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Home , Ataraxia, Heraclitus, Hylozoism, Zeno of Citium

Lecture 10.2: Stoics and the Hellenistic World Rorty UCSC

I: The School They talk about the school in two stages: the Early , and the Late Stoa. Three names associated with the original ‘school’: , a Cypriot (244-262 BC) , from Asia Minor (died c. 232 BC) (died c. 206 BC) The texts of the Early Stoa are as scattered and fragmentary as those of the pre-socratics—but the doxography is much better. Many of the same people who are the sources of the fragments of the Presocratics are also responsible for the reports of the doctrines attributed to the early stoa. The doctrines of the school are considered to have been solidified pretty much by Chrysippus. The only complete works of the stoics we have are from the Latin stoics: primarily Seneca (4 BC-65 AD) (55-135 AD) (121-180 AD) Epictetus was a Turkish slave; Marcus Aurelius was a Roman emperor. It was a very cosmopolitan school; the people who figure in its came from all over Alexander’s empire, and were associated by doctrines rather than common background. The same conditions that lead us to our current concern with multiculturalism were the conditions that obtained in the . Alexander conquered the known world; his empire extended north to Germany, east through Asia minor to Egypt, west through Spain… One empire means lax borders; heavy trade (in ideas as well as objects); a lingua franca , a common language (not French, as it was at one in Europe and Africa, nor English, as it is now coming to be the case in this century)—but the common language of greek, and later, as the center of empire moved to , Latin. It means free movement across what used to be borders: we are all equally citizens of Alexander’s empire, and later, of the . And—we are all, by this point in the Mediterranean, literate cultures. I’m not saying that there was literacy; but there were throughout the empire, everywhere, people who read; and they all read the works of all the sages, the philosophers, the schools. The writings of a were (as Sloterdjik says of all the classical texts, well into ) “letters to unknown friends,” inviting them to join a community of like-minded people; catching hold of common needs and experiences, offering a way of looking at the world which could catch the imagination of someone hundreds of miles away, raised in a different language or time…1 They did have a place, though, for a while: the Stoa, the porch—an architectural feature of the main marketplace of , where the Cypriot Zeno established his school. I imagine the Athenian to be the equivalent of Hyde Park in London, or the Plaza up at UC Berkeley—a place where people hung out to harangue each other. Zeno sort of took over that corner of the public space, and the name of the school traces back to that formative location, however far it later spread. And it was a school, in the sense of a school of thought. People who considered themselves stoics were united by a body of doctrine in three divisions: , and . The Later Stoics were mainly interested in the ethics (which is what makes them such fun to read); so information about the physics is sort of scanty.

II: The Doctrines As the Epicureans stood to , so stood the Stoics to . Now as you know, I LOVE Heraclitus. I like his images: the universality of booming, throbbing life saturating all; his of identity—that you can’t step into the same river twice; that ‘into the

1 For Sloterdjik on the subject of humanistic education (and its decline) see “Sloterdijk: Elmauer Rede” on my website, main page, under “papers.” (“For Love of the Game” at the same location is a comment on that paper.

