Therapy of Desire

Is philosophy a kind of therapy? Martha Nussbaum’s excellent The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (1994) impressed me greatly when it first came out. Looking at it again 30 years later, this ethical “therapy” turns out to follow a different paradigm from the emphasis on mutuality in dialogue that I have been addressing from various angles recently. The discussion has many interesting twists and turns.

What is philosophy for, anyway?

Nussbaum says “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” (p. 3).

Her main point in this early work is to exhibit the sophistication of Epicurean, Stoic, and Skeptical understandings of emotion. She highlights their practical commitment and “combination of logic with compassion” (p. 9). An important part of her argument, though, is that these later figures further developed themes that Aristotle already raised. I’m currently expecting to cover her first three chapters, where Aristotle plays a larger role. This post focuses on the introduction and first chapter.

“In order to get a purchase on this complex issue, I shall begin this book with Aristotle. For Aristotle sketched an account of the emotions and desires that is very close to the more elaborate accounts we find in the Hellenistic philosophers. And yet he did not defend a norm of detachment from the mutable good things of this world. His best human life is a life rich in attachments to people and things outside the self — friendships, family loves, political ties, ties of certain sorts to possessions and property. Thus it is a life rich in possibilities for emotions such as love, grief, fear, and even anger; the study of these connections will shed light, by contrast, on the Hellenistic conceptions” (pp. 41-42).

Aristotle’s positive valuation of various forms of emotion stands in opposition to these later philosophers.

The Hellenistic period is usually said to extend from Alexander the Great up to Roman times. Increased long-distance trade brought many cultures into closer contact with one another. Religions became detached from local traditional communities, with many coexisting side by side. The new philosophies that emerged in these times were simpler than those of Plato and Aristotle and more dogmatically presented, but still quite sophisticated and interesting. It is largely through them that philosophy for a while gained an unprecedented place in mainstream culture. Meanwhile, Aristotle’s uncirculated manuscripts were left to decay in the attic of a relative who had greedily claimed them. The great rise in Aristotle’s influence began only later, after a third or so of his uncirculated works were recovered and edited. (See Fortunes of Aristotle.)

“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 something 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” (p. 10).

I hold that a consistent application of Socratic-Platonic-Aristotelian philosophical values rules out any kind of elitism, by grounding everyday values in mutuality and reason.

“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'” (ibid).

Several important points about Aristotle are expressed in condensed terms here. Virtuous activity depends in part on conditions the individual does not control. Good politics should benefit all, not only some. He favors engagement rather than withdrawal, and he favors refining our emotional sensitivities rather than casting them aside or suppressing them.

On the other hand, “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…. I shall conclude that this criticism has some merit” (p. 11).

But there is also substantial common ground.

“[B]oth 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 example, that most people learn to value money and status far too highly, and that this corrupts both personal and social relations.)” (ibid).

Here we come to the center of her reading, which is that for the Hellenistic philosophers, philosophy is a kind of therapy of the soul. (I note in passing the unanimity with which the philosophers denounce the overvaluation of money and status.)

“Epicurus 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.’ The ancient Skeptical teacher, too, portrays himself as a healer of the soul. 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” (p. 13).

“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’. Philosophy heals human diseases, diseases produced by false beliefs” (p. 14).

“All three schools, in short, could accept the Epicurean definition of philosophy: ‘Philosophy is an activity that secures the flourishing [eudaimon] life by arguments and reasonings.’ 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” (p. 15).

She contrasts all this with Augustine, for whom “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. 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” (p. 18).

“For both Platonists and these Christians, digging more deeply into ourselves is not the right way to proceed in ethical inquiry” (p. 19).

Here we reach a matter of deep ambivalence, and correspondingly great interest. Nussbaum will argue that on this particular point, Aristotle is closer to the “therapeutic” attitude of the Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics than to the heaven-centered, more objectivist views of ethics that she attributes to Plato and Augustine. I broadly agree.

Referring to mytho-poetic imagery in Plato’s Phaedrus, she says “We do not inquire into the human good by standing on the rim of heaven; and if we did, we would not find the right thing. Human ways of life, and the hopes, pleasures, and pains that are a part of these, cannot be left out of the inquiry without making it pointless and incoherent. We do not in fact look ‘out there’ for ethical truth; it is in and of our human lives. More than this, it is something to and for human lives” (pp. 20-21).

For Aristotle, the Good is always concrete and situationally attuned.

“The medical conception of ethical inquiry opposes itself, as well, to another conception of ethics that stands, so to speak, at the opposite end of the spectrum from Platonism. This is the idea that ethical inquiry and teaching are simply the recording of traditional social belief and have no legitimate goal beyond this” (p. 24).

As Nussbaum points out, none of the Greek philosophers defends this kind of traditionalist view of ethics. The Hellenistic philosophers in particular see much that is wrong with the social world.

“For according to the Hellenistic philosophers, society is not in order as it is; and, as the source of most of their pupils’ beliefs and even of their emotional repertory, it has infected them with its sicknesses. The upbringing of young people is held to be deformed in various ways by false views about what matters: by excessive emphasis, for example, on money, competition, and status” (p. 26).

This is quite a far cry from the divine right of kings, the invisble hand, and other providential underwriting of the status quo that was claimed in early modern times. The Hellenistic philosophers dwelt more extensively than their avid readers in the Enlightenment on what modern people might call alienation.

