Estoicismo

Stoicism

Stoicism is the Greek philosophical system founded by Zeno of Citium c.300 bc and developed by him and his successors into the most influential philosophy of the Hellenistic age. It views the world as permeated by rationality and divinely planned as the best possible organization of matter. Moral goodness and happiness are achieved, if at all, by replicating that perfect rationality in oneself, and by finding out and enacting one's own assigned role in the cosmic scheme of things.

The leading figures in classical, or early, Stoicism are the school's first three heads: Zeno of Citium, Cleanthes and Chrysippus. It is above all the brilliant and indefatigable Chrysippus who can be credited with building Stoicism up into a truly comprehensive system. 'Early Stoicism' - the main topic of this entry - is in effect largely identical with his philosophy.

No formal philosophical writings of the early Stoics survives intact. We are mainly dependent on isolated quotations and secondary reports, many of them hostile. Nevertheless, the system has been reconstructed in great detail, and, despite gaps and uncertainties, it does live up to its own self-description as a unified whole. It is divided into three main parts: physics, logic and ethics.

The world is an ideally good organism, whose own rational soul governs it for the best. Any impression of imperfection arises from misleadingly viewing its parts (including ourselves) in isolation, as if one were to consider the interests of the foot in isolation from the needs of the whole body. The entire sequence of cosmic events is pre-ordained in every detail. Being the best possible sequence, it is repeated identically from one world phase to the next, with each phase ending in a conflagration followed by cosmic renewal. The causal nexus of 'fate' does not, however, pre-empt our individual responsibility for our actions. These remain 'in our power', because we, rather than external circumstances, are their principal causes, and in some appropriate sense it is 'possible' for us to do otherwise, even though it is predetermined that we will not.

At the lowest level of physical analysis, the world and its contents consist of two coextensive principles: passive 'matter' and active 'god'. At the lowest observable level, however, these are already constituted into the four elements earth, water, air and fire. Air and fire form an active and pervasive life force called pneuma or 'breath', which constitutes the qualities of all bodies and, in an especially rarefied form, serves as the souls of living things.

'Being' is a property of bodies alone, but most things are analysed as bodies - even moral qualities, sounds, seasons and so forth - since only bodies can causally interact. For example, justice is the soul in a certain condition, the soul itself being pneuma and hence a body. A scheme of four ontological categories is used to aid this kind of analysis. In addition, four incorporeals are acknowledged: place, void, time and the lekton (roughly, the expressed content of a sentence or predicate). Universals are sidelined as fictional thought constructs, albeit rather useful ones.

The world is a physical continuum, infinitely divisible and unpunctuated by any void, although surrounded by an infinite void. Its perfect rationality, and hence the existence of an immanent god, are defended by various versions of the Argument from Design, with apparent imperfections explained away, for example, as blessings in disguise or unavoidable concomitants of the best possible structure.

'Logic' includes not only dialectic, which is the science of argument and hence logic in its modern sense, but also theory of knowledge, as well as primarily linguistic disciplines like rhetoric and grammar. Stoic inferential logic takes as its basic units not individual terms, as in Aristotelian logic, but whole propositions. Simple propositions are classified into types, and organized into complex propositions (for example, conditionals) and complete arguments. All arguments conform to, or are reducible to, five basic 'indemonstrable' argument formats. The study of logical puzzles is another central area of Stoic research.

The Stoics doggedly defended, against attacks from the sceptical Academy, the conviction that cognitive certainty is achieved through ordinary sensory encounters, provided an entirely clear impression (phantasia) is attained. This, the 'cognitive impression' (phantasia katalēptikē), is one of such a nature that the information it conveys could not be false. These self-certifying impressions, along with the natural 'preconceptions' (prolēpseis) which constitute human reason, are criteria of truth, on which fully scientific knowledge (epistēmē) - possessed only by the wise - can eventually be built.

Stoic ethics starts from oikeiōsis, our natural 'appropriation' first of ourselves and later of those around us, which makes other-concern integral to human nature. Certain conventionally prized items, like honour and health, are commended by nature and should be sought, but not for their own sake. They are instrumentally preferable, because learning to choose rationally between them is a step towards the eventual goal of 'living in agreement with nature'. It is the coherence of one's choices, not the attainment of their objects, that matters. The patterns of action which promote such a life were systematically codified as kathēkonta, 'proper functions'.

Virtue and vice are intellectual states. Vice is founded on 'passions': these are at root false value judgments, in which we lose rational control by overvaluing things which are in fact indifferent. Virtue, a set of sciences governing moral choice, is the one thing of intrinsic worth and therefore genuinely 'good'. The wise are not only the sole possessors of virtue and happiness, but also, paradoxically, of the things people conventionally value - beauty, freedom, power, and so on. However geographically scattered, the wise form a true community or 'city', governed by natural law.

The school's later phases are the 'middle Stoicism' of Panaetius and Posidonius (second to first century bc) and the 'Roman' period (first to second century ad) represented for us by the predominantly ethical writings of Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius.

 

1 School history, sources

The name 'Stoic' originates from the Stoa Poikile or 'Painted Colonnade' at Athens, where at least the school's first generation used to meet. At first called 'Zenonians', they came in time to be known as the 'Stoa people', or 'Stoics'. The founder Zeno of Citium and his successor as school head, Cleanthes, forged the system in large measure. But it was the third head, Chrysippus, at the end of the third century bc, who developed it into a truly global philosophical creed.

Stoicism was in many ways a technically updated version of Socrates' century-old philosophy. Its debt to earlier thinkers like Heraclitus and Plato is also manifest. How far it took account of Aristotle's work, on the other hand, is disputed. Contemporary negative influences included Epicureanism, to which it was diametrically opposed on most issues, and the sceptical critiques of Stoic positions launched from the New Academy.

Chrysippus is the main voice of Early Stoicism. His successors Diogenes of Babylon and Antipater made their own contributions and modifications, but are seen as continuing the same tradition. In the late second and early first century bc, there was some softening of positions and a renewed interest in the writings of Plato. This has led many scholars to classify Panaetius and Posidonius as leading a separate phase, known as 'Middle Stoicism'. Finally, 'Roman' Stoicism designates that of the early Roman Empire, whose main spokesmen for us are the Latin essayist Seneca and the Greek writers Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. The great bulk of their interests lies in moral philosophy.

The chart is a guide to entries on individual Stoics (listed in capitals).

 

We possess little evidence about the school's institutional base, in Athens or elsewhere, and it is not even clear whether it ever occupied its own premises. Its cohesion was, at any rate, primarily doctrinal. There was extensive agreement between individual Stoics, alongside a good deal of in-school quarrelling over specific issues. The most publicized dispute occurred in the first generation, between Zeno and the independent-minded Ariston of Chios. After his death, Zeno was revered by most Stoics, who would not openly criticize him. Rather, their philosophical disagreements often took the outward form of disputes as to what Zeno had really meant.

No early Stoic text survives, apart from Cleanthes' short Hymn to Zeus. But modern scholarship has managed to reconstruct most of the system in considerable detail from secondary sources, which incorporate numerous verbatim quotations. Book VII of Diogenes Laertius' Lives of the Philosophers is a major source, as is the doxographer Arius Didymus. Cicero's philosophical treatises contain first-rate presentations of various parts of the system. And invaluable evidence is available even from entrenched critics of the Stoics, such as the Platonist Plutarch, the Pyrrhonist Sceptic Sextus Empiricus and the doctor Galen.

 

2 The parts of philosophy

The Stoics formally sanctioned what was to become thereafter the canonical division of philosophy into three parts: physics, logic and ethics. Stoicism is arguably the first fully and self-consciously systematic philosophy. In the next three paragraphs correspondences will be noted between these three main areas of philosophy and the individual topics covered in the following sections. However, some of these topics (especially those in §§6-9, 14, 20) may not fit quite as neatly into any one of the three areas as the schematization implies.

