. This means understanding as much as one can of the relevant aspects of Roman literary, political, and social history, of the nuances of the Latin language, as it both translates Greek philosophical terms and alludes to its own literary traditions, and, finally, of specifically Roman attitudes to ethical and social questions. Roman Epicureans and Stoics are Epicureans and Stoics; and as Epicureans and Stoics they are concerned with what they believe to be aspects of our common humanity, as each school understands it. But as Epicureans and Stoics they also believe that good philosophical argument must be searchingly personal, bringing to light and then treating the beliefs that the interlocutor has acquired from acculturation and teaching, including many that are so deeply internalized that they are hidden from view. Many such acquired beliefs are specific to the society in question; so good Roman Epicurean or Stoic philosophy must at the same time be a searching critical inquiry into Roman traditions.

Frequently philosophical scholars neglect this contextual material, producing a picture of Hellenistic ethics as a timeless whole. Typically such approaches will use the Latin texts only as source material for the Greek Hellenistic thinkers, disregarding their specifically Roman literary and social features and the shape of the literary wholes in which the philosophical material is embedded. This book, by contrast, is committed to studying the philosophical arguments in their historical and literary context. In-deed, I shall argue that Hellenistic therapeutic argument is, by design, so context-dependent that it can be fully understood in no other way-even, and especially, when we are trying to understand aspects of human life that are of continuing interest and urgency to us. (This does not imply that there are no transcontextual ethical truths to be unearthed by such a study, as we shall see.) On the other hand, I am aware that to study all of these contextual features completely, in the case of each of the relevant texts and authors, would be the undertaking of several lifetimes, not of a single book. Nor can I achieve complete coverage by limiting my inquiry to a single author, or even a single school; the questions I want to ask require comparing the techniques and insights of the three schools. To make matters more complex still, my own preference for whole texts whose literary form can be analyzed as a part of its argument has drawn me more and more to Roman sources as my work has progressed.

I have therefore found no easy solution to the problems of chronological and cultural range, apart from that of selecting certain topics for discussion and not others, certain works of a given author rather than others-and, in general, focusing on Lucretius and Seneca more than on Cicero, Epictetus, or Marcus. I have begun by limiting my focus to the three major schools in their more or less central and orthodox development, using Aristotle's ethical thought as a background and a foil. I have omitted eclectic schools and the later versions of Aristotelianism. A more problematic omission is that of the Cynics, practioners of a quasi-philosophical form of life that challenged public conventions of propriety as well as intellectual conventions of appropriate argument. The Cynics are certainly important in some way in the history of the idea of philosophical therapy; and the reader of Diogenes Laertius' life of Diogenes the Cynic will find them fascinating figures. On the other hand, there is, I believe, far too little known about them and their influence, and even about whether they offered arguments at all, for a focus on them to be anything but a scholarly quagmire in a book of this type. With some regret, then, I leave them at the periphery.

In the case of each school, I have tried to give some idea of its Greek origins, as well as its Roman continuations. Thus I try to reconstruct the Epicurean practice of therapeutic argument, and to examine Epicurus' own attitudes to fear, love, and anger, before dwelling on the analogous aspects of Lucretius' poem and its therapeutic design. And I attempt to reconstruct Chrysippus' own theory of the passions (concerning which, fortunately, we have an unusually large amount of information) before examining its development in Seneca's therapy of anger and its ambivalent treatment in Senecan tragedy. In each case I have tried to mention at least those portions of the cultural context that seem the most relevant. Although I offer no systematic account of the history of rhetorical practices-again, an under-taking that would require another book-I do consider some portions of Aristotle's Rhetoric in detail, and I attend closely to the rhetoric of particular philosophical arguments. Where my account has gaps, I hope that there is sufficient methodological frankness that the gaps themselves will be visible, in such a way that they can be filled in by others.

At the very least, I hope to have shown-by the incompleteness of my account as much as by what it does succeed in doing-how hard and yet how exciting it is to study the history of ethics in this period, when one understands it not simply as the history of arguments, but also as the history of practices of argumentation and psychological interaction aimed at personal and societal change.

Writing this book has also posed some delicate philosophical problems, which it is best to mention at the start. I undertook this project to get a better understanding of an aspect of Hellenistic philosophy that I enthusiastically endorse-its practical commitment, its combination of logic with compassion. This commitment is to some extent bound up with a more problematic aspect of Hellenistic thought, namely, its advocacy of various types of detachment and freedom from disturbance. The two commitments seem to me to be, in principle, independent of one another; and to some extent this is so also in practice. But it is also plain that one cannot go far in understanding these accounts of philosophical therapy without grappling with the normative arguments for detachment.

When one does grapple with them one finds, I think, three things. First, one finds that to a certain extent the radical social criticism of the Hellenistic philosophers does indeed require them to mistrust the passions: not, that is, to take passion-based intuitions as an ethical bedrock, immune from rational criticism. If passions are formed (at least in part) out of beliefs or judgments, and if socially taught beliefs are frequently unreliable, then passions need to be scrutinized in just the way in which other socially taught beliefs are scrutinized. But this seems to be a wise policy from the point of view of any philosophical view (including Aristotle's) that holds that some ethical beliefs and preferences are more reliable than others.

Second, it becomes clear that at least some of the arguments that Epicureans and Stoics give for radically cutting back the passions are powerful arguments, even to someone who is antecedently convinced of their worth. In particular, their arguments against anger, and their further arguments connecting passions such as love and grief with the possibility of destructive anger, seem unavoidably strong. It is relatively easy to accept the conclusion that in living a life with deep attachments one runs a risk of loss and suffering. But according to Hellenistic arguments that risk is also a risk of evil: at the very least, of corruption of the inner world by the desire to harm. Confronting these arguments should occasion anxiety for any defender of the emotions. This book investigates that anxiety.

Finally, however, one finds in at least some of the Hellenistic texts themselves-especially in Lucretius and Seneca-a greater ambivalence than is at first apparent about the emotions and the attachments that are their basis. Epicurus' commitment to invulnerability is qualified already by the central role he gives friendship. In Lucretius, commitments to the world extend more widely, including, it seems, not only friendship but also the love of spouse and children and city or country. This leads to a complex position, where love, fear, and even anger are concerned. The position of Stoicism is apparently simpler. But Seneca qualifies his anti-passion view in some ways even in his dialogues and letters; and in his tragedies, I believe, one sees a deeper ambivalence, as Stoicism confronts traditional Roman norms of worldly effort and daring. These complexities should be recognized in any critique of Hellenistic norms of self-sufficiency.

Further difficulties are raised by the role of politics in Hellenistic thought. The major Hellenistic schools are all highly critical of society as they find it; and all are concerned to bring the necessary conditions of the good human life to those whom society has caused to suffer. They are, moreover, far more inclusive and less elitist in their practice of philosophy than was Aristotle, far more concerned to show that their strategies can offer some-thing to each and every human being, regardless of class or status or gender. On the other hand, the way they do this has little to do, on the whole, with political, institutional, or material change. Instead of arranging to bring the good things of this world to each and every human being, they focus on changes of belief and desire that make their pupil less dependent on the good things of this world. They do not so much show ways of removing injustice as teach the pupil to be indifferent to the injustice she suffers.

Aristotelianism sets exacting worldly conditions for the good life, making virtuous activity dependent in many ways upon material and educational conditions that are beyond the individual's control. But Aristotle then assigns to politics the task of bringing those conditions to people: the good political arrangement is the one "in accordance with which each and every one might do well and lead a flourishing life" (Pol. 1324a23-25). Don't the Hellenistic schools, by contrast, promote what is claimed to be well-being by simply lowering people's sights, denying that material conditions have importance, and renouncing the political work that might effect a broader distribution of these conditions? Epicurus urged a complete withdrawal from the life of the city, Skeptics an uncritical obedience to forces of existing convention. Even among the Stoics, whose commitment to the intrinsic value of justice is plain, we hear less about how to alter the political fact of slavery than about how to be truly free within, even though one may be (politically) a slave; less about strategies for the removal of hunger and thirst than about the unimportance of these bodily goods in a wise life; less about how to modify existing class structures and the economic relations that (as Aristotle argued) explain them, than about the wise person's indifference to such worldly distinctions. In all three schools, the truly good and virtuous person is held to be radically independent of material and economic factors: achieving one's full humanity requires only inner change. But isn't this in fact false? Isn't the inner world itself at least in part a function of social and material conditions? And doesn't the failure to consider this diminish the interest of Hellenistic arguments for contemporary thought? (Consider, in this connection, Marx's shift of allegiance from Epicurus, the topic of his doctoral dissertation, to Aristotle, the classical mentor of his mature work, once the importance of class analysis and of the material conditions of human flourishing became plain to him.)

