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Stoicism Today Jean-Baptiste Gourinat

Stoicism Today Jean-Baptiste Gourinat

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 , and . It argues that many aspects of its logic and physics are outdated but that the general Stoic approach to these disciplines may still be relevant to modern philosophers.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 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 phi- losophies, is that is not only a theoretical system but a “way of .” 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 by sometime around 300 BC1 and presumably lasted down to the death of the supposed last leader of the School, , 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 , it culminated with the reign of (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 , for example, a body of thought that was founded by 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, , Marcus Aurelius and , to whom we may add the partial remains of Arius Didymus and . 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 ’s philosophy, or even than ’ 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 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 (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 barely existed at all. During this period, only was strong enough to rival Stoicism, along with Academic scepticism as a revised form of Platonism and, up to a certain point, . 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 we have a short and famous poetic text, the Hymn to , and from 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 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 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 (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 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 towards life and the 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 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 , 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 contempo- rary Sceptics, such as Stanley Cavell, for instance. One is therefore justified in raising the following questions: what is Stoicism today? Is it still a living philosophy? Can it ever be a living philoso- phy? And if so, in what possible form? And what is its precise relationship to ancient Stoicism?

Ancient Stoicism as a philosophical system

As far as we know from the existing sources, Stoicism was the first philoso- phy explicitly presented as a system. Zeno was the first Stoic to divide phi- losophy into the three parts of logic, ethics and physics, and this division of philosophy was adopted by the Stoics in general.8 It was generally considered impossible to remove any part of this system or even to move any proposi-

6 The most famous revival of Stoicism, of course, was that of Lipsius in the 16th century. The Dutch scholar Joets Lipss (1547-1606), generally known under the Latinised form of his name as Iustius Lipsius, wrote numerous books on Stoicism, including the Manuductio ad Stoicorum philosophiam of 1604. Lipsius’ work was basically a scholarly reconstruction of the Stoic system which was intended to serve as an introduction to his edition of Seneca. It proved enormously influential nonetheless, and contributed significantly to the modern rebirth of Stoicism. In contrast to Calvin, who had published a commentary on Seneca’s before he turned against Stoicism, Lipsius was and subsequently remained a Catholic. Stoicism played an important part in the debate on free will conducted between supporters of the Reformation (who were hostile to the idea of free will) and Roman Catholics (who endorsed it). On Lipsius, see J. Lagrée, Juste Lipse. La restauration du stoïcisme, Paris, Vrin, 1994. 7 In this regard we might consider the case of James Stockdale who describes himself, in accordance with the title of one of his books, as a “philosophical fighter pilot.” See J. Stockdale, Thoughts of a Philosophical Fighter Pilot, Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1995. 8 See P. Hadot, “Philosophie, discours philosophique et divisions de la philosophie chez les Stoïciens,” Revue internationale de philosophie, 45 (1991), pp. 205-219; K. Ierodiakonou, “The Stoic Division of Philosophy,” Phronesis, 38 (1993), pp. 57-74; P. Hadot, Études de philosophie ancienne, Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1998, pp. 125-158. Stoicism Today 501 tion or argument inside the system by changing its position in the whole.9 But this claim may well be exaggerated since the most prominent of all the Stoics, Chrysippus, is reported to have frequently said to his master Cleanthes that he did not care for the proofs because he was quite able to find them out for himself.10 This may be another exaggeration, but many disagreements are reported among the Stoics, even between Cleanthes and Chrysippus. It thus seems clear that, up to a certain point, Stoicism allowed internal disagree- ments, developments, and heterodoxies.11 However, if we wonder whether Stoicism can still represent a living philosophy, one must surely ask if this is possible for all aspects of Stoicism, and for all parts of the system. In its fully-fledged, mature form, Stoic philosophy was the work of Chrysippus of Soli, the third head of the Athenian school (circa 280/276- 208/204 BC). It is impossible to give a detailed account of the Stoic system here,12 but I shall provide a rough sketch of its general character and structure.

Logic

Stoic logic was the most impressive part of Chrysippus’ work. Of the more than 705 books he wrote, 311 of them, or nearly half, were devoted to logic. In terms of its length,13 this was the most impressive body of logical treatises composed in the ancient world. And in terms of its authority, it was rivalled only by Aristotle’s smaller corpus of logical treatises, the 15 books of his so- called Organon. As far as we know, Chrysippus’ “logic” included an episte- mology, a rhetoric and two subdivisions of what he called “,” one on “signifiers” and one on “signified items” (more or less corresponding to logic in the modern sense).

