Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation (The Gifford Lectures)

Rating:
Summary: Great for both scholars and philosophers
Review: What are emotions ? Are they felt movements occasioned or caused by our judgements, as held by the founder of the Stoic school, Zeno of Citium ? Are they our mistaken judgements themselves, accompanied by felt movements, as argued by his successor, Chrysippus ? Or do they sometimes originate in some irrational part of the self, as claimed by Posidonius, «the Stoic who deliberately reverted to Plato's tripartite psychology» ?

Should we eradicate them, as most Stoics and some Church Fathers advocated, or should we merely moderate them, as the Aristotelians and most Church Fathers held ?

And what methods of control and/or eradication are available to us ? What works and what does not ? Is it sufficient to reappraise the situations we are confronted with as indifferent and to consider it inappropriate to react emotionally to them, as Chrysippus taught ? Should our emotions be purged by catharsis as Aristotle believed ? Or should we play them off against each other in order to get rid of unwanted moods, as the Christian Desert Father Evagrius recommended ? Are some aspects of emotion- the so-called «first movements»- unavoidable, as modern neurophysiology seems to prove ? And do they pose a threat to the Stoic program of eradication, or can they be meaningfully defined away as non-emotions ?

These are some of the highly challenging questions Richard Sorabji, Professor of Ancient Philosophy at King's College London, addresses in this sweeping survey of classical theories of emotions and emotional control, from Plato to St Augustine.

The author himself is not a Christian : he rejects the doctrine of Original Sin, which he quaintly describes as «dear to Jerome and Augustine» ; defends «models of marriage more favourable [ ?] than Augustine's, for example Plutarch's» (which is presented as more « romantic » and as seeing «sex as a treaty whose renewal enables you to put up with the annoyances of daily living») ; and regrets the Pelagians did not win the «political battle» for orthodoxy against St Augustine. But though he evinces the modern scholarly antagonism to the latter's view of lust, he does recognize him as «a philosopher for whose genius I have repeatedly expressed my admiration.»

Neither is Sorabji a Stoic. But he goes so far as to admit that «the case against eradication [of the emotions] is not so obvious as one might take it to be at first», which has the merit of turning a modern prejudice back into an open question.

The book will be of interest both to historians of ideas, who seek to understand how (mostly Stoic) Pagan views of emotion were developed and enriched across the centuries, and how they were absorbed into and reformulated by the Christians of the Patristic age ; and to anybody who has begun to question the appropriateness of having whatever emotions he happens to have and aspires to a more ordered affective life.

Though dense, highly detailed and occasionally very technical (as in its 20-page analysis of the formation of the modern concept of will), *Emotions and Peace of Mind* is a very accessible book which spares the reader untranslated quotations or terms. Whatever Greek or Latin words are used in the text are always well-defined and/or translated, and it is very easy to get along by jotting down a short glossary of less than a dozen recurrent Stoic terms (like horme, oikeiosis, proairesis or akrasia.)

Another recently published treatment of Stoicism I highly recommend is A. A. Long's *Epictetus : A Stoic and Socratic Guide to Life*.