I shall conclude that this criticism has some merit. But the simple contrast I have just drawn, between material/institutional change and inner change of belief and desire, is too crude to tell the whole story about the relationship between Aristotle and his Hellenistic successors. For in fact both Aristotle and the Hellenistic thinkers insist that human flourishing cannot be achieved unless desire and thought, as they are usually constructed within society, are considerably transformed. (Both hold, for ex-ample, that most people learn to value money and status far too highly, and that this corrupts both personal and social relations.) Nor does the more insistent and elaborate attention to such inner changes in the Hellenistic schools seem inappropriate, given their powerful diagnosis of the depth of the problems. Any viable political approach-now as then-must also be concerned, as they are, with the criticism, and the shaping, of evaluative thought and preferences.

Furthermore, the Hellenistic focus on the inner world does not exclude, but in fact leads directly to, a focus on the ills of society. One of the most impressive achievements of Hellenistic philosophy is to have shown compellingly and in detail how specific social conditions shape emotion, desire, and thought. Having shown this, and having argued that desire and thought, as they are currently constructed, are deformed, these philosophers naturally concern themselves with the social structures through which these elements have been shaped, and with their reformation. Above all-like Aristotle, but with more detailed arguments-they are preoccupied with education. Their philosophical therapies both describe and model a new approach to the design of educational practices; and in their representation of the relation between teacher and pupil, they represent, as well, an ideal of community. Here, at least, they appear to achieve an egalitarian result that would have been unachievable in the world around them.

In other respects as well, they reshape social institutions that seem to them to impede human flourishing. Epicurus and Lucretius conduct a radical assault on conventional religion; Lucretius reconstructs social practices in the areas of love, marriage, and child-rearing. Since their arguments claim to be not only correct but also causally effective, they claim to contribute to the revolution they describe. In the Greek Stoics we find ideal political theory that attempts to eliminate differences of gender and class, and even to do away with the moral salience of local and national bound-aries. In the Roman Stoics-along with several different types of political theory, both monarchical and republican (the latter very influential in practice, both at Rome itself and in much later republican revolutions)-we find arguments that confront entrenched political realities with bold criticisms, on the topics of slavery, gender relations, ethnic toleration, the concept of citizenship itself. The idea of universal respect for the dignity of humanity in each and every person, regardless of class, gender, race, and nation-an idea that has ever since been at the heart of all distinguished political thought in the Western tradition-is, in origin, a Stoic idea. The relationship of this idea to Stoic detachment needs close scrutiny. But in the meantime, we can say that to study the inner world and its relationship to social conditions is at least a necessary, if not a sufficient, task for a political philosophy that aims to be practical. Hellenistic philosophy gives us distinguished help with that task.


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Chapter 13: The Therapy of Desire

To say more than human things with human voice,
That cannot be; to say human things with more
Than human voice, that, also, cannot be;
To speak humanly from the height or from the depth
Of human things, that is acutest speech.
Wallace Stevens, "Chocorua to Its Neighbor"
So PHILOSOPHY, in these schools, makes itself the doctor of human lives. What should we make of their achievements? A comprehensive philosophical appraisal would require nothing less than answering the fundamental questions of human life. We would need to get clear about what the death of a human being is, and whether it is ever right to fear it; about what forms of attachment to undependable external things a human life needs in order to be complete, and whether one can have these without debilitating uncertainty; about how much uncertainty and need a person can endure, while retaining integrity and practical reason; about whether it is good to love at all, given the pain that love can inflict; about whether virtue itself needs love, and whether, if it does not, it is still sufficient for a complete life; about whether society should be based on love, need, and compassion, or on respect for the dignity of reason; about whether, in order to avoid slavishness, we must allow ourselves angers that can corrode the heart, alienating us from our enemy's humanity and our own. Much of the distinction of Hellenistic ethics lies in the complexity of its description of these problems, and in the fertility of the questions it thus continues to provoke.

It is likely that there will remain deep division-among human beings and, perhaps, within each human being-over these questions. For vulnerability is indeed painful, and the life of passionate attachment to externals a perilous and, at times, a harmful, unjust life. On the other hand, it is difficult to dismiss the thought that these attachments contribute something without which life-and perhaps even virtue itself-is not complete. I am not sure that it is philosophically good to believe that one has an exhaustive once-and-for-all solution to these problems. If one can lucidly describe their difficulty and one's own perplexity before them, criticizing inadequate accounts and making a little progress beyond what was said in the more adequate, this may stand, perhaps, as a Socratic substitute for arrogant certainty. And that sort of philosophical work should be a good preparation for the complex particular confrontations of life-not in the spirit of skeptical equipoise and indifference, but in that of the Socratic search for truth and excellence-which retains awareness too, however, of the limitations of human wisdom concerning matters so mysterious and many-sided. I (Here I side methodologically neither with the Skeptics nor with the more confidently dogmatic of the Epicureans and Stoics, but with the open-endedness of the Socratic elenchos and of Aristotelian dialectic; but this approach is paralleled, I think, in the most complex and Socratically humble of Stoic ethical writings, and in the more dialectical portions of Lucretius.) This Socratic inquiry has been carried on throughout the book, and it would be false to my purpose (as well as beyond my abilities) to offer, here, a sudden answer to all difficulties. Instead, I want to conclude with some unsystematic reflections about several themes that link the book's various chapters and sections.


METHODOLOGICAL ACHIEVEMENT OF THERAPEUTIC ARGUMENTS


I have argued that a conception of philosophy's task as medical, dedicated to the relief of human suffering, leads to a new conception of philosophical method and procedure; that choices of method and procedure are not, as some might suppose, content-neutral, but closely bound up with a diagnosis of human difficulties and an intuitive conception of human flourishing. I have tried to show that in each case the procedures embody complex conceptions of disease and health-and, as well, of friendship and the structure of community. On the other hand, I have tried to show that this fact does not make the entire enterprise question-begging: for the different elements in the conception support and reinforce one another, in such a way that justification, while holistic, is not therefore just a joke. But what, more specifically, do I take the methodological achievements of the schools to have been, both to their own historical context and to our own concerns about how moral philosophy should work?

1. First and centrally, one must, I think, point to the new attention to questions of need and motivation that we see in the schools' attempts to grapple medically with concrete human lives. Ancient Greek and Roman philosophy tends to be more sensitive to these questions than contemporary moral philosophy in any case; for asking how to live is never, in the Greek traditions, a merely academic exercise, nor philosophy a merely academic subject. It is prompted by real human perplexities, and it must address these in the end. But the Hellenistic schools move well beyond Aristotle, and even beyond Socrates and Plato, in their fine-tuned attention to the interlocutor's concrete needs and motives for philosophizing. They design their procedures so as to engage those deepest motivations and speak to those needs. The different schools do this in different ways, with rather different conceptions of the diseases that lead the pupil to seek the philosophical doctor. Yet from all of these attempts contemporary moral philosophy has much to learn, if it wishes to move beyond the academy to take its place in the daily lives of human beings.

2. Closely connected with this, and a major source of the excellence of these philosophical works, is their careful attention to the techniques of philosophical speech and writing.[2] Rigor and precision, they feel, are, while necessary, not sufficient, if philosophy is to communicate to more than a narrow elite. For rigor and precision couched in dry or fussy or jargon-laden academic language will not engage the pupil in the search for truth, will not penetrate deeply enough into her thought about what matters in life to draw from her an acknowledgment of what she really thinks and what is troubling her. Literary and rhetorical strategies enter into the methods at a very deep level, not just decorating the arguments, but shaping the whole sense of what a therapeutic argument is, and expressing, in their stylistic concreteness, respect for the pupil's need. In the course of writing this book I have become more and more concerned with this aspect of Hellenistic procedure; and this has, of necessity, led me more and more to Rome rather than to Greece, since there are whole literary works to be examined. In chapters 5 through 7, 1 1 , and 12, especially, I have found in Lucretius and in Seneca remarkable models of philosophical-literary investigation, in which literary language and complex dialogical structures engage the interlocutor's (and the reader's) entire soul in a way that an abstract and impersonal prose treatise probably could not.