9 See , De finibus, III, 74: “I have been led on by the marvellous structure of the Stoic system and the miraculous sequence of the topics […] Where do you find a conclusion inconsistent with its premise, or a discrepancy between an earlier and a later statement? Where is lacking such close interconnexion of the parts that, if you alter a single letter, you shake the whole structure? Though indeed there is nothing that it would be possible to alter” (Rackham translation). 10 Diogenes Laertius, VII, 179. 11 The most heterodox Stoic was certainly , a pupil of Zeno. See A. M. Ioppolo, Aristone di Chio e lo Stoicismo antico, Naples: Bibliopolis, 1980. 12 See M. Isnardi Parente, Introduzione allo Stoicismo ellenistico, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1993; A. A. Long, , London: Duckworth, 1986 (2nd ed.), pp. 107-209, or B. Inwood (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Stoics; J.-B. Gourinat, Le stoïcisme, Paris: PUF, 2007. 13 Diogenes Laertius, VII, 180. In this connection the number of “books” refers not to the number of treatises as such, but to the books into which the various treatises were divided. His Logical Investigations, for example, comprised 39 books, and thus accounted for more than 10% of the logical treatises, although it constituted a single treatise. 502 Jean-Baptiste Gourinat

Little is known of Zeno’s logic: it may be that he was not particularly concerned with logic in our sense, but he was certainly the founder of Stoic . In this area, he introduced a new “criterion of ,” the cog- nitive or “cataleptic” impression, which has “a peculiar power of revealing its objects.”14 To specify this kind of impression, Zeno used a Greek word, , which Cicero translated by comprehensio. This is a good example of the legacy of Stoic philosophical vocabulary, for this is a term that has become a familiar word in a number of modern languages. However, what remains of Zeno’s philosophical stance here is merely the use of the word in an episte- mological sense, and, up to a certain point, its general meaning, including the original metaphor (the notion of grasping firmly, literally with the hand, and metaphorically with the mind). The philosophical thesis that such an impres- sion is the criterion of truth is not included in the package, and, paradoxi- cally enough, one of the most important implications of Zeno’s thesis – that we must give our assent to a only if it is clear and distinct – now belongs to idealist philosophies of a Cartesian inspiration. The Stoic theory of “signifiers,” usually regarded as theS toic “grammar,” is the basis of Alexandrian grammar, from which modern grammars derived much of their vocabulary and basic concepts. The traditional distinction of common name and proper name, for instance, dates back to Alexandrian grammar, and it was originally inspired by Stoic distinctions: “an appellative is a part of language which signifies a common quality, e.g. ‘man,’ ‘horse’; a name is a part of language which indicates a peculiar quality, e.g. ‘Diogenes,’ ‘.’”15 The legacy here is intricate: the grammarians took over from the Stoics the semantic distinction between the common and the peculiar quality as distinctive of two kinds of name, yet they did not commit themselves to the distinction of two classes of words, but preferred a unique class divided in several species including these two. The simplicity of the Stoic division was lost, along with its semantic implications, for the Stoics themselves specifically claimed that “generic impressions” were neither true nor false, so that the corresponding , e.g. “Man is …” were ill-formed and should be rephrased or, at least, considered as equivalent to complex propositions like “If something is a man, then this is …” Of course, this was an important logical insight, but it was forgotten for centuries until it was rediscovered by Russell and given its correct logical formulation.16 The Stoics, here, were quite right, but unfortunately their ideas were historically fruitless in this regard.

