Stoicism Today Jean-Baptiste Gourinat

Stoicism Today Jean-Baptiste Gourinat Abstract: The aim of this paper is to elucidate the meaning of Stoicism today. First, it roughly sketches Stoicism as a philosophical system, namely its logic, physics and ethics. It argues that many aspects of its logic and physics are outdated but that the general Stoic approach to these disciplines may still be relevant to modern philosophers. Moreover, the more persuasive part of Stoicism is ethics: Stoic ethics is naturalistic and intellectualist. Stoics argue that virtue is the only good, and attempt to force us to give up emotions and affections. These aspects of the Stoic approach frequently seem intolerable, but the strength of Stoicism depends on this intellectualism. One of the distinctive features of Stoicism, as well as of most ancient philosophies, is that philosophy is not only a theoretical system but a “way of Life.” In that respect, it is clear that Stoicism is still a living philosophy, as may be shown from the celebrated figure of J. Stockdale, the “philosophical fighter pilot.” Moreover, given its intellectualist approach, the Stoic theory of passions is obviously opposed to the psychoanalytic approach and its emphasis on unconscious processes. The theories known as “cognitive therapies” have close affinities with Stoicism, as they frequently proclaim. Therefore, Stoicism in more ways than one is a living philosophy. As an established school, stoicism enjoyed a relatively short life: it was founded in Athens by Zeno of Citium sometime around 300 BC1 and presumably lasted down to the death of the supposed last leader of the school, Panaetius, around 110/109 BC, a period of less than two hundred years in all. However, as a living philosophy, it endured much longer, apparently until around the mid- dle of the 3rd century AD. In a sense, it culminated with the reign of Marcus Aurelius (161-180), who was at once stoic philosopher and ruler of the Roman Empire. nevertheless, after the death of the emperor, stoic philosophy went into rapid decline, and the last stoic teachers we hear of were active around 230 BC During the first half of the th6 century AD the neoplatonist philosopher simplicius wrote that stoicism had no longer been taught for centuries, and that 1 see D. sedley, “The school, from Zeno to Arius Dydimus,” in B. Inwood (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Stoics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 7-32, esp. pp. 24-28. Iris, Issn 2036-3257, I, 2 October 2009, p. 497-511 © Firenze University Press 498 Jean-Baptiste Gourinat most of its texts were lost.2 The historical success of stoicism cannot therefore be compared with the long life of Platonism, for example, a body of thought that was founded by Plato during the 5th century BC, developed and transformed by his successors, and taught until the very end of Antiquity by figures like simplicius. Moreover, ancient stoicism is a dead philosophy in the sense that virtually nothing remains from the hundreds of books which were written by its founders3 – what is left is no more than abstracts, quotations and paraphrases, conveniently assembled in collections of what specialists call “fragments” (like the famous collection of Hans von Arnim, the Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta4), and, in addition, some later texts dating from the Roman period, involving six philosophers in all: Cornutus, seneca, Musonius Rufus, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius and Cleomedes, to whom we may add the partial remains of Arius Didymus and Hierocles. Thus although some stoic texts did survive, the most important part of them vanished into ashes and dust nearly two millenniums ago. From this point of view, stoicism cannot be said to have really survived at all. It is certainly less alive than Plato’s or Aristotle’s philosophy, or even than Epicurus’ philosophy, all philosophers whose surviving texts have been known, read and commented on through the ages, even if it there were certain dark periods in the transmission and interpretation of their thought. However, the persistence of stoicism as an influencial trend of thought was rather a long one, lasting more than five hundred years, and, when it was alive, it was certainly one of the more influential philosophies of its time, and for some centuries perhaps even the most influential. When stoicism was at the peak of its intellectual influence, from the time of Zeno to that of Posidonius (Panaetius’ most distinguished pupil, active in the 1st century BC), Platonism for instance was rather weak, and survived mainly in an attenuated, sceptical form, and Aristotelianism barely existed at all. During this period, only Epicureanism was strong enough to rival stoicism, along with Academic scepticism as a revised form of Platonism and, up to a certain point, Cynicism. It is only with the revival of classical philosophy (Platonism and Aristotelianism) during the 1st century BC that stoicism lost the prominent position it had occupied for two hundred years and finally took its place as one of the four major philosophies of antiquity, alongside Platonism, Aristotelianism and Epicureanism. It is a sign of this decline of influence that we find Panaetius and Posidonius dealing with Platonic and Aristotelian ideas, even to the point that Panaetius seems to have 2 simplicius, In Aristotelis Categorias, p. 534, ed. Kalbfleisch. 