Commentary on Englert Martha Nussbaum

I admire Englert's paper. I find its major conclusions entirely convincing: (1) the analysis of the difference between Epicurean and Stoic attitudes to suicide; (2) the account of the original Stoic position; (3) the argument that Seneca is an orthodox Stoic about suicide; and (4) the very interesting claims about the role of dif- ferent sorts of freedom in Seneca's arguments. Although I am persuaded by his analysis, I am inclined to be somewhat more critical of the Stoic position than he seems inclined to be: for I think that in a crucial way it is internally incoherent. In what follows, therefore, I want to focus on a problem in the Stoic account itself, with respect to the ambivalence the suicide theory reveals toward the importance of externals. I shall do this by focusing on one line of argument leading to suicide, in Seneca's De Ira.l 1. The Stoics famously hold that only virtue is worth choosing for its own sake. And virtue all by itself suffices for a complete- ly fulfilled and fulfilling human life, that is, for eudaimonia. Virtue is something unaffected by external contingency—both, apparently, as to its acquisition and as to its maintenance once acquired? Items that are not fully under the control of the 1. My interpretation of this work is developed at greater length in Nussbaum 1994. My general account of Stoic virtue theory and its relationship to the call for the extirpation of passion is in chapter 10, my detailed analysis of the argu- ments about anger in the De Ira in chapter 11. Since these chapters give a detailed account both of textual sources and of the secondary literature, I shall not reproduce all that material here, but shall cite only a representative group of the most directly pertinent passages. 2. See for example SVF 111.238, 240, 242. Diogenes Laertius (DL) 7.127 (SVF agent, such as health, wealth, freedom from pain, the good func- tioning of the bodily faculties, and—as they repeatedly stress—the external virtuous action itself, have no intrinsic worth, nor is their causal relationship to eudaimonia even that of an instrumental necessary condition. In short, if we take all these things away, if we imagine a wise person living in the worst possible natural circumstances, so long as she is good (and once good she cannot be corrupted) her eudaimonia will still be completed She will be living as valuable and choice-worthy and enviable a life as a human being possibly could. At this point we enter an area of considerable controversy and obscurity. For the Stoics (in order, apparently, to explain why and how the wise person will actually act in any way at all out there in the world4) also insist that these external goods are appropriately preferred, in many circumstances, to their oppo- sites. The wise person will in many cases, and rightly, pursue health and not sickness, freedom from pain rather than pain, and so forth.5 Some texts seem to suggest that these items may therefore be correctly said to have, in those circumstances, some worth. But, however we understand the obscure notion of worth (axia)—and I cannot get too deeply into that hereb-what is clear is that virtue itself admits of no trade-offs in terms of any other good, and is not even commensurable with any other good7 And it is equally clear that external goods are neither IIL237) reports, however, a difference of opinion between Cleanthes and Chrysippus, Cleanthes holding that virtue can never be lost, Chrysippus that it is lost in times of drunkenness and mental illness—in other words, when the entire functioning of the hegemonikon is knocked out. Chrysippus, however, con- tinues to deny that virtue can degenerate in circumstances short of this. 3. See, for example, DL 7.127. 4. Contrast the heterodox position of Aristo of Chios, who, holding that every- thing other than virtue is a matter of perfect indifference, left the wise man no reasons for action. If he moves and acts at all, it is only in the way a stage actor does (DL 7 .160-4). 5. For the list of the "indifferents," and the claim that they are not goods (agatha), see DL 7.102, and SVF 111.118-23. 6. See esp. DL 7.105-6, SVF 111.124-39, Cic. Fin. 3.50-53. 7. See Cic. Fin. 3.33-34, 44, 50, SVF 111.29-30. The evidence is well discussed in Irwin 1986, 205-44.