14 Cicero, , I, 41 (LS 40 B, Long/Sedley translation) [LS = A. Long and D. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987, 2 vols.]. 15 Diogenes Laertius, VII, 58 (LS 33 M). 16 See B. Russell, My Philosophical Development, London: Allen and Unwin, 1959, pp. 66-67. Stoicism Today 503

As far as Stoic “logic” (in our sense of the word “logic”) is concerned, one may say that it represented the ancient form of propositional logic – if one scratches the surface, it turns out that this is not entirely true,17 but one may concede that it is superficially true. From this point of view, it is certainly not difficult to be a Stoic logician, and is certainly closer to con- temporary propositional logic than Aristotelian syllogistic is to contemporary predicate logic. Even the Stoic theory of signification, though it certainly cannot be stated precisely in terms of modern theories, has certain similarities with Frege’s Bedeutungslehre. All in all, it is not difficult for a contemporary logician to feel a certain affinity here, and Stoic logic is hardly a problem if we ask ourselves about the relevance of Stoic philosophy. Nonetheless, despite the huge amount of work that Chrysippus dedicated to logic and the considerable influence of Stoic logic on ancient logic in general, one may say that one can be a Stoic without a Stoic logician for this was certainly the case with many of the ancient Stoics. As I have already mentioned, Zeno does not seem to have been a devoted logician, and “Stoic logic” does not seem to have existed before Chrysippus. Moreover, Aristo of Chios, Zeno’s heterodox pupil, “abolished the topics of physics and logic, saying that the former is beyond us and the latter none of our concern.”18 Later Stoics such as Seneca and Marcus Aurelius also show little interest in logic: Seneca emphatically mocks Zeno’s syllo- gisms, and considers them as clumsy and useless,19 and Marcus Aurelius him- self “abandoned the hope of being a dialectician and a physicist” (VII 67).

Physics

Stoic “physics” would of course seem to be the most outmoded part of Stoic philosophy. But in some of its more general aspects, it can still speak and appeal to modern philosophers: for instance, apart from the four incorporeal enti- ties (space, time, the void, and the lekton of logic), everything is corporeal for Stoicism. However, with regard to the two material principles of the universe, Zeno and his Stoic followers maintain that one is prime matter and the other is as an active principle that gives shape and quality to this qualityless mat- ter. This active principle manifests itself under different forms, such as breath (spiritus in or in Greek), or . In contrast to the position of the Epicureans, who believe in the existence of material atoms separated by the

17 See J.-B. Gourinat, La dialectique des stoïciens, Paris: Vrin, 2000, pp. 294-300. 18 Diogenes Laertius, VII, 25 (LS 31 N). 19 For Seneca and logic see J. Barnes, Logic and the Imperial Stoa, Leiden: Brill, 1997, pp. 12-23. 504 Jean-Baptiste Gourinat void, the Stoics think that the void only exists outside the world, that the world itself is continuous, with no void within its limits, and that the coherence of the world is sustained by its all-pervading pneuma. Pneuma both holds individ- ual bodies together from the inside and links them with one another. Animal is itself a kind of breath, the “psychic” breath which is characterised by sense- and impulse (and directs bodily movements), as distinct from “natural” breath which is common to animals and plants, but accounts only for growth and nutrition. The world is itself a living being, whose rational soul rules the world as God, Fate and Providence. The world periodically turns into fire and disintegrates, while at the beginning of each new process the world is refashioned out of this state of fire.S toic is so strict that, according to most of the Stoics, each new world is almost exactly identical to the previous one, down to the smallest details and to all the events of the human history. This of course is the doctrine known since Nietzsche as that of “eternal recur- rence.” In the Stoic version of this doctrine, the actions of human are therefore as strictly determined (“co-fated”) as the universe in general. It is evident that the details of – and principally the doctrine of the all-pervading pneuma – hardly conform to the details or even the gen- eral structure of any modern physical theory. However, once again, we see that it is not necessary to believe in Stoic physics in order to be a Stoic. As Marcus Aurelius puts it: “Somehow, atoms or fate; and if the universe is a god, be all right in everything, if it is ruled by chance, be not yourself ruled by chance” (, IX 28).20 The alternative is clear: either Epicurean phys- ics (atoms) or Stoic physics (God and providence), but in either case, you must be ruled by moral principles and not by chance. Even if Marcus Aurelius is not really interested in the details of Stoic physics (as he himself acknowledges), this does not mean that he rejects Stoic physics; it is evident from many pas- sages of his work that he was actually committed to Stoic physics, pneuma, providence, etc., but he thought one could still apply Stoic ethics, even if one believed in another kind of physics. On the other hand, and more importantly, it is clearly the moral implica- tions and consequences of Stoic ethics that can still be considered relevant in some respects today. However, here again, there is some uncertainty concern- ing what should count as the ethical core of Stoic physics. The moral implica- tions of Stoic physics are epitomised by the well-known Epictetean motto:

