Anti-Curiosity Exercises, Plutarch, and Quitting Obsessions

    I am setting myself a challenge: in 2024, I commit to practicing one new philosophical exercise each month. And then write about it! For January 2024, I took on Plutarch’s anti-curiosity exercises, described in his essay On Curiosity.¹ The reason why I selected this practice to start off the year is because I was wondering if these exercises could help counteract Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. I have OCD myself and I am part of a team of philosophers who is leading an inquiry into this condition. We are trying our best to put the voices of the people who have OCD at the center of the discussion. The project is called Stuck on the Puzzle²: it involves a podcast being produced, a blog calling for guest-posts, and hopefully, eventually, the design of a philosophical exercise that could perhaps help when dealing with OCD.

    Reflecting on my own OCD, I came to agree with Juliette Vazard’s assessment that this disorder must have something to do with a dysfunction of the mechanism that normally leads someone to pick out things worth inquiring into³. She describes two linked affective mechanisms: one mechanism to assess if a proposition has stakes that are pragmatically costly, thus deciding if the proposition is worth inquiring into in the first place, and another mechanism to assess if the belief we have on the proposed topic was formed in a safe way, making it likely to be accurate (thus securing a good inquiry). Her hypothesis is that anxiety plays a role in this process, which is healthy, but that it can all go wrong in the case of hyper-anxiety. What we get in the end is intrusive uncertainty, as opposed to productive uncertainty. It becomes difficult to assuage the signal that something is worth looking into properly, even after you’ve looked into it properly enough. The experience is quite destabilizing. I would say that the result is not unlike a hyper-anxious kind of curiosity. It makes us perceive a proposition as being full of new and worrying possibilities that we feel we could investigate if only we took the proper steps. This potential connection to curiosity is what made me think of Plutarch’s prescriptions.

    I had not read Plutarch’s essay On Curiosity before, even though hearing about his proposed philosophical training in passing had made enough of an impact on me to prompt me to give it a try. His prescriptions are about training yourself to be less curious about things that do not matter all that much. Plutarch suggests, for instance, that we might want to postpone opening official letters we receive, or that we might want to deliberately turn away from sources of gossip while out and about. I do practice those two things. When I feel that my eagerness to know what an important message says does not align with my deeper values, I try to re-prioritize things in my life, starting from postponing the opening of the message. When I walk past a newspaper stand that displays tabloids with sensational headlines, I unfocus my eyes or look away, because I don’t think it’s good for me to have any sort of curiosity towards that sort of thing. The point is to be wary of curiosity’s potential connection to unhealthy obsessions, and to quit it, in this very counter-intuitive way, emboldened by the thought that it is counter-intuitive only because of this obsessive background, which is safe to ignore. Plutarch talks derisively of the “strangle-hold”⁴ that things can have on us. For instance, he recounts an anecdote which, in a way, pits an athlete against someone in the audience: “when Diogenes​ saw the Olympic victor Dioxippus making his triumphal entry in his chariot and unable to tear his eyes away from a beautiful woman who was among the spectators of the procession, but continually turning around and throwing side-glances in her direction, "Do you see," said the Cynic, "how a slip of a girl gets a strangle-hold on our athlete?" And you may observe how every kind of spectacle alike gets a strangle-hold on busybodies and twists their necks round when they once acquire a habit and practice of scattering their glances in all directions.” A lot of the examples he uses in his essay are steeped in sexism and classism, but if one manages to put that aside, one can be swayed by the main point, which is to regain some autonomy regarding the things that capture our attention.