In attending closely to the pupil's needs, these writers are the heirs of Socrates' oral practice.3 And in chapter 4 I brought forward evidence that the oral practice of argument in the Epicurean tradition, at least, had enormous rhetorical complexity and particularity. But, unlike Socrates and like Plato, Lucretius and Seneca have to grapple with the fact that their audience is diverse and at a distance. This they do by the creation of an internal surrogate for the reader, and by the use of language well designed to engage the imagination of the sort of reader they address. Form and content are not just incidentally linked, as they are so frequently in philo-sophical writing today. Form is a crucial element in the work's philosophical content. Sometimes, indeed (as with the Medea), the content of the form proves so powerful that it calls into question the allegedly simpler teaching contained within it. More frequently, the relationship is simpler and more harmonious.

Historians of philosophy, who have usually turned to Lucretius and Seneca as the source for arguments that they can use to reconstruct the Greek Epicurean and Stoic positions, should recognize that they cannot without violence to the overall philosophical enterprise-indeed, without missing some of what is actually being argued-remove the " arguments" from the entire context of their expression. Classical literary scholars, who frequently attend to the literary form of these works without bothering much with the philosophical arguments, should recognize that the form is not separable from the philosophy and can be fully understood only as philosophical expression. There is a lot more work to be done along these lines, on writers as diverse as Lucretius and Cicero, Seneca and Plutarch. 4 And from all of this, contemporary moral philosophy, whose formal choices are now frequently dictated by academic convention-by the policies of established journals, for example) rather than by human need, has a great deal to learn.

3. In all of their procedures, the Hellenistic moral philosophers develop further Aristotle's interest in particular perception as an ingredient in good choice. The way in which they do this diverges to some extent from Aristotle, as chapter 4 argued: for on the whole particularity takes center stage when the doctor is seeking to treat a patient's disease, not when she is articulating the norm of health itself. On the other hand, it is in the particular that the norm must, if at all, be realized; and all the schools recognize this. For the Stoics, furthermore, it is the particular circumstances in which an action is chosen that give it its moral status. And the medical therapeutic attention of the teacher I doctor is to be applied by each person to herself in the struggle to examine one's motives and to live well each day. Thus for the Stoics as for Aristotle, particular perception is an essential moral ability, crucial in any reasonable enactment of a general conception, and of moral worth in its own right.5 Here is one more way in which the conception of moral inquiry as therapeutic leads the Hellenistic schools to a rich exploration of an element in ethics that contemporary moral theory has less often made central.

Further work on Stoic ethics would also offer valuable guidance concerning the relationship between particularism and relativism, showing clearly that an ethics that' values the keen perception of particular contexts and holds this to be criteria! of good choice need not in any sense be relativistic-any more than good doctoring need have a situation-relative idea of health. As I argued in chapter 1 and subsequent chapters, the norm of health itself must respond to something in real human beings, and in particular to some of their deepest needs and desires, or it will not be a norm of health. But this in no way entails subjectivism or even relativism-for all these schools argue powerfully that human beings at some level have similar deep needs and similar underlying goals of flourishing. Those goals must be realized in a way that suits each context and each history, each particular set of impediments to flourishing. But they are still, in their most general form, universal human goals.

Central among the methodological achievements of Stoicism and Epicureanism is their recognition that existing desires, intuitions, and preferences are socially formed and far from totally reliable. This is connected, of course, with one of their greatest substantive achievements, their powerful analyses of desire and emotion. And it is one example of the manner in which content and procedure are fruitfully and not question-beggingly related. Modern moral philosophy, on the whole, has tended to treat existing preferences and intuitions as a reliable basis for argument. This is true explicitly and methodologically of the simpler (especially the economic) forms of Utilitarianism; more complex philosophical Utilitarians, who insist on some correction of preferences at the heart of their theory, do not always worry about this in their practice of arguing with their readers. 6 It is true as well, in both theory and practice, of some contemporary moral philosophers who think of themselves as heirs of the ancient Greek virtue-centered traditions. 7 For they believe that the advice of these traditions is to trust to the intuitions and emotions; and i n a sense they are (so far as Aristotle is concerned) correct. But they, to some extent, neglect the subtle insights of Aristotle himself concerning the deformation of preferences and desires in existing societies; and they certainly neglect the radical challenge of the Hellenistic schools. Nothing is trickier than to balance the recognition that preferences are unreliable against the wish for the interlocutor to be an active self­governing participant in the process of argument. It is easy enough to bypass the pupil's preferences if one simply discards the whole idea of arguing and brainwashes the pupil instead, or induces, through non­argumentative means, some sort of "conversion" experience. Such procedures have more in common with religious and political manipulation than they do with philosophy; to the extent that the Hellenistic schools turn to them, they risk ceasing to be philosophical. I shall say more about this shortly. On the other hand, the best of the arguments I have considered here do show a recognition that the work of criticism must be undertaken from within the pupils own beliefs and desires, and by a process of rational critical argument. If techniques of a more manipulati've sort are used, their results can generally be validated by appeal to cogent arguments, impressive for the way in which they bring the allegedly unreliable preferences of the pupil into conflict with other things she believes and wants, clarifying for her the nature of her alternatives. Lucretius on anger and love and fear,

Seneca on love and anger-these are arguments that radically challenge what most people will say if asked to state their current intuitions. Yet their conclusions are reached by argument, and by argument that slices deeply into the pupil, drawing up hidden and deeper beliefs. This issue has complicated my own task in writing the arguments of this book. And I have more than once been aware that my conclusions, especially where critical of Hellenistic therapies, might be accused of being biased by my own culturally formed (or deformed) preferences, preferences that I expect many of my readers to share, but which are not validated simply by their ubiquity. It is difficult to be confident that one has probed deeply enough into oneself, or looked critically enough at one's society, to satisfy the demands of Hellenistic therapy. Where I have been able to discover a tension or inconsistency in the Hellenistic view itself-as with Lucretius on fear and Seneca on anger-this gives me some confidence that the intuitions I bring forward in criticism are deep and worthy of respect. The only way to proceed here, I think, is to put oneself on the line with as much sincerity and accuracy as possible, showing what one takes to be truly deep and pertinent; and I shall be content if the reader judges (there and elsewhere) that I have done this.

5. Finally, the Hellenistic schools are the first in philosophy's history in the West to recognize the existence of unconscious motivations and beliefs. This innovation-again both substantive and methodological-leads, as I have argued, to a radical change in the methods of Aristotelian dialectic. Methods must now be designed to draw these unconscious views to the surface for inspection and, as well, to ensure that the true beliefs get lodged at a deep enough level that they can, in Epicurus' words, "become capable" in the soul. This means that philosophy cannot be conducted simply in an academic fashion, occupying only a small part of one's life. It requires long and patient effort, a careful attention to each day and each part of each day, and, too, the support of philosophical community and philosophical friendship.

Epicureans place the emphasis, here, on the role of the wise teacher, who demands the pupil's trust and "confession," and sometimes uses techniques (such as memorization and repetition) that do not require the pupil's own critical activity. Skeptics go much further, engineering the methods of philosophy to cut away the pupil's active cognitive contribution, leaving her more and more in the grip of motivating forces that do not involve belief. s Of all the schools it is the Stoics, I think, who most effectively combine recognition of depth in the soul with respect for the pupil's active practical reasoning, producing a picture of philosophical friendship that combines intimacy with symmetry and reciprocity, a picture of self-scrutiny that supplements, and does not displace, dialectical philosophical procedures. (Lucretius seems to capture this combination in many of his arguments, both forming that sort of friendship with the reader and making friendship an end in itself; he may to this extent diverge from the authoritarianism of what seems to have been the common Epicurean procedure.)

