The Stoic Conception of Mental Disorder: The Case of Cicero
- The Stoic Conception of Mental Disorder: The Case of Cicero
Marcus Tullius Cicero, the great promoter of Greek thought to the Latin world, gives a very detailed presentation of the Stoic philosophy of mind and of mental disorder in his Tusculan Disputations (46 b.c.). In an interesting way, this philosophy anticipates the modern philosophical theories of affections or emotions developed by, for instance, R. M. Gordon, which are based on the concepts of belief and desire. According to Cicero, having an affection is the same as having a belief about something which one considers to be good or evil, either in the present or in the future. Cicero develops these ideas about affections within the context of a theory of mental disorder, claiming that all but the mildest affections are in fact species of mental disorder. This paper summarises Cicero’s theory of affection and disorder and indicates its relations to modern thinking in the philosophy of emotion and mental health.
mental health, Stoic philosophy, affections and their classification, theory of emotions
Introduction
Marcus Tullius Cicero is not the most central of philosophers in the history of ideas. He is hardly ever studied in philosophy courses anywhere in the world. The people who know him best are the Latin scholars, and the reason for this is very clear: Cicero was not only the most productive author in classical Latin; he also has the reputation of representing the perfection of Latin style. His style became the paradigm for many scholars to follow.
But Cicero deserves a prominent place in the history of ideas as well, mainly as a very diligent introducer of Greek thought into Roman civilization, but also as the creator of a Latin philosophical terminology; indeed the technical terminology that we use in locutions such as salva veritate, ceteris paribus, and sui generis. Moreover, as I shall argue in this paper, Cicero deserves a place in the history of psychiatry. His work, The Tusculan Disputations, contains a detailed and interesting analysis of a variety of mental disorders. In this analysis Cicero, to a great extent, develops thoughts initially put forward by the early Stoics. Cicero’s philosophy of mental health is much inspired by one of the greatest Stoics, viz. the Greek Chrysippos from the third century b.c. In trying to provide an understanding of Cicero’s theory, I shall here also sketch the fundamentals in Stoic ethics and Stoic philosophy of mind.
Cicero’s Life
Cicero, who lived between 106 and 43 b.c., is best known as an orator, a state advocate, and a statesman. At one time he had the highest position in the Roman republic; he was a consul for a year in 63 b.c. Towards the end of his life he [End Page 285] withdrew from official duties, mainly in disappointment. Specifically, he feared that the republic was not going to survive, afraid of the dictatorial tendencies demonstrated by Caesar, and was no longer prepared to take part in government.
Cicero then sat down in his villa in Tusculum and produced an impressive number of texts. The first concerned mainly political science and philosophy of politics; the later ones written in the years before his death addressed metaphysics and the philosophy of welfare in general. The latter, the Tusculan Disputations (TD), is the topic of the work which has attracted my attention the most. The name stems from the villa of Tusculum.
Cicero had an extraordinarily advanced philosophical training for his time. He spent a few years in Greece visiting the important schools there, mainly the Academia of Platonic thought. He had a reverence for Plato, valued his philosophy highly, and considered himself an heir to Plato. This is also shown in a superficial way in his way of writing. Many of Cicero’s books including the Tusculan Disputations are in the form of dialogues. Yet in spite of this declaration of being a Platonian, Cicero was more of an eclectic, and the main influence on his philosophy of welfare in particular probably came from the Stoics, particularly Chrysippos, the greatest of Stoics who lived from 281–208 b.c. 1
On Stoic Ethics
As a...
