Stoicism at the doctor’s

It has been proposed that, to deal with certain sorts of emotional problems for which we go to the doctor, we should be given an improving book to read. Quite right too, the Stoic would reply.

‘Stoicism’ derives from the Greek stoa, the portico in Athens where from 300 BC its inventor Zeno (a Cypriot) taught it. Its main principle is caught in Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ with its ‘motion and a spirit that impels/All thinking things, all objects of all thought,/And rolls through all things’. The argument was based on the idea that (i) in a sense the universe was God, and God was the universe, (ii) the divine element in the world was reason (logos), and (iii) the whole material world was permeated by logos — ‘like honey through a honeycomb’ — including our souls, the divine in us. Happiness therefore depended on exercising the reasoning faculty, which alone would align us with the divine in the universe. As medicine ministered to the diseased body, so reason to the diseased mind: logos was the art of the happy life.

If that was the case, then, what was it that most obviously deranged the logos? Answer: the emotions — anger, fear, pride, grief, desire, even (to take it to extremes) pity and love. So the question became: how did you control them? That depended upon where they came from: find the source, and you were almost there. The obvious source was one’s own beliefs about the beneficial consequences of e.g. the anger (or whatever) which you allowed to take you over. So what was required was what we now call ‘cognitive therapy’ — reason your way with and through those beliefs. Nothing like a good book on the subject to help you do that.