As for the arguments in favor of recognizing the unconscious, these are not above criticism-no such argument could be-but in the case of Lucretius on fear they are extremely impressive. The central problem here is that the arguments are relatively local and unsystematic, not linked to any clear developmental theory of infancy. The Hellenistic thinkers are in some ways the parents of modern psychoanalysis, but they have not done the empirical work with actual children that would make such a practice well grounded in a developmental way.9 There is rich material in Lucretius, I think, for a theory of infant emotional development and the ensuing repression of anxiety. Such an account, if fully developed would stand comparison with the best of psychoanalytical theories. In some respects it would be on stronger ground than mainstream Freudian theory, since it would start from the very general and certainly (in some form) universal experience of need and the lack of self-sufficiency, rather than from the problematic and rather narrow notion of infantile sexuality. The work of Melanie Klein and the object relations school develops some of these insights. [10]

6. We now must confront some of the potentially more problematic methodological consequences of using therapy as a norm. First of all, I have been troubled throughout by the possibility that the schools, in their passion for health, might subordinate truth and good reasoning to therapeutic efficacy. I argued that it was not unreasonable to define ethical truth (to some extent at least) in terms of the deepest needs and desires of human beings. All ethical theories make the connection between truth and desire somehow. In the case of an extreme form of Platonism, the link is contingent, through recollection. But in the case of Aristotle's theory, an ethical proposal will be rejected as false if it is too far out of line with the deepest wishes and desires of the participants in the inquiry. I argued that it is still appropriate to speak of truth here-in part because of the insistence of such a theory on broad consistency and fit, in part because the demand for consistency will also constrain the ethical theory from without, as it fits itself to results in psychology and physics. The Stoic theory clearly meets these constraints, and it seems perfectly appropriate for it to claim truth. In fact, as I argued in chapters 9 and 10, the Stoic theory is in a sense less anthropocentric and more externally realist than the Aristotelian theory, since human desires are good guides just in case they are the ones that harmonize with the rational order of the universe. (However, for those who cannot accept Stoic teleology, the Stoics, I argued, also offer independent arguments for the extirpation of passion that are good dialectical arguments in the Aristotelian sense-see point 7 in this section.) We may add that the Stoics, unlike the other schools, make practical reasoning a major intrinsic value; in no way do they subordinate it to the good of apatheia.

At the other end of the spectrum, the Skeptics clearly do jettison truth, and even good reasoning, on the way to ataraxia. They cheerfully admit, even insist, that they do this; so to point this out is not a knockdown criticism of their practice. The criticism in chapter 8 came from a comprehensive look at what a life without truth and norms of good reasoning is really like. I argued that it is an impoverished life.

The case of the Epicureans is, on this point, the subtlest, the most difficult to describe correctly. For on the one hand the Epicureans do offer powerful and compelling arguments in favor of their positions. The quality of the arguments is important to them, and the arguments do construct a comprehensive view of the universe, or at least of all those aspects of it that bear on any question pertaining to our ataraxia. On the other hand, it appears that this reasoning is given a purely instrumental value, albeit a very high instrumental value. And scientific inquiry here, by contrast to Aristotle's school, is pursued only for the sake of an ethical end. It is not altogether clear, then, that physics can offer ethics the independent support that seems important if we are to think of ethical truth as a (partly) desire-independent notion. The broad coherence and fit of Epicurean ethics and physics may themselves suffice to give the view a claim to truth, especially when we add to this the (alleged) correspondence of the view to the deepest of human needs and desires. But the instrumentality of reason remains a troubling element in the Epicurean procedure, compounded by the procedure's failure to consider the opinions of the "many and the wise" in Aristotelian dialectical fashion. Ataraxia is somewhat dogmatically put forward as an end; and this end is then used to shape other arguments, and even to determine which judgments and arguments will be considered. (Some of Lucretius' arguments fared better in this regard.)

7. This leads directly to my second area of concern: the tension between critical autonomy and causal manipulation in the treatment of the pupil. The schools want the pupil to achieve eudaimonia, and all of them (even the Skeptics, or so I argue) operate with some definite conception of what this end is. They all, as well, view existing society as diseased in its beliefs and preferences, and the pupil as infected with those diseases. This naturally leads to a desire to intervene in the pupil's rational thought processes, to cut beneath what society has imparted in order to get at the sounder judgments that are, they hold, buried beneath this material in the soul. (Or, in the case of the Skeptics, to knock out all the belief-material, leaving nothing in its place.) Aristotle solves the problem of the pupil's autonomy by beginning with pupils who have already had a good moral education (which relies on habituation and other forms of non-philosophical, though certainly not non-intellectual, teaching). With such a pupil he can safely use open-ended dialectical strategies, since he can rely on their producing-in interaction with those relatively healthy preferences-an ethically reliable result. The Hellenistic schools cannot do this: and all, to a greater or lesser extent, restrict the pupil's free consideration of alternatives, manipulating the outcome.

Here, once again, the Skeptics produce by far the most disturbing result, since they quite frankly apply their arguments to the pupil as behavior-manipulating devices, not as arguments to be critically assessed. The strength of the argument, indeed, is calibrated precisely to meet the strength of the pupil's disease. The pupil is discouraged from playing any active or critical role, and becomes, increasingly, a passive recipient of forces. The teacher is like this too, so authoritarianism is not the problem. The problem is, in effect, the complete disappearance of subjecthood and agency. This may bring nothing but joy to the Skeptic; I have argued that it it is, however, a bad result for social and personal life.

The Epicurean community has, as well, some disturbing aspects. The pupil is encouraged to mistrust herself and to rely on the wisdom of the teacher, the saving power of the Epicurean doctrine. Separated from the city and its cognitive influence, subjected to a daily regimen of memorization, repetition, and confession, denied the evenhanded consideration of alternative views, the pupil does not have very much autonomy. Nor is autonomy recognized as a valued end by the Epicurean doctrine. It is striking that in Roman Epicureanism things seem to be subtly different. Arguing with Romans who are deeply attached to their own integrity, who live, moreover, at Rome with other Romans, Lucretius moves his interlocutor gradually to a position of greater autonomy and maturity. His attitude to opposing views is still contemptuous and shrill, far from dialectical. But he asks the pupil to take on himself the job of arguing and assessing. For this pupil will not live in a tranquil Epicurean community, celebrating the hero-feast of Epicurus and relying on the support of Epicurean friendship. He must go home to his family and friends, and play his role as a political and military man in a world in which most people he meets will be non-Epicureans. Lucretius does not leave him unprepared.

The Stoics, I think, solve these problems in the most attractive way. For, first of all, they recognize that they will not always be dealing with pliant Stoic or pre-Stoic pupils. Thus, though they are happy to expound their system and to show how it coheres as a whole, they are also eager to offer arguments to interlocutors who are not Stoics-as Seneca, for example, so frequently does. This entails arguing seriously and dialectically against Peripatetic and Epicurean positions. Moreover, since they hold that active practical reasoning is intrinsically valuable, they encourage the pupil not to defer to anyone's authority (neither teacher nor book), but to take charge of her own life. And this means, in effect, doing away with the asymmetry between teacher and pupil that is suggested by the medical model, as the teacher goads and assists, but leaves the conclusions to emerge from the pupil's own thought. Entrenched social beliefs still need to be subverted: and the teacher is ready to offer the pupil some very powerful arguments and some vivid rhetoric to that end. But he is not an authority: the reason of the pupil is the only true authority. This means that self-criticism and self-recognition take the place of Epicurean "confession" as the central critical and diagnostic activity. Here the Stoics follow very effectively the example of Socrates, who with his ironic distance from the pupil and his stinging challenge to unexamined belief places the pupil's autonomy ahead of her comfort, and even her adherence to the correct view. [11]

I suggested in discussing Epicurus that the open-endedness of Aristotelian dialectic stood in contrast to the dogmatism of Hellenistic "medical" thought, and that no thoroughly medical conception could have Aristotle's flexible capacity for self-scrutiny and self-revision. The Stoics call this into question. For while their method is, to be sure, not officially dialectical and in fact quite dogmatic, they are so deeply committed to the integrity of practical reason that they deny the pupil the shelter that dogmatic authority would afford. Nothing is reliable, except (insofar as one is rational) oneself. Thus it is not surprising that out of that procedural commitment we get the examples of self-questioning and apparent revision of Stoicism that we have found in chapters 11 and 12; no surprise that in Seneca we find not the inflexible announcement of a creed, but a resourceful and deeply personal grappling with ongoing problems.
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Re: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Nussbaum)

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TENSIONS IN THE MEDICAL MODEL


The medical model yields a rich portrait of the philosopher-sympathetically concerned and yet free from disturbing gusts of emotion, expert in skill and yet close to each suffering patient. In this portrait there arise two tensions that we must now confront. First is the apparent tension between compassion and freedom from disturbance. The medical philosopher is apparently led to philosophy by the urgency of human need, and is depicted as moved by some sort of compassionate response to that need. And yet for none of the schools is compassion (pity)[12] an appropriate motivation; for all insist that the wise person is free from all (or, in the Epicurean case, most) emotions. How, then, can they explain the doctor's choice to be a soul-doctor-presumably not the easiest and least upsetting course a person could follow?

