Ricky DeSantis

Cognitive behavioral therapy is not only the most widely practiced form of therapy in the world, but its treatment methods—particularly mindfulness—have come to saturate self-help literature, human resource departments, and military training programs. I argue that despite its pretensions to scientificity, there is reason to think that CBT has become an ideology. I make this argument by returning to the two founding sources of second-wave CBT—Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck—to show that the core of CBT lies in a revitalization of a Stoic theory of subjectivity. From here, I argue that while Ellis and Beck find inspiration in Stoicism’s theory of emotions, they both miss the teleological metaphysics underlying Stoicism’s therapeutic project. Drawing on Hegel’s reading of Stoicism, I argue that this elision leads CBT to reproduce the same problem of empty formalism that plagued Roman Stoicism, leaving it susceptible to ideological co-option.

This paper offers a reading of passages in Heidegger’s Nietzsche lectures in which Heidegger describes love as a feeling which grants an essential vision. I contend that by invoking this language of vision while simultaneously contrasting love with infatuation, Heidegger is implicitly attempting to situate love within his category of fundamental attunements. While Heidegger does not explicitly follow this thought through, I argue that doing so leads to a problem—namely, how can love be a fundamental attunement if such attunements are necessarily objectless? I suggest we can see a response to this problem in Heidegger’s treatment of Plato’s Phaedrus within the same lecture course. I conclude by claiming that while Heidegger attempts to follow Plato in arguing that love is most properly directed towards Being, love nonetheless poses a challenge to Heidegger’s category of fundamental attunements which also strikes at the heart of his claim that ontology is first philosophy.