Donald J. Robertson

Euhemerism or Mythology as “History in Disguise”

Euhemerism or Mythology as “History in Disguise”

What if the Greek and Roman myths were “history in disguise” — stories about real historical individuals and events that gradually became exaggerated and distorted through centuries of retelling? Some influential ancient Stoics appear to have been proponents of a theological doctrine, later known as Euhemerism, which said just this.

The term “Euhemerism” is derived from the name of an obscure Greek philosopher called Euhemerus, believed to have been born in Messina, Sicily. Euhemerus was a friend and courtier of King Cassander of Macedonia, and a contemporary of Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism. His major work Sacred History was written in the early 3rd century BC, during the first decades after Zeno founded his Stoic School in Athens. Only fragments of Euhemus’ writings, quoted by other authors, survive today. However, from these the broad outlines of his philosophy can be seen.

Euhemerus argued that mythological accounts of the gods should not be taken literally but rather interpreted in a more rational and naturalistic manner. He believed that most of these myths originated in accounts of real events and individuals, which had become exaggerated and mythologized over time. Storytellers naturally tend to embellish stories and so what began as naturalistic accounts of real historical events, such as the lives of famous rulers, are gradually distorted by continual retelling over the centuries and turned into mythological accounts of supernatural events. Today, we might also describe Euhemerus as favouring a relatively skeptical perspective on ancient myths and theology.

In short, Euhemerus appears to have developed a systematic account of ancient myths, which claimed that the gods were originally great kings, heroes, and benefactors of humanity, who became objects of religious veneration over time. He noted that the deification or apotheosis of powerful rulers was not uncommon, even within living memory, such as that of the tyrant Dion of Syracuse, a couple of generations earlier, or the Egyptian pharaohs. (Centuries later, of course, Stoics would witness the Romans also deifying their emperors.) This observation naturally led to the skeptical view that myths concerning most deities originated in a similar manner but were fashioned into increasingly supernatural stories.

There appear to be two main ways in which this tradition reinterprets myths naturalistically:

1. Some myths about gods are read as symbolic representations of natural phenomena, e.g., the Egyptians worship the River Nile as a god, the discovery of wine led to its personification as the god Dionysus, etc.

2. Others myths are viewed as resulting from the deification of kings (also pharaohs and emperors) and various great men and women

For example, Euhemerus claims that Zeus was actually a real king of Crete, who became so highly revered that legends gradually turned him into a god. This interpretation was supported by the fact that the Cretans were known for making the controversial claim that a tomb near Knossos, inscribed with the words “The tomb of Zeus”, contained the mortal remains of a Cretan king upon whose life the myth of the Greek god was originally based. Porphyry later claimed that Pythagoras discovered the tomb and inscribed it with the words “Here died and was buried Zan, whom they call Zeus”. In fact, Cretans had earned a reputation among other Greeks for being liars and atheists because of their controversial claim that Zeus had, in reality, been a mortal king of Crete.

These naturalistic and somewhat skeptical methods of interpreting myths don’t necessarily lead to atheism. However, perhaps unsurprisingly, positions resembling Euhemerism were widely regarded in the ancient world as forms of atheism or agnosticism, which could lead to the persecution of those advocating such ideas.

Although he became known for promoting it, Euhemerus was not the first to develop a rational, naturalistic interpretation myths. Some of the natural philosophers who preceded Socrates appear to have held similar views. For example, Xenophanes observed that people tend to construct representations of the gods in their own image:

But if cattle and horses and lions had hands
or could paint with their hands and create works such as men do,
horses like horses and cattle like cattle
also would depict the gods’ shapes and make their bodies
of such a sort as the form they themselves have. […]
Ethiopians say that their gods are snub–nosed and black
Thracians that they are pale and red-haired. — Xenophanes

If a god exists he must be quite unlike humans. “But mortals think that the gods are born and have the mortals’ own clothes and voice and form”, says Xenophanes. In other words, we naturally tend to create anthropomorphic images of gods. The natural philosophers who came before Socrates therefore realized that the gods of Greek mythology were probably, in some sense, merely human inventions. However, it was from the Sophists that the Stoics inherited their naturalistic interpretation of the gods as “history in disguise”.

The Sophists as Euhemerists

Protagoras, the first famous Sophist, earned considerable notoriety for his agnosticism. According to Diogenes Laertius, for instance, his book On the Gods began with the words:

As to the gods, I have no means of knowing either that they exist or that they do not exist. For many are the obstacles that impede knowledge, both the obscurity of the question and the shortness of human life. — Protagoras, On the Gods

Protagoras’ most famous student, the Sophist Prodicus, a friend of Socrates, was also frequently labelled an “atheist” or “agnostic” because, a few generations before Euhemerus, he embraced a naturalistic reinterpretation of the gods as symbolic personifications of natural phenomena.

Prodicus of Ceos says that ‘the ancients accounted as gods the sun and moon and rivers and springs and in general all things that are of benefit for our life, because of the benefit derived from them, even as the Egyptians deify the Nile.’ And he says that it was for this reason that bread was worshipped as Demeter, and wine as Dionysus, and water as Poseidon, and fire as Hephaestus, and so on with each of the things that are good for use. — Sextus Empiricus, Against the Mathematicians

These sort of interpretations appear to have been very familiar to educated Greeks. For instance, in the Phaedrus, Plato portrays Socrates discussing the myth about Boreas, the god of the north wind, abducting the Athenian princess Orithyia. Socrates mentions that some intellectuals, perhaps Sophists like Prodicus, claim the myth originated because a strong gust of wind blew a real girl called Orithyia over the rocks by the riverside, causing her to fall to her death, something that became transformed over time into the myth that she had been carried off by Boreas, the god of the north wind. However, Plato’s Socrates finds this mode of naturalistic interpretation somewhat unpersuasive.

The Early Stoic Euhemerists

The famous allegory of Prodicus, called “The Choice of Hercules”, as recounted in Xenophon’s Memorabilia of Socrates, was apparently the text that inspired Zeno of Citium to become a philosopher. It ultimately led to the founding of the Stoic school. As we’ll see, we’re told that one of Zeno’s most influential students accepted Prodicus’ interpretation of religious myths as metaphors for natural phenomena. Although we can’t be certain, it’s quite possible therefore that Zeno himself also adopted this view, as it may have followed quite naturally from his pantheism.

In Diogenes Laertius, who provides one of our best accounts of early Greek Stoicism, we’re told:

The deity, say they, is a living being, immortal, rational, perfect or intelligent in happiness, admitting nothing evil [into him], taking providential care of the world and all that therein is, but he is not of human shape. He is, however, the artificer of the universe and, as it were, the father of all, both in general and in that particular part of him which is all-pervading, and which is called many names according to its various powers. They give the name Dia because all things are due to him; Zeus in so far as he is the cause of life or pervades all life; the name Athena is given, because the ruling part of the divinity extends to the aether; the name Hera marks its extension to the air; he is called Hephaestus since it spreads to the creative fire; Poseidon, since it stretches to the sea; Demeter, since it reaches to the earth. Similarly men have given the deity his other titles, fastening, as best they can, on some one or other of his peculiar attributes. — Diogenes Laertius

This is attributed to Stoics in general, although the context suggests it may perhaps have been the original view of Zeno, perhaps stated in his treatise On the Whole.

For the Stoics, therefore, the universe considered in its totality was divine, a single living rational being, which they called Zeus. “Zeus” and “Nature” were therefore basically synonymous terms, as they would later be for Spinoza, another pantheist, who became notorious during his lifetime for saying Deus sive Natura — “God aka Nature”. By interpreting the traditional myths as metaphors for Nature as a whole, or aspects thereof, the Stoics could potentially avoid the charge of atheism for which earlier philosophers had been persecuted. Although sometimes the very ambiguity of their position would backfire and bring the same charge upon their heads.

Zeno, in his Republic, reputedly taught that all temples and religious sculptures should be abolished. Similar views resurface three centuries later in the Pharsalia of Lucan, Seneca’s nephew, which portrays the Stoic Cato of Utica refusing to seek an oracle from the priests in a temple to Zeus (called Jupiter by Romans) because he is a pantheist and therefore believes that god is everywhere and within everyone equally.

Did he select the barren sands
to prophesy to a few and in this dust submerge the truth
and is there any house of God except the earth and sea and air
and sky and excellence? Why do we seek gods any further?
Whatever you see, whatever you experience, is Jupiter. — Lucan, Pharsalia

In an article entitled ‘The Stoic Worldview’, John Sellars, one of the leading contemporary scholars of Stoicism, writes:

It is difficult to know how serious this talk of ‘God’ was. The early Stoic Cleanthes appears very sincere in his ‘Hymn to Zeus’, for instance, and we have no reasons to doubt his sincerity. However the Stoics were also well known for offering allegorical interpretations of the pagan Gods, including allegorical interpretations of the portraits of the Gods in Homer for instance. Famously, the Stoic Chrysippus once said that Zeus and his wife Hera are actually the active and passive principles in Nature, breath and matter. (In one source, Diog. Laert. 7.147, divine names for Nature are explained on the basis of their etymology.) Much later, in the third century AD, the philosopher Plotinus said that the Stoics bring in God into their philosophy only for the sake of appearances (Enn. 6.1.27). If ‘God’ is simply another name for Nature then it doesn’t really do much work in their philosophy; it doesn’t add or explain anything, so one might easily drop the word without any obvious loss. — John Sellars

Indeed, the Stoics became especially known for interpretation the Greek myths allegorically, as metaphors or symbols for various natural phenomena and processes. For instance, Henry Sedgwick, in his biography of Marcus Aurelius, summarizes the original teachings of Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism as follows:

Zeus, Hera and Vesta,
And all the gods and goddesses
Are not Gods, but names
Given to things that lack life and speech;
For Zeus is the sky, Hera the air,
Poseidon the sea, and Hephaestus fire.

We’re actually told that Persaeus, the most prominent of Zeno’s immediate students, adopted this agnostic or atheistic way of interpreting the gods from the teachings of Prodicus.

Persaeus appears in reality to be prepared to dispense with a divinity, or at least take up an agnostic position; seeing as, in his treatise On the Gods, he says that Prodicus was not unpersuasive in writing that things that provided nourishment or other help to us were the first things to be acknowledged and honoured as gods, and later that persons who first found new means of obtaining food or providing shelter, or invented other arts and crafts were called names like Demeter, Dionysus and the like. — Philodemus, On Piety

Cicero also attributes Prodicus’ view of the gods to Persaeus:

Persaeus says that it was men who had discovered some great aid to civilization that were regarded as gods, and that the names of divinities were also bestowed upon actual material objects of use and profit, so that he is not even content to describe these as the creations of God, but makes out that they are themselves divine. — Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods, 1.15

In his recent book, Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World, Tim Whitmarsh therefore classes the Stoic Persaeus as an atheist, like Prodicus before him. Early Christian authors familiar with Stoicism, would turn this into a way of refuting the very existence of their pagan gods. They enthusiastically embraced Euhemerism, with regard to the Greek and Roman gods, allowing Clement of Alexandria to exclaim: “Those to whom you bow were once men like yourselves”.

However, Persaeus wasn’t the only Stoic to use arguments based on the historical theory of mythology. We actually have a surviving text from the Stoic Cornutus, titled the Compendium of Greek Theology, which elaborates at great length on the symbolic interpretation of the gods, drawing heavily on speculations about ancient etymologies.

For example, the Greek goddess Artemis was traditionally given the epithet Phosphoros, meaning “light-bearing” because, says Cornutus, the moon, like a lesser version of the sun, also “emits light and illuminates the surroundings to some extent,” especially when it is full. The moon, he says, came to be depicted as the huntress Artemis because it appears to “chase” the animals of the zodiac “and swiftly catches them up — speed being something associated with a hunt as well.” Cornutus therefore concludes:

In the same way, my child, you can apply these basic models to everything else that comes down through mythology concerning those considered to be gods, in the conviction that the ancients were far from mediocre, but were capable of understanding the nature of the cosmos and ready to express their philosophy in symbols and enigmas. — Cornutus, Compendium of Greek Theology

Cornutus wanted to remove “superstition” from the ancient myths by interpreting them symbolically but he still believed piety was important and customary rituals should be preserved. Throughout his text traditional myths concerning each of the gods are understood metaphorically as references to different aspects of divine Nature.

Seneca, who was a contemporary of Cornutus, makes it clear that he sees the ancient myths as akin to children’s stories and that no educated adult should take them literally.

I am not so foolish as to go through at this juncture the arguments which Epicurus harps upon, and say that the terrors of the world below are idle — that Ixion does not whirl round on his wheel, that Sisyphus does not shoulder his stone uphill, that a man’s entrails cannot be restored and devoured every day; no one is so childish as to fear Cerberus, or the shadows, or the spectral garb of those who are held together by naught but their unfleshed bones. — Seneca, Letters, 24

It’s not necessarily the case that skeptical positions like Euhemerism should lead to atheism or even agnosticism. One might believe in the divinity of Nature as a whole, like the Stoics, or in a single transcendent God, like the Christians, while interpreting numerous ancient myths as “history in disguise”, deriving them from distorted accounts of real historical individuals and natural phenomena. However, once you start down the skeptical road, it can be hard to turn back. Someone who basically reinterprets all of the traditional myths allegorically is surely bound to go on to question whether or not gods even exist at all.

What Stoic Philosophy Would Say About Offensive Behaviour

What Stoic Philosophy Would Say About Offensive Behaviour

Recently I’ve been thinking more about insults and what Stoicism might tell us about how to view them. That’s been prompted by some articles by William Irvine and Eric O. Scott about insults, social justice, and political correctness, following Irvine’s recent publication of the book A Slap in the Face: Why Insults Hurt and Why They Shouldn’t. Their discussion does a good job of applying Stoic philosophy to a specific dilemma that’s topical at the moment. There’s been a lot of reference in the media recently to “microaggression”, “safe spaces”, and “trigger warnings”, particularly on US college campuses.

I’m not attempting in this post to provide a comprehensive overview of these issues. I mainly want to contribute a few observations from my perspective as a cognitive-behavioural therapist and to point out some relevant passages in the ancient Stoic literature that I feel may have been overlooked.

Let’s start with microaggressions. I was a psychotherapist for many years, so this dilemma is pretty familiar to me because it frequently comes up in therapy sessions, particularly in the context of treating social anxiety and providing what therapists call social-skills training. Psychological literature on dealing with insults, or put-downs, goes back, in particular, to the 1970s, the heyday of what used to be called “assertiveness training”. So I feel that when considering some of these issues it’s helpful to bring in elements of that perspective, as well as some of the insights Stoic philosophy has to offer. Psychotherapy, of course, speaks mainly to the psychological issues at stake in these debates, but it also has something to say about the ethical and political dimension because those are dilemmas that any therapist working in this area, over the last forty or fifty years, will have had to wrestle with in discussions with their clients, as well as in clinical supervision.

William Irvine’s article cites a recent article, which quotes, Sheree Marlowe, the chief diversity officer at Clark University, giving the following advice to incoming students in her presentation on microaggressions:

Don’t ask an Asian student you don’t know for help on your math homework or randomly ask a black student if he plays basketball. Both questions make assumptions based on stereotypes. And don’t say “you guys.” It could be interpreted as leaving out women, said Ms. Marlowe, who realized it was offensive only when someone confronted her for saying it during a presentation.

Irvine claims that much of this advice is further sensitizing students to insults, whereas the ancient Stoics would have recommended that they be desensitized to them, i.e., that they learn to “shrug off insults”.

The Stoics, after devoting considerable thought to how best to respond to insults, concluded that we would do well to become insult pacifists. When insulted, we should not insult back in return; we should instead carry on as if nothing had happened. It is, I have found, a very effective way to deal with many insults. On failing to provoke a rise in his target, an insulter is likely to feel foolish.

In relation to some of the most serious kinds of insults, “hate speech”, Irvine’s advice is as follows:

What about hate speech, though? Should we remain silent in the face of a racist insult? It depends on the situation. But the one thing we should not do is take the insult personally. We should instead dismiss hate speech, in much the same way as we should dismiss the barking of an angry dog. We should keep in mind that the dog, not being fully rational, cannot help itself. The Stoics would add that if we let ourselves get angered or upset by a barking dog, we have only ourselves to blame.

Eric O. Scott’s response to William Irvine’s book, and his presentation on this subject at Stoicon, raises the concern that Stoicism might be misinterpreted by some as advocating an overly-passive attitude toward social injustices, because of the the emphasis it places on acceptance. He writes:

If people find modern Stoicism’s advice for victims of injustice off-putting, it may have more to do with the choices we make about how to go about presenting that advice than with what the ancients have said. Being resilient to insults and being an active agent for Justice are not inimical objectives, and while I accept Irvine’s call to the former, I would caution him that he has gone too far in his neglect of the latter.

Many people today appear to read the Stoics as advising that we should be in some sense indifferent to the suffering of others. I think Scott does a good job of forcefully arguing against this, putting forward the case that Stoicism has always emphasized the virtue of justice, and an ethical concern for the common welfare of mankind. Irvine then replied to this article, as follows:

But besides being concerned with their own well being, Stoics felt a social duty to make their world a better place. This could be done, they knew, by introducing other people to Stoicism, but it could also involve helping extract non-Stoics from the trouble they got themselves into as a result of their misguided views regarding what in life is valuable. Marcus Aurelius is a prime example of a Stoic who took his social duty very seriously, but despite being the emperor, he failed to bring about a just society. The Rome that he ruled still allowed or even encouraged slavery and acts of human cruelty.

