The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics [Hardcover]

"The Therapy of Desire" extends the argument in two ways. First, it focuses on the part of our vulnerability we ordinarily think of as within: our attachments to ourselves and to others, with the intense emotions of anger and love these entail. Second, it moves past the major works of Plato and Aristotle to the Stoics, Skeptics, and Epicureans. For that alone, it may well be a more useful book. She writes very clearly indeed, making the arguments of each credible, and the arrangement by school and thematic approach make it easier to follow than such well-known surveys as Annas's "Morality of Happiness," even as she responds to each one in her own way.

She continues, as in the previous book, to argue that both her themes and Greek thought forbid a separation of philosophy from literary writing (a notion that sounds contemporary now, too, with Derrida and others), and so she gives much space to Lucretius (whereas others stick to the fragments of strictly philosophical writings that are left us). It made me read him. She also again makes the case that post-Classical philosophy, concerned with moral imperatives or the greatest happiness of others, slights a key question.

I have to say that the complaint in an earlier review that she's too Marxist just has me puzzled at the red-baiting. As I say, she thinks something serious got lost starting at least with Kant, and the rare reference to Marx is dismissive. Similarly, using "he" and "she" interchangeably is pretty much the norm in such presentations these days. Perhaps just finding someone who believes in affections and human community as part of virtue annoys a neo-con.

In *The Therapy of Desire*, Nussbaum evaluates the therapeutic aspects of the ethical teachings of these three schools, showing how each of them addresses the emotional needs and vulnerabilities of its disciples and guides them towards eudaimonia, or human flourishing. Using Aristotle as her starting point and foil, she shows what insights the three Hellenistic schools added to his psychology (such as, for instance, the crucial discovery of the unconscious), what dangers they identified in the passionate life he advocated, and what ways they found to avert them. One thing I learned in this book for instance is that the original Skeptics were not as nihilistic as their contemporary equivalents, but that their all-encompassing doubting was a means of protecting themselves from intellectual vulnerability and fostering a eudaimonistic equanimity.

Rather disturbingly, Nussbaum concludes that each individual has to choose between a life of deep emotional commitments that might lead to destructive anger and a life freed from the risk of such anger at the cost of his humanity. She herself seems to favor the former.

*The Therapy of Desire* is unlike most modern philosophy books in that it attempts to move philosophy "beyond the academy to take its place in the daily lives of human beings". Combining abstract arguments with insightful real-life illustrations and the literary analysis of works such as Lucretius's *De Rerum Natura* and Seneca's *Medea*, it weaves a very intricate picture of man's emotional life and the profound moral choices it involves.

My only reservation about the book concerns the author's feminist and Marxist leanings.

The former manifest themselves in an obsessive infatuation with the pronoun "she" (to the point of inserting it in quotes from the Stoics) and occasional diatribes against our patriarcal society which "turns half of its members into possessions, both deified and hated, the other half into sadistic keepers, tormented by anxiety".

As for Nussbaum's Marxism, it reveals itself in citations from Marx and Engels' writings, which seem designed solely to give them visibility, and a general tendency to see people as "victims of false social advertising... convinced in their hearts that they cannot possibly live without their hoards of money, their imported delicacies, their social standing, their lovers". According to her, "nothing is more urgent in contemporary society than the reasoned critique of limitless wealth-maximizing and power-seeking" (notice the package deal). Moreover, Nussbaum's sympathies for ancient philosophers seem to be dictated mostly by the openness of their schools to women and "the excluded"- which means that even though she turns out to be closer to Aristotle than the other schools, she clearly dislikes him. As for her brief forays into political philosophy, they remain strategically vague, but it is not difficult, given the context, to guess what she means when she advocates "a politics of gradualism and mercy".

For all its biases, I highly recommend this marvellous exploration of hellenistic philosophy. But I sincerely hope that in the future, scholars uncontaminated by Marxism will intervene to prevent the recuperation of Epicureanism and especially Stoicism by the academic left.

(As antidotes to Nussbaum's attacks on "greed", I recommend Edwin Locke's *The Prime Movers*; George Reisman's *Capitalism*; and the complete works of Ayn Rand.)