The Therapy of Desire

Nussbaum's 1994 'Therapy of Desire' — Hellenistic ethics as philosophical-medical therapy

Tradition: Hellenistic-ethics revival / virtue ethics / philosophical-medical reading of Stoicism, Epicureanism, Scepticism

Nussbaum's 1994 'Therapy of Desire' — Hellenistic ethics as philosophical-medical therapy of the passions

Published by Princeton University Press in 1994 from the 1986 Martin Classical Lectures at Oberlin College, 'The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics' argues that the Hellenistic schools — Epicureanism, Stoicism, and Scepticism — understood philosophy as a medical therapy of disordered passions and false beliefs about value. The book treats Lucretius (against the fear of death — Nussbaum's reading of De Rerum Natura as a therapeutic argument intended to dispel the false belief that death is bad for the one who dies); Cicero and Seneca (Stoic therapy of anger, grief, and erotic love — drawing on Cicero's Tusculan Disputations and Seneca's letters and treatises); Sextus Empiricus (Sceptical equipoise as therapy of dogmatic anxiety — the Pyrrhonian sceptic's promise that suspension of judgement produces ataraxia, untroubled peace). Each major school is treated as practitioner of a philosophical-medical art rather than as a purely academic philosophical position. The book's central methodological argument: ancient philosophy can be understood adequately only if we take seriously its self-conception as therapy of the soul; modern philosophy's separation of theoretical analysis from practical-existential consequence is a relatively recent and not necessarily good development. The book contributed substantially to the late-twentieth-century revival of Hellenistic ethics (Annas, Long, Cooper, Inwood, Brennan) and to the broader recovery of philosophy as a way of life (Pierre Hadot, whose 'Philosophy as a Way of Life' Nussbaum engages explicitly).