3 From Cleanthes we have a short and famous poetic text, the Hymn to Zeus, and from Chrysippus some papyrus fragments of two of his works that amount to only a few pages. nothing from any other stoic philosopher of the period has survived. 4 H. von Arnim, Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta, Leipzig, Teubner, 3 vols., 1903-1905, with indexes compiled by A. Adler in 1924 (vol. 4). The work has been reprinted many times. stoicism Today 499 acted as the editor of Plato’s dialogues. However, by the time stoicism disap- peared, it had already exercised such a prominent influence that one might say that it had effectively been extinguished because it had become so common that it was completely absorbed by common culture. Examples of such success are principally to be found in the arts and sciences of language, where stoic ideas were so influential that they still permeate many of the underlying concepts of our grammar, linguistics, and logic. However, the fact that stoic ideas were so widespread, even if subjected to certain alterations, had a rather negative influence on the position ofs toicism as a living philosophy: the tradition of the “liberal arts,” for instance, had adopted many stoic positions, and also modified them to a certain extent, with the result that nobody had any reason to go to the school of a stoic teacher in order to learn logic or grammar. During the 1st century AD a stoic philosopher like Cornutus could still exercise an influence in the field of grammar and rhetoric (he taught and strongly influenced two of the major poets of the era, Lucan and Persius), but less than two decades after his death, Epictetus, the most influential philosopher of his time, was renowned for his moral teaching, but hardly for his expertise in grammar which was rather disappointing.5 nevertheless, stoicism should be remembered for more than the fact that it was absorbed into the common culture or effectively dominated the ancient world for several centuries. In the first place, “stoicism” has become a common term, and, as such, is still alive, and not merely because of specific influences whose stoic origin is unknown to most of us. In this sense stoicism is a vivid way of life, a vivid vision of the world and of our relationship to it. One may certainly ques- tion what still lives on in this ordinary form of stoicism. Is it a feeble trace of the lost splendour of the stoicism of Antiquity – to put it harshly, a mere caricature of what stoicism once really was? Or is it an existential attitude, a constant attitude of the human mind towards life and the universe which the ancient stoics merely systematised and explicitly developed as a philosophy? In either case, ordinary stoicism is not the same as ancient stoicism in all its complexity. And in this sense, in fact, it is not even a philosophy: it is simply an attitude or a psychological disposition that bears a distant and external resemblance to a vanished philosophy of antiquity. Despite the obviously limited character of this survival of ancient stoicism, it is also clear that, as a philosophy, stoicism has known many avatars through 5 Epictetus, Discourses, III, 9,14: “Then you leave with this remark: Epictetus was nothing at all, his language was full of solecisms and barbarisms” (Oldfather translation). At the turn of the 2nd BC Euphrates of Tyre, another stoic philosopher who died in AD 118 or 121, may have enjoyed even greater respect than Epictetus, but he was not a teacher and was famous only for the perfect conduct of his life. I shall say something more on Euphrates below. 500 Jean-Baptiste Gourinat the centuries. The ancient stoics used to compare the stoic sage to a phoenix, the stoic sage seeming as rare as the phoenix. In another sense, stoicism itself may also be compared to a phoenix: it repeatedly rises from its own ashes and lives another life, under a different form, one which is nonetheless recognis- able as a new form of stoicism.6 some of our contemporaries still endorse stoicism as a philosophy and claim an intimate connection with the ideas of Epictetus – and this itself is rather extraordinary insofar as contemporary sceptics do not claim, for instance, to be disciples of Pyrrho, but develop a scepticism of their own instead. On the other hand, contemporary stoics are not usually “professional” philosophers,7 in contrast to the case of contemporary sceptics, such as stanley Cavell, for instance.

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