The Therapy of Desire

Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics

Martha C. Nussbaum

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781400831944
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Philosophy

The Epicureans, Skeptics, and Stoics practiced philosophy not as a detached intellectual discipline but as a worldly art of grappling with issues of daily and urgent human significance. In this classic work, Martha Nussbaum maintains that these Hellenistic schools have been unjustly neglected in recent philosophic accounts of what the classical "tradition" has to offer. By examining texts of philosophers such as Epicurus, Lucretius, and Seneca, she recovers a valuable source for current moral and political thought and encourages us to reconsider philosophical argument as a technique through which to improve lives. Written for general readers and specialists, The Therapy of Desire addresses compelling issues ranging from the psychology of human passion through rhetoric to the role of philosophy in public and private life.

CHAPTER 1

Therapeutic Arguments

I

EIPICURUS WROTE, “Empty is that philosopher’s argument by which no human suffering is therapeutically treated. For just as there is no use in a medical art that does not cast out the sicknesses of bodies, so too there is no use in philosophy, unless it casts out the suffering of the soul.”¹ The ancient Skeptical teacher, too, portrays himself as a healer of the soul:² “Being a lover of humanity, the Skeptic wishes to heal by argument, insofar as possible, the arrogant empty beliefs and the rashness of dogmatic people.” As a doctor tries out different remedies on the ailing body and uses the ones that work, so the Skeptic selects, for each pupil, the arguments that are most appropriate and most efficacious for that person’s disease (Sextus PH 3.280–81). The Stoics vigorously endorse this picture of philosophy and develop the analogy between philosophy and medicine in elaborate detail. The great Greek Stoic Chrysippus, describing his philosophical art, proudly announces:

It is not true that there exists an art called medicine, concerned with the diseased body, but no corresponding art concerned with the diseased soul. Nor is it true that the latter is inferior to the former, in its theoretical grasp and therapeutic treatment of individual cases. (Galen PHP 5.2.22, 298D = SVF III.471)

Or as Cicero, speaking on behalf of the Stoa, more succinctly puts it:

There is, I assure you, a medical art for the soul. It is philosophy, whose aid need not be sought, as in bodily diseases, from outside ourselves. We must endeavor with all our resources and all our strength to become capable of doctoring ourselves. (TD 3.6)

Philosophy heals human diseases, diseases produced by false beliefs. Its arguments are to the soul as the doctor’s remedies are to the body. They can heal, and they are to be evaluated in terms of their power to heal. As the medical art makes progress on behalf of the suffering body, so philosophy for the soul in distress. Correctly understood, it is no less than the soul’s art of life (technē biou). This general picture of philosophy’s task is common to all three major Hellenistic schools, at both Greece and Rome.³ All accept the appropriateness of an analogy between philosophy and the art of medicine. And for all, the medical analogy is not simply a decorative metaphor; it is an important tool both of discovery and of justification. Once one has in a general way understood that philosophy’s task is like the doctor’s task, one can then rely on that general understanding (further elaborated in a number of general criteria) to find out, more concretely and in greater detail, how the philosopher ought to proceed in a variety of circumstances.⁴ And one can appeal to the analogy to justify some new or dubious procedure as philosophically appropriate. The rival schools debate with one another in terms organized by the analogy, commending themselves to prospective pupils as doctors belonging to rival schools of medicine would debate, proclaiming the merits of their differing conceptions of the art. As such debates developed, the analogy became both more complex and more concrete. Specific strategies of the doctor were compared with specific philosophical techniques. And the analogy also generated an increasingly rich enumeration of characteristics that a good “therapeutic argument” should have, traits whose importance could be shown by pointing to the presence, and the importance, of analogous traits in medical procedure.

In short, there is in this period broad and deep agreement that the central motivation for philosophizing is the urgency of human suffering, and that the goal of philosophy is human flourishing, or eudaimonia.⁵ Philosophy never ceases to be understood as an art whose tools are arguments, an art in which precise reasoning, logical rigor, and definitional precision have an important role to play. But the point of these devices, and of philosophy insofar as it is wedded to them, is understood to be, above all, the achievement of flourishing human lives. And the evaluation of any particular argument must concern itself not only with logical form and the truth of premises, but also with the argument’s suitability for the specific maladies of its addressees. I am speaking here above all of ethical arguments; and the schools differ in the ways in which they connect the ethical part of philosophy to its other parts. For Epicureans and Skeptics, the ethical end (the achievement of a certain sort of life) is central in a more obvious way than for the Stoics. But for all three, philosophy is above all the art of human life; and engagement in it that is not properly anchored to the business of living well is regarded as empty and vain.

