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
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.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"
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.