Logic (§§10-13), the science of rationality (derived from logos, 'reason'), included not only inferential logic in the modern sense (more correctly called 'dialectic' by the Stoics), but also theory of knowledge, in which generation after generation of Stoics defended the existence of cognitive certainty against sceptical attacks. All Stoics, with the exception of Ariston of Chios, regarded logic as a fundamental part of philosophy.

Physics (§§3-9) - the study of nature (physis) - was a largely speculative or theoretical discipline, concerned with understanding the world's rational structure, and therefore embracing such diverse disciplines as biology, psychology and theology within its scope. It drew on the findings of contemporary scientists, but was not itself any kind of empirical science. Indeed, opponents accused it of wilful blindness to inconvenient new scientific discoveries, such as the demonstration by Alexandrian doctors that the rational mind is in the head, not the chest. Physics presupposed logic, at least to the extent that its findings were largely developed in strings of syllogisms.

Ethics (§§14-19), the authentically Socratic core of Stoic philosophy, was the discipline which described how happiness could be achieved. It presupposed physics, which supplied an understanding of the world's rational structure and goodness and of the individual's place in it.

There was less agreement about how the three parts related to each other. One favoured model compared philosophy to an orchard in which logic was the protective outer wall, physics the soil and trees, and ethics the fruit. Posidonius favoured the analogy to a living animal, in which logic was the bones and sinews, physics the flesh and ethics the soul. These and other analogies probably agreed in making ethics the ultimate aim and crowning achievement of philosophy. The value of physics and logic was in a way instrumental - to acquire the understanding which would make a happy life possible. But that understanding, a perfected rationality, was itself so integral to the Stoic conception of happiness that to call it instrumental may be to underestimate the true unity of Stoic philosophy.

Most leading Stoics put the three parts of philosophy into the sequence logic-physics-ethics, but some favoured other orders. Here they are likely to have been specifying nothing more than the best order in which to teach it, with no implications which might threaten its conceptual unity.

 

3 The foundations of physics

Physics is the study of nature (physis), and to understand the true nature of the world it is necessary to start at the very lowest level of physical analysis. The world and its contents consist of passive 'matter' (hylē) and active 'god' (theos). These two 'principles' (archai) totally interpenetrate each other, and their interaction underlies all change. The active principle is quite literally god, a divine causal force which imbues the entire world with rationality.

Why is the second principle, matter, added? Not in order to make the world corporeal, since god (as well as matter) is already corporeal. It is a fundamental Stoic principle that only bodies are capable of causal interaction, and god could not shape the world if he lacked causal powers. Rather, matter is added because god is an entirely active causal power, and there must therefore be something passive on which he acts. Matter is thus a purely theoretical construct, with no properties of its own to contribute beyond its mere passivity.

Matter and god, then, are conceptual rather than empirical items. At the lowest observable level, at which cosmic processes of change can actually be studied, matter and god are already by their interaction constituted into the traditional four 'elements' - earth, water, air and fire. Of these, air and fire form an active and pervasive life force called pneuma or 'breath', which by its presence in things constitutes their qualities (see Pneuma §2). Earth and water, on the other hand, are essentially passive elements, which serve a primarily material role: it is only the pervasive presence of pneuma in them that shapes them into complex items, including living things. Thus at the lowest phenomenal level earth and water take over the role which pure matter had held at the lowest theoretical level, while air and fire, paired as pneuma, take over a role analogous to that of the second principle, god.

Pneuma, as the combination of warmth and breathed air that is fundamental to animal life, had already earned a central place in medical theory, to which Stoic physics was heavily indebted. The distinctive contribution of Stoicism, at any rate by the time of Chrysippus, was to extend the explanatory role of pneuma beyond individual animal life, and to make it the vital power of the world as a whole. Since the Stoic world (following Plato among others) is itself a living creature, this extension was not as surprising as it may at first seem. Pneuma is the vehicle of the divine 'reason' (logos) which pervades and governs the entire world (see Logos §1).

Pneuma is all-pervasive, but varies in its properties according to its degree of tension. In its most highly attuned form, a portion of it may serve as the soul (psychē) of an animal (see Psychē). Many Stoics held that the human soul, at least, survives the death of the body (although it must of course eventually perish in the conflagration, see §5). A lesser grade of it is called 'nature' (physis), in a special sense in which the vegetative life force of a plant may be called its 'nature'. Finally, a still less refined form of pneuma is present in any discrete object, even a stone or a cup, being what endows it with its cohesion as a single object: as such, it is called the thing's 'tenor' or 'state' (hexis).

Both the primary 'principles' and pneuma play a key role in securing one of the most characteristic of Stoic tenets, the identification of 'being' with corporeality. At Sophist 246-7 Plato had launched a devastating attack on crude materialists who restrict being to bodies. Since they can neither deny that there is (for example) justice, nor equate justice with some body, Plato suggests, they must abandon their position in favour of a new existential criterion, namely that to be is to have the power to interact. Stoicism sets out to defend the materialist position from Plato's attack: the two criteria considered by Plato are in reality one and the same, since the only things that have the power to interact are bodies. Hence to be is, after all, to be a body.

Virtually everything in the Stoic world is a body (for the few exceptions, see §7-8). This should not be misunderstood as reductive materialism. At the lowest level, 'god' is a body, but not a mere body: life and intelligence are his irreducible properties. God has corporeality in addition to these vital properties simply because only thus can he have any causal role in moving and shaping matter. Once this link of corporeality to causality is accepted, it is extended to the vast majority of items traditionally thought incorporeal. Justice, for example, must have causal powers if it is to do any good. It must sometimes make the limbs and voice move in ways in which they would otherwise not have moved. Therefore justice is a body. This apparently paradoxical outcome is defused once we learn what body it is. Justice is simply the soul in a certain condition; and the soul is a body, being an individual portion of pneuma pervading the organism and therefore able to govern its movements. Similarly, (spoken) words are bodies because they are vibrating portions of air, and that is how they can affect the thoughts of a listener.

Stoic corporealism was much derided by ancient critics, but it has the considerable merit of explanatory economy.

 

4 The continuum

Matter is permeated by god, and the passive elements by the active ones which constitute pneuma (see §3). What is this permeation? Mere juxtaposition of particles, such as atomism posits, could never constitute the intimate causal link between god and the matter which makes the Stoic world an inherently and ideally intelligent being. The active body must permeate the passive body 'through and through'. Stoic theory distinguishes three grades of mixture. 'Juxtaposition', for example of mixed grains, conforms to the atomist model. 'Fusion' (synchysis) is a kind of interpenetration in which the ingredients irreversibly lose their distinctive properties and a single new stuff is generated. In between these lies 'blending' (krasis), which also involves total interpenetration, but with the ingredients retaining their own distinctive properties. A helpful Stoic example, the fire which is seen to permeate a red-hot piece of iron, may clarify how the two ingredients can be seen as literally coextensive, rather than alternating as in 'juxtapostion'. It is 'blending' that describes the relation of pneuma to the material substrate.

'Division is to infinity, or ''infinite'' according to Chrysippus (for there is not some infinity which the division reaches, it is just unceasing). And blendings, also, are through and through' (Diogenes Laertius, VII 150-1). The doctrine of total interpenetration depends on the infinite divisibility of body, because if each of the blended stuffs consisted of indivisibly small particles these could only be juxtaposed, and not further blended. Hence the Stoics are, like Aristotle, committed defenders of the infinite division, on both mathematical and physical grounds.

For example, critics of the continuum had argued that if a finite body is infinitely divisible it will consist of infinitely many equal parts, and hence, impossibly, be infinite in size. Chrysippus replied that a finite object does not consist of any particular number of ultimate parts, finite or infinite. On an old puzzle of Democritus', whether the two circular planes yielded by horizontally slicing a cone are equal (in which case why isn't it a cylinder?) or unequal, Chrysippus replied that they are 'neither equal nor unequal'. Unfortunately our sources are so depleted as to permit little more than speculation about his defence of this claim. The same applies to the traces of a Stoic solution to the celebrated paradox according to which motion through an infinitely divisible continuum is impossible because it would consist of an infinite, and therefore uncompletable, series of sub-motions (see Zeno of Elea §5). They replied that the moving object may complete a distance in a single undivided (though divisible) motion - possibly on the ground that divisions are thought constructs, of which only a finite number can be actually imposed on a distance.