The Skeptics here are, if implausible, still consistent-for they insist that the teacher has no emotional motivation, only the habit of following a trade and whatever perceptions and feelings are left when all belief is removed. This does not yield a very rich account of the alleged philanthropia of the teacher, nor explain very well why someone would go in for teaching others in the first place, rather than just using his trade to cure himself. But perhaps the Skeptic became a teacher before being a full-fledged Skeptic-and kept at it even when belief dropped away. Or maybe he makes his living that way. Here as elsewhere, these are hardly motives to rely on, in constructing a society. But the Skeptic is not in the business of being reliable.

The Epicureans face a very complex tension, which is a version, really, of the tension in their whole position on questions of friendship and love. Unlike the other schools, they do not repudiate all emotion, so they can and do permit some compassion (cf. chapter 7) ; and their view of the human goal, which allows them to believe that in general pain and disturbance are bad, gives a basis for compassion, when another's pain is encountered. On the other hand, the end for each person is supposed to be his or her own ataraxia and aponia, and, as we saw, the good of others comes into it above all instrumentally, though possibly also via the intrinsic worth of certain sorts of interaction with friends (cf. chapter 7). This does not seem sufficient to explain why Epicurus runs his school, and leaves a will providing for its future; why Diogenes of Oenoanda erects an elaborate inscription aimed at strangers and people of the future; why Lucretius wishes to leave behind for others a work on which he has expended much labor. Even if all altruism to the living could be explained as based upon the (largely, but not entirely) instrumental principles of Epicurean friendship, that will not ex-plain any sort of concern for strangers and people of the future. And yet Epicureans clearly have this concern, and rely on it for the genesis of their work.

The Stoics have, here, the problem they have with all altruism: they have to explain why the good of others matters to someone who has eliminated all the attachments on which the emotions are based. And they have a further problem as well: they must explain why, if virtue is self-sufficient, needing nothing from without in order to realize and maintain itself, virtuous people will judge that other people need their help. These problems they handle by their complex account of the preferred indifferents (see chapter 1 0), which may or may not be sufficient to explain the actions in question. (Certainly it denies the philosopher all motives based on pity or compassion; I think this is a considerable loss here, as also in the case of material goods and their distribution.) In addition, they hold that philosophical activity is of intrinsic worth-so the person who philosophizes hardly needs a justification for doing so (though that by itself does not explain why it is done to and for others). Above all, however, they rely, here, on the self-activiting work of each pupil, thinking of doctoring as, above all, self-doctoring, of argument as scrutiny of oneself. The question is whether all these answers, put together, are really sufficient to explain the sort of altruism to which the interlocutors of Stoic arguments (especially at Rome) are profoundly attached. And it is not surprising that here, as in Epicureanism, we should find cases of philosophical involvement with the world that go beyond what the official position allows-as when Seneca curses the slavish parent, as in the passionate attachment with his pupil's good that Seneca more than once seems to reveal, as in the ambiguities within the Medea's portrait of eros.

A second tension in the medical analogy is harder to describe; it played a major role in chapter [11]. On the one hand, the conception of the philosopher as doctor creates a strong asymmetry of expertise and places the pupil far from the teacher. This leads, in the case of some of the Greek Stoics and Epicureans, to a rather severe posture, in which the doctor watches and judges the pupil with keen perception, but without fellow feeling. On the other hand, the particularism inherent in the medical model leads, on its side, to an interest in understanding the patient's whole history. And this narrative emphasis leads, in Seneca, to a turning away from harshness, to empathetic fellow feeling, and to mercy. The two approaches are in principle consistent, since expert perception can be particularistic; but in practice they lead to different attitudes and to different philosophical techniques. The emphasis on expertise leads to hard dogmatism; the emphasis on narrative leads to flexible judgment that diverges from fixed rules, or at least turns aside from the punishments they recommend. Much hinges here on the attitude the doctor takes up to him or herself: for the distant and judgmental stance is likely to be associated with the idea that one is far wiser than the pupil, the merciful stance, as Seneca makes explicit, with the recognition that one is oneself imperfect in ways similar to the offender.

The Skeptics do not concern themselves with the distinction between moral judgment and mercy, preferring the limitless flexibility of the teacher who suspends all judgment. In Epicureanism things are more complex: to some extent the distant asymmetrical relation of moral judgment prevails (though with greater mutuality in Lucretius) ; at the same time, however, compassion for human weakness is an approved sentiment, and one that guides the teacher's practice. The Greek Stoics appear to have opted for distance and austerity of judgment. But it remained for Seneca-drawing, probably, on both Aristotelian and Roman traditions-to develop the idea of mercy, connecting it with a perception of one's own imperfection and the intractability of the " circumstances of life. " I think that this is an advance of major proportions for moral philosophy, both substantively and (as the end of chapter 12 argued) methodologically.


NATURE AND FINITUDE


Each of the schools claims to give the pupil a life according to nature. All make claims about nature, deriving them from some sort of scrutiny of the human being, its needs and capabilities. In all, the notion of nature is normative rather than simply descriptive, a notion of unimpeded flourishing connected with the removal of certain obstacles imposed by (usually social) diseases. And in all cases the claim to give us a life according to nature is connected with an idea of recognizing our finitude as mortal beings, giving up socially induced longings that take us beyond those limits. On the other hand, in all three schools as well there is a claim to give us a godlike life-usually in connection with the claim to remove disturbances that most vex a mortal life. Here we see, in each case, a tension or series of tensions between the repudiation of transcendence and the attempt to achieve another sort of transcendence. How does each of the schools deal with this issue?

The Skeptics have, among the three, the most reductive idea of nature-one that really does confine the "naturally" human to the level of animal impulse plus habit, as the pupil is urged "to divest" herself utterly " of the human being. " And it is this very life that they also defend, somewhat rhetorically, as blessed and godlike-for it is that life, they argue, that exemplifies the blessed end of ataraxia. In the Greek tradition, the beast and the god lie close to one another in certain ways (cf. chapter 7) : for neither has ethical and other-related concerns, neither has the virtues. The Skeptic's divinity is of this negative and quasi-bestial sort, the freedom from disturbance that comes from having no cares and no commitments. Their "nature" is still a normative idea of freedom from impediment; the impediments are, as in the other schools, traced to that which society and teaching impose. But in their zeal to remove these impediments, and through their relentless assault on normative commitment itself, they take away what has seemed to all other Greek philosophers-and to most ordinary people-to be, in normative terms, an essential part of our human flourishing.

In Epicureanism the tension between "nature" and divinity is far more complex. For the gods are exemplars of invulnerability and self-sufficiency, and they serve explicitly as norms for the pupil. On the other hand, as we have seen, much of the detailed and excellent philosophical work of the arguments consists in leading the pupil to understand herself, in a way free from conventional religious longing, as a finite mortal being. The rich normative conception of nature includes an idea of accepting one's membership in a world of finite living things. And it also appears to include friendship as an item of intrinsic value-at least in Lucretius and possibly in Epicurus as well, making the flourishing person ungodlike in her need for others. In Lucretius' treatment of anger, community and friendship, and in much of his account of love, that finitist idea predominated, as Lucretius offered the pupil a human way of inhabiting both love and risk, "yielding to human life," forgoing the longing for divine life, for perfect safety. These results may not be fully consistent with the official Epicurean demand for ataraxia as goal; and yet Lucretius does not in these cases pursue that goal at the expense of the mortal goods his argument has identified. (He does not, for example, like Epicurus, counsel the philosopher against marriage and children, nor does he urge the avoidance of political life, with its possibilities for anger.) In the arguments against death, however, and in the love arguments' refusal of any erotic connection that is more passionate than a sexualized friendship, we see the tension between mortal and divine, safe and vulnerable, arise within Lucretius' position itself. I have on the whole preferred the finitist strain in his argument, and I think the Epicurean can have a consistent anti-transcendence position by focusing on this strand-but only by weakening, as Lucretius appears to, the commitment to perfect ataraxia.

The Stoics have, among the three, the richest normative conception of nature, one that permits the life according to nature to include practical reasoning as an intrinsic good, and even reasoning about the rational order of the universe. Thus there seems to be no tension in their position between the aspiration to live in accordance with nature and the aspiration to live in a godlike manner. Our nature is a godlike nature: for what is most godlike is to seek comprehensive understanding. Thus through reason we both fulfill ourselves and join Zeus.

