THE EMOTIONS IN HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHY

Transcription

1 THE EMOTIONS IN HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHY

2 The New Synthese Historical Library Texts and Studies in the History of Philosophy VOLUME46 Managing Editor: SIMO KNUUTIILA, University ofhelsinki Associate Editors: DANffiL ELLIOT GARBER, University ofchicago RICHARD SORABJI, University oflondon Editorial Consultants: JAN A. AERTSEN, Thomas-lnstitut, Universität zu Köln, Germany ROGER ARIEW, Virginia Polyrechnie Institute E. JENNIFER ASHWORTH, University ofwaterloo MICHAEL AYERS, Wadharn College, Oxford GAIL FINE, Cornell University R. J. HANKINSON, University oftexas JAAKKO HINTIKKA, Boston University, Finnish Academy PAUL HOFFMAN, University ofcalifornia, Riverside DAVID KONSTAN, Brown University RICHARD H. KRAUT, University of Illinois, Chicago ALAIN DE LIBERA, Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Sorbonne JOHN E. MURDOCH, Harvard University DAVID FATENORTON, McGill University LUCA ÜBERTELLO, Universita degli Studi di Genova ELEONORE STUMP, St. Louis University ALLEN Wooo, Cornell University

3 THE EMOTIONS IN HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHY Edited by JUHA SIHVOLA University of Helsinki, Finland and TROELS ENGBERG-PEDERSEN University ofcopenhagen, Denmark SPRINGER-SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V.

4 A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN ISBN (ebook) DOI / Printed on acid-free paper Ali Rights Reserved 1998 Springer SciencetBusiness Media Dordrecht Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1998 Softcover reprint of the hardcover I st edition 1998 No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner

5 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION vii SIMO KNUUTTll..A and JUHA SlliVOLA I How the Philosophical Analysis of the Emotions was Introduced 1 TAD BRENNAN I The Old Stoic Theory of Emotions 21 JOHN M. COOPER I Posidonius on Emotions 71 CHRISTOPHER Gll..L I Did Galen Understand Platonic and Stoic Thinking on Emotions? 113 RICHARD SORABII I Chrysippus - Posidonius - Seneca: A High- Level Debate on Emotion 149 JOHN PROCOPE I Epicureans on Anger 171 RICHARD BETT I The Sceptics and the Emotions 197 T.H. IRWIN I Stoic lnhumanity 219 AMELIE OKSENBERG RORTY I The Two Faces of Stoicism: Rousseau and Freud 243 MARTHA NUSSBAUM I Eros and the Wise: The Stoic Response to a Cultural Dilemma 271 TROELS ENGBERG-PEDERSEN I Marcus Aurelius on Emotions 305 EYJ6LFUR KIALAR EMll..SSON I Plotinus on the Emotions 339 CONTRIBUTORS 365 SUBJECT INDEX 367 INDEX OF NAMES 373

6 JUHA SIHVOLA AND TROELS ENGBERG-PEDERSEN INTRODUCTION Since the nineteen-seventies, the emotions have been among the most intensively debated topics in the philosophy of mind and action. This philosophical reflection has led to thoroughgoing criticism of certain stereotypical views, e.g. that emotions are irrational bodily and psychic movements which just happen to people because of their psychophysical constitution. According to these views, they are essentially passive reactions to external stimuli, which give rise to certain behavioral tendencies but cannot be much modified through teaching and argument. Recent philosophical Iiterature on the emotions has paid attention to the fact that even the everyday use of the paradigmatic instances of emotionterms, such as anger, fear, pity, grief, and joy, involve prominent features that are neglected in the notion of emotion as an irrational feeling or passive psychophysical reaction. First, emotions are intentional; they have an object at which they are directed or about which they are. Secondly, emotions are closely related to the representational and evaluative acts of those undergoing them. Thirdly, occurrent emotions are regarded as adequate or inadequate reactions. The emotions seem to involve elements that are often understood as functions of reason: cognition, evaluation, judgment. In spite of a growing recognition of the intentionality of the emotions and the role of cognition in them, the notion of emotion has remained quite controversial in modern discussions. Cognitive philosophical theories concerning the emotions can roughly be divided into judgment theories, which more or less identify the emotions with the judgment involved, and componential theories, in which the emotions are understood as complexes of cognitions, desires, and affects. Discussion is still much at what Aristotle would have called a dialectical stage. Analyses concerning the emotions have been focused on what is designated by the paradigmatic instances of emotion-terms, but no consensus has been reached either on the overall definition of the notion of emotion or on the general demarcation lines of discussion. In such a Situation, it is not surprising that the ancient discussions of the pathe have been thought to be directly relevant for philosophical analyses of the emotions. However, the conceptual tools provided by ancient philosophy Juha Sihvola and Troels Engberg-Pedersen (eds.), The Emotions in Hellenistic Philosophy, 1998 Kluwer Academic Publishers.

