STOIC PHILOSOPHY AND THE EMOTIONS

Reply to Richard Sorabji

BERNARD WILLIAMS

The question is whether the Stoic philosophy of the emotions can be helpful either by
being or by contributing to psychotherapy. The distinction between such a philosophy
itself comtituting psychotherapy, and its providing materials for a therapy, is important,
and it is perhaps not sufficiently marked in Sorabji’s treatment. If Stoic philosophy offers
a deep and convincing analysis of the emotions, it will not be surprising if that account
offers material for a well designed therapy. Even at this level, there may be reason to
doubt how much material it may offer, since what the Stoics considered as an analysis or
account of the emotions does not say much (at least as Sorabji presents it) about the
infantile or other origins of the emotional structures that characterize the psychic life of a
particular individual, and one might suppose that this was what was likely to make most
contribution to therapy for that individual. In any case, even if analysis at the Stoics’ level
does offer some such material, this is still a long way from the idea that initiation into the
Stoic philosophy, and the practice of it, is itself likely to have therapeutic value. This was
the point that was principally at issue in my disagreement with Martha Nussbaum, to
which Sorabji refers.
There is a significant contrast here with the case of psychoanalysis. It might be pointed
out that, in classical psychoanalytical treatment, an important part of the treatment is
formed by understanding and assimilating the theory itself. However, to the extent that
this is true, it is so only because the process by which the theory is assimilated is one that
is intimately associated with very powerful psychic changes, above all those involved in
transference. No psychoanalyst ever supposed that you could be cured by listening to
lectures on psychoanalysis, or by rehearsing arguments about what, according to
psychoanalysis, the emotions are.
Nobody is going to deny that there are some pieces of everyday advice, or ‘tricks’ that
people can acquire .as helps in controlling their emotions, or putting a fit of gloom, for
instance, into perspective. Most people above a certain age know that counting up to ten
may help with some bursts of anger, and refusing the invitation to come up for a cup of
coffee may have some effect on sexual involvement. But, first, these are banalities, and,
like most banalities - like proverbs, in fact which they closely resemble - they are just as
often false as true. “You’re not the only one” may serve occasionally to cheer up
someone in adversity, but I doubt that it did much to cheer up any given person who was
alongside others in the trenches of the First World War. Apart from all this, the
connection of these banalities with the rigorous demands of the philosophical analysis of
the emotions is exceedingly slight. You do not need to get involved in the controversies
between Chrysippus and Posidonius to realize that someone might be encouraged by the
thought that what had just happened to him in the committee meeting was not
humililating in the way that he is presently disposed to think it was.

ARISTOTLE AND AFTER 21 1

212 ARISTOTLE AND AFTER

What Sorabji needs for his defence of the therapeutic usefulness of Stoic philosophy is
this:
rigorous philosophy about X, presented to a person Y, can help Y
who has a problem in the realm of X which needs therapy.
I do not deny that there can be some cases which fit this formula: the causes of emotional
change are so obscure and often so surprising that almost anything could help someone.
But, as a general characterization of a relationship between philosophy and therapy in a
given area, virtually none of the possibilities that Sorabji has discussed, as it seems to me,
entirely satisfies this formula.
Sorabji stresses the importance of the sufferer grasping the analysis himself. But there
are questions of how self-help is supposed to work, which lead to a wider issue of who is
supposed to have the attention of whom, and for what reason. At the level of the ‘tricks’,
what the philosopher is supposedly offering are recommendations directed to self-help.
But even at the most superficial level, there must be a question of the circumstances in
which one could administer such help to oneself. The advice to look in a mirror when one
is angry is bizarre, not least because it leaves it obscure in what kinds and conditions of
anger one would remember to do this and be suitably impressed by what one saw. At a
deeper level, the problem is the same as that encountered in the comparison with
psychoanalysis. All the banal pieces of advice, and any more direct and thorough-going
use of philosophy that might be proposed, require the person engaged in self-help to
recognise the dangerous br troubling state that he or she is in. But seriously dangerous or
troubling states need interpretation, and it is not purely a cognitive point that the sufferer
needs some else’s help in that interpretation. The psychoanalytical concept of
transference is only the most dramatic and far-going representation of something that is in
general true, that it is not just the content of a helper’s help that does the work, but one’s
relation to the helper.
It is another application of this fundamental point, that if there were someone for
whom philosophical truths and arguments did serious work at a therapeutic level, this
would only be because of some more fundamental psychological fact about that person,
that their need was met (for no doubt obscure reasons) by discourse of that sort. In a text
on the supposed powers of philosophy to moderate the character [ad Q. fr. 1.1.71, Cicero
implicitly acknowledges this point, at the same time as making a claim more extreme than
any, I take it, that Sorabji would support:
Your nature is such that even without teaching it seems to have been capable of
being moderated, but the teaching applied is one which could elevate even the
most vicious nature.
[tua] natura talis est ut etiam sine doctrina videatur moderata esse potuisse, ea
autem adhibita doctrina est quae vel vitiosissimam naturam attollere possit.