On the other hand, this rather one-sided picture of nature, with its obsessive focus on the intellectual, does raise some serious questions about the rest of what Aristotle (again, speaking normatively of that which is most important in human life) would have called our nature, all the part that reflects our finitude. Our mortality, our needs for one another as lovers, friends, spouses, fellow citizens, our needs for food and drink and support for our health-is our life to be "in accordance with" all this, as well as with our intellect? The Stoics give, as we have seen, a complicated answer. For they do acknowledge that such things are in most cases rightly preferred, and preferred, it would seem, on account of their role in our first "nature. " On the other hand, our commitment to them is not to be so deep as to compromise apatheia, freedom from passion-and this shallowness of commitment Aristotle would think unnatural for a being who is affectionate, finite, and " disposed to live with others. " They are not differing about matters of empirical, value-neutral fact, since for both of them the notion of nature is a normative notion. But they are differing in a fundamental way about what a human life needs in order to be complete. As in the case of Epicurus, I have preferred those Stoic works that acknowledge the pressure of the Aristotelian position, recognizing, especially, the depth of ties to others in a truly reasonable and complete life. It seems to me a major contribution of Hellenistic ethics to have urged us to think humanly, like the finite beings we are. I believe that this insight should have moved the argument, in some cases, away from apatheia and toward both eras and compassion.


IV. COMMITMENT AND ATARAXIA


We must now confront directly the central problem with which many of these chapters have grappled: how far does the attachment of these schools to various versions of freedom from pain and disturbance allow their pupils to form commitments to anything outside their own virtue? And how complete is the life that results?

The Skeptics divest their pupil of all commitments, including cognitive commitments, on the grounds that any commitment to the world, even a commitment to the fact that it is this way or that, puts the pupil at risk. (Thus they see a remarkable fact: that the philosophical pursuit of truth, praised by the Platonist tradition as the most stable and risk-free life of all, is actually not so free from danger-for it makes our good depend on the way a reality is outside ourselves, and on the ability of a finite mind to grasp that reality.) Far less does the pupil have any commitment to loved ones or country or even to her own past, her character, her tastes. These things are there, and they exert their causal force-but if they happen not to, the pupil does not go after them. This gives her a life of remarkable safety; but it impoverishes the self and makes the self untrustworthy for others.

The Epicurean seems to understand ataraxia itself in a more active way than the Skeptic-not just as the absence of disturbance, but, in positive terms, as the healthy and unimpeded functioning of all our faculties, including, probably, some uses of our cognitive faculties,13 and possibly including the interactive mutuality of friendship. This means that even the end may include certain sorts of commitment to others; but the instrumental requirements of the end import far more commitments. First there are the cognitive commitments of Epicurean philosophy, through which the pupil has a stake in the world's being a definite way, a way that might be falsified by experience. That imports an element of risk-though not great risk, the teacher will insist, since the Epicurean position is elaborated in such a way as to have a persuasive answer for every question and challenge. Second are the requirements of virtue and virtuous action-which are chosen only as means to ataraxia, but which are, apparently, binding as rules on the pupil, even when, in a particular case, virtuous action is not advantageous. 14 Here again, the pupil incurs some risk because of a commitment. And the risk may be considerable. Finally there are the commitments of friendship-instrumental above all in Epicurus, and excluding marriage, sexual love, children, and the political community. Commitments extend more broadly and deeply in Lucretius to embrace these excluded spheres, endowing them, it would seem, with more than instrumental value. In this way risk and sacrifice become likely parts of the good person's life.

The Stoics' dilemma on this point I have discussed at length-as apatheia and its cognitive basis would seem to be at odds with the sort of risk-taking loyalty and courage a Stoic hero is said to possess. Stoic friends and spouses must live i n such a way that the death o r departure of the other will not cause grief. Though pietas and reverence for duty may produce much loyal and quasi-committed action, the Stoic goes through the motions like one playing a role. He entrusts no part of his good to any other. This lack of deep love and openness may seem, to us as to Seneca's Medea, to render that life impoverished and incomplete.

So far I have focused above all on commitments to friends, loved ones, and fellow citizens, where the Hellenistic positions are deeply controversial. But in another area these schools make a major contribution. The societies they encountered are dominated by the competition for wealth, power, and luxuries. People feel committed to the pursuit of these goods, as if they had some sort of intrinsic value. And this leads, as all three schools document in their own way, to antagonisms and frenetic striving, to acts of cruelty, to the rupturing of ties that bind families, cities, the community of human beings. The injunction to live in accordance with nature is, in large part, the injunction to drop the frenzied pursuit of these pseudo-goals, and to reform one's desires and preferences in the light of the recognition that they are at best highly limited tools of human functioning. With probing arguments Epicureans and Stoics both show that the pupil's deepest and most consistent conception of human flourishing makes these items mere instruments, without intrinsic value. And by their analysis of connections between these false ends and socially divisive desires, they provide a further consequentialist argument in favor of their reform of preferences.

These are arguments that contemporary social life and, above all, con-temporary economic thinking, need to take to heart. For if the Hellenistic thinkers are correct, the behavior of individuals who seek to maximize wealth and other satisfactions-far from being either natural or rational-is the product of a diseased form of social teaching. (For Lucretius it is still worse-the consequence of a false and self-deceptive belief that one can defeat one's own death by accumulation.) Such behavior will not be chosen by fully informed human beings, when they have duly scrutinized the alternatives through a process of critical argument.

Nothing seems more urgent in contemporary society than the reasoned critique of limitless wealth-maximizing and power-seeking. And yet these goals are rarely approached head on by moral philosophers, especially those in capitalist countries. Economic Utilitarians officially endorse wealth-maximizing as a rational end. Other Utilitarians modify the picture in various ways, but rarely as much as the Hellenistic argument requires. Even the contemporary Kantian theory of John Rawls includes wealth and income as among the "primary goods" of which more is always better. 15 Only theories with a clear affiliation to the ancient Greek world-such as the neo-Aristotelian theory of Amartya Sen[16]-clearly state that these financial goods are only means to human functioning. The vigorous and detailed critique of the Stoics and Epicureans still needs to be heard. [17]


POLITICS


Hellenistic approaches to the therapy of human life focus on self-sufficiency. And where the pupil's needs make her dependent on a world that does not always meet those needs, they alter needs to meet the world, rather than altering the world to meet human needs. Sometimes one suspects that the account of what has intrinsic worth in human life is tailored to meet the philosopher's knowledge of what can be readily and reliably secured, so that the claim of the uncertain goods that politics distributes is not fairly acknowledged. Do these philosophers want so much to establish philosophy as the art of life, providing everything needed for eudaimonia, that they underrate the worth of political distribution? And doesn't this mean that, in their focus on the souls of individuals, they lose sight of another task that philosophy had previously performed, that of the education of legislators for just and humane public service?

This worry has been with us from the beginning; and it is indeed possible to make a stark contrast between Aristotelian and Hellenistic thought along these lines. Aristotle, who insists that certain "external goods" are necessary for eudaimonia, turns to political planning to bring the world to people; the Hellenistic thinkers, instead, make people adjust their aims to fit the uncertainties and injustices of the world. Such a contrast would, however, be far too simple. This book has not attempted a comprehensive account of Hellenistic social and political thought;18 and yet we have seen enough of the schools' views about community and self-sufficiency to begin to bring the true complexities of the picture to light.

The simple picture fits the Skeptics well: for they have no interest at all in modifying the world, and focus entirely on the project of getting the pupil to be less pained by the way things go in it. Even bodily pain they do not expect entirely to remove; so they will not consider an insufficiency of material goods incompatible with eudaimonia, so long as the pain caused by the absence of these goods is moderate. Beyond that (in a situation, say, of famine) they make no recommendation, political or philosophical, and leave it to the natural responses of the organism to cope as best it can. It is likely to cope selfishly. As for psychological pains caused by social evils such as slavery, injustice, loss of friends, their remedy is to remove the belief that these things are bad. Their pupil will thus (to use their own image) be a eunuch with respect to political change, having no desire, not even one that has to be resisted, to seek social remedies for injustice.

With the Epicureans, things are already more complicated. Epicurus himself strongly discourages active involvement in the political community, and treats justice as merely instrumental to one's own freedom from disturbance. But he is at the same time very much concerned with the body and its needs, defining all pain as bad and eudaimonia as requiring its absence. And he is also very concerned with structures of community, and the ways in which these can help human beings meet their needs. Some of these ways involve simply being distracted from the pain that is occurring; but we have reason to suppose that the Epicurean community was concerned with the bodily well-being of its members, as well as their spiritual freedom from care. The very fact that Epicurus insists on the physical nature of all reality, including the reality of the human soul, is salient: for no longer (as in Platonism) can bodily ills be dismissed as harmless because they do not affect the "real me. " The limits of his approach are, however, plain: not only in the instrumental conception of justice-well enough, perhaps, in a community of friends but less than adequate for a wider world-but also in the narrow boundaries of the world itself, its absence of concern for all but a few nearby people. The whole world cannot organize into little Epicurean communities; such communities are always parasitic upon the economic and political life of the larger world. How, then, is that world to live? Epicurus does not say.

