Chapter Three Stoic Eudaimonism

by Anthony A. Long

The history of ethics has moved on by some two thousand years since Stoicism began to make its mark on the Roman Empire. If, in the light of that history, we ask what kind of an ethical theory the Stoics advance, an obvious answer is at hand. Like their Platonic and Aristotelian predecessors and their Epicurean contemporaries, the Stoics are eudaimonists. For them, as for these other philosophers, ethics finds its official purpose not, or not primarily, in justifying morality or in deter- mining the grounds of a particular sphere of conduct labelled "moral." The sphere of Stoic ethical inquiry is human life and conduct quite generally. In a manner that looks thoroughly Aristotelian, with roots stretching back to Socrates and Plato, the Stoics profess to be interested in an end "for the sake of which everything is done but which is not itself done for the sake of anything," "the ultimate object of desire," "the summum bonum." Nor do they disagree with other Greek philosophers on the term that characterizes this objective.|··1760 0 0 |8|··2385 0 0 |c|··1722or "happiness" 0 0 |a|··2386 is 0 0 |u|··1063 0 0 |o|··2079 0 0 |v|··1802 0 0 |{|··1722 0 0 |a|·" typ="BWD" xbd="1048" xhg="844" ybd="1758" yhg="1716" ID="I97.20.5">ev8ayovia the -rixoq set forth in Stoic ethics just as it is in Aristotle's ethical works. The Stoics, in other words, lay claim to being philosophers who will tell us what happiness is and how happiness is to be attained. But this claim, the more seriously it is taken, may seem to confront the Stoics with two independent but equally powerful challenges. On the one hand, "happiness," as it is commonly From a paper read at Boston University on October 22, 1987, as part of the Tenth Annual Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy. thought to be represented in Stoicism, does not square well with the richness of experience, positive emotion, and fulfill- ment of reasonable expectations that are well-acknowledged features of happiness in most cultures. Stoicism has become a byword-witness our dictionary entries—not for happiness but for repression of emotion, indifference to pleasure or pain, and patient endurance. To be sure, Stoicism satisfies a number of conditions philosophers have deemed favorable to happiness— probity, a rational plan of life, internal harmony—but, this line of argument continues, it achieves invulnerability against ill fortune at the cost of emotional impoverishment and indiffer- ence to ordinary human experience. Its recipe for happiness, as a Ciceronian critic observed, would not even satisfy an unem- bodied mind (De finibus 4.27). Call this the "impoverishment" objection. The other critique confronts the Stoics with disingenuous- ness and pretence, or at best, self-deception and incoherence. It grants that they claim to be eudaimonists, but goads them with the objection that they misdescribe their ethical theory. Only superficially and in purely formal terms is "happiness" the Stoic Te홢oS. What the Stoics are really recommending, according to this line of argument, is not the true route to hap- piness but a proto-Kantian moral outlook, in which happiness and morality are quite independent of one another. Stoic ethics, on this account, should be interpreted as an adumbra- tion of the viewpoint that obedience to moral norms is categor- ical and absolutely binding on a rational agent irrespective of his happiness; such moral norms are expressions of a good which is sui generis and which has nothing to do with happi- ness, empirical data, or the outcomes of action, as ordinarily conceived. According to this challenge, the Stoics are of great significance for the development of ethical thought, but they are eudaimonists only nominally or in a sense that imposes intolerable strains on the coherence of their philosophy. Call this the "disingenuousness" objection. The spokesmen for these two objections are imaginary. They do, however, serve as rough approximations and exag- gerations of tendencies commonly found in modern studies of