 

5 Cosmology and theology

The Stoic world is a living creature with a fixed life cycle, ending in a total 'conflagration' (ekpyrōsis). Being the best possible world, it will then be succeeded by another identical world, since any variation on the formula would have to be for the worse. Thus the Stoics arrive at the astonishing conception of an endless series of identical worlds - the doctrine of cyclical recurrence, according to which history repeats itself in every minute detail. (For the leading Stoic dissenter on this, see Panaetius §1.)

Although a conflagration terminates each world phase, this is not its collapse into ruin but its achievement of perfection. That is because 'creative fire' (pyr technikon) is the purest, the most divine and the most creative form of divine pneuma, to be associated more with the light and warmth that promote growth than with flame. In our present world phase, the strongest concentration of creative fire is the sun, which some Stoics identified as the world's divine 'commanding-faculty' (hēgemonikon). During the conflagration what exists is in effect pure intelligence, which plans the next world phase in every detail. There follows a process by which the fiery stuff differentiates and stratifies itself into the four elements. It already at this stage contains the 'seminal principles' (spermatikoi logoi), which may be viewed as blueprints for the individual organisms and other entities which will eventually emerge. Both the dominant role assigned to fire and its association with divine 'reason' (logos) owed much to the influence of Heraclitus (see Heraclitus §4; Logos §1).

By 'god' the Stoics meant, primarily, the immanent principle governing the world, variously also identified with 'creative fire', with 'nature' or with 'fate' (on which see §20). Second, the world itself was also called 'god'. But - characteristically of Greek religious thought - this apparent monotheism did not exclude polytheism. Individual cosmic masses were identified with individual gods: for example the sea and the air were linked with Poseidon and Hera respectively, and the remaining traditional gods were likewise assigned specific cosmic functions. By means of allegorical rationalization, Stoic theology incorporated and interpreted traditional religion, rather than replacing it. Etymology (sometimes highly fanciful) was one tool used in this process. For example, two common forms of the name Zeus were 'Zēn' and 'Dia', which could also mean respectively 'Life' and 'Because of': this made it easy to interpret the traditional head of the pagan pantheon as symbolizing the Stoic primary deity, who was the world's life-force and causal principle.

The world, then, is itself divine, and is from first to last providentially planned and governed by an immanent intelligence. This thoroughgoing teleology owed much to Plato's Timaeus, but also to his Phaedo, where (96-9) Socrates had been portrayed as advocating a teleological physics, while admitting his own incapacity to develop one. It owed even more to Xenophon's portrayal of Socrates, where (Memoirs I 4 and IV 3) belief in a providential, anthropocentric teleology is presented as the basis of true piety (see Xenophon). We can here glimpse one of the many ways in which Stoicism sees itself as working out in full technical detail what was already implicit in the thought and life of Socrates.

Since the world is god, in his most manifest form, there is no distinction in Stoicism between proving the existence of god and proving the perfect rationality of the world. These proofs, most of which are variants on the Argument from Design, generated massive controversy between the Stoics and their critics (see especially Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods II-III). They include the following lines of argument. First, the world (especially the heaven) is like a giant mechanism, vastly superior to the most elaborate human invention. If must therefore, a fortiori, have an intelligent designer. Second, the creation of such a world by mere accident (for which see Epicureanism §8) is as unlikely as producing a literary masterpiece by shaking out letters randomly onto the ground. Third, the world is full of beneficial structures which cannot have been invented by its inhabitants: for example, the cycle of seasons, the temporal uniformity of the heavenly rotations, symbiotic relationships between species, and the food chain - including that miraculous foodstore the pig, created as a living being purely in order to keep the meat fresh. Fourth, the world is supremely beautiful, and therefore the work of a consummate artist. And fifth, any imperfections are either merely apparent (for example, wild beasts, which encourage the virtue of courage in us), or inevitable concomitants of the best possible structure (for instance, an example borrowed from Plato, the fragility of the human head). Sometimes localized sufferings are justified by the greater good they serve, even if it is not always evident what that good is. Chrysippus remarked, 'If I knew that I was fated to be ill now, I would set out to be ill. So too the foot, if it could think, would set out to get muddy'.

The syllogisms used to further this theology contained some highly controversial premises, for example: if there is anything which human beings cannot create, whoever did create it is superhuman. Or again: if a thing has rational parts (as the world does - namely us), then the whole must be rational too.

 

6 The 'categories'

Aristotle developed a complex ontological scheme, his ten 'categories' (see Aristotle §7; Categories). The Stoics, following not Aristotle but the early Academy, recognized just two categories: that is, they divided all existing things into absolute or per se items, and relative items. For example, a house or dog is something absolute, whereas to be a slave, or sweet, is relative: being a dog does not, as such, involve standing in any relation, but to be a slave is to be somebody's slave, and to be sweet is to taste sweet to one or more percipients.

However, the Stoics also developed a more original, fourfold ontological classification, commonly known to modern interpreters as the Stoic 'categories', although it is unlikely that they used this term for it, and it is safer to call them 'genera'. It is disputed what the origins and purpose of this scheme were, but its most interesting recorded uses are to account for individual identity over time, and to amplify the thesis described in §3 that 'being' belongs only to bodies.

According to this classification, any given item may be seen as: (1) a mere 'substrate' (hypokeimenon); (2) something 'qualified' (poion); (3) something 'disposed in a certain way' (pōs echon); and (4) something 'disposed in a certain relation' (pros ti pōs echon).

To start with the first pair. To pick out a thing as (1), a 'substrate', is merely to individuate it as a (temporary) lump of matter, for example, by pointing at it. To mark it as (2), something 'qualified', is to distinguish it by one or more qualities which it possesses. Here the Stoics have a precise physical analysis of what a quality is: a portion of pneuma imbuing the thing, whether as its soul or as some other inherent property, for example, its colour or its weight. There is a further subdivision of the 'qualified' into (a), what is 'commonly qualified', for example, dog, human, wise, green, and (b), what is 'peculiarly qualified', for example, Fido, Socrates. These correspond, roughly, to what is signified by (a) common nouns and adjectives, and (b) proper names.

It is the first pair that is invoked to explain diachronic identity. Such identity had been challenged by the Growing Argument (auxanomenos logos), a puzzle much favoured by the Stoics' sceptical opponents in the New Academy. This argument objected that any 'growth', however slight, must generate a new individual, since a body with even one new particle added is not the same body as before; therefore there can be no enduring subject of growth; and hence no growth. The Stoic answer is that what endures as the subject of growth is not the material substrate (or 'substance', ousia), but the 'peculiarly qualified individual'. Qua 'substrate' Dion (to use the Stoics' favourite stock name) has little if any endurance, but qua 'peculiarly qualified individual' (idiōs poios), that is, qua Dion, he endures throughout his life. Although Dion's matter constantly changes, the individuating quality that makes him Dion is with him, unchanged, from birth to death. That there is such a lifelong peculiar quality is a thesis of Stoic physics (there is no evidence what they thought it consisted in; the uniqueness of fingerprints is a modern discovery), but the need to solve the growing argument elevates it to the status of a metaphysical necessity. It also plays a part in Stoic epistemology (see §12).

