Wellness goes hand in hand with how we think. Our beliefs, perceptions and thoughts all affect our health, mind and body. As a society, we have long explored the inner reaches of our mind to support our lives and while we still have a lot to learn about modern society and civilisation, many of these lessons come from our past, from ancient wisdom, and thought leaders who we have long looked towards to help understand life, health and wellbeing.
The wisdom held in our personal, cultural and social histories can have far reaching impact on our health and wellness.
But are we listening and what can we learn?
Dr Tim Crowley, lecturer and assistant professor at the School of Philosophy, UCD, argues that the problem of presentism – the practice of judging historical figures by the moral and ethical standards of the present day – can negate the lessons to be learned. He refers to it as a “TikTok history”, leading to demands “to pull down statues, rename or de-name buildings, or ransack curricula in schools and universities with a view to removing those parts of the canon that people today, in our present moment, might find problematic or not reflective of our values”.
These reactions are not helpful as this attitude is a form of cognitive bias that prevents us from seeing what is being communicated and the lessons to be learned from history. Learning comes from challenging the past and present while being aware of our own thinking traps.
“Understanding that we too occupy a particular moment in history, and we too have our own blind spots, should open up an approach to history that is not motivated by denunciation and resentment, but appreciation and wonder,” says Crowley, which means “we may gain insights into human nature, as well as developing a sense of intellectual humility and indeed fallibility”.
Looking to ancient wisdom not only allows for reflection on humanity, human thought and action, but also the understanding that this translates to our mental wellness, our health and wellbeing and the knowledge that the body and mind are connected. Crowley specialises in ancient Greek wisdom and notes that the Greek revolution revolves around inquiry, criticism and self-reflective argument.
“The exemplar of Greek wisdom is Socrates,” he says, “but all he claimed to possess was a merely human wisdom, which is partial, limited and of little worth. It consists of knowing the extent of his ignorance. But from this comes the desire to seek out the truth, to the extent that one can.”
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This, Crowley suggests, is what ancient Greek wisdom can give to us, “not maxims or slogans to learn and repeat, but an attitude of inquiry, criticism and self-criticism,” he says. “In Greek philosophy, there is an invitation to participate, not to regurgitate.”
And yet, as with anything, this wisdom and learning can be manipulated towards specific agendas or individual ideologies, and not always for the good. “In the wrong hands,” Crowley says, “this inward self-criticism can easily turn toxic. Plato warns us of this in his Republic: in the hands of the young, philosophy can be destructive. Shallow, fashionable ideas are always lurking in the shadows.”
These “mind viruses” as Crowley puts it, limit free inquiry, which is crucial for society to not only have freedom of speech but also the freedom to hold others accountable.
Ancient wisdom encourages us to ask questions, challenge ideas and enable free thought, but is this happening?
Crowley suggests that university should be a place of free and open inquiry, a place we have “inherited from Socrates”. While we expect it to be a “mental or intellectual gymnasium devoted to mental fitness”, Crowley believes it is anything but that.
“Students are directed straight into the steam-room,” he says. “The hot house of homogeneous opinions. The weights are hidden, the spin bike disabled, the rowing machine locked up, the swimming pool empty. And yet even here in this sedentary, inert, comfortable and comforting scenario, which seems designed so that one enters and leaves with the same, unexamined opinions, mental health supports for anxiety and depression among the student body increase annually.”
Crowley suggests this is not a coincidence. “Perhaps mental health demands not safety, or protection, but resistance, and opposition, without which we become intellectually weak and vulnerable.”
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Three things ancient wisdom teaches us
Intellectual Humility
Or, as Crowley describes it, “the embrace of fallibility”.
“The Socratic claim to ignorance, that what one knows is that one knows nothing, is fundamental,” he says. “This is not the same as open-mindedness. One can be so open-minded that one’s brains fall out, to be filled with all sorts of nonsense. This ignorance is linked to the beginning of wonder and remains mere ignorance if not allied to a critical tool kit, and readiness to interrogate whatever comes before you, for its soundness and consistency.”
Intellectual Autonomy
“This goes together with a healthy scepticism of authority,” says Crowley, who explores how we may question what is fashionable today with how Aristotle challenged thought leaders. “For Aristotle, not even his teacher Plato, the greatest philosopher of all time, could be taken as an unapproachable authority. ‘Plato is my friend,’ he said, ‘but truth is a greater friend’.”
Crowley recognises that ancient wisdom can feel close and familiar, but it is also “alien and unfamiliar”. Our understanding comes from “contexts and assumptions that we may need to reconstruct in order to make sense of their arguments, and frequently this can have the merit of helping us to see beyond the contexts and assumptions, or intellectual fashions, of our own situation.”
The Importance of Freedom
”In a trivial sense, the need for leisure time, or freedom from immediate want, related to basic survival, to conduct philosophical investigations was apparent to the ancients,” says Crowley. “But such freedom is for the body and, while necessary for the business of doing philosophy, is not sufficient.
“For that, one needs the freedom of the mind, firstly to question, and secondly, to pursue and disseminate results without restraint or regardless of any restraints. Conditions preserving and promoting this latter freedom have been rare and precious throughout history and are never, not even today, guaranteed.”