1 same river we both step and do not step, we are and are not’; his quotable quotes: “this world is and ever will be an ever-living , kindling in measures and going out in measures…” Can’t beat it. But the Stoics remind me of the dangers of reading too much Heraclitus; or at least, of taking him too literally. Their understanding of the of the world is a Heraclitean . 1. They are materialists (of a heraclitean, not a democritean, sort) --and the material is itself, of itself, dynamic. I think when we were talking about Heraclitus I introduced the term “ ”—animate . The ultimate material of the is not inert, as (or modern mechanics) might have it—but something which is to be understood as an integrated unity of concrete energy. Heraclitus calls it ‘fire’; the Stoics understand it as , ‘fiery breath.’ (see my p. 483) (In this reading of the stoics as hylozoistic monists, by the way, I am disagreeing with the editors of our text on my p.474: they describe the stoics as having two principles, pneuma and matter. Some of the other commentators take this tack too, so consider this one of the many places this quarter where your Talking Head has imposed her own interpretation upon you.) The universe is of one stuff throughout, although it takes various forms, or modes, or currents – the 4 elements, and through them, the various bodies and things that occupy the world. is coextensive with ‘matter’ in this sense, and it is not passive . What the stoics call ‘tension’ is the essential attribute of body. [Personally, I think that is darned clever. As I may have said in other connections, once you separate things out, you have the devil of a time putting them back together again; and the hylozoism of the presocratics keeps matter and energy interconnected in a way that modern physics seems to me to find sympathetic. If the Epicureans were corpuscularian materialists, the Stoics were something closer to modern atomic theory.] 2. Their monism is a . As you may remember, for Heraclitus, =fire=. The same thing is true for the Stoics. God is as much material as the world itself is (namely, one manifestation of pneuma ); and saturates the world throughout; and the has the same relation to the body (=microcosmic/macrocosmic analogy). AND, furthermore—the nature of that soul is identical with the nature of god—providing the basis for a soterical claim that the soul after death can be reunited with the divine. God is logos, nomos and hegemenon: , mind and ruling principle; and so is the soul, with respect to our body. 3. The universe is strictly deterministic. Since god is reason, it follows that the world is governed by reason; and this means two things. First, it means that there is purpose in the world, and therefore order, , and design. Secondly, since reason is the law of nature, it means that the universe is subject to the absolute sway of law, is governed by the rigorous necessity of cause and effect. The stoic lives in a deterministic, and determined, world. (It may, indeed, it must, be the best possible world, too, since by the logic we’ve been pursuing it is the only possible world.) One of the stoic stories that sticks in my mind is a definition of freedom. The image is of a dog tied on a short leash behind a cart. The cart is driven down the road. But the dog is absolutely free: he can choose to assent, or to refuse to assent. He can choose whether to run after the cart—or be dragged. 2 Furthermore, that world is subject to eternal recurrence. There is a cycle to our ; it will be consumed by a conflagration, and will in endless cycles re-emerge and repeat itself. 4. Psychology This pantheism/ has implications for the stoic doctrines about the operations of the soul, both for , and for action. a--perception The soul is not tripartite, or in any other way divided or divisible. It is the one rational soul that has sensations; assents to judgments; is impelled (or not) toward objects of desire; just as much as

2 --A philosopher’s joke: What’s the difference between a stoic and an existentialist? For the stoic, freedom is choosing to run after cart. For the existentialist, freedom is to be dragged.

2 it thinks or . The difference between thinking and perceiving is that one is in the absence of its object, the other in its presence. So perception for the stoics, as for the Epicureans, is of what exists and is veridical. The world appears to us as it is; the role of reason is to assent to our judgments about it, or not. The workings of the mind on the world don’t differ in kind, but only in degree.. First, we apprehend something through the senses. If it’s vivid and stable and plausible, we assent to it. (We can ‘assent’ prematurely or inappropriately, in which case we have opinion, which can be false.) Isolated apprehensions don’t constitute ; we have to combine and synthesize our apprehensions, integrate them, through the force of reason, into a consistent and coherent whole. Zeno is said to have represented this process with first, a flat, outstretched hand (=sensation); bending the fingers was assent; a clenched fist represented “simple apprehension,” mental grasp of an object. Knowledge, integrated assents, is the clenched fist held tightly in the other hand. b—action: Thinking about ethics is on the An model: Determine a specification of the goal of living; and then figure out the best means to get to that end. are an integral and rational part of an integral and rational world-order; their proper end and goal is whatever will benefit them under all circumstances. That is what it is to live “according to [our] nature,” as Zeno recommends. What will benefit them under all circumstances (and this is a bit Aristotelian as well) are the characteristic excellences of human (=rational) nature: the (prudence, justice, courage, moderation, etc.). This is not so much (they aren’t big on pleasure)—but self-preservation. (This is a bare-bones teleology—not pleasure, but survival—is the goal of human life. It reminds me a bit of Hobbes.) As a part of nature, human beings are naturally inclined to desire that which is appropriate for them, those things which are most “in accordance with the unfolding of nature’s rational and providential plan.” Of course, exercise of is a bit of a problem in a deterministic world for basically ignorant (although rational) creatures. We ought to choose in accordance with what will happen—if we had any idea what that might be. So we have to let go of the outcomes, which are beyond our control. The stoics (to put it mildly) were very pessimistic about the possibility of self-determination. The best we can do is to live according to virtue—do our duty—and hope for the best. Really, everything that happens to us is out of our control. Only our will is ours to master. And: it is our choice of things which constitute happiness—not our attainment of them. And it is whether we select, aim at, [the things which would constitute our happiness if we got them] rationally that determines our happiness. So long as I order (and express) my preferences in accordance with my nature and universal nature, I will be virtuous and happy—even if I don’t actually get the things I prefer. [Aristotle seemed to acknowledge that the possession of those external goods like beauty and successful children increased our happiness; the Stoics didn’t think so.] If we cannot hope for self-determination, we can at least aspire to self-sufficiency. And when we look into the details of the life the stoic sages recommended, we begin to see some more similarities with the Epicureans. The genuinely happy person is only wealthy or popular if she is fated to be so. The genuinely happy person, the virtuous person, lacks for nothing, and enjoys a kind of independence of the vagaries of fate/fortune/. This means you don’t get hung up on wishing for something you might never get. This means you don’t get hung up on the good things you might actually have, either. Your happiness depends upon your character and your tranquility of mind. This recommendation of tranquility as the highest form of happiness is common to both the Stoics and the Epicureans, I think. Reading the stoics – the Enchiridion, or Marcus Aurelius—is satisfying in a way in which some of the high theory of Aristotle is not. Zeno’s or logic is kind of boring, I admit— but the recommendations for how to attain and preserve peace of mind in a deterministic but unknowable and uncontrollable world is great stuff. It’s a little bit like reading Suzuki on zen Buddhism. Paragraph 1, or the first part of 15, in the Enchiridion, for instance, or paragraph 49 in Marcus Aurelius. A word about some greek words: ; ; metropatheia

