Crippled by social anxiety and burnt out after a decade of hedonism, Jules Evans eventually found inspiration from the ancient Greeks. Here he tells how 2,000-year-old words of wisdom transformed his life and equipped him to help others solve their modern-day problems

Grounded: Jules Evans at home in north London. 'Greek philosophy is a road map for the good life,’ he says  Photo: Martin Pope

By Jules Evans

7:00AM BST 29 Jun 2013

18 Comments

Growing up in the Nineties, my friends and I were amateur neuroscientists. Every weekend, we conducted experiments on our brains with various chemicals, to see what happened: marijuana, LSD, MDMA, amphetamine, mushrooms, all tossed into our system like ingredients in a cauldron. We had some hilarious, beautiful, even spiritual times. Then I noticed my friends beginning to burn out.

My best friend had a psychotic breakdown when he was 16. He’s been in and out of mental care homes ever since (he’s now 35, like me). Other friends developed paranoia, bipolar disorder, depression and anxiety. In my first year at university, I started to get panic attacks, too. My body would be filled with mortal terror, in the most un-mortal of situations. I lost confidence in my ability to know myself or to steer a coherent course through life. I started to distrust myself, to avoid social situations. I was terrified that I had permanently damaged myself before the age of 21.

Radical Psychology

Summer 1999, Vol. 1, Issue 1.

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Petra von Morstein

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... It is death
That is ten thousand deaths and evil death..
Be tranquil in your wounds. It is good death
That puts an end to evil death and dies.
Be tranquil in your wounds. The placating star
Shall be gentler for the death you die
And the helpless philosophers say still helpful things.
--Wallace Stevens

These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action
--T.S. Eliot
I. The ground of psyche's suffering.
I believe that philosophy is an essential way of being human and that lived philosophy is prior to any of its methods and theories. Questions like "Who am I? What am I to do? What is real? What is being? What is truth? What is the origin and scope of knowledge?" arise originally from lived experience, often with intense urgency. Our own lives as well as writings of great philosophers -- e.g., Plato, Augustine, Descartes, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, -- make this patently evident. Human beings are creatures whose existence includes the question of being. We need to know. This need precedes any concern with the origin, methods, and scope of knowledge. After the mythical Fall from paradise, metaphor for the liberation of human consciousness, we can no longer rest in the primal order of existence, in unreflected unity with the world. We only can long for it, and we do. Regressively so; for in paradise human consciousness does not know itself; it exists seamlessly in the world incomplete unity if thus it can be said to exist at all. There is no I-it and no I-Thou. Adam and Eve just are, without direction toward anything. The world of paradise is their extension, as the mother is but extension to the baby prior to its ability to relate.
In innocence (= ignorance), we do not recognize the implications of human existence and have no sense of either self or other. As we exit paradise we are given freedom and condemned to it. The freedom of consciousness manifests itself in thought and action. We are, as we know, fallible in both, and the 'horrible truth' (which Hamlet a la Nietzsche recognizes so devastatingly that he is left with his overwhelming either-or question) is that thought can never fully reach action. The fall to sin is the fall to knowledge which must embrace uncertainty and in this embrace keep moving from question to question after every apparent answer, moving on its belly. Uncertainty leaves alternatives to any conclusion open and thus engenders freedom of choice -- responsibility in not knowing. It is here where confusion, awareness of guilt, anxiety and depression are ontologically grounded. Consciousness begins in confusion, guilt, and anxiety.
Consciousness is born through expulsion from paradise. Human freedom entails fallibility and choice. God's gift of freedom to consciousness comes with its shadow of cognitive and moral uncertainty, with, always, the possibility of falsehood and sin. Choices cannot be secured with guarantees of truth or goodness. This makes for primordial disorientation -- a dis-ease which cannot possibly be eradicated from human consciousness. -- The scope of human knowledge is confined by inherent human boundaries, basic human forms of experiencing. Kant thought of space and time as such forms, Jung of archetypes.
I see the history of philosophy -- not exclusively, but importantly -- as a diverse multitude of endeavors to find therapies for such primordial suffering. As this is constitutive of human existence and cognition, thus ontologically necessary, it cannot be cured. It can be integrated, considered as a cognitive source, to be lived with rather than under. Thus we are, as Nietzsche says, always convalescents.