7 viii JUHA SIHVOLA AND TROELS ENGBERG-PEDERSEN do not at first sight seem too promising for a theory of what we would call the emotions. The basic meaning of the term pathos is not "emotion"; pathos stands for a much more general notion which covers all accidental and contingent changes that happen to somebody in cantrast to what he or she actively does. The broad sense of pathos, familiar from Aristotle's Categories and Metaphysics, comes out in translationssuch as "affection", "experience", "undergoing" or "attribute", as opposed to "emotion" or even "passion". However, both Plato and Aristotle also focus attention on pathe in the sense of the emotions as we understand them, although it may be questioned whether the discussions in the Philebus and the Rhetoric amount to actual theories of the emotions. By contrast, there is no doubt that the Stoic doctrine of the pathe is a systematic theory in which the term pathos is given a strict technical meaning. Moreover, the class of psychic phenomena which the Stoics call pathe clearly refers to what we call emotions, but it also considerably revises commonsense beliefs - both ancient and modern - about them. It is questionable whether these pathe include everything that we or the ancient contemporaries of the Stoics recognized as emotions, and accordingly, whether all emotions are really extirpated in the Stoic ideal of apatheia. In fact, the Stoic doctrine, araund which the Hellenistic discussions of the emotions to a large extent circled, drew heavy criticism from early on. On the other hand, it has also been praised for achieving a Ievel of sophistication and precision not even matched in the modern Iiterature on the topic (see Sorabji below). Scholarly interest in the Hellenistic theories of the emotions has been lively during the last couple of decades. But even though several excellent articles on the topic have appeared and the emotions have been perceptively discussed in volumes on Hellenistic ethics and philosophy of mind, no booklength comprehensive treatment has been available so far. This collection aims to fill this gap in the Iiterature and to give a many-sided overview of the Hellenistic theories of the emotions, their background, the main controversies, and the later developments. The idea for the volume originated at a conference on the Hellenistic philosophy of mind organized by the Philosophical Society of Finland in Helsinki in A considerable number of papers at the conference focused on the analysis of the emotions and seemed to form a nucleus for a volume of essays. However, in order to gain comprehensiveness, several prominent scholars in the field were invited to contribute new essays to the volume. The editors are grateful to all those who accepted- or who allowed us, in a few cases, to reprint older essays. In the end, the volume turned out to be a little less complete than planned,

8 INTRODUCTION ix with a less than wholly adequate coverage of non-stoic views like those of Cyrenaics and Epicureans. Still, there are enough essays to balance the emphasis on the Stoics. As already noted, practically all Hellenistic thought on the emotions must be understood in relation to the early Stoic analysis of the pathe. The Chrysippean doctrine gave rise to the main controversies: What kind of background psychology, a unitary or a tripartite soul, is needed to explain the emotions? Are the emotions functions of reason or of some lower parts or Ievels of the soul? What kind of therapy is needed to modify or extirpate the emotions? What, if any, is the possible value of the emotions in a flourishing life? The intrinsic centrality of Stoic analyses of the emotions within Hellenistic thought is clearly visible in the structure and contents of this volume. The emergence of the philosophical analysis of emotions in Plato and Aristotle is outlined by Simo Knuuttila and Juha Sihvola. Their aim is to show that the Hellenistic discussions did not come out of the blue but bad deep roots in classical philosophy. They also pay attention to interesting reflections by Plato and Aristotle on the feeling aspect of emotion which was less discussed in the Hellenistic period. With the scene thus set, Tad Brennan presents a detailed introduction to the early Stoic theory of the emotions, as weil as a critical survey of a few areas of disagreement among modern interpreters of the doctrine. This is followed by three articles, by John Cooper, Christopher Gill, and Richard Sorabji, which trace the later development and criticisms of the Stoic theory from different points of view and reach rather different conclusions. Cooper argues that Galen unfairly represents Posidonius's psychology as being much more Platonist than it actually was. To a large extent it was consistent with orthodox Stoicism. According to Cooper, Posidonius understood the pathe as functions of the rational faculty that express the agent's beliefs of what is worth reacting to and acting for, but, differing from Chrysippus, he thought that some of the force of the impulse derives from an independent nonrational power which resembles Platonic appetite or spirit. Thus, Posidonius's main intention would have been to preserve the basic structure of the Stoic doctrine against criticism. Gill agrees with Cooper on Posidonius, and further argues that even Plato's psychology was in fact much closer to Stoicism than Galen and other later Platonists allowed. Gill finds two alternative explanations of psychic conflict in Plato: sometimes it is explained in terms of different functional parts of the soul, but sometimes, in anticipation of the Stoic view, as being between different sets of beliefs and reasonings.