As well as being (1) a lump of matter, and (2) both (a) human, wise and so on and (b) Dion, he is also at all times (3) in some disposition or other, for example, sitting, and (4) in some relation, for example, the person on my right. Here (3) and (4) represent the final two genera. The third genus, 'disposed in a certain way', is widely used to analyse as corporeal items commonly believed to be incorporeal (see §3). For example, knowledge is analysed as 'the commanding-faculty of the soul disposed in a certain way' - where the soul itself is corporeal, being pneuma. The fourth genus has similar analytic uses. What is special about it as a mode of being is that it picks out, not all relative items, but those whose being what they are is wholly parasitic on that relation, so that they could cease to exist merely because their external correlate changes or perishes. Suppose Dion is Theon's accomplice. Qua Dion he may continue to exist despite Theon's desertion or death; but qua accomplice he cannot. Hence 'accomplice' is a fourth genus item, while 'Dion' is not. For an important debate about the status of virtue, using this fourth genus, see §16.

7 Space and time

After their heroic defence of corporealism (see §3), it may come as a disappointment that the Stoics do nevertheless admit four kinds of incorporeal: place, void, time and the lekton or 'sayable'. These do not have actual being, because none of them possesses any causal powers to act or be acted upon. Nevertheless, an account of the world is incomplete without them, and they are therefore proper subjects of discourse. This entitles them to be described, with a lesser label, as having 'subsistence'.

A thing's 'place' is conceived by the Stoics as a portion of three-dimensional (geometrical) space, coextensive with its own occupant. This is given in the Stoic definition of place as 'that which (i) is able to be occupied by what-is and (ii) is occupied throughout, (iii) whether by some thing or by some things'. Here (i) gives place its genus - roughly, space; (ii) adds its differentia, namely that its capacity to be occupied must be being exercised; (iii) specifies that the 'being', that is, body, which occupies it may be comprised of one or more discrete individuals. Put non-technically, a place is a fully occupied portion of space, whether occupied by a single entity or by a collection of entities.

When on the other hand some space's capacity to be occupied is not being exercised, it is called 'void' (or 'vacuum'). Void is defined as 'that which is able to be occupied by what-is, but which is not occupied'. As a matter of fact, this failure to be occupied is held to be a possibility only for the infinite space surrounding the world, since the world itself is an absolute plenum, containing no vacuum at all. The extra-cosmic void comes to be occupied - at least, some of it does - only during the 'conflagration' (see §5), when the world in its pure fiery state is said to expand into it.

The whole universe, called the 'all' in the sense of 'sum total', consists of the world body plus the infinite surrounding void. But of this combination, it is only the world body which is called the 'whole'. A whole, to qualify as such, must have a single unifying pneuma (see §3), something with which the void, being altogether empty, could not possibly be imbued. Thus the terminological distinction captures the Stoic thesis that the void is not any interacting part of the cosmic organism. It provides the conditions for one special kind of cosmic change, but it is not itself a participant in any change.

Since void is undeniably an incorporeal, and since void and place are both generically the same, it is hardly imaginable that the Stoics could have found a way of re-analysing place as a body. In any case, an adequate account of place must make sense of motion, that is, of a place being entered or vacated by a body. If the place were itself identified with the occupying body, no such account would be feasible.

The third incorporeal on the Stoic list is 'time'. Yet, curiously, in our sources individual parts of time are often analysed, in typical Stoic fashion, as corporeal. For instance, days and nights are simply the world's atmosphere in such and such a condition, and hence both they and the longer periods of time composed of them are said to be bodies. And reasonably so, one may think, since these temporal items could easily be deemed to have active or passive causal powers - for example, to be caused by the movement of the sun, and in turn to cause the progression of life cycles, and so on.

It seems to be only time as a whole which is conceded to be an incorporeal. Why so? Time (in this sense) is defined as 'the dimension of the world's motion'. Probably then the idea is as follows. The regularity of a body's motion - including the rotation of the heaven, which paradigmatically displays the progress of time - presupposes fixed spatial and temporal intervals through which it takes place. If either of those intervals were (in the usual Stoic corporealizing fashion) identified with the moving body itself, its motion would be left altogether without objective coordinates. This consideration may be what motivates the thesis that not only the spatial interval - 'place' - but also the temporal interval - 'time' - subsists independently of the moving bodies which pass through it.

 

8 The lekton

The fourth incorporeal on the list, the lekton (plural lekta), 'sayable', is a key term in Stoicism. Plato in the Sophist (261-2) distinguishes two linguistic tasks: naming, which is to pick out a subject, and 'saying' (legein), which is, roughly, to attach a predicate to that subject. This is probably the background to the Stoic lekton, which seems to have originally meant, as distinct from a subject, the sort of thing that you can say about a subject. As in Plato, it is typically expressed by a verb like 'walks' or 'to walk'. The actual action, walking, is itself a body: it is analysed as the commanding faculty of the soul (itself pneuma, and therefore a body) functioning in a certain way. But in certain contexts the predicate expressed by the verb 'to walk' is not properly identified with some body. The Stoics noted at least two cases - wishing, and causation. (1) When we say 'I want to walk', the soul which wishes is a body, but what it wishes for is not either itself, or for some further body to be added to it: it is for some predicate to become true of it. (2) When, for example, fire causes wood to be burnt, the effect generated is not some new body, burnt wood, since the wood already exists: it is that some new predicate becomes true of the wood. Thus, both the objects of wishes and the effects of causes are incorporeal predicates, technically called lekta.

The most prominent role of the lekton is in logic. Stoic logic (see §§10-11) is less interested in predicates as such - what they call 'incomplete lekta' - than in the complete propositions containing them, the primary bearers of truth. Normally speaking the predicate expressed by a verb, for example, '...walks', serves a full linguistic function only when it has a subject term supplied by a noun, for example, when someone says 'Dion walks'. The notion of a 'complete lekton' is used to distinguish such cases. Most commonly, a complete lekton is the proposition expressed by a complete declarative sentence, as in the example given, although other complete lekta include questions ('Is Dion walking?'), commands ('Walk, Dion') and so on.

A complete lekton is said to be produced by attaching a predicate to a 'nominative case (ptōsis)'. This generates an interpretative puzzle. A lekton is well attested to be an incorporeal, yet a nominative case, being a grammatical form, ought to be a word and hence a body (a spoken word being vibrating air; a written word probably ink). Can a complete lekton be incorporeal and yet have one part which is corporeal? It may be that the subject term, by being expressed, makes the lekton complete without actually becoming part of it. Or it may be that the Stoics posited, in addition to the predicate expressed by the verb, a further incorporeal incomplete lekton, namely the subject of the complete lekton, expressed by the subjective nominative noun of the corresponding uttered sentence. Both suggestions (which do not exhaust those available) are problematic, and neither gains unequivocal support from the surviving evidence.

Nor is it easy to find a link between the incorporeality of the lekton and that of place, void and time (see §7). These latter three have some sort of mind-independent reality. Can the same be said for lekta? This is controversial, but the causal role of lekta must lend them some degree of objectivity, since causal processes presumably go on in the same way whether or not anyone is there to observe or analyse them. The lekton is defined as 'that which subsists in correspondence with a rational impression' (that is, roughly, with a human thought (see §12). This could be taken to make it parasitic on the thought processes of rational beings. But it may alternatively mean no more than that a lekton is a formal structure onto which rational thoughts, like the sentences into which they can be translated, must be mapped. This latter possibility bears some comparison to space and time, which, although defined by reference to their potential or actual occupants, are the objective dimensions onto which the positions and motions of those occupants are to be mapped, and are not altogether parasitic on them for their reality. The analogy must not be pushed too far, since the lekton differs from the other three incorporeals in not being any kind of mathematically analysable extension. But rationality is as much an intrinsic feature of the Stoic world as dimensionality, and it would be entirely Stoic to hold that there are objective parameters onto which its rational structures can be mapped

 

9 Particular and universal

There seems to be no room for universals in a Stoic world, where to exist is to be a body and hence, it seems, a particular. The highest ontological class recognized by Stoicism is that of 'something' (ti, plural tina), a class so broad as to include both bodies and incorporeals. Yet even this class excludes certain 'not-somethings' (outina), which Stoics identify with universals. That a universal is a 'not-something' they demonstrate by the following syllogism, diagnosed as being invalid precisely because in the minor premise it illegitimately substitutes a universal, 'man', for 'someone' (tis, the masculine form corresponding to the neuter ti) in the major premise: 'If someone is in Athens, they are not in Megara; but man is in Athens; therefore man is not in Megara'. So universals are apparently metaphysical outlaws, intractable even to basic logical laws.