Lucretius takes on this task, however, in his Roman context. We do not find a developed account of political distribution, or of the best political order. But we do find Epicurean arguments about our limited need for material goods, and attacks on unlimited material accumulation, explicitly used in a political context. And we find reflections about the social compact and about compassion that are of real political significance. Lucretius, furthermore, does much to show how the major ills of political life in his day have, in fact, psychological roots, in the anxiety and greed that make people seek to amass more and more property, in fierce competition with their neighbors.

Here, I think, Epicureanism, especially as developed in Lucretius, shows clearly how much a distinctively Hellenistic approach via the psychology of the individual has to offer to politics. For Lucretius sees something that has only recently been rediscovered in Western political thought: that the personal-the life of the emotions and one's own intimate associations, including erotic associations-is political, formed by society and having its fruits in society in turn. Politics is not simply, then, a matter of distributing the usual goods and offices. It involves the whole soul, its loves and fears and angers, its gender relations, its sexual desire, its attitudes to possessions, to children, to family. Epicureans see to what extent these allegedly "private" aspects of life have been warped by the traditions of an unjust and accumulative society; and they commend their personal therapy to us by asserting that individuals so warped can become good social agents in no other way.

The Stoics have, far more than the other schools, a developed political theory-or theories, since accounts of the best community vary between Greece and Rome and within Roman Stoicism itself. I have not studied those accounts here. They make it plain that the Stoics are deeply interested in the circumstances in which virtue is nurtured in the world-since virtue, if self-sufficient when once attained, still needs to be educated (even if external goods are not supposed to be strictly necessary for its formation). Furthermore, and, I think, more important, the Stoics have, like Lucretius, an elaborate account of the social/political nature of that which appears to be personal and innate-anger, the fear of death, passionate love, one's attitudes to food and money and sex. The personal self-inspection of each Stoic agent is also a profoundly political act, as chapter 1 1 has argued, a rooting out of socially formed preferences that deform interpersonal life at all levels, and a cultivation of humanitas that bears fruit (in Seneca at any rate) in a politics of gradualism and mercy.

Stoic politics is built, to a great extent, on ideas not of human incompleteness but of human dignity and self-government. This emphasis, especially when combined with Stoic universalism about the potential for virtue, puts the Stoics in a position to make a strong contribution to accounts of human rights and human freedom. 19 Their insistence on the equal humanity of slaves and women i s especially striking-even if not combined with any very robust interest in altering the political realities of slaves' and women's lives. On the other hand, their firm repudiation of pity or compassion as a political motive undoes a tradition that played in the Greek world, and can still play in ours, a major role in appeals for beneficence and for the recognition of human fellowship and equality. To respect a slave as a human being is, as Stoic texts make clear, perfectly compatible with perpetuating and endorsing the political institution of slavery. By contrast, compassion, which makes the slave's pain real for oneself and acknowledges its significance, would naturally lead in the direction of material and institutional change. But the Stoics deny themselves compassion precisely because it ascribes significance to such external circumstances, as if human dignity were not self-sufficient. Both slaves and masters ought, instead, to see that slavery is no big deal, given our inalienable dignity and freedom. Wisdom by itself, and wisdom alone, makes one truly free.

Stoic political thought seems to me, for these reasons, to be a very mixed achievement: profound and perceptive in its analysis of the politics of the passions and the limits of materialism, profound again in recognizing the dignity of humanity across differences of social class, ethnic membership, and even gender, harsh and dogmatic when it comes to the bearing of material circumstances on eudaimonia. It is one thing to recognize that even in conditions of slavery human beings retain an inalienable worth on account of which enslaving them is unjust and morally repugnant. It is quite another to claim that this dignity is the only thing of true importance to human flourishing, and that it is so rock hard that slavery doesn't touch it-so that it really doesn't matter to eudaimonia whether one is a slave or not. Here it is Aristotle and not the Stoics who seems to set political thought in the right direction: since functioning matters, and since functioning has material and institutional necessary conditions, material and institutional conditions matter, and matter enormously.

The Hellenistic thinkers all recognize that people are shaped by the institutional and material conditions in which they live. In fact, it is the deforming effect of institutions upon desire and functioning that is their starting point. And yet-this is the central difficulty-they seem to take as their task the production of perfect people, one by one, as if perfect people could in fact be produced without profound changes in material and institutional conditions. To some extent the philosophical communities them-selves create conditions different from those of the surrounding society. But that does not go very far, as they themselves recognize. And yet at the same time they do not want to acknowledge to what extent the full success of their enterprise, where people are concerned, awaits and requires political and social alterations. For this would make human beings dependent on circumstances for flourishing, and most emphatically dependent on some-thing other than philosophy. This the schools, with their teaching of self-sufficiency and their grand claims to be the art of life, would rather not acknowledge. The fact is that their own thought about the deformation of desires and preferences naturally leads in the direction of a call for partnership between philosophy and politics: for it is only in conjunction with efforts out in the world that the life of thought and desire can really change in any meaningful way. Imagine, for example, what would have happened had the U.S. civil rights movement insisted on ridding people of racist desires and thoughts before moving on to laws and institutions; what would happen if women, rather than demanding equality from laws and institutions, had insisted, first, on perfecting the consciousness and the desires of men. We can conjecture that desire and thought themselves would have made less progress under such a program than in the present state of things, where, frequently, laws and institutions lead the way and thought and desire reluctantly knuckle under-perhaps to be truly changed in future generations. We can forgive many of these thinkers for not achieving much in and through politics: for the times in which they lived were difficult times, and it is never easy for philosophers to know how to do any good in politics. What we cannot and should not forgive them for is that they did not more often call for such changes, that they implied, indeed, that we could produce the kingdom of reason on earth simply by perfecting individuals one by one, and then permitting these perfected people to create the world.[20]

One further element in Stoic thought makes a major political contribution to the contemporary world; it will enable me to end this section on a positive note. This is the idea that each of us is a citizen of the entire universe, a kosmou polites. From its Greek beginnings, Stoic thought is anti-sectarian and anti-nationalist, turned firmly against the narrow loyalties that make politics focus on competition between groups rather than on rational deliberation about the good of the whole. In chapter 9 we have seen how each Stoic pupil is to view her good as interconnected in complex ways with that of others, taking the interlocking order of the entire world as the basic subject of deliberation. This does not mean endorsing a world state; it does mean thinking of one's fundamental membership as not a local or sectarian one, but a truly global one, and of one's fundamental family as that of all human beings. This attitude to politics is still too rare in the modern world. Even our major theories of justice-for example, that of John Rawls[2I]-take the nation as their basic unit, and say little about international justice or international concern.[22] For the more relativistic among such theories there may be nothing to say, in that all norms of justice derive from traditions internal to a particular community,23 Stoicism offers a non-relative concern for human flourishing, together with a keen awareness of the interlocking interdependence of the world order. It thus offers a promising basis for deliberation about some of the urgent problems of the contemporary world-such as hunger, ecology, population, the status of women-issues that will not be well handled unless they are approached with an eye to the good of all human beings, and, indeed, of the entire world.


VI. THE PASSIONS


The central topic of this book has been the passions. And it is now finally time to assess what we have found. One thing, I think, is indisputable: that the analyses of emotions offered by Stoic and Epicurean texts have a subtlety and cogency unsurpassed by anything on the topic in the history of Western philosophy. Aristotle's accounts were valuable predecessors, clearly. But the Hellenistic thinkers go beyond Aristotle, I believe, in the detail and power of their analyses of the relationship between emotion and belief, in their accounts of the evaluative element in emotion, in their suggestions concerning the interrelationships among the emotions, and, finally, in their connection of the emotional life with a very general view of the world, one in which we have hostages to fortune. Whatever one thinks of their arguments against the passions, and whatever one finally decides about the Stoic identification of passion with belief or judgment, these accounts are indispensable starting points for any future work.