There are two classes of things: those that are under our control and those that are not. Under our control are opinion, choice, desire, aversion and, in a word, every-

20 My translation here is based on the manuscript tradition, except for Randall’s emendation of amere to eimarmene translated as “fate.” Stoicism Today 505

thing that is our own doing; not under our control are our body, our possessions, our reputations, our offices and, in a word, everything that is not our doing.21

According to this very popular version of Stoicism, it is only our decisions and the reactions of our that are up to us, while the events of the world, our position and belongings and even our own body (for we may for instance fall ill) are not up to us. The moral consequence of this is that we must do the right thing notwithstanding the circumstances, and patiently bare any event or disaster, including poverty, illness, our own death, and the death and ill- ness of our loved ones. However, in a way, this version of Stoicism is not the version advocated by the ancient Stoics themselves, since, as I have indicated above, they rather insisted on the tenet that “many things result from us, but they are no less co-fated than the order of the universe.”22 Of course, the ancient Stoics also tried to reconcile determinism and freedom, but while they insisted on the fact that our actions are fated, Epictetus insists on the fact that our decisions are up to us. It is rather difficult, therefore, to assess precisely what the ethical consequences of physical determinism on ethics may be. Nonetheless, it may be said that it is a Stoic point of view to insist on determinism and to draw moral consequences from determinism. All in all, given the significant longevity of Stoicism and its variations over this long period, it is not easy to determine what is properly to count as “Stoicism” in physics. Roughly speaking, however, all the Stoics agree on corporealism, physical determinism, providentialism, and a rational vision of the universe, and construct their ethics on this physical basis. All of these characteristics clearly distinguish Stoic thought from the physical doctrines of the other ancient schools, and, if considered within this general perspective, Stoic physics is not completely outdated.

Ethics

Stoic ethics is naturalistic. According to the Stoics, the ultimate goal (or telos) of life is to “follow nature.” Nature is rational, and man’s nature is rational. Therefore man must follow nature in being rational. “Following nature” means “following reason” but it also means “living virtuously” since virtue is sufficient for happiness: virtue is the only good, and all other things, usu- ally considered as good or bad in themselves, are ultimately indifferent, i.e. richness and poverty, health and illness, life and death, etc. The argument

21 Epictetus, Handbook ,1.1, Boter translation. 22 Eusebius, Evangelical Preparation, VI, 8.26 (LS 62 F). 506 Jean-Baptiste Gourinat for justifying the rejection of what people ordinarily consider to be good is that while we can make either a good or a bad use of those things, we can only make a good use of virtue. The Stoics argue that ordinary good does not depend on us, and that since we cannot make our happiness depend on uncertain things, we must rely on what is really dependent on us and cannot possibly be misused. The Stoics also assume that virtue is a kind of , and vice is ignorance, and therefore adopt the Socratic position of identifying virtue with knowledge: if you know what the objects of a particular virtue are, e.g. the objects of , you may act virtuously (e.g. justly). However, the Stoics also go one step further by claiming that virtue is also sufficient for happiness. This further step has often seemed intolerable to many since it excludes from the realm of happiness the very things that usually make people happy. Virtuous life is based on the conviction that one’s individuality is unimportant and must be subjected to the perspective of the universe as a whole. And this is certainly the element that is easiest to identify as the central feature of Stoic ethics: to bear the misfortunes of life in the light of the convic- tion that we ourselves are unimportant in comparison with the universe, and that ordinary goods are precarious and indifferent since they do not lie within our power. Paradoxically enough, even though Stoicism takes happiness as its goal, it seems to be a philosophy more suitable for protecting us from the suffering and resentment generated by the misfortunes of life than one that is capable of making us positively happy. But the way in which such a stance of detachment is attained may also strike us as unacceptable: it seems that Stoic ethics attempts to force us to renounce our emotions and affections, and this may appear to be an inhuman or intolerable position.23 Yet we should note that Stoicism does not in fact reject all emotions or feelings, but only the “pas- sions” insofar as they are irrational and excessive feelings. And furthermore, since, as Bernard Williams acknowledges, the rejection of emotions has always been a controversial issue, this is hardly sufficient to discredit Stoicism as a philosophy with a certain relevance for our contemporaries. Moreover, it is a distinctive feature of the Stoic theory of emotions that it adopts a “cognitiv- ist” or “intellectualist” perspective in many respects:24 according to the Stoics, passion involves judgment, or is plainly a false judgment, and even if we do not accept the Stoics’ rejection of passion, this does not necessarily mean that their