As an aside, we do know that Marcus passed several laws that improved the situation for slaves under his rule. I’ll discuss the notion that he and other Stoics are to blame for failing to openly oppose the institution of slavery in a separate section below. In any case, Irvine agrees with Scott here that Stoics do have a social duty to help others, which must be reconciled with their emotional acceptance of external events.

What the Stoics Really Said

Stoicism differs from its predecessor, Cynicism, which encouraged plain speaking (parrhesia) in a manner that was more indifferent toward the feelings of others. The Stoics also advocated plain speaking, but in a more moderate form that took account of the vulnerabilities and needs of others. I believe there’s a crucial, and actually fairly well-known passage, that may help clarify the psychological aspect of the Stoic position. In the Encheiridion, Epictetus is quoted as teaching his students:

When you see a man shedding tears in sorrow for a child abroad or dead, or for loss of property, beware that you are not carried away by the impression that it is outward ills that make him miserable. Keep this thought by you: ‘What distresses him is not the event, for that does not distress another, but his judgement on the event.’ Therefore do not hesitate to sympathize with him so far as words go, and if it so chance, even to groan with him; but take heed that you do not also groan in your inner being. (Handbook, 17)

Does Epictetus advise his students to ignore the man in distress? Does he suggest that they should simply challenge him for being overly-sensitive or tell him to “suck it up, buttercup”? No. Does he suggest delivering a lecture on Stoic Ethics to the person in distress? No. What Epictetus actually advised his students was that they should express outward sympathy, without hesitation. And to groan along with him, in certain situations, showing commiseration. His only caveat is that we should not ourselves become upset at the same external things: groan along outwardly, by all means, but not inwardly.

Why does Epictetus say this? Well, first of all, it’s clearly an important passage. Arrian selected it for the Handbook, which is a highly condensed summary of Epictetus’ Stoic teachings. So it’s not a throwaway remark. It’s presumably a central component of his teaching, and something it was considered important for all of his students to remember in daily life, hence its inclusion in the Encheiridion. Epictetus must have encountered similar misinterpretations of Stoicism to the ones we hear today: that it encourages us to be callous toward the suffering of others. That’s not consistent with Stoic Ethics, though. We have a duty to care for other rational beings, and to wish them well, Fate permitting.

We should desire to alleviate the suffering of others, where possible, although doing so is outside of our direct control and must therefore be pursued “lightly” as Epictetus put it. That doesn’t mean abandoning the goal of helping other people altogether, though. It means balancing the desire to help others overcome their suffering with acceptance of the fact that they have minds of their own. You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink. We can and should try to help others, nevertheless.

Sometimes people rightly detect that the Stoics think the best thing we can do for others is to educate them if we believe they’re mistaken, which would include with regard to the things that upset them. Sure. But what people often miss is that the Stoics also recognize that when someone is in the grip of a passion they’re not thinking straight so it’s not the best time to reason with them. Seneca says that if you tell someone who is in the throes of anger to calm down, it will just make them worse. That tends to apply to anxiety and other emotions as well. The Stoics knew that over 2,000 years ago. Cognitive therapists arrived at the same conclusion, based on their experience. People find it difficult to think objectively when they’re upset so there’s no point trying to lecture them. We should treat them with kindness and empathy, wait for their passions to naturally abate, and then perhaps talk to them about things if the opportunity arises, but in a sensitive manner rather than in a hectoring or condescending way.

I think it’s extremely helpful to dwell on the passage above for a moment and consider how it would apply to some of the modern examples being discussed. One of the typical examples of a microaggression given on university campuses is asking foreign students “Where are you from?” It’s considered to be potentially offensive to pose this question. I’m Scottish but I live in Nova Scotia, in Canada. About once a month, I reckon, someone asks me what part of Ireland I’m from — it’s mainly taxi drivers. (I’m totally serious.) Is that a microaggression? I don’t know. It would probably offend some people. It just makes me laugh. I think my Canadian girlfriend gets more annoyed about it than I do. Several British people in Canada have told me that they actually felt quite offended by similar remarks, though.

What advice should a Stoic give to people genuinely offended by these sort of comments? Should we say: “It’s not events that upset us, but our judgement about events.” Should I tell them to cultivate indifference toward external things? No. That would obviously be flippant and insensitive. It wouldn’t normally be very helpful. Why? Precisely because their passions, being external to my volition, are not under my direct control. In other words, merely telling them “what not to think” is unlikely to transform them into Stoic Sages. That’s something that seems trivial when it’s said to me but at which other people do sometimes take offence.

Here’s a more sensitive example… The bars in North America often sell a cocktail called an “Irish car bomb”. The first time I noticed that my jaw hit the floor because it seemed to be making light of atrocities such as the 1998 Omagh bombing, which killed 29 civilians, including several young children and a pregnant woman. It’s a pretty common drink, though. Would a typical Canadian bar serve a cocktail called an “Iraqi car bomb” or one (hypothetically) called an “Ottawa shooter”? Probably not. So that’s technically a double-standard and morally hypocritical, right? Although, notice that some of these are empirical questions… For all I know there are bars in Ontario that do a roaring trade in Ottawa shooters.

What if someone’s maiden aunt lost a close friend in the Omagh bombing and then walked into a bar in Canada to be greeted by a massive blackboard on the wall saying “Irish car bombs half-price on St. Paddy’s Day”? Is it offensive? Yes. Is it worth being upset about. No. Should we be surprised if some people are upset by it? No. Should we tell them to “get over themselves” and not take things so personally. No. What would Epictetus and the other Stoics actually advise us to do? Well, as we’ve just seen, according to Arrian, they’d say that if someone is genuinely upset we should express outward sympathy, and act sensitively. They’d say that we should be more concerned, though, about remaining inwardly detached ourselves and not joining in their distress — not allowing ourselves to be triggered. We should also behave sympathetically, though.

Stoicism is Actually a More Nuanced Philosophy

You see, what Stoicism has to say about this is actually very insightful, complex, and interesting… because it asks us to strike a careful balance. Often people in these debates about political correctness, and so on, go to one extreme or the other. They focus either on the notion that people are emotionally overreacting to things that others see as trivial (“liberal snowflakes”). Or they focus on the fact that people are being insensitive to the inevitable distress caused by certain triggers (“right-wing bigots”). I like to say that Stoicism is all about striking a delicate balance between “acceptance and action” or between emotional indifference and ethical concern. That’s the whole point of the philosophy really.

We all know the Stoic Sage is unperturbed by Irish car bomb cocktails and “sticks and stones may break his bones but words will never hurt him.” Sure but the Sage is a hypothetical ideal: the individual equivalent of a Utopian society. Or at least, he’s as “rare as the Ethiopian phoenix” as the Stoics put it — and that was born every 500 years, according to legend. Most of us — including Zeno, Chrysippus, and Epictetus — are classed as fools by the Stoics. Everyone is flawed. We’re all FINE — fucked up, insecure, neurotic, and emotional. It’s unrealistic, un-Stoic, and unphilosophical, to act surprised when other people are upset by external events, as Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius repeatedly point out. It would also be morally vicious to completely disregard their distress.

What do therapists who work with clients on a daily basis, dealing with these issues, actually do? Well, they have the whole “armamentarium” of psychological techniques at their disposal. For example, clients may learn to employ cognitive distancing strategies to moderate the distress caused by certain insults. Alternatively, they may employ “fogging”, from assertiveness training, the subtle art of agreeing with someone without really agreeing with them. Or they might employ repeated imaginal exposure to the upsetting event until their anxiety has naturally abated.

But should the therapist be shocked if their client is initially offended by insults? Or should they join with the client in their judgement that the events are “awful”, or offensive enough to be upsetting? Well, modern cognitive therapists face this dilemma every day. They all know that they have to walk a thin line between empathy and agreement. It’s understandable that the client is upset by insults but it’s also true that they don’t really need to feel deeply hurt by words — they could learn to view them in a more detached way.

Trigger Warnings

What about trigger warnings? Massimo Pigliucci has written an excellent article on “trigger warnings” in academia. These are warnings given to students in advance that a lecture may contain material that could be upsetting, especially to sufferers of PTSD. Now, the concern you’ll hear most therapists express about this issue is that the main treatment for anxiety, including PTSD, is repeated exposure to the feared event, and that avoidance is symptomatic and a maintaining factor in anxiety disorders. So the very idea of giving trigger warnings seems to fly completely in the face of what psychological research tells us about best practice in the treatment of PTSD.

If I am “triggered” by conversations about sex then avoiding those conversations is probably not going to help me in the long-term, it will potentially backfire by maintaining or even increasing my sensitivity. That said, exposure in therapy is usually following a graduated hierarchy, prolonged sufficiently for habituation to occur, and carried out in a safe environment under controlled conditions. It may be unhelpful for people to be caught off guard by experiences that trigger their anxiety. However, if we simply eliminated these exposure experiences, by never mentioning sex or whatever triggers are a concern, that would definitely reduce the chances of natural habituation taking place, and the anxiety or distress abating naturally — the vulnerable students would potentially get worse rather than better in the long-run.

For example, in an article entitled “HAZARDS AHEAD: The Problem with Trigger Warnings, According to the Research”, Richard J. McNally, a Professor of Psychology at Harvard, writes:

Trigger warnings are designed to help survivors avoid reminders of their trauma, thereby preventing emotional discomfort. Yet avoidance reinforces PTSD. Conversely, systematic exposure to triggers and the memories they provoke is the most effective means of overcoming the disorder.

Also, warning a group of students about quite specific triggers carries the risk of unintentional disclosure by alerting some students to the fact that others have a specific form of anxiety. The lecturer says, “Oh, by the way, we’re going to be talking about alien abductions today, in case anyone’s concerned by that…” Student x gets up and leaves the room, looking flustered. So everyone else in the class now basically knows that student x has anxiety that’s triggered by discussions of alien abductions. The cat is out of the bag. So that can now be spread around as gossip, etc. (The lecturer could warn students beforehand by email, etc., but the mere absence of particular students would still potentially lead to unintentional disclosure in this way.)

So are philosophers clouding the issue by speaking outside their sphere of competence and trespassing on the professional domain of psychologists? One of the things I notice about these debates is that they often turn on questions that are empirical rather than purely ethical. For example, whether or not we warn students in advance about a possible trigger word is probably going to depend on our appraisal of the probability and severity of the distress caused. That’s not really an ethical question, though. I noticed when reading the arguments around this topic that one side would often focus on examples of obvious overreactions to seemingly trivial triggers — such as someone seemingly choosing to take offence at a particular word — whereas the other side would focus on more serious, pathological, and even dangerous psychological conditions — such as someone with severe PTSD, perhaps a rape victim or war veteran, being re-traumatized.

If I was talking to vulnerable group of female refugees from a war-torn country where sexual abuse is common, I might think that it’s tactless to bring up the subject of rape without some kind of preliminary remark. Most of us would probably agree on that, probably even Epictetus. At the other end of the scale, some people have clown or belly-button phobias but they’re not so common that you’d expect to find one in every lecture room, and they’re not usually severe enough that they induce full-blown panic attacks at the mere mention of the word. (Although there’s always the exception that proves the rule.)

So if the majority of us, even the Stoics, agree that sometimes it makes sense to warn people in advance then the disagreement seems mainly to be over where to draw the line. Again, that seems to be an empirical question for psychology, not a purely philosophical question. We might want to consider what the actual prevalence of sexual trauma or other potential issues is among the population we’re addressing, for example. We should also distinguish between different forms of anxiety. Phobic anxiety can be severe but isn’t usually overwhelming or traumatizing unless it’s accompanied by what psychologists technically refer to as “panic attacks”, a term that has a very specific meaning in psychopathology. PTSD, by contrast, is often more severe and frequently accompanied by panic attacks, in which anxiety feels completely overwhelming. That can lead to a phenomenon called re-traumatization, in which anxiety being triggered can cause a relapse into PTSD symptoms, especially if experienced in a public setting, such as a lecture theatre. Once again, though, these are empirical questions about psychopathology.

We all agree (or most of us do) that we shouldn’t knowingly harm other people, which is the ethical component. The disagreements often turn on where the line should be drawn dividing acceptable from unacceptable levels of risk. Perhaps that’s really a question for psychologists, though, which would help explain why philosophers have struggled to agree on an answer, especially if they’re just engaged in armchair speculation without reference to scientific data. Perhaps they’re simply not the best people to answer the question.

Some Comments on Stoicism and Slavery

Perhaps this is a little bit of a digression but I think it may be of interest… In his article, Scott writes:

Moreover, there are well-founded reasons for being concerned that the ancients themselves failed to emphasize Justice as much as they should have. “About the institution of slavery,” say the authors of the introduction to the Chicago University Press’s series of Seneca translations, “there is silence, and worse than silence: Seneca argues that true freedom is internal freedom, so the external sort does not really matter.”

I agree with the fundamental point he is making here. However, I feel that the quote about Seneca is misleading, if it implies that Stoicism in general didn’t question the institution of slavery.

For a while, I did assume that the Stoics said virtually nothing about the institution slavery. In many ways, it would be unrealistic to have expected them to condemn it very forcefully or openly. It may even be that they simply thought it would be unrealistic to try to oppose it. Marcus Aurelius’ armies, for example, probably captured hundreds of thousands of barbarians during the major wars of his reign. Should they have been executed? Released to regroup and attack again? In fact, Marcus tried to resettle many inside the empire, in Italy, although I think some then engaged in an uprising. So apart from the fact that the Roman economy was entirely dependant on slavery, in the ancient world abolition perhaps posed other problems, such as what else could be done with hundreds of thousands of hostile foreign captives. That’s not a “justification” of slavery, just an attempt to explain why the Stoics may not have been in a position to speak out effectively against the entire institution.

However, I feel it’s only fair to say that, contrary to the book cited above, Seneca did go a little further than mere silence on the matter. In fact, he dedicated the whole of letter 47 to the topic of a master’s relationship with his slaves. There he argues that a master has a duty to treat his slaves with respect and affection, as fellow human beings, and friends. Although he certainly doesn’t question the institution of slavery as a whole, Seneca does forcefully argue that slaves should be treated with equal respect to free men: “Kindly remember that he whom you call your slave sprang from the same stock, is smiled upon by the same skies, and on equal terms with yourself breathes, lives, and dies.” He condemns those who abuse their slaves or see them as inferiors. The kernel of his advice, as he puts it, is this: “Treat your inferiors as you would be treated by your betters.”

Nevertheless, Seneca does not go so far as to say that people should cease to own other people, as their slaves. I used to think that’s as far as the Stoic critique of slavery went but then I noticed the following passage in Diogenes Laertius’ overview of early Stoic philosophy, part of his chapter on Zeno of Citium:

They [the Stoics] declare that he [the Sage] alone is free and bad men are slaves, freedom being power of independent action, whereas slavery is privation of the same; though indeed there is also a second form of slavery consisting in subordination, and a third which implies possession of the slave as well as his subordination; the correlative of such servitude being slave-ownership; and this too is evil.

According to Diogenes Laertius, therefore, it appears that the early Stoics did indeed condemn the institution of slavery as evil.

I suspect he is probably referring either to Zeno’s Republic or to one of the many writings of Chrysippus. It’s not surprising that the Stoics may have said this, of course, because as many people today note their concept of brotherly-love for the rest of mankind on the basis of us all being citizens of the same cosmos, appears very much at odds with the notion of slave-ownership. Moreover, Zeno’s Republic, perhaps the founding text of Stoicism, apparently portrayed a Utopian vision of the ideal Stoic society, in which all men and women were wise and equal. It’s therefore difficult to imagine how the institution of slavery could possibly be part of the ideal Stoic society- a sage would have to own another sage but, in any case, we’re told all property is to be held in common. So slavery must surely have also been abolished, along with law-courts, property, currency, etc., in Zeno’s Republic.

Rational Techniques of Emotional Therapy in Spinoza and the Stoics

Rational Techniques of Emotional Therapy in Spinoza and the Stoics

All things come from One, and are resolved into One. – A precept of the Orphic Mysteries, c. 6th Century BC.

NATURE! We are surrounded and embraced by her: powerless to separate ourselves from her, and powerless to penetrate beyond her… – Goethe, Aphorisms on Nature

Who Was Spinoza?

During his lifetime, and for many years after his demise, he was one of the most controversial philosophers in Europe but he is now seen as an intellectual hero of the Enlightenment. Benedictus de Spinoza (1632–1677) was a Jewish philosopher who lived in the Netherlands where, refusing the offer of a prestigious university professorship, he earned his living as a lens-grinder until his untimely death from a lung condition. In his writings, particularly The Ethics or Ethica, Spinoza developed an impressive and visionary metaphysical system, written in technical Latin and drawing together many themes from classical philosophy, which climaxed in a rational psychotherapy and method of personal philosophical enlightenment.

Spinoza is generally considered to be one of the most influential figures in the history of Western philosophy and, along with Descartes and Leibniz, one of the three great “rationalist” philosophers of the European enlightenment period. His work is perhaps the most imposing example of classical philosophical therapy and preempts modern psychotherapy, especially cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT), in many important respects. Bertrand Russell called Spinoza, ‘the noblest and most lovable of the great philosophers’ (1946: 552), and conceded that his grand theory, ‘was magnificent, and rouses admiration even in those who do not think it successful.’ (Russell, 1946: 553). Even someone who cannot accept the whole of Spinoza’s metaphysic, will often feel that his moral and psychological conclusions remain deeply profound, and that includes his psychotherapy as we shall see.

