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A New Stoicism / Lawrence C ANEWSTOICISM Lawrence C. Becker PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY Copyright 1998 by Lawrence C. Becker Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Becker, Lawrence C. A new stoicism / Lawrence C. Becker. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-691-01660-7 (cl : alk. paper) 1. Ethics. 2. Stoics. 3. Virtue. 4. Happiness. I. Title. BJ1031.B439 1998 171′.2—dc21 97-15847 CIP This book has been composed in Sabon Princeton University Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources http://pup.princeton.edu Printed in the United States of America 10987654321 Contents Acknowledgments ix PART ONE: THE WAY THINGS STAND 1 1. The Conceit 3 2. A New Agenda for Stoic Ethics 5 3. The Ruins of Doctrine 8 Science, Logic, and Ethics 8 Norms and Moral Training 14 Virtue and Happiness 20 Commentary 22 Acknowledgments 30 PART TWO: THE WAY THINGS MIGHT GO 33 4. Normative Logic 35 Norms and Normative Propositions 36 Normative Constructs 39 Axioms of Stoic Normative Logic 42 5. Following the Facts 43 Impossibilities 44 A Posteriori Normative Propositions 46 Motivated Norms 52 Heteronomous Endeavors, Autonomous Agency, and Freedom 59 Commentary 69 Acknowledgments 80 6. Virtue 81 The Development of Virtue as the Perfection of Agency 81 THE STRUCTURE OF AGENCY 82 AGENCY CONSTRUCTED AND PERFECTED 103 VIRTUE AS IDEAL AGENCY 112 The Argument for Virtue as the Perfection of Agency 114 Exalted Virtue 119 Commentary 123 Acknowledgments 137 viii CONTENTS 7. Happiness 138 A Complete Life 138 A Controlled Life 142 Life on the Rack 146 Joy 148 Commentary 150 Acknowledgments 158 Appendix A Calculus for Normative Logic 159 Notation and Interpretation 159 Basic Definitions, Rules, and Axioms 163 Normative Constructs 167 Axioms of Stoic Normative Logic 181 Immediate Inferences 182 Commentary 185 Acknowledgments 191 Bibliography 193 Index 201 Acknowledgments REFERENCES to individuals who have commented helpfully on portions of the manuscript appear at the end of the relevant commentaries—to Chap- ters 3, 5, 6, 7, and to the Appendix. An early draft of some chapters was completed with the help of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities (1993–94), and a draft of the remainder was finished during a Faculty Research Assignment from the College of William & Mary (Fall 1995). I thank both institutions for their support. Portions of my article “Good Lives: Prolegomena,” from Social Philosophy and Pol- icy 9 (1992): 15–37, appear in Chapters 3 and 5, by permission of the publisher. And I acknowledge with gratitude the publishers, authors, and translators involved for permission to quote material identified more fully in the text of the commentaries in which they appear: Material from Cicero, De Finibus (translated by H. Rackham) De Officiis (translated by Walter Miller), and Tusculan Disputations (translated by J. E. King) is reprinted by permission of Harvard University Press and the Loeb Classi- cal Library. Poem #249 from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, is reprinted by permission of Harvard University Press and the Trustees of Amherst College. Selections from The Hellenis- tic Philosophers, edited and translated by A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley are reprinted by permission of Cambridge University Press. A fragment from Hierocles, translated by Julia Annas in her book The Morality of Happi- ness, is reprinted by permission of the author and Oxford University Press. A passage from Sophie Botros, “Freedom, Causality, Fatalism and Early Stoic Philosophy,” in Phronesis, is reprinted by permission of E. J. Brill (Leiden, The Netherlands), the current publishers of that journal. I thank also Akademie-Verlag, for permission to reprint material from Galen’s On the Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato (translated by Phillip De Lacey); the Journal of the History of Philosophy, for a passage from Amélie Rorty, “The Two Faces of Stoicism”; and the Monist, for a pas- sage from Nicholas P. White, “Stoic Values.” And this is the place to express my sincere gratitude to the many people who kept the project on the right path from disheveled manuscript to book. Ann Wald, editor-in- chief at Princeton University Press, saw the possibilities at an early stage and gave me persistent and effective support. Molan Chun Goldstein and Joan Hunter, respectively the production editor and copyeditor for the book, were outstanding. Maria I. Salazkina helped me read proof; she and Charlotte Becker helped me prepare the index. Part One THE WAY THINGS STAND 1 The Conceit AFTER FIVE hundred years of prominence in Greek and Roman antiquity, stoic ethics was pillaged by theology and effaced by evangelical and impe- rial Christianity. A few stoic philosophers survived, most of them by pro- viding analgesics for use in pastoral counseling, the military, and what then