On the other hand, universals have a fundamental place in the job of the dialectician. In the tradition bequeathed by Plato, the Stoics regard the science of dialectic (see §10) as largely concerned with the activities of division and definition: dividing genera into species and defining individual terms. And the things divided and defined are, of course, universals - as Plato had already indicated by equating them with Forms.

Hence a dilemma: universals are essential to dialectic, and yet are logically incoherent items with no place in a Stoic ontology. Their resolution of the dilemma comes in two parts, one logical, the other epistemological. Logically, the dialectician's use of universals is justified by a re-analysis. A dialectician's definition, for example, 'Man is a rational mortal animal', actually means 'If something (ti) is a man, it is a rational mortal animal'. A similar analysis was offered for statements of division. Thus dialectical pronouncements which appear to have universals as subjects are legitimate only because they are disguised conditional statements about particulars ('somethings'). (A partial analogy can be found in modern attempts to re-analyse as logically coherent 'The average man has 2.4 children'.)

The epistemological side of the resolution is required because Plato had maintained that universals are, as such, proper objects of thought. This time the conditional re-analysis offers little help in formulating a Stoic response. Rather, their reply is that universals are indeed objects of thought, or 'concepts' (ennoēmata), but that far from being objective parts of the world's furniture they are nothing more than thought constructs. The thoughts themselves are real enough: being 'conceptions' (ennoiai), they are simply our mental pneuma in a certain condition, and hence bodies; but the 'concepts' which constitute the intentional objects of those conceptions are not themselves bodies, or indeed anything at all. This position makes it appropriate to call the Stoic doctrine of universals an early variety of 'conceptualism' (see Nominalism §1).

 

10 Dialectic

Dialectic is the main branch of what the Stoics called 'logic', and amounts, roughly, to the science of argument. Although dialectic was both theorized and applied in innumerable treatises, the Stoics never lost sight of the Platonic conception of it as a fundamentally bipartisan activity, involving interrogation and response. 'Dialectic' actually means 'the science of dialogue'. The science of rhetoric differed from dialectic precisely in being the science of producing a good monologue, and was treated as a separate branch of logic. There was no uniform Stoic view as to whether theory of knowledge (see §§12-13) counted as part of dialectic, or as a third branch of logic.

In so far as it is concerned with argument, dialectic has distinct parts dealing with (1) signifiers and (2) significates. The former are words (and hence bodies; see §8), and Stoic dialectic's concern with language as such led it, among other things, to develop the first real grammatical theory in Western thought. It became the basis of all subsequent work on grammar in antiquity and far beyond.

The latter term, 'significates', designates lekta (see §8), the incorporeal meanings which in their complete form are expressed only by whole sentences. Stoic logic (to use the word now in its modern sense) concentrates on one species of lekta, the declarative ones, called axiōmata. This term, literally 'judgments', is more familiarly translated as 'propositions'. Stoic logic is indeed the first fully developed propositional or sentential logic. In this it differs radically from Aristotelian logic, which is a logic of terms (see Logic, ancient). The origins of Stoic logic probably lie less in Aristotle than in the work of the Dialectical school (see Dialectical school; Diodorus Cronus; Philo the Dialectician).

 

11 Inferential logic

Propositions are the bearers of truth and falsity, and simple propositions are the atomic units of Stoic logic. One symptom of the latter fact is that in syllogistic the negation sign 'Not...' is properly prefixed to the entire proposition, rather than (as in Aristotle's logic) to its predicate. On the other hand, propositions are classified partly according to the subject terms which they contain: 'This individual is walking' (ideally accompanied by pointing) is a 'definite' proposition; 'Someone is walking' is 'indefinite'; and propositions expressed with a noun in the subject position, for example, 'A human being is walking', 'Dion is walking', are 'intermediate'. This triple distinction, like most aspects of Stoic logic, is adopted ultimately for the sake of validating the arguments in which these simple propositions feature. Indefinite propositions are verified by the corresponding intermediate or definite ones, but not vice versa. Hence in a syllogism whose major premise begins 'If x is walking...' and whose minor premise has the form 'But y is walking...', validity will normally be preserved if 'x is walking' is indefinite, but neither if it is definite while 'y is walking' is indefinite or intermediate, nor if it is intermediate while 'y is walking' is indefinite.

Complex propositions are those compounded of two or more simple propositions with the help of connectives like 'and' or 'if'. Here again, they are selected for their role in syllogistic theory. Thus they comprise: conjunctive propositions, for example, 'It is day and it is light', which are important mainly in negated conjunctions, for example, 'Not: it is day and it is dark'; disjunctive propositions, for example, 'Either it is day or it is night'; and conditionals, for example, 'If it is day, it is light'.

Simple and complex propositions are the basic components of syllogisms. These are held either to have, or to be reducible to by four rules of analysis known as the themata (see Logic, ancient §6), one of the following five forms: (1) 'If the first, the second; but the first; therefore the second'; (2) 'If the first, the second; but not the second; therefore not the first'; (3) 'Not: the first and the second; but the first; therefore not the second; (4) 'Either the first or the second; but the first; therefore not the second'; (5) 'Either the first or the second; but not the second; therefore the first'. These are considered irreducibly primitive argument forms, hence called the five 'indemonstrables'.

A great deal of work went into the diagnosis of argument validity (see Logic, ancient §5). Both formal rigour and inferential cogency were demanded. A valid argument, according to Stoic logic, is one in which the conclusion follows from the conjunction of the premises in just the way in which in a true conditional the consequent follows from the antecedent. Hence the notion of 'following' became a focal point of debate. Some Stoics adopted a truth-functional analysis of a true conditional: the second proposition follows from the first just if 'Not (the first and not the second)' is true (see Philo the Dialectician for the background to this). But Chrysippus adopted a much stronger criterion, called synartēsis or 'cohesion': 'If the first, the second' is true just if the negation of the second is incompatible with the first. This restricts 'following' to a strongly conceptual kind of implication.

The restriction in turn led Chrysippus to the view that many ordinary-language uses of 'if' do not represent real conditionals, and should properly be expressed by the negated conjunction: not 'If the first, the second', but 'Not both: the first and not the second'. He applied this, for example, to the rules of empirical sciences such as divination (see §20); and analogous doubts led at least some Stoics to deny the validity of inductive inference. It was also applied, importantly, to the individual steps of the Little-by-little argument or Sorites (see Vagueness §2). The Academic sceptics plagued the Stoics with this puzzle, aimed at challenging important philosophical distinctions by asking to be told the exact cut-off point. The archetypal Sorites is 'If two grains are not a heap, three aren't; if three aren't, four aren't;...' - and so on to the conclusion that if two grains are not a heap then 10,000 are not. Chrysippus, who wrote extensively on this problem, advised that at some point in the procedure there will be premises of this form which it is proper neither to affirm nor to deny. But he also seems to have authorized the Stoic practice of insisting that the individual steps be formulated not as conditionals, as above, but as negated conjunctions: for example, 'Not both: seven grains are not a heap and eight grains are a heap'. Part of the point is clearly that, whatever the grounds for asserting such a premise may be, there is no actual incompatibility between 'Seven grains are not a heap' and 'Eight grains are a heap', so that assent to the premise must remain optional.

A wide range of other logical puzzles exercised Chrysippus and other Stoics. Some turned on ambiguities, and they developed a sophisticated classification of ambiguity types. The most persistent thorn in their flesh, however, was the liar paradox: 'I am lying' is, if false, true, and, if true, false (see Semantic paradoxes and theories of truth §1). This, along with the Sorites, was wielded by the Academics as a potentially lethal weapon against Stoic logic. It appeared to undermine the most basic tenet - that every proposition is either true or false. Chrysippus wrote many books in refutation of the liar paradox, but if he had his own favoured solution it is impossible now to recover it from our sources.