Spinoza was driven to develop a system of therapeutic self-help because of his own “existential” crisis. Though he considered himself Jewish, he had been excommunicated from the faith over his liberal interpretation of scripture, ritually cursed and cut adrift from his community. His published works were condemned as ‘forged in Hell by a renegade Jew and the Devil’, and banned from certain Jewish and Christian communities. In an unfinished manuscript on his method of self-improvement, Spinoza refers to his early uncertainty and craving for happiness, hinting at darker experiences of ‘extreme melancholy’, and his inner quest to procure philosophical balm for his troubled mind:

I thus perceived that I was in a state of great peril, and I compelled myself to seek with all my strength for a remedy [or “therapy”], however uncertain it might be; as a sick man struggling with a deadly disease, when he sees that death will surely be upon him […] is compelled to seek such a remedy with all his strength, inasmuch as his whole hope lies therein. (De Intellectus Emendatione, 4–5)

Ironically, this document, like Spinoza’s most important work, The Ethics, was hidden until after his death because of the same threat of religious persecution which forced him to develop his “emotional remedies” in the first place.

Spinoza’s Relevance to Modern Psychotherapy

Human impotence in moderating and controlling the emotions I call slavery. For a man who is enslaved by passions is not his own master, but lies at the mercy of fortune such that he is often forced, though he may see what is better for him, to follow what is worse. (E4, Preface, my translation)

The main reason why Spinoza’s psychotherapy is not currently more popular is probably because modern readers have difficulty with his terminology. For instance, classical philosophers included what we now call “psychotherapy” or “self-help” under the broad heading of “ethics.” Spinoza’s Ethica has little to do with “morality” in the modern sense; it really describes a self-help method, a system of therapy for overcoming negative emotions and cultivating personal enlightenment. As one commentator writes, ‘It picks up ancient debates, where questions about the nature of knowledge and of the ultimate nature of things were integrated with reflection on the mental attitudes required for a well-lived life.’ (Lloyd, 1996: 141).

Those taught that psychotherapy began with Freud are therefore surprised to discover that a definite therapeutic tradition can be traced back through the great Stoic and Epicurean schools to the very ancient teachings of Socrates, and perhaps even Pythagoras (fl. 6th century BC). I will pass over these issues, though, sadly, modern therapists are not usually taught the history of their own field and its close-knit connection with Western philosophy (See my ‘Stoicism as Philosophical Psychotherapy’, Therapy Today, 2005). Suffice to say that Spinoza provides one of the most sophisticated models of philosophical psychotherapy, though he seems heavily indebted to Hellenistic philosophy.

Leibniz dubbed Spinoza as pioneering ‘the sect of the new Stoics’. His personal library contained not only the works of Cicero and Seneca, but also those of Arrian containing the Stoic Handbook and Discourses of Epictetus. Indeed, many have seen Spinoza as a “Neostoic” in disguise, but I think there is also evidence of Epicureanism in his writings. It is perhaps better to consider the possibility that Spinoza was weaving together various influences from ancient and medieval thought into a new philosophical whole. It is no coincidence that he was one of the last great philosophers to write mainly in Latin, and the language itself may be considered a major influence upon his philosophy.

A further obstacle to the modern reader lies in Spinoza’s use of the word “God” to denote the logico-metaphysical absolute from which his system is deduced. Again, brevity forces me to say only that Spinoza’s “God” is very much a philosopher’s God, a pure metaphysical concept, and not at all the insidious anthropomorphism which bewitches the popular imagination. Einstein once said, “I believe in Spinoza’s God, Who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God Who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.” (Quoted in Einstein: Science and Religion, Arnold V. Lesikar)

For Spinoza, the whole of existence is, without exception, sacred and divine when considered in its entirety, a position known as “pantheism.” Not surprisingly, his philosophy struck a chord with mystically-inclined poets including Goethe and Wordsworth; and it stoked the ire of frightened, religious bigots who condemned him, somewhat self-contradictorily, as an atheist, heretic, Satanist, and pagan (q.v., Letter LXXIII). He caused an ongoing storm in Europe by referring to Deus sive Natura, ‘God aka Nature’, and indeed his metaphysic can be more credibly presented nowadays by substituting “Nature” for “God.” The fact that I have done so is only likely to offend people ignorant of Spinoza’s professed meaning.

Spinoza’s Philosophy & Psychology

I am fascinated by Spinoza’s pantheism, but admire even more his contributions to modern thought because he is the first philosopher to deal with the soul and the body as one, not two separate things. (Albert Einstein, quoted in Glimpses of the Great (1930) by G. S. Viereck)

Monism & Pantheism (The Bigger Picture)

Metaphysical Nature (Natura) is the concept of something which exists necessarily, by definition (causa sui). It is absolutely infinite, without borders or limitations in any dimension or sphere of being. It precedes, encompasses and pervades everything. Everything that exists does so by reference to it, and within it. It is the cloth from which everything is cut, the solitary metaphysical ground or substance of all that exists. It is the essence of everything, and all things conceived as a unified whole. When perceived accurately, it is accepted with absolute certainty as perfectly real, a necessary and eternal truth, because, ex hypothesi, its very existence is part of its essence.

By [Nature] I understand a being absolutely infinite, that is, a substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses eternal and infinite essence. (E1, Definition 6)

If we were to view it as conscious, we would probably want to call it “God”, though doing so may be more trouble than it’s worth. People have therefore vacillated between dubbing Spinoza as “god-intoxicated” on one hand, and an irredeemable atheist on the other: he is, of course, both and neither.

My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety toward the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests. (George Santayana, Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies, 1922: 246)

Spinoza’s metaphysical “Nature” exceeds the vastness of space and time, and the depth of the human imagination. Your body is a tiny, wandering cell within its vast body, your mind a slender and shadowy thought within its cosmic mind. This is Spinoza’s main premise.

For Spinoza, contemplation of the essence of Nature as an “absolutely infinite” metaphysical substance, is the highest philosophical and therapeutic method. The Nobel-prize winning writer, Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short story, The Spinoza of Market Street, an otherwise flawed effort, describes the euphoric vision of a Spinozist thus:

Yes, the divine substance was extended and had neither beginning nor end; it was absolute, indivisible, eternal, without duration, infinite in its attributes. Its waves and bubbles danced in the universal cauldron, seething with change, following the unbroken chain of causes and effects, and he, Dr. Fischelson, with his unavoidable fate, was part of this. (Singer, 1962: 25)

When asked why he doesn’t attend synagogue, the old scholar replies, “God is everywhere […] In the synagogue. In the marketplace. In this very room. We ourselves are parts of God.” (Singer, 1962: 21).

Pantheism is a philosophy favoured by mystics and ancient religions. Indeed, nowadays, it is tempting to compare Spinoza’s nameless, faceless, infinite God with the Brahman of Hindu vedanta, or the Sunyata of Buddhist metaphysics. Spinoza has therefore been taken as representative of a “perennial philosophy” (philosophia perennis). Aldous Huxley, who wrote a book on the subject, defines the perennial philosophy as, ‘the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man’s final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being.’ (Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy, 1946: 9).

To understand ourselves, transient things, and the individual events in life in relation to the whole in this way is to see things, in Spinoza’s celebrated phrase, sub specie aeternitatis; a vision of everything that happens as an aspect of the same timeless essence of Nature. All this heady stuff is probably too much for the purposes of practical psychotherapy, nevertheless it is important to grasp the theoretical context of Spinoza’s techniques, albeit in broad strokes, before proceeding to discuss them — it would be folly to pretend that none of this matters. If I remember rightly, it was upon hearing a reading of Goethe’s beautiful poem Nature, which paints the material world itself in godlike hues à la Spinoza, that the young Sigmund Freud was inspired to dedicate his life to plumbing the depths of human nature.

Double-Aspect Psychology (Mind-Body Unity)

The philosopher Rene Descartes developed the modern world’s most influential philosophy of psychology, which postulates that mind and matter are two completely distinct substances. In a sense, the theory of “Cartesian dualism” merely confirms a latent tendency in folk-psychology to regard the mind and body as separate objects. Indeed, the same presupposition, deeply ingrained in our language, still pervades contemporary psychology and psychotherapy.

However, mind-body dualism was seen as an incoherent theory by almost everyone who stopped to consider its implications in any detail. In the 20th Century, it was fiercely attacked both by existentialists and behaviourists, but it seems to keep boomeranging back into our collective consciousness. The Cambridge philosopher Gilbert Ryle famously dubbed it the “ghost in the machine”, the philosophy of mind received by default in modern society. However, Spinoza studied Descartes closely and was hot on his heels with a counter-argument.

Mind and body are one and the same individual which is conceived now under the attribute of thought, and now under the attribute of [physical] extension. (E2, 21, n.)

I cannot engage further with metaphysics here. I hope it will suffice to say that Spinoza argued, very convincingly, that mind and matter are two side of the same coin. He replaced Descartes’ dual-substance theory of mind with what became known as a dual-aspect theory. Putting things back together is often a wiser strategy than breaking them asunder, especially with regard to the human sense of self.

Modern psychotherapy, CBT in particular, is wont to speak of a cause-effect connection between the body and mind. For instance, that negative cognitions “cause” negative feelings and behaviour. The ghost of Spinoza would object that this seems to be a throwback to Cartesian dualism; there can be no “causal” relationship between body and mind because they are the same thing viewed from two different angles. The relationship between them is “closer than close”, it is one of total union. Hence, it makes no more sense to say that thoughts “cause” emotions and behaviour, or vice versa, than it does to say that the circumference of a circle causes its diameter. You might say that a person worries and gives himself an ulcer, an example of cause-effect between the mind and body. However, I would rather say that his worried brain caused the ulcer, one part of his body causing damage to another, and that his worried mind was just another aspect of the same event.

Spinoza’s Philosophy of Love (Positive Psychology)

Spinoza famously labels the fundamental emotion, which man experiences when he accurately perceives the essence of universal Nature, Amor Dei Intellectualis, the “intellectual love of God.” Given my reservations about Spinoza being pigeon-holed as a theologian, I would paraphrase this, in line with his writings, as “the rational, or philosophical, love of Nature.” This is the feeling Einstein claimed motivated most great scientists, a quasi-religious devotion to understanding and contemplating the essence of life and the universe. Moreover, its connection to therapy is that it is both the key to emotional insight and its conclusion, ‘he who understands himself and his emotions loves [Nature], and the more so the more he understands himself and his emotions.’ (E5, 15).

I cannot emphasize enough that contrary also to those who would miscast Spinoza, and philosophy in general, as arid intellectualism, Spinoza’s therapy is essentially founded upon a philosophy of love, one of the dominant themes in the Ethica. Spinoza argues that the ultimate human emotion is an active, rational, love of existence itself and from this descend in turn all other human emotions in fragmentary form. This is the true meaning of “Platonic love” as expressed by Socrates in The Symposium, and the meaning of the very word “philosophy”, which most have forgotten means “love of wisdom.” Philosophers are essentially lovers of contemplation and the classical quest for enlightenment is a labour of love toward apprehension of absolute Nature. Hence, the appeal of Spinoza’s philosophy to great poets becomes most apparent.

The Essence of Psychotherapy

Modern readers of Spinoza must first come to terms with the fact that he envisages a “deductive” model of psychotherapy, in which its essence is inferred from a handful of metaphysical axioms by a process of pure reasoning, i.e., a priori and without experiment or observation; ‘we shall determine solely by the knowledge of the mind the therapies for the emotions.’ (E5, Preface, my translation).

This method proceeds logically but not empirically, so many find it hard to decide whether they consider it “scientific” or not. Deductive arguments of this kind are traditionally considered legitimate proof in mathematics and formal logic, etc. Indeed, the Ethica is styled on the format of Euclid’s Elements, the ancient textbook of geometry, and Spinoza even claims to treat ‘human actions and desires precisely as though I were dealing with lines, planes and bodies.’ (E3, Preface). Nevertheless, it seems peculiar nowadays to contemplate a psychotherapy that has more in common with math than experimental psychology. Nietzsche, otherwise an admirer, was forced to bewail, ‘that hocus-pocus of mathematical form with which Spinoza encased his philosophy as if in brass.’ (Beyond Good & Evil, §5). In Spinoza’s defence, however, his method seems less absurd to most academic philosophers and many people, including some great scientists, feel it to have borne impressive fruit. As one contemporary philosopher writes:

The style of these works is sparse, unadorned, and yet solemn and imposing; the occasional aphorisms jump from the page with all the greater force, in that they appear as the surprising but necessary consequences of arguments presented with mathematical exactitude. (Scruton, 1986: 19)

Another remarkable consequence of this method is that it entails the assumption that we already possess an innate knowledge of the essence of psychotherapy, albeit in a confused form. Spinoza writes of the therapy of emotions ‘which I think every one experiences, but does not accurately observe nor distinctly see’ (E5, preface). However, Spinoza is a realist in this respect and keen to emphasize that he sees our ability for self-mastery as fairly limited; he only wishes to illustrate the extent to which it is possible, under the right circumstances, to achieve some degree of enlightenment and peace of mind.

The last section of the Ethica, on ‘Human Freedom’, introduces his proof of ‘the path or lifestyle which leads to freedom.’ Spinoza sets out to demonstrate ‘the power of the mind, or of reason’, and ‘the extent and nature of its dominion over the emotions, for their control and moderation.’ (E5, Preface). Believing that he has exposed the essence of philosophical therapy with mathematical certainty, he goes so far as to write:

I have now gone through all the therapies for the emotions, or all that the mind, considered in itself alone, can do against them. (E5, 20 n., my italics)

Spinoza therefore proceeds to summarize the five essential processes in which philosophical psychotherapy consists. These can only be properly understood by reference to Spinoza’s philosophy as a whole but I will attempt a brief outline before proceeding to discuss his more empirical therapy.

Spinoza’s Therapeutic Armamentarium

1. Cognitive Insight into the Emotions. (Cognitive Restructuring)

[Therapy consists in] the actual knowledge [or “cognition”] of the emotions.

The essence of Spinoza’s psychotherapy is the idea that cognitive insight into the nature of desire and emotion is necessarily therapeutic. Spinoza carefully defines what he means by such knowledge in the Ethica and provides schematic examples. For instance, when specific emotions are understood in the light of his theory of mind, of pain and pleasure, and “active” and “passive” emotion, a cognitive transformation occurs in our experience of them. When we realize that our thinking shapes our emotion we can learn to actively choose rational emotions, rather than being passively swept along by emotions which impose themselves upon us. True knowledge of the emotions also entails an understanding of the extent to which they are founded upon confused (irrational) cognitions and their purification in terms of accurate ideas. This resembles the “cognitive restructuring” of emotion in CBT.

Spinoza defines accurate cognition as occurring, ‘when a thing is perceived solely through its essence, or through the knowledge of its proximate cause [causa proxima]‘ (De Intellectus Emendatione, 8). Some modern philosophers, notably Sir Stuart Hampshire, have argued that this kind of insight prefigures Freud’s development psychoanalytic interpretation. However, Spinoza himself provides many examples of what he means by the essence of emotion and these clearly show that he is referring to insight based on the current cognitive structure of emotion, similar to modern cognitive therapy, and not repressed childhood libidinal attachments, etc., as postulated by psychodynamic therapy. I think Spinoza would say that the childhood antecedents of an adult emotion are no longer part of its essence, but merely its “remote cause”, and therefore understanding them does not constitute the kind of accurate cognition referred to in his therapy; there is, of course, no trace of anything even loosely resembling Freudian interpretation to be found anywhere in his writings.

The feeling that an interpretation is correct, or the supposed recovery of a repressed memory, would be classed by Spinoza as inadequate (hypothetical) knowledge, based upon sensation and imagination, rather than deductive reasoning. Spinoza would also seem to imply that recollection of the historical origin of an emotion provides unreliable knowledge unless we already accurately perceive the essence of the emotion as it exists in the present (q.v., De Intellectus Emendatione, pp. 10–11). As an advocate of the cognitive-behavioural tradition, I would concur. According to a well-known legend, Guatama Buddha said that if we find a man wounded by an archer, there’s no point debating who made the arrow or where it came from, we should set to work immediately removing the arrowhead and repairing the wound. It’s knowledge of the proximate (“maintaining”) causes of suffering that Spinoza thinks we should be concerned about.

2. Separation of Rational Emotion from Imaginary Causes. (ABC Model)

[Therapy consists in] the [mental] separation of the emotions from the idea [“cognition”] of an external cause, which we imagine confusedly.

Spinoza argues that when emotions are accurately understood we perceive them as determined primarily by our own internal images and ideas rather than by the external “triggers” which we naturally tend to blame them upon. We say “He made me angry”, but it would be more accurate to say, “I made myself angry toward him.” When we stop blaming our feelings on others and take responsibility for them ourselves, we become fundamentally empowered. This is strikingly similar to the idea of ‘cognitive mediation’, or the ABC model, in modern CBT. Indeed, Aaron Beck, the founder of cognitive therapy, quotes the following passage from Spinoza as one of the chapter mottoes in his seminal Cognitive Therapy & the Emotional Disorders (1976).

I saw that all the things I feared, and which feared me had nothing good or bad in them save insofar as the mind was affected by them. (Spinoza, quoted in Beck, 1976:156)

Spinoza also writes:

Wherefore the reality of true thought must exist in the thought itself, without reference to other thoughts; it does not acknowledge the object as its cause, but must depend on the actual power and nature of the understanding. […] Thus that which constitutes the reality of a true thought must be sought in the thought itself, and deduced from the nature of the understanding. (De Intellectus Emendatione, 26)

By which I take him to mean that a rational belief is necessarily derived from some active proof and insofar as an idea is experienced as being triggered passively by external events it is irrational. There is no causal relationship between body and mind. Therefore, when we assume that a physical event, including another person’s actions toward us, causes our emotional response we are necessarily in contradiction.

3. The Necessary & Eternal Basis of Rational Emotions.

[Therapy consists in the perception of] time, whereby emotions referring to [timeless] things which we distinctly understand overpower those which refer to [transient] things perceived in a confused and fragmentary manner.