23 See, for example, B. Williams “Stoic philosophy and the emotions,” in R. Sorabji (ed.), Aristotle and After, “Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies,” Suppl. 68 (1997), pp. 211-213. He concludes that Stoicism is “a philosophy which we cannot believe.” 24 Again, this is not entirely true since the Stoics assume (1) that passion may remain even when reason has restored right judgment and (2) that there is an initial movement or propatheia that precedes assent and is uncontrollable. But the Stoics are intellectualists in the sense that they maintain that there is no “irrational” part of the soul at the origin of passion. Stoicism Today 507 analysis of the phenomenon of passion should be disregarded as uninteresting. According to Williams, this analysis does not actually have very much to offer, since, in contrast to the kind of approach that is offered by psychoanalysis

what the Stoics considered as an analysis or account of the emotions do not say much […] about the infantile or other origins of the emotional structures that characterize the psychic life of a particular individual,25

But, of course, not every form of psychotherapy is psychoanalytic in char- acter, and cognitive therapies believe that the self is largely a conscious, rather than an unconscious, product and in this respect their approach has more affinity with Stoicism than psychoanalysis has. Finally, Lawrence Becker pointed out that there are some essential features of Stoic ethics that may still be acceptable today: a moral philosophy can be said to belong to the Stoic tradition if it is eudemonistic (in taking happiness as its goal), intellectualist (in identifying happiness with virtue and virtue with rationality, and also in assuming passion to be a false judgment), and naturalistic (in basing practi- cal deliberation on the facts of natural world). And from this point of view, Becker has argued that it is possible to defend a “new stoicism.”26

Stoicism as a way of life

It is one of the distinctive features of Stoicism, as indeed of most ancient philosophies, that philosophy is regarded not simply as a theoretical system, but also as a “way life,” as Pierre Hadot has frequently argued. According to Hadot, philosophy here is not merely a “theoretical discourse” but equally “a practice, an askesis, and a transformation of the self.”27 This is clearly the case with Stoicism since the Stoics defined philosophy not as a body of knowl- edge, but as a practice: “The Stoics said that is a science of divine and human affairs, and that philosophy is the exercise of an appropriate art. Only virtue is appropriate and is above everything else.”28 Thus the ancient Stoics do not explicitly define philosophy as an intellectual research or activity, but

25 Williams, Stoic philosophy, p. 211. 26 L. Becker, A New Stoicism, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998, p. 6. Becker’s book makes an interesting attempt to reconstruct Stoicism as if it had effectively survived from antiquity and adapted itself to the evolution of contemporary sciences. 27 P. Hadot, Qu’est ce que la philosophie antique?, Paris: Gallimard, 1995, p. 413. See also Id., Philosophy as a Way of Life. Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, edited and introduced by A. Davidson, trans. M. Chase, Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. 28 Plutarch, Opinions of the Philosophers, Praef., 874 E (LS 26 A) [my translation]. 508 Jean-Baptiste Gourinat as an exercise whose aim is virtue. As Epictetus puts it, “when someone says to me, ‘Explain Chrysippus’ work to me’, I would sooner blush when I fail to show acts that are in accordance and harmony with Chrysippus’ lessons” (Handbook, 49). Philosophy is a question of acting and living, not simply one of theorizing, commenting, learning, teaching, and writing. In this respect, it is clear that Stoicism is still a living philosophy. A rather well known example in the USA is the late admiral James B. Stockdale, a former naval pilot during the Vietnam War. Stockdale, after being shot down over Vietnam, was held prisoner for seven years, and says that he survived by sticking to Epictetus’ principles. As soon as he was shot down, he had the feeling that he was “leaving the world of technology and enter- ing the world of Epictetus.”29 He had discovered philosophy a few years before when he was studying at Stanford to become a strategic planner in the Pentagon, and had read Epictetus in detail. “Ready at hand” for him were Epictetus’ distinction between what is “within our power” and what is “not within our power,” the Stoic conception of good and evil as inner dis- positions, and the notion of one’s station in life as indifferent. He adds that he remembered “a lot of attitude-shaping remarks.”30 Stockdale’s point is interesting not only because he explains how Epictetus helped him to resist everyday physical and psychological pressures, but also because, conversely, he believes that his experience allowed him to “test” Epictetus’ doctrines and understand how they made sense in his situation. For instance, it was as a prisoner, he writes, that he “learned what ‘Stoic harm’ means,” i.e. that there is no greater harm than destroying the self-respect of a human being. It was as a prisoner that he also understood what Epictetus meant when he said that one’s status or position in life is indifferent. It was also in those circumstances that he learned the meaning of controlling one’s emotions and the idea that emotions are acts of free will. All this effectively shows how one may find some strength inS toic philosophy, and how there may be some practical truth in Stoic philosophy.31