3 *** *** *** I find the Hellenistic period strangely appealing—sympathetic in some ways that the rational and secure intellectual world of 5 th century Athens isn’t. It’s not stoic advances in logic that are so much admired by many of my fellow tradesmen that appeal to me, although a sound basis in critical thinking is sometimes useful in evaluating the claims of hucksters, internet scammers or politicians. Nor am I a philosopher of ; so when I think about Big Issues, like the nature of and how (or whether) I know it, my background assumptions are modern science and a kind of Aristotelian common-sense realism. But some of the expositions or applications of positions that I might not be able to accept in toto stick in my mind, and are useful to me. Maybe its because of some similarities in the world in which the stoics wrote, and the world in which I live. The Hellenistic world was cosmopolitan and chaotic. The exercise of civic virtue, so important to them—so important to us all—transcended the comfortable and manageable of 5K people, where one person’s judgment and values could have an immediate and measurable effect. It was a time of rapid change, in ways impossible to predict or control. It threw the back on himself in some ways. Paragraph 3 in Marcus Aurelius, talking about the of a retreat within yourself; the value of tranquility in the midst of a chaotic world. Pleasure not an option; survival the best you can hope for. My general sense that Hellenistic ethics was radically individualistic speaks to the need in such to focus on what you can predict or control.—a kind of inward turning, and a . There’s another aspect of the Hellenistic period that I find it illuminating to think about. It’s the other side of the coin of the inward-turn, in times of change and social expansion. It was a widespread turn to god, or the . This was a period of incredible religious fervor in the Mediterranean basin. There was a resurgence of old , a proliferation of new ones— indeed, the Epicureans themselves may have been a kind of hippy commune, and the stoics god- obsessed fatalists. The rise of religious in our own contemporary societies is equally characteristic of times of change, when tradition seems to be breaking down, and reason rendered helpless. offers an other-worldly alternative to this world for people who are driven by a need for . Of course it’s not just the Hellenistic philosophers that provide couches in my head to rest upon. When I consider child-rearing, I’m glad to have read Aristotle—the importance of early good habits, and the centrality for happiness of good character. When I consider education, I’m glad to have met , whose main passion was to encourage in others (by emulation) an examined life. Of course, when I’m designated talking head, there’s not much room for Socratic method; I suppose the image in my mind in that context is of myself as a mediocre student in the Academy or Lyceum—taking notes and trying to wrestle an interpretation out of a text; but even in that degraded form, there are traces of that quiet pure mental pleasure Aristotle made such a fuss about, associated with the exercise of theoretical reason. In those moments of my life, which come sometimes to everyone’s life, when bad things are coming down, I remember the stoic story of a roman aristocrat whose magnificent house and grounds caught fire. As his concerned neighbors were watching the , they saw him come running, naked and empty handed, from the flames. When they condoled him on his losses, he is reported to have said “I have still everything that is my own.” I hope you’ve found some things in the 500 pages that I’ve flogged you through in the last 10 weeks that will be of equal use to you as couches in your head. I leave you with the following thought: The US Army and Aristotle have the same recommendation: “Become all you are capable of being.” The end is common to both. [The means, I suspect, are rather different.]

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