When we accurately understand the essence of a thing we perceive what is constant and unchangeable in it. The truth that the angles of a triangle add up to two right angles is timeless; though triangular shaped things in nature may come and go the concept remains eternally the same. Because reason perceives things in relation to essential truths it gives rise to emotions which are more rational, stable, and powerful.

The more we truly understand people, for example, the less our feelings are swayed by individual appearances and the more rational and constant they become because they are determined by general principles of our philosophy. If I conclude, with Spinoza and Socrates, that people essentially desire happiness that will become a constant factor in my emotional responses, if I have no philosophy of human nature I will respond to each event according to the vagaries of habit and irrational association.

A famous example, but one likely to provoke much misunderstanding: The Stoic philosopher Seneca the Younger is reputed to have handled his own execution in this way. His former student the emperor Nero — who became a political tyrant and persecutor of philosophers — forced Seneca to fall on his sword, or rather to swallow poison and cut his wrists. Seneca, one of the most reasonable men in the world, reputedly calmed his frantic supporters by observing that everyone already knew Nero was a murderer, therefore it should come as no surprise when the time comes for him to murder his opponents. In doing so, however, he was utilizing an ancient therapeutic formula derived from philosophy and rhetoric. The same technique is rehearsed by Marcus Aurelius in his journal of meditations,

When you run up against someone else’s shamelessness, ask yourself this: Is a world without shameless people possible?

No.

Then don’t ask the impossible. There have to be shameless people in the world. This is one of them.

The same for someone vicious or untrustworthy, or with any other defect. Remembering that the whole class has to exist will make you more tolerant of its members. […]

Yes, boorish people do boorish things. What’s strange or unheard-of about that? Isn’t it yourself that you should reproach for not anticipating that they’d act this way? (Meditations, 9: 42, Hays)

For Seneca, there could be no anxiety in the face of the inevitable. He knew what to expect from life and from mad emperors, and when Nero’s hired thugs came to put him to death he was serene because he was prepared to meet his fate. (Of course, if there had been an escape route, no doubt Seneca would have taken it.)

For the Stoics, irrational anxiety was always accompanied by a kind of feigned surprise and naive indignation incompatible with reason and common sense. On the day of his death, Seneca felt the same way about his murderers that he had always felt, because his emotions were based on a long-standing perception of the general situation and not a superficial gut-reaction to the heavy knock on the door of Nero’s guards. If we all know that we must necessarily die, why should death frighten us any more when it is close than when it is far away? This is the “constancy” of the ideal Sage who “never changes his mind”, because his deepest layer of emotion is rooted in a clear and distinct perception of the timeless essence of Nature.

4. The Multiple Causes of Rational Emotion. (Determinism & Empathy)

[Therapy consists in] the multitude of causes whereby emotions are fostered which refer to the common properties of things or to [the essence of Nature itself, which Spinoza calls “God”].

To understand things rationally is to do so by reference to philosophical principles, and ultimately the essential idea of Nature itself. Instead of responding to individual “triggers” in our environment, which send us hither and thither, our emotions are shaped by the whole structure of our rational world-view. When we see the common properties of things we respond to things in context rather than in isolation and our feelings become balanced and rational. Under this heading, presumably, fall the therapeutic effects of determinism so fundamental to both Spinozism and Stoicism. The last of Spinoza’s example rules of life states,

[…] in so far as we understand, we can desire nothing save that which is necessary, nor can we absolutely be contented with anything save what is true: and therefore insofar as we understand this rightly, the endeavour of the best part of us is in harmony with the order of the whole of nature. (E4, Appendix XXXII)

The more we understand, the more we experience external events as causally determined, and the actions of ourselves and other people as determined by various motives and causes. To understand all is to forgive all. Einstein puts Spinoza’s theory of empathic understanding very neatly in a letter, discussing the Christian rule of life, “love thine enemy”.

I agree with your remark about loving your enemy as far as actions are concerned. But for me the cognitive basis is the trust in an unrestricted causality. ‘I cannot hate him, because he must do what he does.’ That means for me more Spinoza than the prophets. (Einstein, in a letter to Michele Besso (6 January 1948))

Like the Stoics before him, Spinoza believed in absolute determinism, and that this assumption in itself conveyed a sense of contentment in lieu of specific causal knowledge. The philosophical Sage’s determinism about life and other people is meant to generate rational equanimity similar to the “unconditional acceptance” of REBT. Therapists may be surprised to find a similar premise in the canon of behaviour therapy but, to some extent, behaviourism and Spinozism are natural allies.

Objectivity, empathy, and sensitivity to suffering are intrinsic to the behaviour therapist’s approach to his patients. The objectivity follows from the knowledge that all behaviour, including cognitive behaviour, is subject to causal determination no less than is the behaviour of falling bodies or magnetic fields. […] To explain how the patient’s neurosis arose out of a combination or chain of particular events helps [empathic] understanding. (Wolpe, 1990: 59)

5. Rational Conditioning of Emotion.

Finally, [therapy consists] in the capacity for mental self-regulation of the emotions, whereby they are organised and mutually associated with each other. (E5, 20, n., my translations )

I have translated this passage to highlight the notion of “emotional self-regulation”, or the rational organisation of one’s thoughts and feelings. The previous methods were techniques of “pure reason” which followed necessarily from cognitive insight into the emotions. Spinoza seems here to acknowledge a range of empirical techniques, whereby the mind can also engineer its habits of thinking so that emotions are conditioned to be associated with each other in a rational and constructive manner. ‘By this power of rightly organizing and associating the modifications of the body we can bring out about that we are not easily affected by bad emotions.’ (E5, 10, n.)

This more “empirical” mode of philosophical therapy bears obvious resemblance to techniques and principles found in modern cognitive and behavioural therapies, which we shall now consider.

Empirical Techniques of Philosophical Psychotherapy

5.1 Ordering of Contrary Associations (Reciprocal Inhibition)

Joseph Wolpe adapted Sherrington’s theory of “reciprocal inhibition” in neurology, making it the core mechanism of the Behaviour Therapy developed in the 1960s. As the name indicates, when two mutually exclusive neurological states coincide the most powerful will inhibit the weaker, a phenomenon variously known as “counter-conditioning” or “response competition.” This basic mechanism has many therapy applications, the most typical being the use of physical relaxation to systematically extinguish nervous anxiety.

If a response antagonistic to anxiety can be made to occur in the presence of anxiety-evoking stimuli so that it is accompanied by a complete or partial suppression of the anxiety responses, the bond between these stimuli and the anxiety responses will be weakened. (Wolpe, Psychotherapy by Reciprocal Inhibition, 1958: 71)

Although this concept was preempted by earlier behaviourists and hypnotherapists, Wolpe believed himself to be the first to make it a central and explicit principle of psychotherapy. Nevertheless, three hundred years before Wolpe, Spinoza made it one of the axioms (E5, A1) underlying his psychotherapy. He concludes that a powerful emotion will suppress a weaker contrary one, including the suppression of fear by mental calm (animi acquiescentia).

An emotion can neither be hindered nor removed save by a contrary emotion and one stronger than the emotion which is to be checked. (E, 4, Prop VII)

However, Spinoza’s “dual-aspect” psychology attempts to resolve the opposition between cognitive and behavioural theories, three hundred years before it became a bone of contention in modern psychotherapy.

5.2 Contemplation of Virtue & the Sage (Covert Modelling)

An ancient philosophical technique consists in contemplating the character of an imaginary wise man, a perfectly enlightened and self-possessed philosopher, the ideal of the Sage. As one modern commentator phrases it,

The Ethics describes the free man, who has risen to the higher levels of cognition, mastered his passions, and reached understanding of himself and the world. (Scruton, 1986: 95).

The Sage is not a real man, of course, nobody is perfect. However, the concept of the Sage is the concept of man-made-perfect and the clear and distinct perception of this goal acts as the moral compass of the philosopher. Spinoza claims that the moral terms “good” and “bad” only have meaning in a relative sense, insofar as ‘we want to form for ourselves an idea of man upon which we may look as a model of human nature’, and we may refer to things which are good or bad at helping us to approach this ideal. (E4, Preface). We may meditate upon the strengths of an ideal Sage, of a real-life hero or role-model, or any strengths manifested by ourselves or others. Contemplation of the Sage resembles, e.g., Cautela’s Behaviour Therapy technique of “covert modelling.”

Though nobody can attain perfect wisdom, ‘meanwhile man conceives a human character much more stable than his own, and sees that there is no reason why he should not himself acquire such a character.’ This character consists in rational love and ‘the knowledge of the union existing between the mind and the whole of nature.’ (De Intellectus Emendatione, 6). Spinoza refers to the work of approaching this ideal as a “purification” of the intellect, the original philosophical meaning of katharsis, the effect of which is supreme peace of mind.

[…] the Sage, insofar as he is considered as such, is scarcely disturbed in mind: but being conscious of himself, of [Nature], and of things, by a certain eternal necessity, he never ceases to be, but possesses eternally true peace of mind (acquiescentia). (E5, 47, Note)

In relation to this, Spinoza observes that in conditioning the mind by means of mental imagery, the focus of our attention should always be upon the pleasant qualities we wish to cultivate and not the unpleasant ones we seek to avoid.

But we must note, that in arranging our thoughts and conceptions we should always bear in mind that which is good in every individual thing, in order that we may always be determined to action by an emotion of pleasure. (E5 P10, Note)

This conclusion follows from Spinoza’s observation that we cannot imagine something as absent without imagining its presence unless we focus our mind on a contrary idea with which it is mutually exclusive. This is a basic axiom of modern hypnotherapy. The clichéd example being the obvious difficulty in obeying the command “Don’t imagine an elephant!” in response to which most people will do just the opposite and picture one. More importantly, if we focus on problems, we risk becoming engrossed in them.

For instance, if a man sees that he is too keen in the pursuit of honour, let him think over its right use, the end for which it should be pursued, and the means whereby he may attain it. Let him not think of its misuse, and its emptiness, and the fickleness of mankind, and the like, whereof no man thinks except through a morbidness of disposition; with thoughts like these do the most ambitious most torment themselves, when they despair of gaining the distinctions they hanker after, and in thus giving vent to their anger would fain appear wise. Wherefore it is certain that those who cry out the loudest against the misuse of honour and the vanity of the world, are those who most greedily covet it. (E5 P10, Note)

The inability of the senses to represent absence (or “non-being”) without imagining presence also explains the importance of reciprocal inhibition in psychotherapy. To remove anxiety, we imagine the presence of calm and relaxation, a positive and contrary state, rather than merely trying to imagine the absence of fear.

Thus he who would govern his emotions and appetite solely by the love of freedom strives, as far as he can, to gain a knowledge of the virtues and their causes, and to fill his spirit with the joy which arises from the true knowledge of them: he will in no wise desire to dwell on men’s faults, or to carp at his fellows, or to revel in a false show of freedom. (E5 P10, Note)

This is undoubtedly related to Spinoza’s striking rejection of the Socratic meditation upon death (melete thanatou): ‘A free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is a meditation not on death but on life.’ (E4, 17).

The contemplation of virtue in general, whether that means seeing the best in others or visualizing the ideal Sage, prepares us with a repertoire of vivid and lively images which are ready-to-hand and can be used counteract negative emotions in the future by “reciprocal inhibition.”

5.3 Mental Fortitude (Ego-Strength)

Spinoza famously argues that the desire for self-preservation (conatus) is the very essence of man. (Another point best understood by reference to his writings.) The power of the mind to act freely and autonomously in accord with reason, love, and self-interest is therefore the essence of human excellence. In this respect, Spinoza appears to follow the connotation of the Latin word for virtue (virtus) which can also mean strength, courage, or vitality, ‘by virtue and power I understand the same thing.’ (E4, D8). He therefore argues that “strength of mind” (animi fortitudo), a kind of basic strength of character closely-knitted to the rational love of existence, is the primary human “virtue.” (We still speak today of someone’s “strengths” or their forte.) For Spinoza, virtue in this (pre-Christian) sense cannot logically co-exist with suffering (pathos); as the ancient saying goes: “The good man is always happy.” Indeed, he is happy, healthy, loving, rational, and empowered. Spinoza’s ideal of mental fortitude is obviously comparable to concepts such as “self-efficacy” or “ego-strength” in modern psychotherapy and with certain concepts in the field of Positive Psychology.

He also divides mental strength, or virtue, into two principal modes of active and rational emotion: animositas et generositas. The technical meaning is difficult to translate, but it is clear from his comments that animositas (“love of life”?) denotes the virtue of rational self-interest or egotism, and generositas (“love of mankind”?) that of rational social-interest or altruism. For Spinoza, seen through the lens of his philosophy, these two basic drives are not in conflict but complementary; they can therefore easily be compared to the notions of rational self-interest and social-interest in Ellis’ REBT.

5.4 The Rules of Life (Coping Statements)

In common with the Stoics and other ancient therapeutic schools, Spinoza recommends that simple philosophical principles, the “rules of living” (vitæ dogmata), should be internalized by repeated memorization.

The best thing then we can bring about, as long as we have no perfect knowledge of our emotions is to conceive some right manner of living or certain rules of life, to commit them to memory, and to apply them continuously to the particular things which come in our way frequently in life, so that our imagination may be extensively affected by them and they may be always at hand for us. (Spinoza, Ethics, V.10.n.)

Of course, they are also comparable to the positive cognitions, coping statements, self-statements, etc., of modern CBT, or to the affirmations and autosuggestions of the hypnotherapists.

In Graeco-Roman philosophical therapy such maxims seem to have been designed to function as an aide memoire or mnemonic. They often take the form of a short, pithy sentence of which the famous inscriptions (“Know thyself”, “Nothing in excess”) at the Oracle of Apollo at Delphi were perhaps the most famous. Spinoza gives the following example. One of the rules of life suggested by the Ethica is that hatred is best met with love and the virtue of social-interest (generositas) and not requited with hatred. Spinoza recommends that we meditate on philosophical “rules” that say,

• Our true advantage lies in cultivating love not hatred within ourselves.

• Mutual friendship is a valuable good in life.

• True peace of mind results from the rational way of life.

• Men act by the necessity of their nature in causing offence, just like any force of nature. (E5, P10, Note)

When these ideas and their implications are borne in mind they counteract, or at least weaken, excessive anger associated with the perceived offence by determining our emotions rationally, through a complex of positive and empowering mental associations.

5.5 The Premeditation of Misfortunes (Imaginal Exposure)

Spinoza preempts several key notions found in Behaviour Therapy. Perhaps most fundamentally, he clearly identifies, under another name, the role of classical (Pavlovian) conditioning principles in psychotherapy,

If the human body has once been affected by two or more bodies [i.e., physical stimuli] at the same time, when the mind afterwards imagines any of them, it will straightway remember the others also. (E2, P6)

One of the cardinal techniques both of ancient and modern psychotherapy is that in which a person visualizes distressing events, usually one’s to be faced in the near future, while mentally rehearsing more positive and rational beliefs and the emotions and actions that accompany them. The Stoics called this premeditatio malorum, preparing the mind in advance, by contemplative meditation, to cope well with misfortune. The Stoic writings of Seneca, e.g., provide many examples of the therapeutic use of premeditation. In modern CBT many variations of the same basic concept are found and referred to as imaginal exposure, covert rehearsal, rational-emotive imagery, etc.

Hence, Spinoza suggests that we mentally prepare for the typical problems that people are likely to encounter in life by rehearsing belief in our philosophical and therapeutic “rules of life.” Spinoza uses the two cardinal virtues of his philosophy, self-interest and social-interest, as examples. First he explains how social-interest (generositas) can be developed by rehearsing the relevant philosophical maxims in the Ethica,

For example, we stated among the rules of life that hatred must be overcome by love or [compassion and social-interest], not requited by reciprocated hatred. But in order that this rule may be always at hand for us when we need it, we must often think of and meditate on the common types of harm done to men, and in what manner and according to what method they may best be avoided through [compassionate social-interest]. For thus we unite the image of the harm done to the imagination of this rule, and it will always be at hand when harm is done to us. (Ethics, V.10.n.)

Spinoza adds “if the anger which arises from the greatest injuries is not easily overcome, it will nevertheless be overcome, although not without a wavering of the mind, in a far less space of time than if we had not previously meditated on these things.” From anger he proceeds to discuss the conquest of fear by means of the cardinal virtue of self-interest (animositas),

We must think of [courage and self-interest] in the same manner in order to lay aside fear, that is, we must enumerate and often imagine the common perils of life and in what manner they may best be avoided and overcome by mindfulness (animi præsentia) and [courageous self-interest]. (Ethics, V.10.n.)

In other words, Spinoza recognizes a kind of classical conditioning in the memorization of positive beliefs and their repeated association with the mental image of challenging situations in a way that anticipates the use of Systematic Desensitization and mental rehearsal in modern research-based cognitive and behavioural therapies.

Conclusions

It behooves a simple introduction of this kind to end by citing Spinoza’s famous and oft-quoted conclusion to the Ethica,

If the road I have shown to lead to this is very difficult, it can yet be discovered. And clearly it must be hard when it is so seldom found. For how could it be that if salvation were close at hand and could be found without difficulty it should be neglected by almost all? But all excellent things are as difficult as they are rare. (E5, Prop 42 n.)

The way of the Spinozistic Sage is indeed a road less travelled. However, the earlier section on emotional therapy concludes on a more encouraging note; if the path is difficult, the steps are not.

Whosoever will diligently observe and practise these precepts (which indeed are not difficult) will verily, in a short space of time, be able, for the most part, to direct his actions according to the commandments of reason. (E5, 10, n.)