Taken seriously, there is a real puzzle in this passage about the supposed difference
between people like Quintus and those who need teaching. If they need teaching that
badly, what makes them listen to it? Conversely, it may be those, like Quintus, who do
not need it, who listen to it, and their listening to it may be one of the indications that they
do not need it.
Such a point s e e p obvious to us, because we live in a world in which it is taken for
granted, except perhaps by the most rationalistic, that psychic forces are largely hidden
and need interpretation. It is a world different from that of the ancient Stoics. We cannot
share their view that philosophy can get a grip on the emotions merely by having a
 BERNARD WILLIAMS; STOIC PHILOSOPHY AND THE EMOTIONS 213

semantic relationship to them. For us, what gets a hold on the emotions, if it consists of
speech at all, is likely to consist of some quite other kind of speech, such as a narrative of
development or of self-discovery.
We may, too easily, say that these differences lie between the ancient world and the
modern. Certainly, it is only recently that the public culture has included explicit and
elaborate theories that make a lot of the truth that the emotions and other psychic forces
have a hidden life of their own. But versions of that truth have been known in the past,
and were acknowledged, in different styles, in the ancient world - by Sophocles, for
instance, and Plato, and Gorgias. What is special about the world of the Stoics is, rather, a
peculiar stance of philosophy that seems to have flourished in their times, according to
which method that we indeed recognise as philosophical (the analysis of the emotions, for
instance), together with obvious generalizations about human life and unobvious
valuations of it, were harnessed to therapeutic pretensions, in a way that earlier in the
ancient world would already have been recognised as unrealistic. It is a genuine historical
question how it became possible to sound like Cicero or Seneca, and what it meant to take
them seriously.
I mentioned the unobvious valuations that some of this philosophy put on human life.
Sorabji has emphasized the point that the considerations that the Stoics brought to bear
need not have and typically did not, consist of the doctrine itself that worldly goods are
‘indifferent’. He stresses that the judgments of how it is ‘right to react’ were the objects
of the philosopher’s attention, and not the general beliefs about what is worthwhile or
indifferent. This may be true, in terms of what was concretely proposed. But if the
specific advice about what reactions are appropriate is taken seriously, the doctrine of the
‘indifferent’ cannot, surely, be far away. If the chilling ritual of reminding oneself, when
embracing one’s loved ones, that they are mortal beings is somehow supposed to cheer
one up, this can only be because there is a conception at hand, which one would
supposedly accept if one were introduced to it, that loved ones are, as mortal creatures,
not ultimately valuable to the wise person. We can scarcely find such an outlook either
intelligible or tolerable.
This is, in part but only in part, a matter of subsequent history. It always was, in the
eyes of most people, a foolish and barely intelligible conception, which ministered to a
picture of philosophers as strange beings on the boundaries of humanity. But at a more
reflective and theoretical level, we have in any case moved beyond a point at which such
a notion could command the assent even of philosophers, because we are so familiar with
the Romantic idea that experience itself, and in particular the variety and power of
emotional experience, contributes to the value of life, as to that of many kinds of art.
These Romantic considerations are deeply woven into contemporary notions of personal
identity, integrity, courage, and the significance of personal relations. The incapacity of
Stoic philosophy to command our emotions and cure our ills comes mainly from its being
simply a philosophy, but it is hampered, further, by being a philosophy which we cannot
believe.

Corpus Christi College, Oxford