Philosophers once knew this, and the best work on emotion in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries-that of Descartes, Spinoza, and Adam Smith-owed them a huge debt, and perhaps in certain ways fell short of them. Today, however, the accounts are almost always ignored in philosophical writing on emotion,24 which, therefore, has to reinvent laboriously (and usually falls well short of) what was clear there. The detailed analyses of particular emotions, moreover, are just as impressive as the general theory. Again, contemporary analyses of love, anger, and fear neglect them to their cost.

Epicurean emotion theory is in certain ways less elaborate (so far as we know) than Stoic theory: it does not make fully clear the relationship between belief and passion, discriminating between necessity and sufficiency and between both of these and identity. On the other hand, Lucretius adds something of great value: the idea of a connection between emotion and narrative.25 The cognitive content of an emotion such as love does only not arrive via a grasp of abstract propositions-or, even, only through highly concrete propositions about one's own life. Instead, we internalize culturally narrated scenarios that give us the dimensions, pace, and structure of the emotion. And these scenarios are then enacted in our own lives, as we cast ourselves and others in the roles created by them. This account leads to a new appreciation of the role that literary narrative might play in moral philosophy, as indispensable to a full understanding of one of its most central elements-but also to an understanding of some ways in which the power of conventional narrative might deform human relationships.

What of the arguments for extirpation of passion? Here I shall not say any more about the fear of death, since I have given my own view on this in chapter 6, and further comparative discussion seems unnecessary. Where pity or compassion is concerned, it should also be clear by now that I approve of the Lucretian tendency to leave it in human life as a basic source of communal affiliation, rather than to banish it in the name of self-sufficiency, as the Stoics do. So I want in this final section to focus on the two passions that have, for my argument, been the most fundamental and the most problematic: anger and love.

Anger is, in a sense, the central topic of this book and its raison d'etre. For I was drawn to the Hellenistic philosophers not only by the power of their analyses of passions, but also by sympathy with their arguments for extirpation, where this one passion i s concerned. I n The Fragility of Goodness I had portrayed the best human life as one that takes on the risk of loss and grief. I had not accepted or even (except in a chapter on Euripides' Hecuba) much considered the idea that the best life runs the risk of corrosive anger. The Hellenistic thinkers did confront this question-in a way that led them to reject all the passions. A motivation for me in writing about them was to discover whether it was possible to accept their arguments about the elimination of anger, while still rejecting their more general attack on passions such as love, fear, and grief.

To a great extent, this attempt failed. Some Hellenistic ways of removing anger-such as decreasing the attachment to money and possessions-were perfectly compatible with keeping some love in one's life, but not love of those things, and only insofar as the potential for anger itself remained as well, wherever love remained. The connection they allege between love and the possibility of anger is powerfully demonstrated, in a way that both vindicates Aristotle's claims about the connections between deep attachment and anger and calls into question, for that reason, his claim that the life of a virtuous person will contain no wrongdoing, and nothing to regret. This means that one must make a choice: either give up both love and anger, as the orthodox Stoics do, or run the risk of harming.

Here both Seneca and Lucretius have complex and ambivalent positions, in both the public and the private sphere. Lucretius' attempt to describe the bases of community shows, at the same time, and retains, the basis for anger on behalf of oneself and one's own. This legitimate anger is not free of potentially disturbing consequences, and chapter 7 saw Lucretius attempting a difficult balancing act, as he tried to create a community in which individuals both protect themselves and cherish their friends. Seneca, too, has great difficulty describing a community that is both self-respecting and free from anger. His analysis makes a powerful case against anger and in favor of a medical attitude toward injury and wrongdoing. But in cases where a tyrant damages someone whom one loves, detachment gives way to cursing.

Where the attachments of erotic love are concerned, things become even more complex. Lucretius imagines a stable marriage free from the risk of anger and jealousy: but only by in effect removing eras, and imagining the relationship as a friendship with sexual pleasure added in. His recommen-dation is similar to the Stoic ideal of marriage described in Musonius Rufus (chapter 12)-though the Stoics attach less importance than Lucretius does to sexual pleasure. I have argued that these balanced and sanitized relationships leave something out: while claiming to yield to human life, Lucretius does not follow that advice far enough. The omitted dimension is stirringly and horrifyingly depicted in Seneca's Medea, which shows the value of eras as well as its dangers. To some extent, we can combine the Hellenistic norm with Seneca, insisting that erotic love is most valuable when it does occur between people who respect one another's characters as friends do and who share commitments and a way of life together. And perhaps in this sort of love there would be somewhat less risk than else-where of the most destructive sort of resentment and rage, since mutual respect counts for something, even in agony.

But this doesn't really remove anger from the erotic life, it only circumscribes it a little. Certainly it does not go far enough to satisfy the Stoics-for good character, as chapter 12 argued, may inhibit harmful action without removing harmful wishing. Here, I think, we must turn, with Seneca, to mercy and to narrative-trying to respond to what has taken place without strict punishment, asking the watchful eyes of wisdom to look with narrative understanding into the complexities of another's motivation and one's own. The bold Stoic attempt to purify social life of all its ills, rigorously carried through, ends by removing, as well, its finite humanity, its risk-taking loyalty, its passionate love. Abandoning the zeal for absolute perfection as inappropriate to the life of a finite being, abandoning the thirst for punishment and self-punishment that so frequently accompanies that zeal, the education I recommend looks with mercy at the ambivalent excellence and passion of a human life.


_______

References:

1. See Vlastos (1985, 1991).
2. The Skeptics seem to be exceptions here, although they do carefully consider how to engage the particular pupil.
3. On Hellenistic attitudes to Socrates, see Long (1988).
4. For examples of new contemporary work along these lines, see Nussbaum (1990d).
5. The Stoics, however, intellectualize this ability far more than Aristotle does.
6. Exceptions to this, with profound methodological considerations, are Hare (1981) and Parfit (1984); see also Brandt (1979). For a valuable recent critique of the reliance on uncorrected preferences, see Sunstein (1991).
7. See, for example, Williams (1985); for a comparable procedure without reference to Greek traditions, see Nagel (1979). The position or positions of Macintyre (1981, 1988) on ordinary belief and intuition are complex. On the one hand, Macintyre does urge a return to a society such as he believes Greece to have been, in which ordinary intuitions about what to do were reliable and harmonious; on the other hand, he believes that this return is impossible without first principles that are secured by religious or quasi-religious authority, which informs preferences by a thoroughgoing ordering of life and practice.
8. The Skeptics do not explicitly recognize the unconscious-and of course to have any theory of the structure of the mind is contrary to their procedure.
9. See Brunschwig (1986).
10. See, e.g., Klein (1984, 1985), Fairbairn (1952), Ballas (1987).
11. See Vlastos (1991) chapter 1 for a related discussion of Socrates.
12. The Greek and Latin words-eleos and misericordia-do not have the associations with condescension that the English word "pity" sometimes does, though "pity" is the most common translation for the words in the modern version. The French philosophical use of pitie (as, e.g., in Rousseau) follows the Greek and Roman usage closely.
13. Though not their philosophical use-see chapter 4.
14. See Mitsis (1988a), Goldschmidt (1977).
15. See Rawls (1971).
16. See Sen (1982, 1985), and Crocker (1992).
17. In pursuing this critique we would want, at least for purposes of inquiry, to distinguish the psychology of moneymaking from that of power-seeking: for both Adam Smith and Samuel Johnson have argued, in different ways, that the person who is occupied in making money is a relatively innocuous character whose virtues will include frugality and self-discipline, and who will not be likely to be given to acts of fanatical hatred or brutality. Such a character may also do good for society as a whole. These arguments need to be carefully considered.
18. See now Schofield (1991) for one part of that project.
19. See Burnyeat (forthcoming a).
20. I owe some of the formulations in this paragraph to conversations with John Roemer.
21. Rawls (1971).
22. But see the very interesting application of Rawlsian principles to international justice in Pogge (1989).
23. This emerges clearly, for example, in some of the work of Michael Walzer (1983) and of Richard Rorty (1982). But international morality and justice are also little discussed in the work of some non-relativist thinkers who derive moral and political norms from historical traditions-e.g., Charles Taylor (1989). (Taylor's current work addresses this gap.) For related arguments, see Nussbaum (1990b and forthcoming b).
24. For just one especially striking example, see Murphy and Hampton (1988), a (fine) book on anger, forgiveness, and mercy that contains no reference either to Seneca or to Stoicism. The one area in which there has not been such neglect is the fear of death, where the Epicurean arguments have been recognized as philosophically central-see chapter 6.
25. A closely related proposal is made in De Sousa (1987).
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