I have presented Spinoza’s conclusions only, in very summary form, and not his deductive “proofs.” I strongly encourage readers to study the Ethica for themselves. As he himself implores his readers, ‘not to reject as false any paradoxes he may find here, but to take the trouble to reflect on the chain of reasoning by which they are supported.’ (De Intellectus Emendatione, 17). In a sense, as I hope you will see, the process of grappling with Spinoza’s ideas, is itself the fundamental technique of his psychotherapy. Nevertheless, I hope that I have shown something of the relevance of Spinoza to modern therapists and whet their appetite for his philosophy.

References

Damasio, Antonio (2004). Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, & the Feeling Brain. Vintage Books.

Deleuze, Gilles (1970). Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. San Francisco: City Light Books

Hampshire, Stuart (2005). Spinoza & Spinozism. Oxford: OUP

Lloyd, Genevieve (1996). Spinoza & the Ethics. Oxford: Routledge.

Robertson, Donald (2005). ‘Stoicism as Philosophical Psychotherapy’, Therapy Today, July, 2005.

Scruton, Roger (1986). Spinoza: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: OUP

Singer, Isaac Bashevis (1962). The Spinoza of Market Street. Middlesex: Penguin.

What the philosopher Marcus Aurelius believed about masculinity

What the philosopher Marcus Aurelius believed about masculinity

Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Just be one!

— Meditations, 10.16

Over the past few decades, there’s been a resurgence of interest in Stoicism. People often confuse stoicism (lower-case), a coping style that involves suppressing or concealing emotions, also called having a “stiff upper-lip,” with Stoicism (capitalized), the ancient Graeco-Roman school of philosophy. Some crudely equate “manliness” with being tough and unemotional (lower-case “stoicism”). I think there’s a more nuanced way to understand how Stoic philosophy might inform a modern man’s conception of his role in society.

The most famous ancient Stoic is Marcus Aurelius, who was emperor of Rome during the height of its power. (I wrote about his use of Stoicism in my book How to Think Like a Roman Emperor: The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius.) Marcus was the closest thing the world has ever witnessed to Plato’s ancient ideal of the philosopher-king. Indeed, we’re told that he frequently quoted Plato: “that those states prospered where the philosophers were kings or the kings philosophers.”

He did have enemies, though. In 175 AD, toward the end of his reign, Marcus faced a civil war when the governor-general of the eastern provinces, Avidius Cassius, had himself acclaimed as a rival emperor by the Egyptian legion. Cassius was a cruel general, known to torture his prisoners of war and deserters alike. He criticized Marcus for being a weak and unmanly ruler, calling him “a philosophical old woman.” After only three months, however, Marcus won the civil war when Cassius’ own officers ambushed and beheaded him. No statues of Cassius survive today and his name is all but forgotten. It would seem that Cassius’s brutal brand of masculinity was not in fact a more efficient leadership style than Marcus’ philosopher-king approach.

Marcus actually tackles the question of masculinity head-on in his personal notes on Stoic philosophy as a way of life, known today as Meditations. Here’s what we can learn from the ancient text.

Manliness and fatherhood

My impression is that Marcus inherited certain old-fashioned Roman values from his immediate family, particularly his mother, Domitia Lucilla. Despite being an immensely wealthy and highly educated Roman noblewoman, she preferred a simple way of life “far removed from that of the rich” (Meditations, 1.3). She seems to have been good friends with Junius Rusticus, who became Marcus’ main Stoic tutor. I sometimes wonder whether it could have been Marcus’ mother who first introduced him to the study of Stoic philosophy, which came to shape his concept of what it means to be a man.

Tragically, his father died when Marcus was a child, perhaps as young as three years old. We don’t know the circumstances. Marcus only knew him through early childhood memories and what he learned from family and friends about his father’s reputation, which he sums up in just two words: “modesty and manliness” (Meditations, 1.2). Other Roman nobles would have regarded “modesty” as evidence of weakness. Marcus, on the contrary, saw the modesty for which his father was known as a sign of his manliness and strength of character.

For Marcus, the ability to show kindness and compassion toward others, rather than wallowing in anger, was one of the most important signs of true inner strength and manhood.

Although he lost his father before he even had a chance to know him, Marcus was fortunate to be adopted as a teen by a Roman noble destined to become the emperor known as Antoninus Pius. Marcus made Antoninus Pius his role model in life and decades after his adoptive father’s death Marcus would still describe himself as a “disciple of Antoninus.” Meditations lists in great detail the qualities Marcus most admired in his adoptive father and sought to emulate. The first thing he mentions is that Antoninus was “gentle.” He was “never harsh, or implacable, or overbearing,” and never worked himself up into a lather over anything (Meditations, 1.16). For Marcus, the ability to show kindness and compassion toward others, rather than wallowing in anger, was one of the most important signs of true inner strength and manhood.

Manliness and mastering anger

In Meditations, Marcus goes into detail about Stoic strategies for mastering our feelings of anger. He concludes by saying something remarkably ahead of its time:

And when you do become angry, be ready to apply this thought, that to fly into a passion is not a sign of manliness, but rather, to be kind and gentle. For insofar as these qualities are more human, they are also more manly. It is the man who possesses such virtues who has strength, nerve, and fortitude, and not one who is ill-humoured and discontented. Indeed, the nearer a man comes in his mind to freedom from unhealthy passions [apatheia], the nearer he comes to strength. Just as grief is a mark of weakness, so is anger too, for those who yield to either have been wounded and have surrendered to the enemy. — Meditations, 11.18

Marcus, like other Stoics, didn’t believe that all feelings of anger and grief are signs of weakness. The Stoics accepted that there is a type of emotional reaction that’s inevitable in certain situations. Here, he’s talking about what they called the unhealthy passions, feelings such as fear or grief that someone indulges in and magnifies beyond the bounds set by nature. The wise man, by contrast, doesn’t add to this initial spark of anger or perpetuate it any further. To do so, according to Marcus, is a sign of true weakness. Although he seemed like a powerful figure, the cruel usurper Avidius Cassius was, in this sense, actually a very weak man. He lacked the strength of character and freedom from passionate grief and anger (apatheia) exhibited by Marcus’ birth father and role models such as his adoptive father, Antoninus.

To be more manly, you must first be more human

One of the pitfalls of defining manliness is the potential implication that women don’t possess the qualities you’re describing. The Stoics avoided that by insisting that the virtues are fundamentally the same in men and women. However, they manifest in superficially different ways in each of us, depending on our nature and circumstances. It would be more accurate to say that Marcus is describing prerequisites for manliness, required for humans to fulfill their nature properly — “insofar as these qualities are more human,” as he puts it, “they are also more manly.” Stoics believed that anyone, whether male or female, required this moral and practical wisdom in order to reach their potential in life.

Elsewhere, Marcus affirms his desire to live up to Antoninus’ example and become “one who is manly and mature, a statesman, a Roman, and a ruler” (Meditations, 3.5). To him this means being able to perform his duties, and even face death, in good cheer, without being dependent upon support from others. He sums it up in the maxim: “you must stand upright, not be held upright.” Marcus repeated this striking expression of self-reliance three or four times in Meditations. Finally, he condensed it into just three Greek words:

Ὀρθός, μὴ ὀρθούμενος

“Upright, not righted (by others)” (Meditations, 7.12). That’s the sort of man he admired and wanted to become. Someone with the strength of character to stand on his own two feet and, like his adoptive father Antoninus before him, to repay even anger with unshakeable wisdom, patience, and kindness.

The View From Above in Stoic Philosophy

The View From Above in Stoic Philosophy

The Roman emperor, and Stoic philosopher, Marcus Aurelius wrote in his personal notes on Stoic philosophy:

A fine reflection from Plato. One who would converse about human beings should look on all things earthly as though from some point far above, upon herds, armies, and agriculture, marriages and divorces, births and deaths, the clamour of law courts, deserted wastes, alien peoples of every kind, festivals, lamentations, and markets [agoras], this intermixture of everything and ordered combination of opposites. — Meditations, 7. 48

This looks like it’s intended as a quote from Socrates in Plato’s writings but, incidentally, it doesn’t appear in any of the surviving Platonic dialogues.

In this and other passages, it’s clear that Marcus is describing a mental exercise — he tells himself to regularly picture such scenes. The French scholar Pierre Hadot coined the name the “View from Above” for this sort of contemplative practice, which appears in many ancient sources — not only the Stoics.

Sometimes it’s tempting to imagine that what’s being described is like the viewpoint of Zeus, or the other gods, atop Mount Olympus, as they look down on mortal affairs below. Indeed, the practice of trying to expand one’s mind by imagining the perspective of a god was a common contemplative exercise in the ancient world and could take several other forms. However, one day a more obvious analogy dawned on me.

I was reading this passage from The Meditations on the Pnyx hill, wondering whether it truly came from Plato or even Socrates. I looked up for a moment at the Acropolis in front of me and suddenly realized that I could almost be reading a description of the view from the Acropolis, where the ruins of the Parthenon, an ancient temple to Athena is located. The word “Acropolis”, in ancient Greek, literally meant “highest part of the city”. It refers to the hill in the centre of Athens that overlooks the ancient agora, the city centre and marketplace. (Indeed, in the passage above, Marcus uses the word agora, translated “marketplace”.)

There are several other passages in The Meditations that appear to relate to the same contemplative practice. For example:

You should always keep these three thoughts at hand… if you were suddenly raised aloft and looked on human affairs from above in all their diversity, with what contempt [or rather indifference] you would view them, seeing at the same time what a host of beings live all around in the air and the ether, and that however often you were raised aloft, you would behold the same things, ever unvarying, ever as short-lived — and it is in these that you set your pride! — Meditations, 12.24

However, in another well-known passage, Marcus actually employs the word acropolis:

Remember that your ruling centre becomes invincible when it withdraws into itself and rests content with itself, doing nothing other than what it wishes, even where its refusal to act is not reasonably based; and how much more contented it will be, then, when it founds its decision on reason and careful reflection. By virtue of this, an intelligence free from passions is a mighty citadel [acropolis]; for man has no stronghold more secure to which he can retreat to remain unassailable from that time onward. One who has failed to see this is merely ignorant, but one who has seen it and fails to take refuge there is beyond the aid of fortune. — Meditations, 8.48

Typical translations of akropolis as “citadel”, etc., obscure the fact that the original Greek implies a high-up place, akin to the “some point far above” mentioned by Marcus in passage 7.48, quoted earlier .

Combining these passages, therefore, a description emerges of the ideal Stoic mind-set as resembling, in Marcus’ own words, an acropolis, high above, looking down on the hustle and bustle of an agora.

Neostoicism

In the sixteenth century, the Neostoic Justus Lipsius actually told the following story about Solon, one of the “seven sages”, which is set in a high tower, presumably on one of the hills, overlooking Athens, quite possibly the Acropolis.

Solon, seeing a very friend of his at Athens mourning piteously, brought him into a high tower and showed him underneath all the houses in that great city, saying to him “Think with yourself how many sundry mournings in times past have been in all these houses, how many at this present are, and in time to come shall be; and leave off to bewail the miseries of mortal folk, as if they were your own.”

Lipsius’ friend advises him to imagine a similarly broad perspective on events, not by literally climbing a hill but by using his imagination to place himself atop Mount Olympus.

I would wish you, Lipsius, to do the like in this wide world. But because you cannot in deed and fact go to, do it a little while in conceit and imagination. Suppose, if it please, that you are with me on the top of that high hill Olympus; behold from there all towns, provinces, and kingdoms of the world, and think that you see even so many enclosures full of human calamities. These are but only theatres and places for the purpose prepared, in which Fortune plays her bloody tragedies.

He is to continually remind himself of the “View from Above” in order to alleviate his distress, but also to remind himself of his own mortality.

Which things think well upon, Lipsius, and by this communication or participation of miseries, lighten your own. And like they [Roman generals] which rode gloriously in triumph, had a servant behind their backs who in the midst of all their triumphant jollity cried out often times “you are a man” [and “remember you must die”], so let this be ever as a prompter by your side, that these things are human, or appertaining to men. For as labour being divided between many is easy, even so likewise is sorrow.

The “View from Above” was a particularly familiar concept to ancient Athenians. This elevated, serene, and somewhat detached perspective on the agora where goods were sold and other important business conducted was the view from the sacred Acropolis in the middle of their city, and from other nearby vantage points on high ground.

Yes, of course. That would be great.

Ever since I began researching and writing about Stoicism, about two decades ago, I’ve been looking for ways to capture the basic…

Ever since I began researching and writing about Stoicism, about two decades ago, I’ve been looking for ways to capture the basic psychological practices of Stoicism in the simplest possible set of instructions. The Stoic Mindfulness and Resilience Training (SMRT) online course that I designed for Modern Stoicism was a first step in that direction. It has now been completed by thousands of participants, allowing us to collect data that suggest even a very simplified Stoic routine can have measurable benefits psychologically.

There are many psychological techniques described in the surviving Stoic writings. I counted about eighteen in The Philosophy of Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy. (I explain how to use them in daily life in How to Think Like a Roman Emperor.) Some of these are exercises done periodically such as contemplating the world as though seen from above or asking yourself what a perfect Sage would do when faced with certain types of circumstances. I think it’s clear, though, that these are all grounded in one continual practice, which Epictetus called prosoche or “attention”, i.e., paying attention to our ruling faculty (hegemonikon) and the way we use our judgment to form opinions, particularly our value judgments.

Attention (prosoche) is the fundamental Stoic spiritual attitude. It is a continuous vigilance and presence of mind, self-consciousness which never sleeps, and a constant tension of the spirit. Thanks to this attitude, the philosopher is fully aware of what he does at each instant, and he wills his actions fully. (Hadot, 1995, p. 84)

In my experience, most people find it natural to refer to this continual attention to their own thought processes as the practice of “Stoic mindfulness”. (Although, it’s not necessarily the same as “mindfulness” in Buddhism.)

More specifically, Epictetus explains that what Stoics should pay continual attention to is the principle that good and evil reside in their own choices rather than in any external events. Whenever we notice ourselves becoming upset we should pause to ask whether the thing we’re concerned about is up to us or not. If not then we shouldn’t assign value to it in a way that causes us to become upset. We should ask ourselves instead what aspects of the situation are up to us — our own thoughts and actions — and how we could respond more wisely by taking greater responsibility for these.

The reason we’re often unaware of this, though, is that our thoughts become fused with our perception of external events. If I’m very upset with someone, I just view them as an awful person. That’s how I see them. Being good or bad is a quality they appear to possess, like being big or small, or having blue eyes or brown ones. In order to pay attention, mindfully, to the way we’re using value judgments we first have to separate them from reality. I have to realize that the “awfulness” I perceive is a quality projected onto the other person by me and not something I’m passively observing that somehow exists apart from me. As Hamlet said, “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” For Stoics that’s true of external things, although our own character can certainly still be called either good or bad.

Aaron T. Beck, the founder of cognitive therapy, called this realization, that our thoughts are separate from reality, “cognitive distancing”.

“Distancing” refers to the ability to view one’s own thoughts (or beliefs) as constructions of “reality” rather than as reality itself. (Alford & Beck, 1997, p. 142)

He explained it by analogy with a set of coloured glasses. If you look at the world through rose-tinted spectacles for long enough you might be forgiven for assuming that the whole world is simply coloured pink and seems so to everyone else. Imagine, though, that one day you met someone wearing dark blue glasses who told you that the whole world seemed cold and blue to them. Realizing that the outside world itself is neither completely pink nor blue but that it’s being coloured by the lenses through which you’re looking is cognitive distancing — the ability to notice the distinction between the lens through which you’re looking and the events at which you’re looking.

In cognitive therapy, we sometimes help clients to do this by teaching them to use strange neologisms like the word “catastrophizing”. (Turning a noun into a verb in this way is called “verbing” or “verbification”.) Imagine someone has been dumped by his girlfriend and says “It’s a catastrophe!”, as though he’s just describing an objective fact about the situation. The therapist might encourage him to say instead that he’s “catastrophizing” it, if that helps him to take responsibility for choosing to view it as a catastrophically bad. Indeed, another person might have viewed the same event less catastrophically, with relative indifference, or even as a positive opportunity to learn and grow emotionally. “It’s not events that upset us”, said Epictetus, “but rather our opinions about them.”

In Stoicism, we’re encouraged to continually be on the lookout for these sort of distressing opinions. Epictetus says that whenever you’re troubled emotionally by an impression concerning external events that’s a warning sign that you’ve fused it with a value judgement. He tells his students to respond to upsetting impressions — such as “My partner lied to me; it’s a catastrophe!” — by literally speaking to them as follows: “You are just an impression and not at all the thing you claim to represent.” It’s not a true objective representation of events (phantasia kataleptike), in other words, because it’s fused with a strong value judgment of the kind that distorts events and causes us to experience emotional distress.

Other common ways of gaining cognitive distance include:

• Translating your feelings into words by stating the thoughts that are causing them, e.g., “I feel as though everyone hates me and that’s awful.”

• Referring to your thoughts in the third person, e.g., “Donald is currently viewing this situation as if it were catastrophic.”

• Keeping a tally of the frequency of certain thoughts or feelings so that you increasingly view them as events in their own right.

• Writing your thoughts down in a journal or on a whiteboard and viewing them in a detached manner, literally from a distance.

• Imagining that your thought is written on a pane of glass through which you’re looking at the event, a bit like looking through rose-tinted glasses but with words such as “This is a catastrophe” scrawled on them.

• Imagining being in the shoes of someone who views the same situation differently from you, perhaps even a wise person like Socrates, in order to develop the flexibility to move easily between different viewpoints.

• Repeating the thought several times with greater awareness of it being an activity in which you’re engaged, e.g., by saying it aloud very slowly or very quickly.