29 J. B. Stockdale, “Testing Epictetus’ doctrines in a laboratory of human behaviour,” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, 40, (1995), p. 4 (Id., Thoughts, p. 189). 30 Stockdale, Testing, pp. 4-6 (Id., Thoughts, pp. 189-192). 31 On Stockdale’s Stoicism, see N. Sherman, Stoic Warriors. The Behind the Military Mind, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. 1-17 (”A brave new Stoicism”). One might note that Stockdale’s experience was part of the inspiration for Tom Wolfe’s 1998 novel, A Man in Full, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The two principal characters are a real estate tycoon who is faced with ruin and a young convict who has escaped from an unjust imprisonment during which he read Epictetus by chance. The tycoon is converted to Stoicism by the young man, gives up his previous way of life, and finally finds success again through a TV programme entitled “The Stoic’s Hour.” The ending of the book is obviously ironical, but the contrast between Stoicism and the wealth and luxury of the tycoon’s life is striking and seductive. Stoicism Today 509

Nevertheless, it is striking that Stockdale’s Stoicism is typical of the way Stoicism may prove useful in a very extreme situation. Once again, Stoicism seems more helpful for avoiding despair and distress in a hostile situation than for achieving happiness. However, the fact that there is some truth to Stoicism in extreme conditions does not mean that Stoicism must be disregarded in ordinary situations. Let us remember the case of Euphrates of Tyre, a Stoic philosopher of the 2nd century AD, who has already been mentioned. As Frede reminds us, it seems that Euphrates had no original philosophical views of his own and that he wrote no theoretical treatises, but he was nevertheless regarded as a prominent Stoic philosopher. To explain why he was considered as such, Frede refers to a long quotation from Euphrates furnished by Epictetus in Discourses, IV, 8.17-20. Euphrates said that he tried not to let people know from outward marks that he was a philosopher precisely because he wanted to be known as a philosopher by what he did, rather than by the “symbols” of a philosopher. So he ate properly, drank properly, walked decently and looked at others decently. Frede comments upon Euphrates’ attitude as follows:

Human life is a matter of banal things, getting up, eating, doing one’s work, getting married, having children, looking after one’s family […]. This is what life is about. If there is something non-banal about it, it is the wisdom with which these banal things are done, the understanding and the spirit from which they are done.32

I do not think therefore that the applicability of Stoicism to extreme situ- ations should lead us to conclude that it must be restricted to such situations, for this was certainly not the case with the ancient Stoics themselves.

Stoicism and psychotherapy

However, on account of its capacity to provide conceptual and moral means of dealing with adversity and misfortune, Stoicism has often been thought to furnish a conceptual framework and a set of procedures that are appropriate to psychotherapy. As I mentioned above, the intellectualist character of the Stoic theory of the passions is obviously alien to psychoanalysis and its emphasis on unconscious processes. But among the non-psychoanalytic types of thera- pies and theories, those known as “cognitive therapy,” “cognitive-behavioural therapy” or “rational-emotive therapy” reveal close affinities withS toicism and indeed often draw attention to these affinities. Cognitive therapies and theories believe that emotions, psychological disturbances, and mental suffering arise