Nussbaum next turns to address the limits of the therapeutic paradigm.

“All this suggests that the medical kind of ethics may be inclined — like medicine itself, but even more so — to adopt an asymmetrical model of the relationship between teacher and pupil, doctor and patient” (p. 27).

As she points out, at the heart of the therapeutic paradigm is an asymmetrical social relation. This stands in implicit conflict with the ideal of mutual and reciprocal relations in Aristotle’s ethics.

“Hellenistic ethics combines immersion with critical distance in something like this way — insisting on the rigorous scrutiny of belief and desire, while insisting, too, that it is to real people and their beliefs and desires that ethics must ultimately be responsible” (p. 28).

“In the course of developing their medical norms of health, the Hellenistic philosophers appeal to ‘nature’ and the ‘natural’. These slippery notions had better be scrutinized, since misunderstanding them could cause serious misunderstanding of the entire medical approach” (p. 29).

“The ancient appeals to nature that we shall be considering do not … pretend to derive value-norms from a value-free account of the ‘scientific’ underpinnings of human life. Ancient accounts of ‘nature’, especially of ‘human nature’, are value-laden accounts…. Norms follow from an account of ‘nature’ because the account is frankly normative to begin with” (p. 30).

The therapeutic paradigm’s appeals to nature ought therefore to be sharply distinguished from what 20th century philosophers called ethical naturalism. Even the account of nature is frankly normative from the outset.

“A good introduction to the Hellenistic appeals to nature, which clearly reveals both the normative and the anti-conventional thrust of these appeals, is in the famous lines of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself concerning the animal kingdom” (p. 31).

“What the animals show Whitman is not a value-free realm of life; nor does he learn from them to glorify that which exists without effort or teaching. What he sees is that certain practices that (already) appear to him to impede human flourishing — practices connected with religious fear and guilt, with economic obsession and accumulation, with status and power — need not exist. Moreover, when they do not exist, certain deformations of life — sleepless fear, groveling subservience, anxiety, dissatisfaction — do not exist either. The ‘tokens of myself’ that the animals show Whitman are possibilities for self-respect, self-expression, and social equality that are frequently obscured by the realities of human social life. So too, I shall argue, in Hellenistic appeals to the nature of the child, the nature of the animal: the purpose is to construct a radical norm of true human flourishing. This norm is not value-free or ‘scientific’: it is justified by appeal to deep human desires and judgments, and it is value-laden; but it is highly critical of ordinary belief, and sees many of our ordinary beliefs as impediments to flourishing” (p. 32).

“The medical conception seeks to combine the critical power of Platonism with the worldly immersion of ordinary-belief philosophy. And it adds something further of its own: a commitment to action” (pp. 32-33).

“Philosophy understood along medical lines deals with both beliefs and emotions or passions. One reason why the tension described earlier seems to arise is that philosophy is asked not simply to deal with the patient’s invalid inferences and false premises, but to grapple, as well, with her irrational fears and anxieties, her excessive loves and crippling angers” (p. 37).

“Both Aristotle and the Hellenistic schools hold, furthermore, that many, if not all, of the passions rest upon beliefs that do not spring up naturally (if any beliefs do this), but are formed by society” (p. 38).

“All the schools dedicate themselves to the searching critique of prevailing cognitive authority, and to the amelioration of human life as a result” (p. 40).

But in contrast to Aristotle, “These philosophers do not simply analyze the emotions, they also urge, for the most part, their removal from human life” (p. 41). This idea of aiming to cast off all emotion I vehemently reject. Nussbaum too finds it troubling.

“Aristotle accepts and develops at length the idea that ethical philosophy should resemble medicine in its dedication to the practical goal of ameliorating human lives. And he develops, in some detail, aspects of the analogy between the philosopher’s and the doctor’s tasks. And yet Aristotle also criticizes the medical analogy at certain points, arguing that there are some very important ways in which ethical philosophy should not be like medicine” (p. 42).

She lists three points common to Aristotle and the Hellenistic philosophers.

“1. Arguments have a practical goal: they are directed at making the pupil better, and can be assessed for their contribution to this end. (This, as I said, does not entail that the value of argument must be merely instrumental.)
“2. They are what we might call value-relative: that is, at some level they respond to deep wishes or needs of the patient and, again, are to be assessed in accordance with their success in doing this.
“3. They are responsive to the particular case: just as a good doctor heals case by case, so good medical argument responds to the pupil’s concrete situation and needs” (p. 46).

Then she lists five more characteristics that apply to the Hellenistic philosophers but not to Aristotle.

“4. Medical arguments, like bodily medical treatments, are directed at the health of the individual as such, not at communities or at the individual as member of a community.
“5. In medical argument, the use of practical reason is instrumental. Just as the doctor’s technique is no intrinsic part of what the goal, health, is, so too the philosopher’s reasoning is no intrinsic part of what the good human life itself is.
“6. The standard virtues of argument — such as consistency, definitional clarity, avoidance of ambiguity — have, in medical argument, a purely instrumental value. As with the procedures of the medical art, they are no intrinsic part of the goal.
“7. In medical argument, as in medicine, there is a marked asymmetry of roles: doctor and patient, expert authority and obedient recipient of authority.
“8. In medical argument, the teacher discourages the sympathetic dialectical scrutiny of alternative views. Just as a doctor does not urge the patient to experiment with alternative medications, so the teacher does not encourage cognitive pluralism” (ibid).