• Imagining how you might view the same situation differently years from now, e.g., if you encountered it many times and got used to dealing with it to the best of your ability or were looking back on it with the benefit of hindsight.

• Describing the same situation to yourself in a more matter-of-fact way, without using any emotive language or strong value judgments.

Sometimes also considering the consequences of viewing a situation in a particular way can help you to separate your thoughts from external events and envisage other ways of looking at the same situation. The Stoics frequently reminded themselves of the paradox that, according to their philosophy, passions such as fear and anger do us more harm than the things we’re upset about. Viewing them in this way requires seeing the beliefs underlying them as, in a sense, arbitrary and unhelpful — we could easily look at the situation in a more helpful way.

As Epictetus put it, “everything has two handles”, a broken handle and a good one. When we become upset we’re trying to pick up events using the broken handle, i.e., an unhealthy perspective. However, often just realizing that’s what we’re doing is enough to weaken the grip that unhealthy beliefs and passions have over our mind. All of the techniques above are just gimmicks, in a sense — props to help you get the cognitive knack of separating your value judgments from external events.

I’ve increasingly come to the conclusion that this ability to gain cognitive distance lies at the psychological core of Stoicism. In a sense, it boils down to wholeheartedly embracing the famous precept that “it’s not events that upset us but our opinions about them”. Whereas in CBT it’s usually presented as a cognitive technique to cope with certain difficult situations, in Stoicism it forms part of a whole philosophy of life. Stoic mindfulness, or prosoche, is the continual awareness of how our value judgments are shaping our feelings, particularly when we begin to grow distressed or irritated with life.

This becomes a more general trait of resilience when we apply it across a wide range of situations. However, it’s also maintained by certain underlying philosophical beliefs concerning the nature of our value judgments. Modern psychologists would potentially classify these as “meta-cognitions” — beliefs about beliefs. In a future article, I hope to return to this subject and explore the ways in which Stoic philosophy is meta-cognitive insofar as it teaches us to experience certain types of belief or judgment in a novel manner.

By D. Robertson and T. Codd, originally published in The Behavior Therapist, vol. 42, no. 2, Feb 2019

Abstract: Stoicism provides the clearest example of a system of psychotherapy in ancient Greek or Roman philosophy. Albert Ellis acknowledged that some of the central principles of Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy were “originally discovered and stated” by the Stoics and Beck that “the philosophical origins of cognitive therapy can be traced back to the Stoic philosophers.” However, the emphasis on mindfulness and living in accord with values in Stoicism was largely ignored by them and unknown to the third-wave psychotherapists who followed them. This article highlights Stoicism’s similarities to modern mindfulness and acceptance-based CBT and its potential as an approach to building emotional resilience.

Introduction

Socrates considered philosophy to be, among other things, a form of talking therapy, a sort of medicine for the mind. Within a few generations of his death, this idea of philosophy as psychotherapy had become commonplace among the various schools of Hellenistic philosophy. However, it was the Stoics who placed most emphasis on this therapeutic dimension of philosophy. For example, the Roman Stoic teacher Epictetus wrote “It is more necessary for the soul to be cured than the body, for it is better to die than to live badly” (Fragments, 32) and he states bluntly “the philosopher’s school is a doctor’s clinic” (Discourses, 3.23.30). Today, though, most people are unaware of the extent to which ancient Greeks and Romans conceived of philosophy as a type of psychological therapy.

Stoicism survived for five centuries but its therapeutic concepts and practices were largely neglected until the start of the 20th century when a rational approach to psychotherapy began emerging, which held that many emotional and psychosomatic problems were caused by negative self-talk or autosuggestions, which could be amenable to rational disputation. Its leading proponent, the Swiss psychiatrist Paul Dubois, employed Socratic questioning with his patients and taught them the basic principles of a Socratic and Stoic philosophy of life. Indeed, he declared:

If we eliminate from ancient writings a few allusions that gave them local colour, we shall find the ideas of Socrates, Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius absolutely modern and applicable to our times. (Dubois, 1909, pp. 108–109).

Dubois also noticed that, paradoxically, the Stoic words of advice he read in the letters of the philosopher Seneca “seem to be drawn from a modern treatise on psychotherapy,” although written in the first century AD.

Dubois placed more emphasis than subsequent psychotherapists on the fundamental distinction Stoics make between what is up to us and what is not. We should, the Stoics believed, learn to assume more responsibility for our own voluntary actions while also becoming more tolerant and accepting of things that merely happen to us. Or as Epictetus put it:

What, then, is to be done? To make the best of what is in our power, and take the rest as it naturally happens. (Discourses, 1.1.17)

This central teaching of Stoicism found perhaps its best-known expression in The Serenity Prayer, written by Reinhold Niebuhr in the 1930s, but made popular by Alcoholics Anonymous. “God, give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to know the difference.” However, by the middle of the 20th century Stoicism and rational psychotherapy, based on these venerable philosophical principles, were temporarily eclipsed in popularity by an oddity that was to be rather short-lived by comparison: Freudian psychoanalysis.

Indeed, psychotherapists began to rediscover Stoicism from the 1950s onward through the writings of Albert Ellis, and what would become known as Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT). Despite the similarity of his approach to that of early rational psychotherapists such as Dubois, Ellis was initially unaware of their writings. However, as far back as his youth, before training as a psychotherapist, Ellis had “read the later Stoics, Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius” (Still & Dryden, 2012, pp. xii-xiii). Indeed, Ellis refers to the Stoics, particularly Epictetus, throughout his writings. Even when he doesn’t mention the Stoics by name, though, Ellis often describes concepts and techniques that seem to demonstrate their influence.

In Ellis’ first major publication on REBT, he famously explained the central premise of this emerging cognitive approach to psychotherapy: emotional disturbances, and associated symptoms, are not caused by external events, as people tend to assume, but mainly by our irrational beliefs about such events. However, he also explained that it was far from being a new idea:

This principle, which I have inducted from many psychotherapeutic sessions with scores of patients during the last several years, was originally discovered and stated by the ancient Stoic philosophers, especially Zeno of Citium (the founder of the school), Chrysippus, Panaetius of Rhodes (who introduced Stoicism into Rome), Cicero [sic], Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. The truths of Stoicism were perhaps best set forth by Epictetus, who in the first century A.D. wrote in the Enchiridion: “Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of them.” (Ellis, 1962, p. 54)

(Footnote: Cicero was an Academic philosopher not a Stoic, although he was sympathetic to Stoicism and wrote extensively about it making him one of our main sources for information on the philosophy. Beck et al., under the influence of Ellis, reproduce this error in their own account.)

Elsewhere Ellis repeats his conviction that “Many of the principles incorporated in the theory of rational-emotive psychotherapy are not new; some of them, in fact, were originally stated several thousand years ago, especially by the Greek and Roman Stoic philosophers,” and he names Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius in particular as his influences in this regard (Ellis, 1962, p. 35). Indeed, Ellis taught the famous quote from Epictetus above to many of his clients during the initial socialization phase of treatment (Therapists today could better translate the same Greek passage: “People are not emotionally distressed by events but by their beliefs [dogmata] about them.”) Following Ellis, this saying also became extremely well known to subsequent generations of cognitive-behavioral therapists. Although, for some reason, surprisingly few of them chose to explore the writings of Epictetus or others Stoics for themselves.

Mainly through Ellis’ writings, Stoicism continued influence Aaron T. Beck, the founder of cognitive therapy and his colleagues. Beck opened his first book on cognitive therapy by describing how his new style of therapy was founded upon the emerging consensus among researchers that cognitions play a central role in determining our emotions. Then, like Ellis, he added:

Nevertheless, the philosophical underpinnings go back thousands of years, certainly to the time of the Stoics, who considered man’s conceptions (or misconceptions) of events rather than the events themselves as the key to his emotional upsets. (Beck A. T., 1976, p. 3)

Beck also illustrated the cognitive model of emotion with a quote from Marcus Aurelius:

If thou are pained by any external thing, it is not the thing that disturbs thee, but thine own judgment about it. And it is in thy power to wipe out this judgment now. (Marcus Aurelius, quoted in Beck, 1976, p. 263)

He’s talking about suspending irrational and unhealthy value-judgements, incidentally, rather than suppressing automatic thoughts.

Nearly two decades after Ellis had first brought it up, Beck et al. restated this claim that the doctrines of Stoicism constitute the “philosophical origins” of cognitive therapy in their groundbreaking treatment manual for clinical depression:

The philosophical origins of cognitive therapy can be traced back to the Stoic philosophers, particularly Zeno of Citium (fourth century B.C.), Chrysippus, Cicero [sic], Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. (Beck, Rush, Shaw, & Emery, 1979, p. 8).

Like Ellis, they quote the famous passage from Epictetus above, which they hailed as a forerunner of their own cognitive theory of emotion. Moreover, if the causes of emotional disturbance are mainly cognitive this implies the possibility of a cognitive cure. They realized, therefore, that this shared premise had led Stoics and cognitive therapists to the same conclusion: “Control of most intense feelings may be achieved by changing one’s ideas.”

Ellis was only exaggerating slightly when he later claimed: “I am happy to say that in the 1950’s I managed to bring Epictetus out of near-obscurity and make him famous all over again” (Ellis & MacLaren, 2005, p. 10). Indeed, in recent decades, partly as a consequence of CBT’s growing popularity, Stoicism has continued to undergo a wider resurgence in popularity. In the 1980s, Vice Admiral James Stockdale helped popularize Stoic philosophy in the US military. Stockdale documented his reliance on the Stoicism of Epictetus as a means of coping with torture and incarceration during the Vietnam War in Thoughts of a Philosophical Fighter Pilot (1995). The Tom Wolfe novel about the Stoicism of Epictetus, A Man in Full (1998) reignited popular interest in Stoicism as did director Ridley Scott’s movie Gladiator (2000), which featured Richard Harris as Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. Since then an increasing number of self-help books influenced by Stoicism such as Ryan Holiday’s The Obstacle is the Way (2014) have appeared. Likewise, a growing number of blog articles and podcasts on the Internet testify to public interest in Stoicism as an approach to self-help and self-improvement. However, these Stoic ideas were ridiculed by Freud’s followers and they would never have resurfaced to this extent if CBT had not effectively replaced the psychodynamic tradition, paving the way for Stoic philosophy to be taken seriously once again.

However, as Stoicism was reaching a wider audience, through self-help literature and the Internet, the field of CBT was changing with the emergence of the third-wave. Third wave therapy introduced greater emphasis on themes like mindfulness, acceptance, and valued living, often turning to Buddhist literature and practices for inspiration. Ironically, though, these themes were already emphasized in the Stoic “philosophical origins” of cognitive therapy. Ellis and subsequently Beck had largely overlooked those aspects of Stoicism. So the next generation of therapists remained largely unaware of the extent to which mindfulness and acceptance were already practices native to ancient Stoicism. Practitioners and researchers began to lose interest in Western philosophy as they turned to Buddhism and eastern thought instead.

Yet many Western clients, and therapists, find Stoicism more congruent with their existing cultural concepts and values. When they learn about the Stoics, they often report a sense of déjà vu as they “join the dots” and realize how it connects countless philosophical themes already familiar to them. From Aesop’s Fables to Hamlet’s “There’s nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so” (also quoted by Ellis), to the Roman poet Horace’s carpe diem (made famous by Robin Williams in Dead Poets’ Society), or the memento mori tradition in the arts (e.g., Damien Hirst’s shark in formaldehyde), Stoic concepts permeate Western culture and literature to this day. It’s as though we’re living among the rubble of a once magnificent temple, without recognizing what it means. Then someone shows us a sketch of what it used to look like and suddenly the landscape is transformed before our eyes as we begin to understand how all the pieces were long ago organized into a whole.

Unfortunately, the popularity of Stoicism, the Greek philosophy, among therapists has also been hampered because of the tendency to confuse it with (lower-case) stoicism, the “stiff upper-lip” personality trait or coping style. The word “stoicism” is often taken to mean crudely suppressing feelings of distress — something potentially quite unhealthy. However, Stoic philosophy teaches a far more nuanced approach to emotional self-regulation, which is more consistent with the aims of psychotherapy. This article will address this and other misconceptions about Stoicism and make the case that it can contribute in important ways to the modern field of cognitive-behavioral therapy.

Who Were the Stoics?

The Stoic school was founded in 301 BC by a Phoenician merchant called Zeno of Citium who had been shipwrecked near Athens. Inspired by the example of Socrates, Zeno became a philosopher. He trained for ten years in the Cynic tradition and studied at the Platonic Academy and the Megarian school, founded by another of Socrates’ followers, before founding his own school combining these influences. He was succeeded as head (scholarch) of the school by Cleanthes of Assos, and then by Chrysippus of Soli, one of the most highly-regarded intellectuals of the ancient world. Between them, these three men defined the foundations of Stoicism.

Moreover, the Athenian school had an unbroken succession of teachers lasting over two hundred years, until Panaetius of Rhodes who died at the end of the second century BC. By that time the philosophy had already gained popularity among Romans and it continued as an important albeit more fragmented tradition right down to the time of the last famous Stoic, the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, who died in 180 AD. In other words, Stoicism survived as a living tradition, in ancient Greece and Rome, for over five hundred years.

At a rough estimate, less than one percent of the ancient Stoic writings survive today. We have about a book’s worth of fragments from early Greek Stoics but no complete texts of theirs. Most of our knowledge comes from commentators and from three famous Roman Stoics of the Imperial period: Seneca the Younger, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius.

Stoicism was eventually assimilated into Neoplatonism but left an impression on early Christianity. The Stoics are even featured in the New Testament, where St. Paul addresses an audience of Stoic and Epicurean philosophers at the Areopagus in Athens, quoting a line from the Stoic poet Aratus to them. Both traditions share similar ethical values so many modern followers of Stoicism describe it as providing them with a secular alternative to Christianity, based upon philosophical reasoning rather than religious faith.

Following the renaissance there was a revival of interest in Stoicism known as Neostoicism and the influence of the philosophy can particularly be seen in the writings of philosophers such as Justus Lipsius and Anthony Ashley-Cooper (Earl of Shaftesbury), and to some extent also in those of Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, and Montaigne. In addition to its direct influence on Ellis and others, Stoicism also indirectly influenced modern CBT through the writings of these and other influential Western thinkers. For instance, as well as citing the Stoics directly, Beck illustrated the cognitive theory of emotion by quoting Spinoza: “I saw that all the things I feared, and which feared me had nothing good or bad in them save insofar as the mind was affected by them.” (quoted in Beck, 1976:156).

What did the Stoics Believe?

Ancient schools of philosophy were typically distinguished from one another in terms of their definition of the goal of life. The Stoics rejected the popular notion that the goal of life was pleasure (hedonism), and the more philosophical Epicurean version that equated pleasure with freedom from pain and other unpleasant feelings (ataraxia). They also rejected the Platonic and Aristotelian view that the goal included a combination of virtue and external goods that lie partially outside of our control such as health, wealth and reputation. Instead the Stoics insisted on the hard line that the supreme goal of life is synonymous with arete, which is conventionally translated “virtue” although most scholars feel “excellence” (of character) is a better translation.

The Stoics adopt the fourfold model of virtue first mentioned by Socrates in the dialogues of Plato: Wisdom, Justice, Temperance, and Fortitude. However, these were broad conventional headings, which include dozens of other positive character traits. Following Socrates, the Stoics claim that all of these other virtues consist in forms of moral wisdom applied to different areas of life. Justice can be thought of as social virtue in general or what it means to deal wisely with others, both individually and collectively. Temperance and courage are the virtues of self-control: wisdom applied to our desires and fears respectively. So the goal of Stoicism can also be understood as a form of moral or practical wisdom, which is synonymous with living wisely or living rationally. They also equate this with sanity or mental health.

The central doctrine of Stoicism was therefore sometimes expressed as “virtue is the only true good” by which they mean that wisdom and excellence of character are to be valued for their own sake rather than as a means to some other end. Virtue is its own reward, in other words. For modern therapists, an important implication of Stoic psychology is their insistence on a worldview in which doing what is under our direct control to the best of our ability, or living wisely, is valued more highly than pleasure or the avoidance of unpleasant feelings, things not entirely under our control.

The Stoic Handbook of Epictetus provides a concise summary of practical guidance based on Stoic moral and psychological doctrines. It opens with the famous sentence: “Some things are up to us and other things are not.” Epictetus meant that the foundation of Stoic practice was the effort to maintain a clear distinction between what is voluntary and what is not, i.e., between our own actions and what merely happens to us. Modern Stoics call this the “dichotomy of control.” As we’ve seen, this Stoic doctrine was stressed by Dubois and other early rational psychotherapists but not by Ellis or subsequent cognitive-behavioural therapists, although it is still well-known having found popular expression in The Serenity Prayer.

Stoics class everything else as “indifferent” or unimportant with regard to the supreme goal of life — Epictetus tends to sum this up by speaking of things such as “health, wealth, and reputation” as indifferent. These things are also called “externals” by which Stoics mean not that they’re external to the body — the body itself is an indifferent — but external to our volition or sphere of control. A common misconception is that Stoics place no value on the “external” or “indifferent” things. However, one of the defining doctrines of Stoicism holds that wisdom consists precisely in our ability to distinguish between indifferent things rationally according to their relative value. However, this “value” (axia), used in practical decision-making, is completely incommensurate with the value of arete, as the supreme goal of life. Put crudely, for Stoics externals are not worth getting highly upset about, although as we’ll see it’s nevertheless still considered natural to experience some emotions toward them.

There’s much confusion about Stoicism’s view of emotion due partly to problems of translation and also to the tendency to conflate Stoicism, the ancient philosophy, with stoicism, the modern coping style. One of the easiest ways to dispel these misunderstandings is to highlight the distinction Stoic psychology made between good, bad, and indifferent emotions. (The Stoics used the term “passion” to refer to what we would call emotions but also to desires.)

