Empty is the argument of the philosopher by which no human disease is healed; for just as there is no benefit in medicine if it does not drive out bodily diseases, so there is no benefit in philosophy if it does not drive out the disease of the soul.Porphyry, To Marcella (Inwood and Gerson 1994, p. 82)
Fear is one of the most significant emotions in shaping human life. Fear permeates many of our minor and major decisions, and explicitly or implicitly influences our choices and behaviour. We fear events, such as making mistakes at work, and we fear real objects, such as snakes and spiders, fictional objects, such as running into ghosts in the dark, or non-material objects, such as the uncertainty of the future. Fear sometimes protects us from short- and long-term dangers, but it may also be a source of severe distress. We may appreciate this distinction in the life of Pyrrho of Ellis (c.360 BCEâc.270 BCE), one of the most fearless philosophers of Antiquity. His ethics of suspension of judgment included a remarkable impassivity in daily life events. Diogenes Laertius describes Pyrrho as âtaking no precaution, but facing all risks as they came, whether carts, precipices, dogs or what notâŚhe was kept out of harmâs way by his friends whoâŚused to follow close after himâ (Laertius 1925: 9.61).1 Pyrrho lived in a state of extraordinary tranquillity and emotional indifference. It was his friends who suffered the fear Pyrrho seems to have lacked.
Fear has been relatively neglected as an object for philosophical study in proportion to its importance. In its more detrimental severity, fear has been addressed by sociologists writing on the concept of ârisk societyâ (Adam et al. 2004, p. 88),2 as well as historians and psychologists conceptualising the twentieth Century as the âage of anxietyâ (Dunant and Porter 1996).3 During the twentieth century severe manifestations of fear, such as anxiety, panic and phobias have been increasingly managed by psychiatrists and psychologists. A personal anecdote related to this trend may help to illustrate the interest of anxious individuals about philosophical therapies.
While working as a practicing psychiatrist in an anxiety clinic, I began studies on Epicurean and Stoic philosophy and became markedly impressed by the relevance of fear in Hellenistic texts, and especially by the variety of remedies recommended by these philosophical schools. I then assembled a short pamphlet that included brief remarks from Epicurus, Cicero and Seneca with advice on managing fear, for patients to read in the waiting area. To my surprise, that little pamphlet was strongly demanded and ran through several reprints including expansions and revisions. Furthermore, a sizeable number of patients reported feeling better after reading the short text. This personal experience kindled my interest in providing a conceptual analysis of fear and its therapies as proposed by philosophers and major thinkers.
It is necessary at this stage to provide more clarification of the object of this work. I shall examine the concept and therapies of fear, where I take fear to include several semantically-related emotional conditions, such as anxiety, phobias, dread, panic, and anguish. The reason for this broad take on fear is justified by a brief lexical analysis presented below which shows that these terms have crisscrossing uses and intertwined histories that do not allow for exhaustive distinctions between them and the phenomena they denote.