All three schools, in short, could accept the Epicurean definition of philosophy: “Philosophy is an activity that secures the flourishing [eudaimōn] life by arguments and reasonings.”⁶ And all can agree that a precise, logically rigorous argument that is not well suited to the needs of its hearers, an argument that is simply and entirely academic and unable to engage its audience in a practical way, is to that extent a defective philosophical argument. Cicero marvelously expresses this point in the De Finibus, criticizing the Stoics for failing, as he believes, in this essential dimension of their job:

Their narrow little syllogistic arguments prick their hearers like pins. Even if they assent intellectually, they are in no way changed in their hearts, but they go away in the same condition in which they came. The subject matter is perhaps true and certainly important; but the arguments treat it in too petty a manner, and not as it deserves. (Fin. 4.7)⁷

This chapter will characterize Hellenistic therapeutic arguments in a general way, contrasting this approach to ethical philosophizing with other approaches available then and now. I shall propose a schematic account of the properties of a “medical” argument that can be used later on to investigate the particular schools, charting their similarities and divergences. Since Hellenistic therapy is above all therapy concerned with desire and emotion, I shall introduce that topic as well, describing a view all the schools share about the emotions and philosophy’s relation to them. Finally, I shall provide a brief overview of the book’s argument.

II

The medical model of philosophizing in ethics can be better understood by contrasting it with two other approaches to ethics that were available in ancient Greece: what I shall call the Platonic approach, and what I shall call the approach based on ordinary belief. The former bears some relation to some elements in some arguments of Plato, and I shall in fact illustrate it using a Platonic text. Whether or not it was actually Plato’s approach, he was read this way by Aristotle and by others. The latter has sometimes been ascribed to Aristotle, and it does bear some resemblance to some elements in his approach. But the positions of both of these thinkers are subtle and complicated; it is not my intention to suggest that these rather schematic descriptions accurately portray those subtleties. (Indeed, in the case of Aristotle, I shall be arguing that the simple ordinary-belief picture is not an accurate characterization of his method.) It is sufficient for my purposes if we can show that these approaches were available in some form in the ancient world—at least as elements in, or simplifications or exaggerations or misunderstandings of, something that was really there. Both approaches are in fact available in modern moral philosophy as well: so a consideration of them will have the additional value of clarifying, for us, the place of the medical model among our actual alternatives.⁸

Consider, then, the picture of ethical inquiry in the central myth in Plato’s Phaedrus. Souls of many kinds, some mortal and some divine, some with ease and some with difficulty, leave their usual world, their daily pursuits, and walk out to the rim of heaven. There, staring out at the eternal beings that inhabit that “realm above the heavens,” they see (some more, some less) the eternal norms that are the true standards for the various ethical virtues. The soul “sees justice itself, it sees moderation, it sees knowledge—not the knowledge that changes and varies with the various objects that we now call beings, but the genuine knowledge seated in that which really is” (247D). In other words, the ethical norms are what they are quite independently of human beings, human ways of life, human desires. Any connection between our interests and the true good is, then, purely contingent. The good is out there; indeed, it has always been out there, even before we began to exist. And no wishing of ours, however profound or urgent, can make it be otherwise. It is not made for us, nor are we made for it.⁹ The best life might turn out to be a life that none of us could attain, or even one that none of us could grasp or envisage. (This is in fact the case for most animals—who, unfortunately for them, have the very same standard of good set before them but are too dense to perceive it.) Or, again, it might turn out to be a life that is so out of line with all actual human ways of life, and with all actual human desires, that human beings as they are would find it repugnant, or base, or so boring or impoverished that they would die rather than live it. Such results would indeed be unlucky for human beings; but they would not constitute any reason to call the account of the good itself into question. It happens that we (or some of us, some of the time) can grasp the true good that is “out there” and, having grasped it, live by it. But we might have been otherwise. Animals are otherwise. And the good—for human beings, for animals, for the universe as a whole—would still have been the same.