Bad emotions are described as being unhealthy, excessive, and irrational. Crucially they’re under our direct control, at least potentially. It’s perhaps easiest to compare these to cognitive processes like worrying or ruminating or to voluntary (strategic) cognitions involving strong positive or negative value judgements, of an unhealthy and irrational nature.

Good emotions (eupatheiai) are healthy, moderate, and rational, and also under our voluntary control. They supervene upon a healthy rational worldview. Stoics classify all healthy emotions under three headings: rational joy, a healthy aversion to doing wrong, and goodwill toward oneself and others. (The English word “compassion” sits awkwardly with Stoics because it implies “sharing a passion,” an unhealthy emotion, but Stoics refer to something similar as the virtue of kindness.) The goal of ancient Stoic therapy wasn’t the suppression of unhealthy emotions but their transformation into healthy emotions by modification of the underlying beliefs from irrational to rational ones.

“Indifferent” emotion is how we might describe what the Stoics call the “proto-passions” (propatheiai), or initial involuntary stirrings of full-blown passions. The Stoics give examples such as being startled, blushing, turning pale, sweating, stammering, and the initial reactions preceding passions such as fear and anger in general. Seneca highlights their involuntary nature by comparing these emotional reactions to the eye-blink reflex. The Stoics emphasized that even a perfectly wise Stoic philosopher will experience these sort of involuntary emotional reactions in a stressful situation. However, because these primitive emotional reactions are involuntary, they’re neither good nor bad according to Stoic ethics but indifferent. Epictetus therefore said that they’re to be accepted as natural, and an inevitable part of life. We’re not to be afraid of them or consider them to be bad or harmful in themselves but rather to accept them with indifference. They resemble the emotional reactions of non-human animals, which naturally abate over time. However, we’re to be careful not to be “swept along” by them by indulging in worry or rumination, for example, in response to them and thereby amplifying or perpetuating them beyond their natural bounds.

What did the Stoics do?

Ancient Stoicism had a more extensive and sophisticated armamentarium of therapeutic strategies than any other school of philosophy. Most of these are well-known to modern students of Stoicism thanks largely to the scholarly work of a French historian of philosophy called Pierre Hadot who carefully identified a variety of “spiritual exercises” in ancient philosophy, particularly Stoicism. Robertson’s The Philosophy of Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy (2010) provides a detailed overview of these techniques, which draws extensive parallels between them and psychological strategies employed in modern cognitive-behavioural therapy. The following list is not exhaustive but includes some of the Stoic techniques of most interest to cognitive-behavioral therapists:

1. Socratic Questioning, which was used by Socrates to undermine irrational assumptions about virtue by exposing contradictions in the other person’s thinking, a process compared to the cross-examination (elenchus) of a witness in a trial, although we’re told it was done tactfully and with compassion.

2. The Dichotomy of Control, the foundation of Epictetus’ Handbook, which requires maintaining a clear distinction between what is up to us and what is not, i.e., taking more responsibility for our own actions while accepting what merely happens to us.

3. Separating Judgements from Events, which Shaftesbury called the “sovereign principle” of Stoicism, and Ellis introduced to the CBT field through the saying “It’s not things that upset us but our judgements about them” — comparable to the process called “cognitive distancing” in Beck’s approach.

4. Stoic Mindfulness, or prosoche (attention), through which Stoics maintain continual attention to their own voluntary thoughts and actions and particularly the distinction between these and external events or automatic thoughts, as in the two preceding techniques.

5. Stoic Acceptance and Indifference, or apatheia (not apathy but freedom from irrational passions), i.e., external events are viewed dispassionately without attaching strong values or emotions to them.

6. Contrasting Consequences, through which Stoics imagine beforehand steps required in and likely consequences of different courses of action, typically the contrast between actions guided by unhealthy passions and those in accord with wisdom and virtue — comparable to functional assessment or cost-benefit analysis in CBT.

7. Postponement of Responses, through which Stoics would wait until strong emotions such as anger or unhealthy desires had naturally abated before deciding what action to take in response to them — comparable to worry postponement or time-out in anger management.

8. Contemplation of the Sage, considering the virtues of real or imaginary role models or how they would behave in specific situations — comparable to modelling techniques in CBT.

9. Contemplation of Death, which takes a variety of forms but was considered to be of fundamental importance to the Stoics who sought to adopt a more philosophical attitude toward the existential problem of their own mortality.

10. The View from Above, which also takes various forms but typically involves picturing events from high overhead or in cosmological terms in order to place them within a broader context in terms both of space and time, something the Stoics and other philosophers found valuable as a way of moderating strong desires and emotions.

11. Contemplating Transience, this theme is encapsulated in the View from Above but the Stoics generally encouraged themselves to contemplate the temporary nature of all things, including their own lives and the lives of others, as a way of moderating strong emotions.

12. Contemplation of the Here and Now, a theme particularly emphasized throughout The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, which involves grounding attention in the present moment, partly because this constitutes our locus of control.

13. Objective Representation, or phantasia kataleptike, the description or mental representation of events in objective terms without strong value judgements or emotive rhetoric — similar to decatastrophizing in CBT.

14. Premeditation of Adversity, praemeditatio malorum, another famous Stoic exercise, which involves regularly imagining a variety of feared situations as if they’re already befalling you, such as exile, poverty, sickness, dying, etc., in order to mentally rehearse a more philosophical attitude toward them (apatheia) through the use of some of the strategies mentioned above — this clearly resembles various imaginal exposure strategies used in CBT but perhaps a better analogy would be the covert rehearsal of cognitive and behavioural coping strategies in approaches such as Stress Inoculation Training (SIT).

15. Memorization of Sayings, of which there are many examples in the Stoic texts, which Stoics would learn until they were “ready to hand” in challenging situations — comparable to the use of coping statements in CBT.

16. Empathic Understanding, trying to understand the perspective, values, and assumptions of others in a rational and balanced manner rather than jumping to hasty conclusions about them because the Stoics were influenced by the famous Socratic paradox that “no man does evil willingly” (or knowingly) — Epictetus, e.g., taught his students to tell themselves “It seemed right to him” when offended by someone’s actions in order to moderate anger and cultivate a more philosophical attitude toward the perceived wrongdoing of others.

17. Contemplating Determinism, which Dubois had originally assimilated into rational psychotherapy, the Stoics frequently remind themselves to depersonalize upsetting events and view them as an inevitable part of life, e.g., there are people who behave honestly and dishonestly in the world, dishonest people do dishonest things, therefore the wise man is not surprised when he sometimes encounters these things in life.

Some of these general strategies are overlapping and not entirely conceptually distinct, e.g., The View From Above inevitably entails the contemplation of the finitude and transience of material things, and even one’s own mortality. Most of these strategie are also employed in the form of various different specific techniques, e.g., the Stoics often employ a shorthand version of contrasting consequences by reminding themselves of the maxim that irrational fear of something often does us more harm than the thing itself. (Also anger often does us more harm than the thing we’re angry about.) Indeed, there are a very wide variety of cognitive (both imaginal and verbal) and behavioral therapy techniques found in the Stoic literature, which go beyond this list. Many of these are found in other philosophical traditions, especially during the Hellenistic period, and also in the writings of poets such as Horace and Ovid who were influenced by philosophy. However, it’s the Stoics themselves who place most emphasis on these techniques.

We might also ask where and with whom the Stoics used these techniques. Conveniently, the three major surviving sources of Stoic literature provide some good examples:

• The Discourses of Epictetus are transcripts of his discussions with groups of students at his philosophical school, where he can be seen answering questions and also employing Socratic questioning, in a way that could be compared to group therapy or a self-help workshop.

• The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius are a private record of his own contemplative practices, like a Stoic self-help or therapy journal.

• The letters of Seneca show him offering advice and support to others. Many are addressed to a novice Stoic (Lucilius). Here Seneca is acting in a manner comparable to an individual therapist or life coach.

About six of Seneca’s letters fall under the heading of a genre known as consolatio or philosophical consolation literature. Typically these are letters addressed to individuals who are struggling following bereavement or some other misfortune. They provide a particularly clear example of the way in which Stoic philosophy was administered as a form of psychotherapeutic advice. Moreover, Epictetus described a Stoic called Paconius Agrippinus having written similar consolation letters to himself, in which he describes the potential opportunities or positives to be found in seemingly catastrophic situations such as illness or exile. This might be compared to the practice of writing “decatastrophizing scripts,” advocated by Beck in the treatment of certain forms of anxiety.

However, there’s also some indication that novice Stoics had individual tutors who administered Stoic therapy in person. For example, Marcus Aurelius mentions that his Stoic tutor Junius Rusticus persuaded him to undergo therapeia to improve his character. The early Greek Stoics actually wrote several books on psychological therapy which are sadly lost, such as the Therapeutics of Chrysippus, the third head of the Stoic school. However, we do have a surviving book called On the Diagnosis and Cure of the Soul’s Passions by Galen, Marcus Aurelius’ court physician. Galen wasn’t a Stoic, he was something of an eclectic. However, he’d studied Stoicism and this book appears to be influenced by earlier Stoic writings on psychotherapy. Galen notes that we tend to have a blind spot for our own errors and so he recommends obtaining the help of a wiser and more experienced mentor who can question us about our character and actions, perhaps the role that Rusticus played for Marcus Aurelius.

REBT and Stoicism

The extent of REBT’s indebtedness to ancient Stoicism, both in terms of theory and practice, has been the focus of two recent books (Robertson, 2010; Still & Dryden, 2012). As REBT is the form of psychotherapy most closely related to Stoicism, it’s worth highlighting some of the similarities between them:

1. As we’ve seen, REBT practitioners often orient clients to their role in therapy by teaching them the quotation from Epictetus above (“Men are disturbed not by things…”); this was a frequently-cited strategy in ancient Stoicism, which involved gaining cognitive distance by reminding ourselves that our distressing emotions are due primarily to our own beliefs.

2. Both REBT and Stoicism therefore agree that our emotions are primarily determined by our beliefs or thinking (cognition) and that beliefs and emotions may be two aspects of a single process rather than, as Plato believed, two fundamentally separate psychological processes.

3. REBT trains clients to closely monitor the relationship between their thoughts, actions, and feelings, when becoming upset, which is similar to the Stoic emphasis on continual attention (prosoche) to one’s faculty of judgment.

4. REBT’s main technique is the rational or “Socratic” disputation of irrational demands, sometimes referred to as the client’s underlying “philosophy” of life; this is comparable to the philosophical disputation of our fundamental value-judgments in Stoicism.

5. REBT’s central claim that irrational and absolutistic demands (rigid “must” statements) lie at the root of emotional disturbance resembles the Stoic emphasis on the centrality of irrational value-judgments concerning what is unconditionally “good” or “bad” in life.

6. REBT encourages a threefold attitude of tolerance, and acceptance of imperfections, toward oneself, other people, and the world, comparable to the threefold emphasis on accepting our own body, other people, and external events as “indifferent” in Stoicism.

7. Ellis’ notion that there are rational and healthy emotions, which we should aspire to cultivate instead of our irrational ones, clearly resembles the Stoic notion of “healthy passions” (eupatheiai).

8. REBT’s concept of replacing absolutistic demands with flexible “desires” or “preferences” resembles the Stoic concept of the “reserve clause,” which attributes “selective value” to external events, for the purpose of making plans, while accepting that they may not turn out as we would like — the Stoics likewise distinguish between light “preferences”, which adapt to setbacks, and rigid desires that are irrational, excessive, and of a demanding nature.

9. REBT’s opposition to “awfulizing,” or judging events to be absolutely catastrophic, resembles the Stoic opposition to judging external events to be unconditionally “bad” or “evil” in an irrational and excessive manner.

10. The main imagery-technique employed in REBT, called “Rational Emotive Imagery” (REI), clearly resembles the Stoic practice of praemeditatio malorum; both involve repeatedly picturing future setbacks or loss, as if happening now, in order to reduce anxiety and build psychological resilience to potentially stressful events.

Indeed, overall, Ellis described REBT as a “philosophical” approach to therapy, and its fundamental goal as “rational living,” which we might compare to the Stoic goal of living “in accord with reason,” or prudently and wisely (Diogenes Laertius, Lives, 7.86). By “inducing the patient to internalize a rational philosophy of life,” in other words, REBT aims to directly uproot and counteract the core irrational beliefs developed from childhood (Ellis, 1962, p. 65).

By direct statement and implication, then, modern thinkers are tending to recognize the fact that logic and reason can, and in a sense must, play a most important role in overcoming human neurosis. Eventually, they may be able to catch up with Epictetus in this respect, who wrote — some nineteen centuries ago — that “the chief concern of a wise and good man is his own reason.” (Ellis, 1962, p. 109)

Some of these parallels between REBT and Stoicism are probably due to the direct influence of Stoic writings read by Ellis on his thinking, some are perhaps more indirect, and some are probably due to Ellis and the Stoics arriving at similar conclusions on the basis of their shared premise that it’s not things that upset us but our beliefs about them.

Stoicism also influenced Beck and his colleagues, as we’ve seen, although in this case the influence appears to be mainly indirect through their exposure to Ellis’ writings on REBT. However, the distinction Beck makes between strategic (voluntary) and automatic thought processes in his revised cognitive model of anxiety happens to parallel a distinction the Stoics also made. They distinguished between judgements or opinions that are up to us (dogmata) and automatic thoughts or impressions that are not (phantasiai). The former we should learn how to change, as they’re potentially under our control, whereas the latter we should learn to accept with a relatively neutral or indifferent attitude.

Third Wave CBT

In some ways third-wave CBT actually has even more in common with Stoicism than Beck and Ellis, although there’s basically no longer any explicit reference to Stoicism, so the connection has now been lost, ironically just as Stoicism is going through a resurgence. It’s unfortunate that third-wave therapists turned predominantly to Buddhism as an inspiration for introducing mindfulness to CBT when similar ideas were already there in Stoicism. These were the main aspects of Stoicism ignored by Ellis, Beck, and other early cognitive therapists. The third-wave practitioners could just have looked deeper into Stoicism and found an ancient Western mindfulness-based psychotherapy.

The focus on values clarification and living in accord with our core values that’s found in approaches such as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and Behavioral Activation (BA) has obvious parallels with ancient Stoicism. The Stoics made a fundamental distinction between the type of intrinsic value that belongs to our own character and voluntary actions, which they called virtue (arete), and the sort of extrinsic value that belongs to external events, including the outcomes of our actions, which they called selective “value” (axia).

The Stoics believed that we should accept that external outcomes are not entirely under our control and shift our focus more on to the intrinsic value of our own character traits, such as exercising greater kindness, friendship, and wisdom in life. They also construe this in terms of filling our various roles in life more admirably, insofar as this is within our sphere of control, such as being a good parent or teacher. The practice of questioning and clarifying our values is integral to the ancient Socratic method and Stoic philosophy as is the effort to live more consistently in accord with them, from moment to moment, throughout each day. The Stoics believed that this led to a greater sense of fulfilment in life, and personal flourishing, whereas over-attachment to external events and the outcome of our actions tended to lead to excessive desires and emotions, which damage our mental health.

With regard to mindfulness, the Stoics placed considerable emphasis on the practice of focusing attention on the present moment. The Stoics called this simply prosoche (“attention”), although modern Stoics tend to describe it as “Stoic mindfulness.” Whereas mindfulness practices derived from Buddhism sometimes entail greater attention to the body or breathing, though, Stoic mindfulness is focused specifically on the activity of our executive function ruling faculty (hegemonikon). For the Stoics, attention should be focused on the seat of our sphere of control: our voluntary cognitive activity in the present moment. The basic principle applied in Stoic mindfulness is then to distinguish clearly between our voluntary cognition (prohairesis) and automatic thoughts and impressions (phantasiai), taking more ownership for the former and adopting an attitude of greater detachment and indifference toward the latter. The Stoics also describe this process as the “separation” of our thoughts and beliefs from their objects as opposed to allowing them to blend or merge together — a strategy we might compare to “cognitive distancing” in Beck’s cognitive therapy or “cognitive defusion” ACT. For example, Epictetus taught his Stoic students that when a distressing thought pops into their mind they should speak to it (apostrophize) saying “You are just an impression and not at all the thing you claim to be.” Similar techniques involving talking to thoughts as if to another person are employed in ACT to aid defusion.

More detailed comparisons with third-wave approaches could be made. However, greater dialogue between Stoics and third-wave therapists is surely justified by the Stoic conceptions of value and mindfulness, and their emphasis on neutral acceptance of unpleasant feelings or events beyond our direct control. Over the past few decades a growing number of people have been drawn to Stoicism as a form of self-help as well as a philosophy of life capable of providing them with a sense of direction and purpose. People often report that they got into Stoicism because they see it as providing a Western alternative to Buddhism. It just happens that neither Ellis nor Beck presented it that way, so later generations of cognitive therapists looked elsewhere for inspiration when it came to mindfulness practices, and Stoicism was unjustly neglected.

Stoicism’s Benefits to CBT

Stoicism has things in common both with second and third wave approaches to CBT. Perhaps it can even help to unite practitioners of those approaches, expanding their common ground.

Moreover, some clients, and therapists, find Stoicism more congruent than Buddhism with their own cultural concepts and values. The classical nature of Stoic literature is also an important asset. For example, Seneca was one of the finest writers of antiquity. Many people therefore find these writings more meaningful, engaging, and memorable than modern self-help or therapeutic literature. People have quotes from Marcus Aurelius tattooed on their bodies — nobody has an Albert Ellis tattoo. These are very beautiful and profound writings, which contain teachings that people can identify with at a much deeper level, as a whole philosophy of life.