Inferential logic is ubiquitously employed in Stoic texts on physics and ethics. These regularly purport to demonstrate their tenets, and a demonstration is itself defined as an argument in which evident premises serve to reveal a non-evident conclusion.

 

 

12 Cognitive certainty

The main Stoic epistemological theorist was Zeno of Citium, who developed his ideas in response to a series of challenges from the Academic sceptic Arcesilaus (see Arcesilaus §2). His key term is katalēpsis - 'apprehension' or 'cognition' - the infallible grasping of some truth, usually by use of the senses. Arcesilaus systematically questioned the grounding of this notion, and argued instead for akatalēpsia, 'inapprehensibility', or 'the impossibility of cognition'.

The starting notion is phantasia, literally 'appearance' but commonly translated as 'impression' or 'presentation'. To have an impression is simply for things to strike you as being a certain way. Whether or not you take the impression to be true depends on a further cognitive act, assent (synkatathesis), which you may give or withhold at will. Since mature human beings are rational, their impressions are called 'rational impressions', meaning that their content can be expressed in language. Strictly speaking it is the proposition associated with it that we are taking to be true when we assent to an impression.

Zeno symbolized an impression by spreading the fingers of one hand, and assent by pulling them together. The next stage, represented by a fist, was katalēpsis, literally 'grasping', that is, infallibly recognizing the truth. This is not so much successive to assent as an ideally successful way of assenting, based on a sufficiently lucid impression. If instead someone assents to an unreliable impression, that will not count as cognition, but as mere fallible 'opinion' (doxa).

One final stage in the hand simile is epistēmē, 'knowledge' - not everyday knowing (which is better identified with katalēpsis) but absolute, scientific knowledge, such as is possessed only by the wise. Zeno symbolized epistēmē by bringing the other hand over to grasp his fist firmly. The point is as follows. Katalēpsis is infallible, in that it successfully applies a simple guaranteed cognitive mechanism shared by virtually all human beings: the truth stares you in the face, and you assent to it without the slightest possibility of being wrong. However, although on this very ordinary model of knowing all of us know lots of things, only the genuinely wise know that they know. This is because the wise, having a complete set of mutually supporting cognitions, could never be argued into disbelieving one of them. The unwise, that is, most people, could be argued out of their assent to genuine cognitions, because they are likely to have also a number of false beliefs, adopted as if they were genuine cognitions. You may, for example, plainly witness a miracle but disbelieve it because, being an Epicurean sympathizer, you falsely believe that the gods do not intervene.

The interest of the Stoic-Academic debate lies largely in its concentration, not on the wise, but on the infallible cognition attributed to ordinary people. The Stoics remained convinced, perhaps like most of us, that in everyday encounters where the truth stares you in the face you cannot be wrong and would be insane to withhold assent. But this common-sense position proved extraordinarily vulnerable to Academic criticism.

Debate centred on the kind of impression to which assent might be fully justified. Zeno called this the phantasia katalēptikē, 'cognitive impression', and initially defined it as one which is '(i) from something real (apo hyparchontos), and (ii) moulded and impressed according to that real thing itself'. Here (i) is likely to mean, not 'caused by something real' (no impression, however delusory, could be either caused by something unreal or totally uncaused), but 'representing something actual' - where it is indifferent whether the thing represented is an object or a fact. What (ii) adds is that the impression depicts this thing in full graphic detail. Arcesilaus' complaint was that such an impression would still not be unmistakably true, since an identical but false impression could occur. This led Zeno to add a third clause, '(iii) such as could not be from something unreal', which we can take to mean 'such as could not represent some non-actual object or fact'.

The problem now was whether there could be such an impression. The ensuing debate focused partly on the nature of external objects, with the Stoics asserting that each object - even an identical twin - has some unique feature (see §6 for the metaphysical justification of this), and the Academics asking in reply how we could ever be sure that the relevant feature was currently evident. The Stoics also tried to describe the phenomenological features of these cognitive impressions, suggesting that as a species of impression they somehow carried their own badge of identity 'just as horned snakes differ from other snakes'. The Academic reply, now through the mouth of Carneades, included appeal to cases where false impressions are so graphic that they lead to action, exactly as allegedly cognitive ones do: can the latter then have any intrinsic features to differentiate them from the former?

The final word belongs to a group reported simply as the 'later Stoics' (Sextus Empiricus, Against the Professors VII 253-60), probably including Antipater, a contemporary of Carneades. They point out that in all but the most special circumstances we simply have no choice whether to assent to a cognitive impression. Once you have such an impression, you do believe it, and that is that. What is in our own hands is not whether, once we are in a position where the truth is unmistakable, we accept it, but whether we take the trouble to get ourselves into such a position in the first place (moving closer, turning on the light, and so on).

This is quite an effective reply to those, like the Academics, who recommend suspending assent. But it leaves the question why the irresistibility of certain impressions should imply their truth. The Stoics here had recourse to a teleological argument: we would not have been given this superb cognitive equipment for any other purpose than to learn the truth. But of course the Academics could easily question the empirical premises on which that teleology was founded, bringing the debate full circle.

 

13 Criteria of truth

To identify the 'criterion (or criteria) of truth' was a standard requirement of Hellenistic philosophers (see Hellenistic philosophy). The Greek word kritērion is literally a 'discriminator', and a common equivalent was kanōn, 'yardstick'. A criterion of truth was expected to be something naturally available to every mature human being as a basis for distinguishing true from false. Since it was that which made progress towards philosophical understanding possible, its availability and use could not be restricted to those who were already philosophers. When it came to naming the criterion of truth, the Stoics differed among themselves, but in some form or other they all identified it primarily with the 'cognitive impression' (see §12), the concept on which the Academic attack on the criterion likewise focused.

A second criterion, widely used in Stoicism and formally named as a criterion at least by Chrysippus, was prolēpsis, inadequately translated as 'preconception'. A prolēpsis, literally 'prior grasp', is any naturally acquired generic 'conception' (ennoia) of a thing (see Prolēpsis). Two other terms which are in most contexts interchangeable with it are koinē ennoia, 'common conception' (that is, common to all human beings) and physikē ennoia, 'natural conception'. These descriptions distinguish prolēpsis from artificially acquired conceptions, usually culture-dependent ones, most of which are not directly given in experience but depend on a synthetic mental process. A centaur, for example, is arrived at by combining natural conceptions, a giant by enlarging them, and so on. Some artificial conceptions are liable to be misleading, but others are an integral part of scientific understanding, for example, one's conception of the centre of the earth, acquired 'by analogy with smaller spheres'. Human reason is itself simply an ample stock of conceptions, some but not all of them natural ones.

What makes a prolēpsis a reliable guide to truth is precisely the fact that the natural conception has not been tampered with. But where does the prolēpsis itself come from? The Stoics sometimes sound like hard-line empiricists, as when they compare the mind of a new-born infant to a blank sheet of paper which will in due course have its stock of natural conceptions written on it by repeated sense impressions, classified and stored as 'experience'. Here a prolēpsis is 'natural' in the sense of being mechanically imprinted on us, and hence unmediated by fallible reasoning. However, some texts indicate that at least basic moral notions are called natural for the quite different reason that they are dispositionally innate in us.

Many Stoic arguments proceeded from appeals to some prolēpsis or 'common conception'. This was their version of the widespread philosophical practice of citing what are alleged to be 'our intuitions'. It ran into the difficulty that such a practice always faces: separating genuinely natural conceptions from those infected by one's culture or other beliefs becomes the new bone of contention. For example, both Stoics and Epicureans appealed to the prolēpsis of 'god', but while the Stoics regarded providence as an integral part of this prolēpsis, the Epicureans argued that god's providentiality was a cultural imposition on the basic prolēpsis, motivated by human bafflement at the world's workings (see Epicureanism §9). A very similar dispute launches Stoic ethics.

