Books

Let’s see whether the ancient Greeks can make us feel better this summer…

by JANE O’GRADY

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“If you look at the matter from a theoretical point of view and ignore this question of degree you can very well say that we are all ill,” wrote Freud in his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. By “ill”, he clarified, he meant “neurotic—since the preconditions for the formation of symptoms can also be observed in normal people.”

The trouble is, instead of remaining exclusive to practitioners and theorists of psychology, the “theoretical” viewpoint Freud referred to has become commonplace. The whole of life has been pathologised; we are always on the hunt for remedies. Tea, bubble bath, Mediterranean tours, books—the chief selling point of any of them is that they are “healing”. In any chemist, practically all the shampoo bottles have labels indicating which specific type of “problem hair”, out of a vast range, they each tackle. It’s often hard to find one for “normal hair”. Freudianism as such may have ebbed, but Freud’s weare-all-ill idea has certainly stuck.

Of course, the sense of being somehow faulty and awry is an immemorial part of the human condition. It is just that, since secularisation in the 19th century, many of us lack the sense that there is a Divine Physician to cure us, or an ordered cosmos that we do, or could, fit into. Now we are on our own. When Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help was published in 1859—the same year as Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and Mill’s On Liberty—it was much derided, and still is, but it spawned the genre of “how to change your life and live better”.

In the last decade or so, a new genre of self-help books has arisen, ones that combine therapy with philosophy. Almost more than “mindfulness”, which poaches from yoga and eastern philosophies, it’s the philosophy of ancient Greece and Rome that now predominates in the sections devoted to “Mind, Body, Spirit”— all three require “healing”—in libraries and bookshops. Classical philosophy can happily be invoked in a secular era since it did not prioritise the gods or God, even when, as with Stoicism, a divinity was presupposed.

Classical philosophy can happily be invoked in a secular era since it did not prioritise the gods or God

And so these classical self-help books are proliferating, with several published, or set to be published, just this year—including Emily Austin’s Living for Pleasure: An Epicurean Guide to Life, Adam Nicolson’s How to Be: Life Lessons from the Early Greeks, and Alexandros Kosmidis’s Resurrecting the Wisdom of the Ancients: Ancient Greek Philosophers and their Relevance in the Modern World. In June, there was even a new, abridged translation of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, published under the title How to Flourish: An Ancient Guide to Living Well.