Danish Yearbook of Philosophy, Vol. 28 (1993), 115-124

SELF AND NATURE IN STOle PHILOSOPHY

SIMON LAURSEN University ofAarhus

A review essay on Troels Engberg-Pedersen: The Stoic Theory of Oikeiosis. Moral Development and Sociallnteraction in Hellenistic Civilization. Studies in Hellenistic Civilization, ed. by Per Bilde, Troels Engberg-Pedersen, Lise Hannestad and Jan Zahle, II, Aarhus University Press (Aarhus) 1990, 278 pp.

Anyone who knows Troels Engberg-Pedersen (henceforth E.-P.) will know also that this is a book literally radiating with commitment. E.-P., it seems, really believes in Stoicism. As E.-P. himself points out, such an attitude to• wards Stoicism is far from self-evident in scholarly work on that once so in• fluential school of philosophy; indeed, one may still find eminent scholars who distance themselves from their object in very explicit words. E.-P. quotes Da• vid Furley for having said about Stoicism that 'it is a weird theory' (p. 10), and expresses the hope that the tendency towards a changed and much more posi• tive attitude to the Stoics that he perceives in more recent work will prevail. But as E.-P. also points out, the negative view of the Stoics is as old as their philosophy itself; in antiquity, not surprisingly, only Stoics felt the urge to de• fend it, and something similar is the case today. To anyone with different sym• pathies in philosophy than those of the Stoics, their philosophy was and is 'weird'; and the best the modem Stoic-minded scholar can expect from his less Stoic contemporaries is a kind of historicist fairness. I myself have now spent quite a number of years working on that abomination to the Stoics, Epicurea• nism; to a very large extent I have done so out of sympathy with this hedonist, atomist and sensualist line of thought, and hence cannot claim myself attracted by Stoicism - to me, as to Furley, Stoic philosophy is and remains weird. But I do, nevertheless, think that historicist fairness is due to the Stoics, and I doubt that anyone who reads E.-P.'s book will not grant it, especially because he clearly wants to render the part of Stoicism in which he is interested exploit• able in a modem context. E.-P., I venture to claim, really is a Stoic for the mod• em world. 116 SIMON LAURSEN

One of the things in the Stoic system that have seemed weird to non-Stoic observers is the concept of 'Nature', in the sense of a world-directing imma• nent force, and particularly weird it is when one considers the relation of indi• vidual human being and 'Nature'. 'Nature' is described as identical with 'divi• ne Reason' and more explicitly with 'Zeus', and it therefore appears to us modern observers to be a theological concept. E.-P. seems to share this distaste for 'Nature', at least in the context of the oikeiosis argument. (Trying to avoid prejudicing the matter, one might say that the oikeiosis argument is an argu• ment in which the Stoics tried to establish their basic ethical teachings on the basis of observation of human infants and animals, and older human beings). In ancient sources and modern scholarship, 'Nature' is often given a central role in that argument. So, in E.-P.'s book, 'One important issue is that of the role of the Stoic teleological and pantheistic understanding of nature for the question of foundations. I aim to show that the doctrine of oikeiosis locates the foundation [of Stoic ethics] elsewhere than in teleology and pantheism' (p. 7). In chapter one, 'The Aristotelian Background and the Stoic Notion of the Telos', E.-P. among other things explains a few terms that he is going to use extensively throughout the book. He distinguishes between aJormal definition of the telos, containing merely the statement that what one strives to attain is the perfectly good; and a substantive definition of the telos, containing some explanation of what we are to understand as good; and a subjective understan• ding of the telos, bringing an answer to the question of what the substantive telos is that relates to, in principle, only one person, and an objective under• standing which is valid for every member ofthe species. Aristotle, E.-P. points out, was interested mainly in the 'objective' telos of man, not in all the indivi• dual, and probably wrong, goals that men set for themselves. Not so the Stoics, who took an interest in 'developing their own substantive account of the telos out oJbeliefs about the good that are more pervasively held' (p. 33). This step, E.-P. argues convincingly, the Stoics had to make in order to create an ethical theory, which would be directed to everybody (not merely the well-educated, as Aristotle' s theory) and be able in itself to show, 'how they could be right in claiming that their theory was also directed to everybody' (p. 23). So E.-P. would like, basically, to persuade us that the Stoics developed a theory that as far as possible avoided specific Stoic concepts such as the world• guiding and hence individual-guiding 'Nature' in a kind of top to bottom movement, and instead derived the contents oftheir ethics from a development that all human beings have experienced, in a kind of bottom to top movement.