Commentary on "The Stoic Conception of Mental Disorder"

Cicero was not a philosopher, but a lawyer and a politician. He became a “professional philosopher” only when he was marginalized from the political arena (Rawson 1983). Caesar’s dictatorship had suppressed the democratic debate, and also the lively and burning political life that moved the Senate and Roman citizens for decades. Political rhetoric, the major political art during democracy, faded too. Cicero, who was a champion of rhetoric and fiercely opposed Caesar, was obliged to retire to private life (be reminded that, after Caesar’s death, Cicero paid with his life in his attempt to return to politics). In his forced retirement, philosophy became the only way to pursue the renewal of the res publica. Cicero was, paradoxically, a man of the past (because he was a republican and defended Roman institutions) and an innovator, because he felt the necessity to open Rome to other cultures like that of the Greeks (Rawson 1985).

When Caesar took power, it seemed that Cicero’s moderate position was defeated. It was in this period that he wrote the Tuscolanae. Cicero had already written several books on philosophy before the Tuscolanae, but in none of them had philosophy emerged as a value in itself. Actually, in his previous manuscripts, philosophical research was viewed only as a way to ground practical and political reasoning. Cicero shared the common Roman view that knowledge should be pursued but remain within the “right boundaries,” beyond which philosophy becomes disengagement and idleness, and incompatible with the citizen’s civil mission. Indeed, Roman public opinion despised philosophy, or, at most, could tolerate it only if it did not require too much time and effort. The reason was easy to understand: on the one hand, the main civil virtue in Rome was political commitment; on the other, philosophy was introduced and practiced by Greek immigrants and slaves, namely by people belonging to the lower classes.

In Tuscolanae, Cicero instead affirmed the primacy of philosophical research on politics, which was the most important novelty of this work. However, Cicero tried to enjoin his public, because he presented philosophy as a behavioral guide and a way to moderate the grief and the pain posed by everyday life. Actually his public was made up of professionals, businessmen, politicians, and others who refused to get entangled in sophisticated metaphysical issues, but who required an immediate and practical exploitation of philosophical knowledge. Thus Cicero might have claimed that philosophy was endowed with an absolute value, only because he presented philosophy as a sort of “medication of the soul.” The first aim of his philosophical therapy was to purify the soul from various erroneous beliefs and wrongheaded goals to which people had been led by family education, cultural falsehoods, and public opinion. The five books that constitute the Tuscolanae are indeed organized like a therapy meant to heal the suffering soul and lead it toward serenity and happiness. This has led several scholars to consider the Tuscolanae a Stoic work, which is only partially true. Cicero’s philosophic background was in Academic philosophy. Academic teaching emphasized that virtues alone were not sufficient to give happiness, there being other essential elements, such as well-being, richness, good health, and social status, as well as political and civil rights.

This position was not consistent with the Stoic explanation of human unhappiness, which they construed as a radical misunderstanding fueled by human passions (Brun 1990). In my opinion, Cicero had never been a true Stoic because he continued to believe that some practical and sensible elements were crucial for human happiness. Indeed, Cicero never stated that real things are irrelevant to humans. Even in Tuscolanae, the most Stoic of his works, he did not truly accept the Stoic weltanschauung. While in the Stoic system the refusal of passions came from some metaphysical premise, ¹ in Tuscolanae an identical refusal was not metaphysically justified. ² Instead, refusing the passions was just a way people could better guarantee serenity and happiness.

On this point, my reading of Tuscolanae clearly differs from Nordenfelt’s, who seems to support...