1.1 A Lexical Introduction to the Concept of Fear
In the secular Old Greek lexicon, phobos had the meaning of âsomeone or something that is to be feared,â of terror (usually when referring to a single individual), or panic (when referring to a group) (Liddell and Scott 1996, p. 1947).4 In Homer, phobos was used to denote panic or flight (Konstan 2006a); Herodotus used it as generic fear or terror; Hippocrates used phobos in the milder sense of doubt or scruple; and it also had the theological connotation of awe and reverence for a divine being, as well as meaning dread and the act of, or the object for, striking terror into someone (Liddell and Scott 1996, p. 1947). The Old Greek also included the noun alusmos to denote the somatic aspects of fear (e.g. restlessness, palpitations, sweating, tremor) (Liddell and Scott 1996, p. 74). The root aluo had the meaning of wandering restlessly and being uneasy, whereas alusmos meant âanguish, inquietude, uneasiness, being troubled,â as well as âtossing aboutâ in the specific case of the sick. The derivation alusis had the meaning of distress and anguish, and in the colloquial Greek, the adjective lusiteles meant âunprofitableâ, whereas in medicine it was used to mean âunfavourable prognosisâ (Liddell and Scott 1996, p. 74). Other derivatives of alusmos were used as medical terms only. For instance, in the Hippocratic corpus the adjective allusmotes was used to denote states of feeling uneasy or troubled (Liddell and Scott 1996, p. 74).5
Despite these relevant semantic differences, recent texts on the philosophy of emotions define âfearâ and âanxietyâ in rather idiosyncratic ways, and a few words on the current technical use of these terms is in order. In her translation of Ciceroâs Tusculan Disputations Graver (2002) takes the Latin noun aegritudo to denote mental pain at present and metus for mental pain in the future. However, this categorical distinction is rendered more equivocal by the fact that aegritudo derives from aeger, an adjective denoting sickness from both body and mind. In the latter case (âaeger animusâ), this term not only has the connotation of pain but also of âany agitation of the passions or feelings, of love, hope, fear, anxiety, sorrowâ as well as being âtroubled, anxious, dejected, sad, sorrowfulâ (Lewis and Short 1891, p. 53) (my italics). Moreover, the early use of aegritudo only had the connotation of illnesses of the body (âof men and brutesâ), and it was Cicero who began using aegritudo in the psychological sense of mental grief and sorrow (Lewis and Short 1891, p. 84). Another important difference in translation is Graverâs rendering of the Latin passio as âemotionâ. Graver acknowledges the different etymologies of these terms, but based on an analysis of Stoic fragments and current use, she considers it is more reasonable to use âemotionâ rather than the old âpassionâ (Graver 2002, pp. 2â3). While this is a debatable decision, these lexical dilemmas show the difficulty of rendering, psychological terms used many centuries ago in a non-anachronistic way. In this book, I have also used âemotionâ to render the Latin passio , except when the text being analysed requires using the original term, for example when addressing Descartesâs The Passions of the Soul , where he uses the terms passion and emotion with different technical connotations (see Chapter 6).
This brief lexical description of Old Greek and Latin terms demonstrates that even in antiquity the noun âfearâ had a rich semantic network and its meanings acquired specificity when analysed in their proper contexts. As argued by Dixon, coining new words or endowing old ones with new meanings âcan create new concepts, and even new worldviews, which may strongly influence peopleâs capacity to understand the world and themselvesâ (Dixon 2012, p. 338). Some philosophers addressed in this book used the noun âpassionâ, a term largely replaced around the middle of the nineteenth century in both the philosophical and medical literature by âemotionâ (Dixon 2003). However, whereas âpassionâ has the connotation of passivity and disease, âemotionâ has been used since the early nineteenth century with the connotation of a vivid feeling, usually detached from pathological considerations (Dixon 2003). It is also the case that the same word may remain in use in different historical times, but gain different connotations with each successive period. An example of such a lexical rejuvenation is provided by the noun âanxietyâ, which was rarely used in its current psychological meaning in the psychiatric or philosophical literature before the late nineteenth century (Berrios 1999), but became of common technical and vernacular use after Freud described the syndrome of âanxiety neurosisâ in 1895 (see Chapter 8). Other terms conceptually related to fear such as âphobiaâ and âpanicâ acquired a strong medical connotation during the twentieth century, and have acted as a linchpin for the medicalization of fear (see Chapter 9). In contemporary colloquial use the sense of fear is implicit whenever using semantically related words such as âfrightâ, âdreadâ, âterrorâ, âhorrorâ, âpanicâ, âalarmâ, âdismayâ, âconsternationâ, âtrepidationâ, âapprehensionâ, âanxietyâ and âtimidityâ, and the selection of which term is used is influenced by a host of variables, such as the acuteness and severity of the event producing the emotion, the presence of people, the age and social status of the agent, the possibility of escape, and other contextual factors (Hollander 2004).
Finally, it is important to remark that there is no single concept of fear, given that this emotion may be analysed from the different perspectives of philosophy, theology, psychology, sociology, psychiatry, the neurosciences, the history of emotions and lexical uses. Nevertheless, some philosophers consider it is possible to provide categorical definitions to fear-related terms. For instance, the philosopher Jesse Prinz suggests that the âfolkâ category of fear consists of two different states, which he termed panic and a...