 

14 Oikeiōsis

Epicurus proposed a method for identifying the genuinely natural human value: consult a new-born baby. Inarticulate infants, and for that matter irrational animals, cannot possibly have been infected yet with the norms of society, and their actions tell us, louder than any words, that their sole motivation is the acquisition of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. Stoic ethics responds by adopting the same starting point but questioning the Epicurean analysis of infant behaviour.

The highly influential concept which the Stoics introduced to facilitate their own analysis is oikeiōsis, variously translated as 'appropriation', 'familiarization', 'affiliation' or 'affinity'. Literally, this is the process of 'making something one's own'. An animal's oikeiōsis is its natural impulse or inclination towards something which it regards as belonging to it.

A creature's first oikeiōsis, Stoics argue, is towards itself and its own constitution, a priority which it displays by making self-preservation its dominant goal. Far from pursuing pleasure, it courts pain in order to preserve and develop its natural constitution, as when we see a toddler repeatedly fall in striving to walk, and an overturned tortoise struggling to regain its upright position. As the human child develops, its oikeiōsis is extended beyond itself: it treats its parents and siblings as belonging to it, and cares for them accordingly, in much the same way in which it already cares for itself. In due course this same other-concern is extended to cover a wider range of people, albeit in increasingly diluted measure. At an extreme it takes in the entire human race. (For a graphic Stoic elaboration of this idea, see Hierocles.)

Oikeiōsis is a continuum, stretching from the instinctive self-preservation of the new-born infant to the other-regarding conduct which is equally natural in rational adults. Where most ancient ethical systems struggled to explain altruism as an extended form of self-interest, there is no such tension in Stoicism, where others already fall within the ambit of our natural affection in much the same way as we ourselves do. This rationally extended sense of what belongs to us does not yet amount to moral goodness, but it is its indispensable basis. Goodness lies in our understanding and collaborating with the ideally rational world plan. It is no wonder that our natural oikeiōsis towards the rest of the human race should be what grounds the project of completely integrating ourselves into that plan.

Oikeiōsis is an affinity founded on the shared rationality of the entire human race. The doctrine thus helped to foster Stoic cosmopolitanism and other widely admired humanitarian stances (see §18). Seneca (§1), for example, reminded his readers of their moral obligations even to their slaves. Conversely, however, the oikeiōsis doctrine also encouraged a hardening of attitudes to non-rational animals, with which humans were judged to stand in no moral relation at all.

 

15 The indifferents

Perhaps the most characteristic doctrine of Stoic ethics is that virtue alone is good, vice alone bad. Everything else traditionally assigned a positive or negative value - health or illness, wealth or poverty, sight or blindness, even life or death - is 'indifferent'. By making this move, the Stoics authorized the use of the word 'good' in a distinctly moral sense - a usage which is still with us, although they themselves bought it at the high price of simply denying that the word, properly understood, has any other sense.

The inspiration of this doctrine is undoubtedly Socratic. In various Platonic dialogues (see especially Euthydemus 278-81, Meno 86-9), Socrates argued that most things traditionally called good - typified with largely the same examples as the Stoic 'indifferents' - are in their own nature intermediate between good and bad. If used wisely, they become good, if unwisely, bad. Hence wisdom is the only intrinsically or underivatively good thing (see Socrates §§4-6).

This Socratic argument encouraged the Cynic idea that only wisdom - or more generally, virtue - is good, and that such coveted possessions as reputation, health and physical comfort are literally irrelevant to the goodness, and hence the happiness, of one's life (see Cynics). The Cynics acted on this by adopting a bohemian lifestyle, disdaining the values of society. And Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, had his first philosophical training from a Cynic. Zeno's independent-minded colleague Ariston stuck close to the Cynic thesis (see Ariston of Chios §2). Zeno, on the other hand, modified it in a way which does more than anything else to account for the widespread success of Stoicism; Zeno's subtly revised position leaves wealth, fame, and so on morally indifferent, while explaining why we are nevertheless fully justified in pursuing them.

Although being healthy does not make you happy, Zeno maintains, the natural thing to do in ordinary circumstances is nevertheless to stay healthy and avoid illness. We should not try to suppress this natural instinct, because to be happy - the ultimate goal to which we all aspire - is to be totally in tune with nature. Therefore the proper way to start out is to respect the preferences which nature dictates, opting where possible for affluence, high civic status, family values and other 'natural' desiderata. As you progress, you will learn when to vary the formula. It may be that in special circumstance the right way for you to fit in with nature's plan is to be poor, or sick, or even to die. If you understand why one of these is the rational and natural thing for you, you will embrace it willingly, and thus further rather than hinder your project of perfect conformity with nature. But barring such special circumstances, the natural values to adopt coincide on the whole with the ordinary values of society.

This leads, in typical Stoic fashion, to a terminological jungle of epithets for the 'indifferents'. The 'things which accord with nature' (ta kata physin), such as health, have a positive, albeit non-moral, 'value' (axia), and are therefore labelled 'preferred' (proēgmena), which means that in normal circumstances we should opt for them, they are 'to be taken' (lēpta). The 'things which are contrary to nature' (ta para physin), such as illness, earn a contrary set of technical terms: 'disvalue' (apaxia), 'dispreferred' (apoproēgmena), 'not to be taken' (alēpta).

The linchpin of Stoic ethics is the way in which it legitimizes a familiar scale of personal and social values, while denying them any intrinsic worth. Their value is purely instrumental, because they are the subject matter of the choices by means of which we progress towards true moral understanding. We might compare the relative 'values' in Stoic eyes of, say, illness, fame and eyesight, to the relative values of cards in a card game. Learning how to choose between these, and even to sacrifice cards of higher value when the circumstances dictate, is an essential part of becoming a skilled player. But these choices matter only instrumentally: It would be absurd to compare the value of an ace to the value of being a good card-player. In Stoic eyes it is an equally grave error - although unfortunately one of which most people are guilty - to rank wealth or power along with moral goodness on one and the same scale.

The things which are naturally 'preferred' can be encapsulated in rules: honour your parents, take care of your health, cultivate friends, and so on. From the start - although again with the dissent of Ariston of Chios - the Stoics attached importance to rules or 'precepts' as the basis of moral progress. What a precept prescribes is a kathēkon (plural kathēkonta), a 'proper function' or 'duty', and many Stoic treatises were devoted to working out detailed lists of kathēkonta. A kathēkon is defined as 'that which, when done, has a reasonable justification': for a rational adult, what is reasonable and what is natural should coincide.

There are two main types of kathēkonta: circumstantial and non-circumstantial. Circumstantial kathēkonta, that is, those prescribed only in very special circumstances, include such abnormal acts as self-mutilation, giving away your property, and even suicide (something of a Stoic obsession, inspired by Socrates' willing death). Non-circumstantial kathēkonta are, despite their name, not prescribed in literally all circumstances, since to each non-circumstantial kathēkon (for example, looking after one's health), there is opposed a circumstantial one, (for example, in very unusual circumstances, getting ill). Rather, they are 'non-circumstantial' because they are what, other things being equal, you should do as a matter of course, and not as a response to your present circumstances.

 

16 Goodness

Kathēkonta are 'intermediate' patterns of behaviour - that is, available to everybody, wise and non-wise alike. Yet in advertizing them the Stoics regularly referred to the conduct of the 'sage', the idealized wise person whom they always held up as a model, despite admitting that the criteria for this status were so tough that few people, if any, ever attained them. It seems, for example, that no Stoic philosopher claimed the status of 'sage' either for himself or even for Zeno and Chrysippus. What was possible for everybody, they insisted, was progress (prokopē) towards this state of wisdom, and that is why they stressed the continuity between the proper conduct of the non-wise and the ideally good conduct of the wise. When you actually become wise and virtuous, what are outwardly the very same kind of kathēkonta which you were already habitually performing are suddenly transformed by your new state of understanding, earning themselves the name katorthōmata or 'right actions'.