Views with this general structure enter the contemporary ethical scene by two very different routes, one scientific, one religious. (Both versions are influenced by Platonism, in different ways.)¹⁰ The scientific version thinks of ethical inquiry as similar to inquiry in the physical sciences—where this is understood in a Platonic way that has by now become deeply entrenched in popular thought about science, if not in the more sophisticated accounts given by contemporary philosophers of science. In this picture, scientists studying nature inquire in a “pure” manner, undisturbed and uninfluenced by their cultural framework, their background beliefs, their wishes and interests. Their task is to walk up to the world of nature (as Plato’s souls walk to the rim of heaven), to look at it, and to describe it as it is, discovering its real permanent structure. Their inquiry might lead anywhere at all; it is constrained only by the way things really are “out there.” A certain physical theory will be either supported or not supported by the facts. The desires, beliefs, and ways of life of physical scientists—or, indeed, of human beings more generally—must not be permitted to influence their inquiry into its status or their choice of methods of investigation. The idea is that ethics, too, is scientific in just this way. Ethical inquiry consists in discovering permanent truths about values and norms, truths that are what they are independently of what we are, or want, or do. They are set in the fabric of things, and we simply have to find them.¹¹ (In some variants of this approach, as in contemporary sociobiology, the relation to science is more than analogical: value-neutral discoveries in the sciences are seen to imply ethical norms. This is not the case in the Platonic view I have described, where the fact-value distinction plays no role and the independent norms are norms of value.)

We get a similar picture by a different route in the Augustinian version of Christian ethics. God has set up certain ethical standards; it is our job to do what God wants. But we may or may not be endowed with the capability of seeing, or wanting, what God wants. Truth and God’s grace are out there; but the ability to see ethical truth or to reach for grace is not something we can control.¹² There is, therefore, no reliable method by which we can construct an ethical norm from the scrutiny of our deepest needs and responses and desires. For it may perfectly well turn out that a truly good life is so far removed from our present condition and insights that it will indeed strike us as repugnant, or boring, or too impoverished to make life worth living. Here we find ourselves in a far more helpless position than in the scientific, or even the original Platonist, picture. For it is not terribly clear how we can inquire further, or do anything about our cognitive predicament. But the central structural idea remains: the idea of the radical independence of true good from human need and desire. For both Platonists and these Christians, digging more deeply into ourselves is not the right way to proceed in ethical inquiry. For the possibility must always be left open that everything we are and want and believe is totally in error.

This is a powerful picture of ethical inquiry and ethical truth, one that has deep roots in our philosophical and religious traditions. It was known already to the Hellenistic thinkers, through their contact with Platonism. And it is a picture that they want to subvert, with the help of the medical analogy. Consider now a medical inquiry conducted on the rim of the heavens by pure souls, without any knowledge of the feelings, needs, pleasures, and pains of actual living creatures. (Or, if they have such knowledge, they are determined not to be constrained by it.) Think of these heavenly doctors trying to come up with an account of health and the healthy life, independently of any experience they may have of the desires and ways of life of the creatures they are going to treat. They do concede that to apply these norms to a group of patients, they will need to know something about their current state. For they cannot treat a disease without recognizing its symptoms and measuring these against their paradigm account of health. What they deny, however, is that the norm of health itself derives in any way from the condition, or the wishes, of the patient. It is “out there” to be discovered and then applied to their case.

These doctors would probably turn out to be very poor doctors indeed. Heavenly physics seems at least initially plausible. But medicine seems to be in its nature an engaged, immersed art, an art that works in a pragmatic partnership with those it treats. It takes very seriously their pains and pleasures, their own sense of where health and flourishing lie. Its aim is to help; that aim can never be completely separated from the patient’s own sense of the better and worse. Suppose our heavenly doctor comes down from the rim of heaven and announces, “See this condition of body that you, poor old woman, find intolerably painful and crippling? Well, that’s an example of what health is, as I have discovered by consulting the sort of knowledge that resides in true being. You children there: you say that you are hungry; you cry. But that too is health; and you will be making cognitive progress if you learn to see things this way, and accept the wisdom of the universe.” Our first reaction it that this “doctor” is sadistic and callous. Our second, however, is that he (or she) cannot be right. These statements are not just brutal, they are false. Health does not have an existence up there in heaven, totally apart from people and their lives. It is not a pure being apart from the patient’s becoming. It is a constituent of the form of life of a living species; and it is to the form of life of the species, and the experiences involved in living it, that the doctor must look in constructing a norm.

People can indeed go wrong about their health, in many ways. They can think that they are doing well, when really they are not. This may be because they have an illness that has not yet manifested itself through perceptible symptoms. Or it may be because they have no experience of feeling any better than they now feel—as h...