Emotional Resilience and its Ethical and Psychological Limits: Galen on Self- and Other-Directed Freedom from Distress

David Kaufman

There was broad interest among the postclassical philosophical schools in developing strategies for reducing or even eliminating our proneness to distress. However, they disagreed both over which methods to employ and whether alupia, complete freedom from distress, was either a realistic or even a worthwhile goal. In this talk, I explore the influential 2nd Century CE medical author and philosopher Galen’s sophisticated contribution to this debate. Although Galen gives a great deal of attention to the emotion of distress and its therapy, his discussion focuses almost exclusively on his resilience and its limits in the face of self-regarding losses, such as the loss of significant wealth, of medical tools and supplies, and of his invaluable library and writings. His only discussion of his resilience vis-à-vis other-regarding losses, such as the death of a friend or a threat to his homeland, is in a short passage from his recently discovered work Freedom from Distress. While this passage has largely escaped critical attention, I show that attending to Galen’s account of his resilience to other-regarding losses, which pose more serious ethical challenges to the ideal of alupia, helps to further articulate his account of distress and his position in the contemporary debate over the ethical, psychological, and eudaimonic limits of emotional resilience.