    As for the main point of the essay, some adjustments are needed as well depending on what you want to do with it. He treats curiosity as a “disease”. As is often the case with ancient philosophers, this makes the relevance of his wisdom ambiguous for the purpose of treating actual mental disorders. What seems at first to invite a point of connection between his theory and psychopathology is undermined by the description of quite ordinary passions as pathological. When ordinary passions are described as illnesses, this sometimes precludes rather than allows a distinction between healthy states of mind and unhealthy ones. When the point is mainly to cure the folly of humanity, the difference between patients and non-patients gets lost. While Plutarch does not think everyone is under the sway of this unhealthy curiosity, the point remains that what he says is a “malady of the mind” is not actually an illness, but has a more universal character. What Plutarch describes is a moral vice, and though he might want to convince the reader that it is both a moral vice and literally a disease, I don’t think we should be convinced by that. All of this means that Plutarch’s exercises are not “ready-to-use” for OCD or for any pathological obsession.

    It is not obvious to me either that the theory behind those exercises is appropriate for other obsessions, even at the scale of the proverbial folly of humanity. This essay does not provide a nuanced discussion of the phenomenon of perceived salience and inquisitiveness. It is not so much a flaw of this essay as an initial misunderstanding on my part: something had been lost in translation. Indeed, what I had known as “On Curiosity” can also be translated as “On Being a Busybody”. What Plutarch talks about is a type of gossipy curiosity that moves people to stick their noses in other people’s businesses. The topic is even narrower than that, since he declares that this gossipy nature always has to do with wanting to learn about other people’s problems. He writes: "Such a malady of the mind, to take the first instance, is curiosity, which is a desire to learn the troubles of others"⁵ As the rest of the essay makes clear, “schadenfreude” is what he has in mind. This essay could have been called “On Schadenfreude”. Moreover, I do believe that even if we stick to the topic of schadenfreude, there are reasons to think he does not describe the actual psychology behind this phenomenon. He derives the desire to learn about other people’s failures from a kind of malevolence, "from a savage and bestial affliction, a vicious nature"⁶. Yet, this is to take things backwards. In reality, schadenfreude derives from a context where we are encouraged to compare ourselves to one another to see how well we are doing in life. Thus, “malignancy” is not a primary passion. It’s a secondary passion that can only exist on the back of heuristics we use to see how well we are doing compared to others. For this reason, I feel like this essay does not capture why gossip is attractive in the first place. Which is why the therapeutic argumentation that Plutarch lays out here does not work for me, and had to be replaced in my mind by my own version of “thinking about unhealthy curiosity”.

    That being said, it is possible that the entire point is to make gossipy curiosity look unattractive, without any concession. To say that Plutarch missed the actual psychology of the phenomenon might miss the fact that this moral exhortation is not necessarily interested in reconstructing such a psychology, and might be entirely comfortable with slander as a rhetorical device. Indeed, when I think about why I found those anti-curiosity exercises helpful, I realize that it is because they provided enthusiastic encouragements to turn away from obsessions, and while I do not find slander particularly helpful, I recognize that the moral condemnation is meant to contribute to the vigorous style of the exhortation. A vigorous style that I did find helpful. With a lot of caveats. I fully recognize that this is not for everyone. In particular, I think of all the OCD sufferers who would not be helped at all by moral condemnation and invitations to exert self-control. But since I took this training regimen with a grain of salt, and since it wasn’t my sole spiritual diet (I could not approach these exercises without supplementing them with mindfulness, and other tips and tricks I picked up along the way to deal with OCD) I wasn’t bothered as much by the downsides.

    During this entire month, I adopted this attitude of deliberately, stubbornly, and counter-intuitively turning away from my obsessions. As part of my OCD, I am a compulsive re-checker (prone to re-checking a dozen or more times that the front door is indeed locked, that the electrical appliances are indeed turned off, etc). It is incredibly difficult for me to break the pattern of obsessing over it and of engaging in compulsive rituals that are meant to serve the obsession (checking in a highly specific way ; for instance counting to 10 while trying the handle of the door with my hand positioned in a very precise way, etc). For this month, I decided to treat a lot of this like bad curiosity. Plutarch inspired me to try things progressively when he writes: "So first let us begin with the most trifling and unimportant matters. What difficulty is there about refraining from reading the inscriptions on tombs as we journey along the roads?"⁷ He invites us to train ourselves to let go by starting with challenges that have the lowest stakes imaginable. I took it as an invitation to challenge myself to completely let go of my OCD behaviour when the stakes are nonexistent or almost nonexistent. This is usually OCD behaviour that exists as a holdover from previous situations. For instance, I learned to check my mailbox in a specific way, because it was broken, but the OCD ritual remained even after the mailbox was replaced by a new one. These low-stake/no stake rituals proved to be a good training ground to cultivate a new attitude. I was then able to cultivate this attitude in contexts where it was scarier for me to do so.