32 M. Frede, “Euphrates of Tyre,” in Sorabji (ed.), Aristoteles and After, p. 6. 510 Jean-Baptiste Gourinat from our way of seeing things and from mental structures which generally lie within the realm of consciousness: this point of view is very close to the Stoic theory of emotions. “In essence, the Stoic viewpoint, which stated that people are disturbed not by things but by their view of things, became the foundation of RET [Rational-Emotive Therapy], and this perspective […] remains at the heart of present-day cognitive-behavioural approaches to psychotherapy.”33 Of course, cognitive therapy is not based principally on the reading of texts by Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, but mainly on the direct study of mental dis- orders and on the practice of therapy, but the basic philosophical framework is very similar to that of the Stoic and therapy of passions. Such claims as the following, for example, have a strikingly Stoic ring to them:

dysfunctional feelings and conduct are largely due to the function of certain schemes that tend to produce consistently biased judgments and a concomitant consistent tendency to make cognitive errors in certain types of situations.34

Cognitive therapy is based on three hypotheses: (1) one’s behaviour springs from one’s view of oneself and the world, and our psychological difficulties and disturbances derive from these views and from our (misconceived) per- ception of external events; (2) this point of view may be modified; (3) this modification of our thoughts and opinions may have positive effects on our behaviour and emotions since the latter are dependent on the former.35 For cognitive therapy, a “cognition” is an image or idea that our mind spontane- ously associates with the perception of an event. The patient associates events with some conditioned psychological responses, but cognitive therapy does not seek to induce the abreaction of the patient, and assumes that acquiring a clear consciousness of these responses may help us, but is not sufficient to cure us since a cure depends on the association of other reactions to these events. Cognitive therapists thus advocate a kind of Socratic maieutics,36 which is also, for example, very close to an Epictetean practice. Now as Sherman points out in the case of the cognitive therapy37 of Post- Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), the Stoic approach differs from the mod- ern psychiatric approach. PTSD is a syndrome resulting from the trauma

33 A. Ellis, The Practice of Rational-Emotive Therapy, New York: Springer, 1987, p. 2. 34 A. T. Beck, D. A. Clark, and B. Alford, Scientific Foundations of Cognitive Theory and Therapy of Depression, New York: John Wiley, 1999, p. 55. 35 C. André, Les thérapies cognitives, Paris: Bernet-Danilo, 1999, p. 5. 36 Ibid., p. 32. 37 We should note that Sherman does not restrict her treatment of PTSD to cognitive therapy, and also that cognitive therapy is only one amongst various methods of treating PTSD, but I limit myself here to the points which are directly relevant to the subject of my paper. Stoicism Today 511 of war, or comparable situations (such as a bombing) and catastrophes. As Sherman recalls, the Stoics systematically insist on the necessity to fortify oneself “by beginning to devalue the impact of externals on one’s conception of happiness” and would maintain that external traumatic factors “ought not […] occasion traumatic fear or stress,” while the psychiatric approach to PTSD “does not minimize the external” but regards external traumatic events as objective and real traumatic stressors: “researchers insist that PTSD is a normal and reasonable response to extreme stress.”38 However, Sherman emphasises that the Stoic analysis of stress caused by war or natural catastrophe in Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, III, 52, itself recounts the three main points of the con- temporary analysis of stress disorder: (1) the lack of control over the actual occurrence of the event; (2) the unpredictability of the event; (3) “the percep- tion of the event as a highly negative experience.”39 It is thus indeed the case that Chrysippus already aptly described the character of PTSD. More impor- tantly, the “core notion of cognitive restructuring,” which is one of the keys to the cognitive treatment of PTSD, has “explicit affinities withS toic practice […] that is, patients are encouraged to revise the automatic and erroneous thoughts that ground traumatic symptoms.” One must of course avoid a category mistake here: cognitive psychother- apy is not a philosophy, and Stoicism is not a psychotherapy. A philosophy claims a much broader range than a medical theory or therapy, but Stoic phi- losophy certainly entertained the ambition to include a therapy of the soul, and there are philosophical affinities between cognitive psychotherapy and Stoic philosophy in relation to their views on mental disorders. Thus even if Stoicism is a philosophy rather than a psychotherapy, certain forms of psy- chotherapy bear a recognisable Stoic imprint, and from this point of view, as from many others described in this paper, Stoicism is still, in more ways than one, a living philosophy.40

Jean-Baptiste Gourinat Centre de recherches sur la pensée antique, Paris (CNRS-Paris IV-ENS) [email protected]

38 Sherman, Stoic Warriors, p. 125. 39 Ibid., p. 127. 40 I wish to express my gratitude to Nicholas Walker and Lars Drinkrow for correcting the roughness of my English.

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