9 X JUHA SlliVOLA AND TROELS ENGBERG-FEDERSEN Sorabji dissents from the Cooper-Gill interpretation and finds little evidence for challenging Galen's reading of Posidonius. In Sorabji's view, Posidonius recognized the role of judgment in an emotion but did not identify it with a judgment or even regard judgments as either necessary or sufficient for an emotion. Thus there seem to have been clearly different views of the emotions in Chrysippus and Posidonius, and an attempt at resolution between the two lines of thought can only be found in Seneca's De ira. After this first round of articles follows another round, by John Procope and Richard Bett, on views on the emotions in two other Hellenistic schools: Epicureans and Skeptics. John Procope bad accepted to write a new essay on the Epicureans for the present volume in continuation of bis excellent article 'Epicureans on Anger' from the Festschrift for Albrecht Dihle. Unfortunately, bis sad death in June 1995 prevented this. lnstead, we gratefully reprint 'Epicureans on Anger' with the kind permission of Mrs Julia Procope and the publisher. In this article Procope in effect covers both Epicurus hirnself and the later important text on anger by Philodemus. He suggests that in the late Epicurean discussion there are important connections to the Stoic doctrine of the passions. Philodemus's view of anger can be understood as seeking a moderate middle ground between Epicureanism in its more extreme forms and Stoicism. Richard Bett has two aims in bis article on the sceptics. First, he suggests that the relative silence of the sources with respect to dogmatic psychology can be explained in terms of the specific version of scepticism outlined by Sextus in Against the Ethicists. If Sextus 's point was to argue that nothing is good or bad by nature, the discussion of any other basic Stoic doctrine could not be expected to go into very great details. Secondly, Bett argues that the preferable emotional condition which the Pyrrhonists claimed to be able to produce to a large extent shared a common ground with the Stoic ideal of apatheia. A new round of articles, by Terence lrwin, Amelie Rorty, and Martha Nussbaum, returns to the Stoics. Now the aim is not to consider the details of developments and criticisms within the Stoic school itself. Rather, writing in their characteristic, widely diverging styles, these authors attempt to situate the overall, philosophical profile of the Stoics on emotion by comparing them, in different respects, with Plato (Nussbaum), with Aristotle (lrwin), and even with Rousseau and Freud (Rorty). Terence Irwin's paper deals with the common accusation of inhumanity levelled against the Stoic ideal of apatheia. He argues against the accusation claiming that those aspects of the emotions that are allowed to the sage are

10 INTRODUCTION xi sufficient to give a Stoic good reason for doing something to relieve the sufferings of others and, in general, to care about pretty much the same things that ordinary people care about. Amelie Rorty also proposes a charitable reading of the Stoic theory of the pathe and defends the Stoics from charges of offensiveness and inconsistency. She argues that the difference between the wise and the fool, drawn by the Stoics, has been considerably exaggerated: the sage and the common man share at least some psychological reactions, and although the common man is mistaken about many things, many of bis impressions and impulses are, as far as they go, correct. In the last part ofthe paper, Rorty moves on to sketching how Rousseau and Freud used Stoic doctrines for different sorts of therapeutic purposes. In her paper, Martha Nussbaum asks which of the two conceptions of erotic relationships found in Plato's Phaedrus the Stoic wise would side with: that of Lysias, who banishes passionate Iove as a dangeraus form of madness, or that of Socrates, who regards loving madness as a necessary source of generosity and kindliness, and thus, as productive of the greatest of goods. According to Nussbaum, the Stoic wise man will choose a nonpassionate form of eros, which may offer something beyond the Lysianic conception, but rejects the Ionging and passivity involved in real, Socratic Iove. The volume is concluded by two essays, by Troels Engberg-Pedersen and Eyj6lfur Kjalar Emilsson, that address two late Hellenistic philosophers: Marcus Aurelius and Plotinus. Here the main focus is not so much on the place of these philosophers within the history of Hellenistic analyses of the emotions. lnstead, the two essays focus on how the emotions are situated within the comprehensive philosophical frameworks of the two philosophers themselves. Thus, Engberg-Pedersen suggests that it is to worthwhile to clarify Marcus Aurelius's own views ofthe emotions, before trying to insert him into the standard framework of the Hellenistic philosophical schools. His conclusions are that Marcus's adaptation of a Stoic type of "view from above" does not imply complete emotional detachment from the particular and temporal world and that Marcus's view makes it possible to distinguish between sane and morbid emotions. Addressing what may in fact be seen as a closely similar problern about emotions in relation to the rational self, Emilsson shows how Plotinus's view of the emotions should be understood in the context of the complex Neoplatonic anthropology and divisions of the soul. According to Emilsson, Plotinus is able to stick to bis main thesis that the soul cannot in any way be affected or changed by the so-called affections of the soul, even though they

11 xii JUHA SlliVOLA AND TROELS ENGBERG-PEDERSEN may change the soul's dispositions and indeed corrupt it morally. The essays in this volume provide searching and provocative argument in an important field of classical and philosophical studies. Perspectives and conclusions differ and even conflict. Together, they show that the Hellenistic debates about the nature and value of the emotions are full of material that is directly relevant to modern concerns and far from exhausted with a view to future study. Academy of Finland University of Copenhagen