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Lecture 10.2: Stoics and the Hellenistic World Rorty UCSC I

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Lecture 10.2: Stoics and the Hellenistic World Rorty UCSC I Lecture 10.2: Stoics and the Hellenistic World Rorty UCSC I: The School They talk about the school in two stages: the Early Stoa, and the Late Stoa. Three names associated with the original ‘school’: Zeno of Citium, a Cypriot (244-262 BC) Cleanthes, from Asia Minor (died c. 232 BC) Chrysippus (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) Epictetus (55-135 AD) Marcus Aurelius (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 history 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 Hellenistic period. 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 time 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 Rome, Latin. It means free movement across what used to be borders: we are all equally citizens of Alexander’s empire, and later, of the Roman empire. And—we are all, by this point in the Mediterranean, literate cultures. I’m not saying that there was universal 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 sage were (as Sloterdjik says of all the classical texts, well into modernity) “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 Athens, where the Cypriot Zeno established his school. I imagine the Athenian agora 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: physics, logic and ethics. 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 Democritus, so stood the Stoics to Heraclitus. Now as you know, I LOVE Heraclitus. I like his images: the universality of booming, throbbing life saturating all; his paradoxes 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 fire, 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 nature of the world is a Heraclitean monism. 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 “ hylozoism ”—animate matter. The ultimate material of the universe is not inert, as Aristotle (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 pneuma , ‘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. Force 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 pantheism. As you may remember, for Heraclitus, logos=fire=god. 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 soul 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: reason, 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, harmony, beauty 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 being 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 cosmos; it will be consumed by a conflagration, and will in endless cycles re-emerge and repeat itself. 4. Psychology This pantheism/panpsychism has implications for the stoic doctrines about the operations of the soul, both for perception, 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 reasons. 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 knowledge; 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.
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