Although Stoicism was used as a therapy overall it has a more preventative orientation than CBT and in that respect it may hold promise as a form of training in emotional-resilience. CBT is a therapy; Stoicism is a philosophy of life. That does introduce limitations because some clients may disagree with the core concepts and values of Stoicism. That said, the values are not so far removed from some of the concepts relating to value taught in approaches such as ACT. Moreover, teaching clients about Stoicism is no more problematic in this regard than teaching them about Buddhism. However, there are clearly already many individuals who find Stoicism appealing as a philosophy, and broadly agree with its ethical values. The very fact that Stoicism is bigger and deeper than CBT in its aim to provide a philosophy of life perhaps gives us reason to believe that its benefits may be more lasting than those of existing CBT-based resilience training programs. People who study Stoicism embrace it as part of their life rather than viewing it merely as a set of coping techniques, which they might later forget if they don’t repeat their initial training. Stoicism offers people a permanent alternative to their existing worldview, which is aligned with CBT in many regards, and might provide a framework for changes that could endure long after initial exposure to them through books and courses. Our hope is that in the future research may be conducted on the potential applications of combined Stoicism and CBT based training courses as a form of long-term emotional resilience-building.

References

1. Robertson, D. ‘Stoic influences on modern psychotherapy’ in The Routledge Handbook of the Stoic Tradition, edited by John Sellars.

2. Baudouin, C. & Lestchinsky, A., 1924. The Inner Discipline. London: George Allen & Unwin.

3. Beck, A. T., 1976. Cognitive Therapy & Emotional Disorders. New York: International University Press.

4. Beck, A. T. & Alford, B. A., 2009. Depression: Causes and Treatment. Second ed. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press.

5. Beck, A. T., Emery, G. & Greenberg, R., 2005. Anxiety Disorders and Phobias: A Cognitive Perspective (20th Anniversary Edition). Cambridge, MA: Basic Books.

6. Beck, A. T., Rush, A. J., Shaw, B. F. & Emery, G., 1979. Cognitive Therapy of Depression. New York: Guilford Press.

7. Dryden, W. & Ellis, A., 2001. Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy. In: K. Dobson, ed. Handbook of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapies. New York: Guilford.

8. Dubois, P., 1904. The Psychic Treatment of Nervous Disorders: The Psychoneuroses & their Moral Treatment. New York: Funnk and Wagnall.

9. Dubois, P., 1909. Self-Control and How to Secure It. New York: Funk and Wagnalls.

10. Dubois, P. & Gallatin, L., 1908. The Influence of the Mind on the Body. New York: Funk and Wagnalls.

11. Ellis, A., 1962. Reason & Emotion in Psychotherapy. Secaucus, NJ: Citadel.

12. Ellis, A., 2004. The Road to Tolerance: The Philosophy of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy. New York: Prometheus Books.

13. Ellis, A. & Harper, R. A., 1997. A Guide to Rational Living. Third Revised ed. Chatsworth, CA: Wilshire.

14. Ellis, A. & MacLaren, C., 2005. Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy: A Therapist’s Guide. Second ed. Atascadero, CA: Impact.

15. Epictetus, 1995. The Discourses, The Handbook, Fragments. London: Everyman.

16. Hayes, S. C., Follette, V. M. & Linehan, M. M. eds., 2004. Mindfulness and Acceptance: Expanding the Cognitive-Behavioral Tradition. New York: Guildford Press.

17. Hayes, S. C., Strosahl, K. D. & Wilson, K. G., 2012. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change. Second ed. New York: Guilford.

18. Long, A., 2002. Epictetus: A Stoic and Socratic Guide to Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

19. Pietsch, W. V., 1990. The Serenity Prayer Book. New York: Harper Collins.

20. Reivich, K. & Shatté, A., 2002. The Resilience Factor. New York: Three Rivers.

21. Robertson, D. J., 2005. Stoicism: A Lurking Presence. Counselling & Psychotherapy Journal (CPJ), July.

22. Robertson, D. J., 2010. The Philosophy of Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy (CBT): Stoic Philosophy as Rational & Cognitive Psychotherapy. London: Karnac.

23. Robertson, D. J., 2012. Build your Resilience. London: Hodder.

24. Robertson, D. J., 2013. Teach Yourself Stoicism and the Art of Happiness. London: Hodder.

25. Robertson, D.J., 2019. How to Think Like a Roman Emperor: The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius. New York: St. Martin’s.

26. Still, A. & Dryden, W., 1999. The Place of Rationality in Stoicism and REBT. Journal of Rational-Emotive & Cognitive-Behavior Therapy, 17(3), pp. 143–164.

27. Still, A. & Dryden, W., 2012. The Historical and Philosophical Context of Rational Psychotherapy: The Legacy of Epictetus. London: Karnac.

Republished by kind permission of The Behavior Therapist from vol. 42, no. 2, available as PDF download from the website of ABCT.

The most important ancient texts on Stoicism

The most important ancient texts on Stoicism

Let these doctrines, if that is what they are, be enough for you. As for your thirst for books, be done with it, so that you may not die with complaints on your lips, but with a truly cheerful mind and grateful to the gods with all your heart. — Meditations, 2.3

The Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, like other Stoics, believed that it was more important to apply philosophy in practice, throughout our daily lives, than simply to read about it in books. However, he also owned a copy of the Discourses of Epictetus, gifted to him by his Stoic mentor Junius Rusticus, which he quotes repeatedly and had clearly studied very closely indeed.

The philosopher Seneca explains the Stoic attitude toward reading as being more about quality than quantity:

Be careful, however, lest this reading of many authors and books of every sort may tend to make you discursive and unsteady. You must linger among a limited number of master thinkers, and digest their works, if you would derive ideas which shall win firm hold in your mind. Everywhere means nowhere. When a person spends all his time in foreign travel, he ends by having many acquaintances, but no friends. And the same thing must hold true of men who seek intimate acquaintance with no single author, but visit them all in a hasty and hurried manner. — Letters to Lucilius, 2

When Jeff Beck sang “You’re everywhere and nowhere, baby”, in Hi Ho Silver Lining, he could have been quoting Seneca.

The Stoic advises his friend Lucilius that people who constantly change the medicine they’re taking get little benefit. We should identify the most valuable books and study them very closely, reading them repeatedly, rather than behaving like a dilettante and dipping first into one book and then another without allowing ourselves the time to properly digest any of the ideas they contain, let alone put them into practice.

Below I’ve listed the most important books on Stoicism, at least as far as I’m concerned. (I’ve grouped them under three main headings, by author, although you’ll notice that I’ve sneakily mentioned more than one text in some cases.) If you’re interested in Stoicism you should probably read these over and over again until you know many of the passages by heart.

Some of you will already have read these books so I wanted to add some anecdotes about the historical context in which they were written. That’s the approach I adopted when writing my latest book How to Think Like a Roman Emperor: The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius. I repeatedly found over the years, running courses and workshops on Stoicism, that people tended to get roughly twice as much out of these books if they read them closely and understand more about the author and their times.

The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius

This is the first book most people read on Stoicism. It consists of the personal notes or journal kept by the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. From two brief remarks in the text, and some other minor clues, it appears he probably wrote most or all of the text toward the middle or end of the First Marcomannic War, probably sometime between 170 and 175 AD. (For instance, The Meditations mentions the death of his adoptive brother, Lucius, which was in 169 AD, but not to that of Marcus’ wife, Faustina, who passed in 176 AD.)

After the untimely death of his brother and co-emperor, Lucius Verus, Marcus, apparently with no military training or experience whatsoever, donned the general’s cape and boots and rode out to take sole command of the largest army ever massed on a Roman frontier — numbering some 140,000 men in total.

Following the Parthian War a devastating disease, known as the Antonine Plague, swept through the empire, particularly the legionary camps, leaving Rome highly vulnerable. Ballomar, the young king of the Marcomanni, seized his opportunity to spring a surprise attack and, in breach of existing peace treaties, led a huge coalition of hostile barbarian tribes across the River Danube, overrunning the northern provinces of the empire. The Marcomanni and their allies proceeded to loot and pillage their way across the Alps and finally laid siege to the prosperous Italian city of Aquileia, bringing war to the very doorstep of Rome herself, and throwing the city into panic.

After driving the enemy out of Italy and liberating the northern provinces, for much of the ensuing war, Marcus stationed himself at the front line, in the Roman legionary fortress of Carnuntum, beside the Danube. It was in the crucible of this gruelling war that The Meditations took shape. My belief is that Marcus may have been inspired to begin writing down his personal reflections on applying philosophy in daily life following the death of his beloved Stoic tutor, Junius Rusticus, around 170 AD — possibly another victim of the plague. Deprived of his closest friend and mentor, Marcus became his own Stoic therapist, as it were, and worked through his emotions by writing short reflections, some of which were probably fragments of remembered conversations with his Stoic teachers.

In one of the most famous passages of The Meditations, which opens the main part of the book, Marcus reminds himself to prepare each morning to face dishonesty and treachery. The manuscript of The Meditations originally bore the title To Himself and this, the main part of the text, opens with the words “Say to yourself…”

Say to yourself at the start of the day, I shall meet with meddling, ungrateful, violent, treacherous, envious, and unsociable people. They are subject to all these defects because they have no knowledge of good and bad. But I, who have observed the nature of the good, and seen that it is the right; and of the bad, and seen that it is the wrong; and of the wrongdoer himself, and seen that his nature is akin to my own — not because he is of the same blood and seed, but because he shares as I do in mind and thus in a portion of the divine — I, then, can neither be harmed by these people, nor become angry with one who is akin to me, nor can I hate him, for we have come into being to work together, like feet, hands, eyelids, or the two rows of teeth in our upper and lower jaws. To work against one another is therefore contrary to nature; and to be angry with another person and turn away from him is surely to work against him. — Meditations, 2.1

Most people assume he’s talking about petty matters but Marcus also faced some massive, historic, acts of betrayal, such as the conspiracy leading to the Marcomanni invasion described above. This passage seems all the more remarkable, doesn’t it, if we stop to consider whether this was how Marcus looked upon the enemy tribes he was waging war against?

The Meditations is a very easy book to read but in my experience people do obtain much more from it when they study the text more closely, and learn a little more about the historical and philosophical context in which it was written. That’s why I wanted to write a book about Marcus Aurelius that linked the inner story of his life, as a philosopher, as found in The Meditations, with the stories of his outer life, as Roman emperor, as told in several Roman histories of his reign, and a few other ancient sources that we still have today.

The Handbook and Discourses of Epictetus

The next book about Stoicism that most people should read is The Handbook or Enchiridion of Epictetus, which is actually a series of fifty three sayings and short passages based on The Discourses, compiled and edited by his student Arrian, a highly-accomplished Roman statesman and general. It’s an obvious choice because it’s short and easy to read. It was specifically designed by Arrian to provide a simple, practical introduction to Stoicism, almost like a bullet-point summary of the much longer Discourses.

Marcus Aurelius also quotes repeatedly from The Discourses and he seems to be mainly following Epictetus’ brand of Stoicism. So if you like The Meditations, you’ll almost certainly like The Handbook as well. And if you like The Handbook, you’ll probably like the longer and more discursive version of the same ideas found in The Discourses.

According to some ancient sources there were originally eight volumes of The Discourse of Epictetus. Unfortunately, only four actually survive today. Intriguingly, though, Marcus Aurelius says that he was given a copy of notes from the lectures of Epictetus by his tutor Junius Rusticus. (Marcus was a young boy when Epictetus died and they’d almost certainly never met in person.) As Marcus later quotes from the surviving Discourses we can be fairly certain those are the notes to which he’s referring. However, he also quotes otherwise unknown sayings of Epictetus, which suggests he’d perhaps also read the four lost volumes of The Discourses. In fact, for all we know some of the other passages scattered throughout The Meditations could be quotes or paraphrases from these missing books of Epictetus.

The most famous passage in The Handbook says that it’s not things that upset us but our judgments or opinions about them. Although this became to be seen as a typically Stoic idea, it can actually be traced back to Socrates, the philosopher whom the Stoics most admired and sought to emulate. Indeed, Epictetus hints at this by immediately bringing in Socrates as an example:

Men are disturbed not by the things which happen, but by the opinions about the things: for example, death is nothing terrible, for if it were, it would have seemed so to Socrates; for the opinion about death, that it is terrible, is the terrible thing. — Handbook, 5

The first part of that quote encapsulates what psychologists now call the “cognitive theory of emotion”. (It’s our thoughts and beliefs, aka “cognitions”, that largely determine our emotions.) It was adopted by Albert Ellis, one of the pioneers of cognitive therapy, in the 1950s, who taught it to most of his clients in their initial session. Hence, it became well-known, almost a cliche, to subsequent generations of cognitive-behavioural therapists.

The second most famous passage from The Handbook is its very first sentence: “Some things are up to us whereas other things are not” (Handbook, 1). There’s clearly a good reason why Arrian chose that as the opening sentence: it’s the foundation of everything that follows. The Stoics believed that we need to train ourselves throughout life to carefully distinguish between things that are directly under our control and everything else.

This concept also became famous through The Serenity Prayer, popularized by Alcoholics Anonymous: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.” Today Stoics tend to call this idea the “Dichotomy of Control”, and I also tend to describe it as the “Stoic Fork” because it involves making a sharp distinction between two domains in life: what we do and what merely happens to us.

Seneca’s Letters to Lucilius

Seneca came from the generation before Epictetus. Curiously, neither Marcus nor Epictetus mention him. That appears to be partly because of a convention whereby Romans writing in Greek (like Marcus and Epictetus) didn’t tend to cite Latin authors. However, there may be another explanation.

Seneca was rhetoric teacher to the young Emperor Nero and later became his speechwriter and political advisor. It might even be reasonable to refer to him as a professional Sophist, rather than a philosopher. Despite Seneca’s guidance, in adulthood Nero quickly degenerated into a violent despot and began murdering his own family members, and persecuting his opponents. At first Seneca continued to support him, often seeming to apologize for and defend his behaviour. However, later he withdrew from public life and eventually Nero had him executed on a seemingly trumped up conspiracy charge.

I said that Marcus doesn’t mention Seneca in Greek but we also have a surviving cache of letters between Marcus and his Latin rhetoric tutor, Fronto. In these, Fronto several times mentions Seneca, in a manner that seems rather derisive. At one point he even goes so far as to warn Marcus that looking for pearls of philosophical wisdom in the writings of Seneca is like grubbing around in the bottom of a sewer just to retrieve a few silver coins.

We don’t really see much of Marcus’ response to this. My guess is that they may have been talking about political speeches by Seneca rather than the philosophical letters he’s best known for today. We get a glimpse of what these may have been like in texts such as On Clemency, where Seneca awkwardly defends Nero, portraying him as a virtual philosopher-king without a drop of blood on his hands, etc. — a claim that would have been laughable to the Senate. By contrast, Epictetus warns his students against flattering tyrants. He had originally been a slave owned by one of Nero’s secretaries and probably witnessed first-hand some of the intrigue and chaos surrounding the imperial court at this time.

During Nero’s reign a group of politicians known as the “Stoic Opposition” adopted a principled stance against him, led by Thrasea, a close friend of the famous Stoic teacher Musonius Rufus, whose student Epictetus would later become. These men criticized Nero more openly than Seneca dared. When Nero sent the Senate a letter trying to excuse the murder of his own mother by claiming that she had been discovered plotting against him and had committed suicide Thrasea silently walked out of the meeting. These acts of peaceful protest undoubtedly provoked Nero’s wrath.

And indeed this was always his way of acting on other occasions. He used to say, for example:

If I were the only one that Nero was going to put to death, I could easily pardon the rest who load him with flatteries. But since even among those who praise him to excess there are many whom he has either already disposed of or will yet destroy, why should one degrade oneself to no purpose and then perish like a slave, when one may pay the debt to nature like a freeman? As for me, men will talk of me hereafter, but of them never, except only to record the fact that they were put to death. — Cassius Dio

I think Thrasea was talking about Seneca here, among others, and that may explain why later generations of Stoics don’t mention his name. Epictetus and Marcus, on the other hand, both heap praise on members of the Stoic Opposition. Indeed, The Handbook concludes with a quote attributed to Socrates which says “Anytus and Meletus can kill me but they cannot harm me”, referring to the two key individuals who brought the charges leading to his execution. (It’s perhaps a paraphrase from Plato’s Apology.) However, Epictetus’ students must have recognized that as a tribute to Thrasea because Cassius Dio tells us that he was famous for applying the same saying to Nero: “Such was the man that Thrasea showed himself to be; and he was always saying to himself: ‘Nero can kill me, but he cannot harm me.’”

Despite his murky political leanings, though, and pace Fronto, Seneca’s philosophical writings do contain a great deal of valuable Stoic wisdom. The Letters to Lucilius, of which there are 124, are the most common place for people to start. They’re beautifully written and provide an excellent introduction to Stoicism as a philosophy of life. They read more like essays and so in some ways they’re more accessible than either the discourses of Epictetus or notes of Marcus Aurelius

If you like those, you should read Seneca’s other letters and essays, perhaps starting with the consolation letters to Marcia, Helvia, and Polybius. These are important examples of the consolatio genre in philosophical literature, in which philosophical advice is given to a friend in order to help them assuage emotional suffering. They illustrate, in other words, a form of Stoic psychotherapy or counselling. Epictetus mentions that one of his heroes, a member of the Stoic Opposition called Paconius Agrippinus, used to write letters of this kind addressed to himself when faced with some personal catastrophe. In some respects, we can also see The Meditations (“To Himself”) of Marcus Aurelius as resembling a consolation letter addressed to himself, although written in the form of fragmentary passages rather than continuous prose.