passed for medicine and psychotherapy. Only those shards of our doctrines were widely seen during the Middle Ages, and the term stoic came to be applied merely to people who used our remedies. This confu- sion persists. In the Italian Renaissance there was a brief effusion of interest in our historical roots, and some of us were emboldened to publish the work we were then doing. A living philosophical tradition changes, and Renais- sance neostoicism, as it is now called, quite naturally bore only a strong family resemblance to that of Zeno and Chrysippus. This wider interest in our views soon dwindled, however, and in still smaller numbers we again went back to private practice. A few major figures in modern phi- losophy continued to use our doctrines in their ethical theories, typically without attribution, and just as typically denounced us for good measure. Modern science presented significant challenges to our metaphysical views, and during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries we gradually abandoned our doctrine that the universe should be understood as a pur- posive, rational being. With that, we lost contact with theology of all sorts. Moreover, we continued to organize ethical theory along eudaimo- nistic lines, and thus lost contact with the secular side of moral philoso- phy as well, mobbed as it was (and is) by people clamoring for apriori principles, sentiment, commonsense virtues, utility, rights, duties, and justice in contractual arrangements. Our obliteration began in this pe- riod, with the emergence of claims for the autonomy of ethics. Even our analgesics were discarded in the nineteenth century, largely due to the rise of romanticism. This Barmecidal substitute for religious fervor was (and in its current decadence still is) contemptuous of stoic moral training. But it was philosophy in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries that finally laid waste to our project—not in direct attacks on stoicism’s intellectual merit, but in a blizzard of fads that undermined commitments to reason and nature. The social sciences bought the fact- value distinction, and philosophy peddled it to them. Nonnaturalism 4 1THECONCEIT arose, collapsed into noncognitivism, and rose again as intuitionism and constructivism. Moral truth was given a coherentist interpretation. Plu- ralism, relativism, and irony abounded, alongside various forms of dog- matism about natural duties and the intrinsic moral worth of human beings. Only three small groups will now say anything in our favor. Some soldiers, actual or spiritual, still prefer our psychotherapy to morphine and mood enhancers. Logicians appreciate our early work on the propo- sitional calculus. Hellenists admire the stoics of antiquity and argue that their ethical doctrines were not (for their time) foolish. It is a complete disaster. Only a few are escaped to tell you. 2 A New Agenda for Stoic Ethics IN ACADEMIC philosophy, stoicism has long been identified with a dis- credited form of naturalistic ethics—one in which the supreme principle is “follow nature.” The ancient stoics apparently believed that nature was a teleological system—a vast goal-oriented entity. They apparently be- lieved that within this vast entity, and with respect to its goal or end, humans had a discoverable role, both as a species and as individuals. And they apparently believed that following out one’s natural role, immunized so as to be able to live contentedly whatever one’s circumstances, was demonstrably the right way to conduct one’s life. These beliefs are now widely thought to be flagrant and uninteresting errors—errors that make stoic ethics wholly insupportable. Thus philoso- phers generally relegate serious work on stoicism to experts on Hellenistic philosophy, regard the medicinal properties of stoic training as mere pla- cebo effects, and reject the ideal of the stoic sage (contentedly accepting her assigned role, immune from most suffering and able to endure the remainder) in the same gesture that dismisses tranquilizers and prefrontal lobotomies as means to a good life. But suppose there were a book about virtue, happiness, and the good life that identified them all with living well—that is, with excelling or flourishing in terms of the available resources. Suppose this book were to argue that living well in that sense was the product of following the final, all-things-considered normative propositions of practical reason, and that those normative propositions could not be constructed a priori but rather depended crucially upon the fullest available knowledge of the natural world. Suppose the construction of those propositions always began in the particular—with what is possible for a particular agent with a particular history, character, and range of choices; that such particulars were generalized only to the extent that agents had a common history, nature, and situation.
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