    My incessant checking behaviour is mostly visual ; checking things with my eyes. I was therefore really inspired by the following passage (minus the reference to servants): "the faculty of vision should not be spinning about outside of us,​ like an ill‑trained servant girl, but when it is sent on an errand by the soul it should quickly reach its destination and deliver its message, then return again in good order within the governance of the reason and heed its command."⁸ I can relate to the idea of having my vision spin around as I double-check everything. Instead, I endeavored to simply look away, turn away from what seemed really relevant in the moment. A happy by-product of this experiment is that I came up with a system where I list all of my OCD triggers, and then assign to each OCD trigger the number of times I think it is reasonable to (re)check it. I decide in advance if it is worth checking once, twice, more, or not at all. The letting go was thus in service of a reasonable plan. At the best of times, it felt less like mustering self-control (which doesn’t really get you out of the stiffness of OCD) and more about escaping a situation as fast as I could. Here too Plutarch provided a bit of indirect inspiration: “neither is this a difficult nor arduous task: […] when a crowd is running to see something or other, to remain seated, or, if you are without self-control, to get up and go away. For you will reap no advantage from mixing yourself with busybodies, whereas you will obtain great benefit from forcibly turning aside your curiosity and curtailing it and training it to obey reason.”⁹

    “Forcibly”, “obedience”, “reason” ; there is a running theme here. We are called to exert self-control, will power. Such exhortations are very hit-or-miss depending whether you need just an extra-push (hit!) or another kind of help (miss!). Quite often, people think all we need is just an extra-push, when in fact we are at the end of our rope. For this reason, those encouragements are not, as they are in their current state, appropriate for OCD sufferers. I don’t think they constitute exclusively a call to exert self-control, since they are embedded in a therapeutic argumentation about gossipy curiosity, which is meant to be persuasive. But as I mentioned, those arguments about gossipy curiosity fail to be relevant. All of that said, the general idea behind those exercises was helpful to get me to a place of “exposure and response prevention”. What I found especially inspiring is that since those encouragements appear in the context of criticizing the allure of curiosity, it prepared me for the fact that exposure therapy required turning away from things that I found very salient in the moment. As Juliette Vazard points out, there is a relevance signal that goes haywire in OCD. I feel like Plutarch’s anti-curiosity exercises prepared me for the fact that I would have to turn away while in the middle of receiving this intense curiosity signal. As such, it is not a philosophical exercise that is very respectful of how OCD shapes the way I perceive the world, with anxious curiosity. This makes it an exercise that I don’t want to be using all the time. But I can see how it could be useful from time to time.

Pierrick Simon

31/01/2024

my email: lemiroirtranquille@outlook.fr

(do not hesitate to reach out)

my Bluesky: @pierricksimon.bsky.social

NOTES:

1https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Moralia/De_curiositate*.html On Being a Busybody, by Plutarch as published in Vol. VI of the Loeb Classical Library edition, 1939. English translation by W. C. Helmbold.

2https://stuckonthepuzzleproject.blogspot.com/

3VAZARD, Juliette, (Un)reasonable doubt as affective experience: obsessive–compulsive disorder, epistemic anxiety and the feeling of uncertainty

4Paragraph 12

5Paragraph 1

6Paragraph 6

7Paragraph 11

8Paragraph 12

9Paragraph 13