Life Lessons From a Roman Philosopher

Review of How to Be a (Happy) Skeptic: The Power of Doubt in a Meaningful Life. By Massimo Pigliucci. Tarcher. 333 pp. $32.

“We should not be too confident in our belief in anything,” Marcus Tullius Cicero, a statesman and philosopher in the Roman Republic, often declared. Nonetheless, Massimo Pigliucci points out that Cicero maintained we should embrace beliefs not as absolute truths, but as logically consistent propositions that conform to the best available evidence and are subject to revision in light of new information.

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In How to Be a (Happy) Skeptic, Pigliucci (a professor of philosophy at the City College of New York and author, among other books, of How to Be a Stoic) uses Cicero as his guide in an examination of the role curiosity and reason can play in laying the foundations of a good life. Part biography of an iconic figure in Western civilization, part history of the last days of the Roman Republic, and part self-help primer, his book is informative and engaging.

Pigliucci acknowledges that “even the best philosophical arguments sometimes fail to convince people,” especially when they concern “deeply felt issues.” But he does not adequately address how often emotion trumps reason in shaping beliefs and behavior. “Contrary to what one often hears,” he writes, without much elaboration, “we are not helpless in the face of our emotions, even strong ones.” Along with Cicero, he asserts that those who cannot bear pain “cannot achieve worthwhile things,” while those who accept it “as a fact of life often discover that they are more than a match for it.” "Which category would you rather belong to?” he asks, as if “the right answer” is all individuals need to make a choice and act on it. And Pigliucci endorses Cicero’s recommendation to accept death as inevitable and refuse to give it further thought, because it is inevitable.

That said, How to Be a (Happy) Skeptic contains lots of useful and practical advice. Stoicism, Pigliucci indicates, has shaped cognitive behavioral therapy. Stoics identified what psychologist Daniel Kahneman called “fast” (subconscious and instinctive) and “slow” (conscious, deliberate, and often more accurate) thinking. And slow thinking prompted Ulysses, who wanted to hear the song of the sirens even though he realized his curiosity might be fatal, to order his crew to tie him to the mast of their ship, ears unencumbered.

Convinced that how we confront adversity, challenges, and setbacks shapes our responses to them – a fundamental precept of rational emotive behavior therapy – Pigliucci recommends “reframing” issues, “a powerful and seriously underestimated ability common to all humankind.” When his daughter died in childbirth, Cicero, he reveals, may have been the first person to write letters “of self-consolation,” a practice recommended by CBT professionals to their clients in the form of meditative journals addressing themselves in the second person in non-emotional language. Like the Stoics, he notes, CBT practitioners also warn against “catastrophizing” about real or feared calamities. Here again, a caveat is in order: The Epicurean recommendation of immersion in “something pleasurable” to ward off grief may be “sound,” but it is much easier said than done.

Pigliucci also provides a vocabulary well-suited to open-minded inquiry. A hypothetical or conditional imperative, he suggests, differs from a categorical imperative (like the Ten Commandments) because it is not absolute. Emphasizing the importance to our species of empathy, cooperation and reciprocity, primatologists characterize human beings (and some mammals) as “obligatorily gregarious,” inclined to practice “reciprocal altruism and punish “free riders.” Pigliucci also stresses what he regards as an urgent need to focus on “actual, not virtual friendships” before cementing what may appear to be at first blush a profound relationship.

Pigliucci recognizes, of course, that reading the classics in general, or Cicero in particular, will not by itself lead to a life well lived. Only knowledge that is internalized and followed by action “will change anything.”

That said, ancient wisdom, with all its flaws, is by no means a bad way to start “the project of self-improvement” in an age of “artificial intelligence and instant gratification.”