Alongside this continuity in moral progress, there is also the sharpest possible discontinuity. One of the most notorious Stoic paradoxes was that all sins are equal. If you are not virtuous and wise, you are totally bad and foolish. The wise are totally happy, the foolish totally unhappy. Whatever strides you may have made towards virtue, you are no happier till you get there. They compared what it is like to be drowning: whether you are yards from the surface or only inches from it, you are still just as effectively drowning.

The motivation of this depressing thesis is not entirely clear. Stoic concern with the paradox of the Sorites (see §11) may have contributed to it, but the main driving force seems to be the conviction that actual goodness, if achieved, differs not in degree, but in kind, from the scale of natural values. At a certain point of moral development, you notice an emerging agreement or harmony between your individual choices and acts. It is, thereafter, not the choices and acts or their objects that matter any longer, but harmony for its own sake. Only from that point on do you have a conception of what goodness is: it is located in a perfect 'agreement' both within the individual and between that individual and cosmic nature.

What does this agreement consist in? Despite the Stoics' extensive cataloguing and classification of the kathēkonta which the sage will perform, ultimately the wise are characterized, not by the actual success of their actions - which may not always be in their control - but by the morally perfect frame of mind with which they act - in other words, by virtue (see Aretē). Socrates had propounded the paradox that virtue is knowledge: all there is to being good is to know the right things. The Stoics develop this Socratic idea to the full. The word for knowledge - epistēmē - can also more specifically mean 'science', and they regard each virtue as a genuine science, complete with its own constituent theorems. The skill of living in harmony is a skill analogous to, although vastly more difficult than, any branch of mathematics or medicine.

Plato had given four virtues canonical status: justice, wisdom, temperance or self-control (sōphrosynē), and courage. The Stoics adopt this list, and treat all other virtues as subordinate species, or perhaps branches, of the four. Are these, then, four entirely distinct sciences? No. Among Socrates' most enduringly influential doctrines was that of the Unity of the Virtues. On one widely accepted version, adopted by some early Stoics (see Ariston of Chios §3; Cleanthes), Socrates' thesis meant that the four virtues are all simply one and the same state of mind, albeit going under different names in different external circumstances. Others took the view that the unity of the virtues consists rather in their inseparability. For example, you could hardly count as just if you were not brave and temperate too, or else you might be deflected from just behaviour through intimidation or bribery. It is perhaps this thought that led Chrysippus to the following view: the four virtues are four separate sciences, each with its own defining set of theorems; but each virtue incorporates and uses the theorems of the other three as subsidiary theorems. The thesis that the virtues are distinct sciences was put by Chrysippus, in the technical language of Stoic metaphysics (see §6), by saying that they belong to the second category, 'quality', and not the fourth category, 'relative disposition'. That is, they differ from each other as distinct qualities or states of mind, not simply as one state of mind differentiated by the varying external situations with which it is confronted.

 

17 The goal

The 'goal' or 'end' (telos) is defined as 'that for the sake of which everything is done, while it is not itself done for the sake of any further thing' (see Telos). This is identified with happiness (eudaimonia), or 'living well'. Both are commonplace to the Greek philosophical tradition. The partisan content arises when philosophers offer their formulas for what this end actually consists in. Zeno's formula was 'living in agreement' (homologoumenōs zēn). The history of Stoic ethics over the next two centuries is largely a history of successive attempts to work out what Zeno must have meant.

Zeno's vagueness was probably deliberate. The 'agreement' comprises both the perfect internal coherence and rationality (the '-log-' part of homologoumenōs means 'reason') of the good life - 'living in accordance with one concordant reason' - and its conformity with nature, the 'nature' in question being itself equated with both one's own individual nature and the nature of the world. Happiness is also identified as a 'smooth flow of life', and Zeno's real point was that only those with complete understanding of cosmic rationality can make their own aims and choices entirely one with those of nature, and thus never come into conflict with either their own or the world's rationality.

Pressure for clarification led either Zeno himself or Cleanthes to make the first addition to the formula, which now became 'living in agreement with nature'. Chrysippus substituted 'living in accordance with experience of what happens by nature'. What became clearer, as these and other formulations competed, was that the ideal life was defined in terms of things which were themselves morally indifferent - the 'things which accord with nature' (see §15). The challenge which the Stoics faced from their opponents in the Academy was how moral good could depend on a set of aims whose attainment was morally indifferent. The answer - compare §15 - was as follows. What matters is not necessarily achieving natural advantages like health, which cannot be guaranteed in all circumstances, and which in any case do not bring happiness. What matters is making the right rational choices - doing everything that lies in your power towards achieving what nature recommends. It is the consistency of those efforts, not of their results, that may ultimately become perfect agreement with nature, that is, happiness. Formulas for the goal designed to capture this emphasis included (Diogenes of Babylon) 'reasoning well in the selection and disselection of things which accord with nature', and (Antipater) 'to live continuously selecting things which accord with nature and disselecting things contrary to nature'. Zeno's original formulation had more to recommend it.

 

18 The cosmic city

Everybody without exception strives for a good and happy life, but only the wise achieve it. Most people in fact misapply the very words 'good' and 'happiness', which they mistakenly associate with morally indifferent states like wealth and honour. This simple point came to be extended by the Stoics to all the other things which are conventionally prized. Everybody wants to be rich, free, powerful, beautiful, loveable, and so on, but, paradoxically, only the wise achieve these goals. Everyone else is, whatever they may think, actually poor, enslaved, powerless, ugly and unloveable. This is because real wealth is to have something of genuine worth (that is, virtue), or to lack nothing that you need; real freedom is to be in full control of your life (including the knowledge of when to accept death rather than ever be forced to do what you do not truly want to do); real power is to be able to achieve everything you want; real beauty is a quality of the soul not the body; and only the genuinely beautiful are genuinely loveable. These Stoic 'paradoxes' are of Socratic inspiration.

A primary motif of Stoic political thought is the extension of such paradoxes into the civic realm. Conventional political ambitions belong to the realm of the indifferent just as much as wealth and health do. Thus, while Stoicism actively promotes conventional political activity as a way of following human nature, it at the same time downgrades it in relation to true moral goodness. Everybody wants to have power, and would like if they could to be a king; but only the wise have power (only they can achieve everything they want) and kingship (defined as 'rule which is accountable to no one'). These Socratic redefinitions were extended even to humbler civic aims: only the wise are generals, orators, magistrates, lawyers, and so on.

An upshot of this was a corresponding downgrading of the civic institution within which such offices operated. A city, in the conventional sense of a human cohabitation with geographical boundaries, a legal code and so on, is an artificial construct. A city in the most correct sense is not constrained in these ways: in fact the world itself is the ultimate city, being a habitation common to humans and gods, united by their shared rationality.

The idea was of Cynic inspiration. The Cynics had already coined the expression 'citizen of the world', kosmou politēs, which the Stoics took over. In a way every human being is a citizen of the world, and this generous version of Stoic cosmopolitanism was to become enormously influential on the ideology of the Roman Empire, as well as leading some Stoics to challenge entrenched gender and class barriers. But on a narrower criterion - influenced by Zeno's early utopian work the Republic (see Zeno of Citium) - it is not all human beings, but only the wise, who participate in the real cosmic city. The cosmic city has its own law, a natural moral law defined as 'right reason (orthos logos) which commands what should be done and forbids what should not'. This notion of a cosmic moral law which transcends local legal codes exerted a powerful influence on later theories of natural law.

Although the Stoics encouraged political involvement in conventional cities, and were themselves prepared to act as advisors to monarchs, there is little reason to think that any Stoic before the late second century bc (see Panaetius §2) made a serious contribution to non-utopian political theory.

 

19 Passions

Everyone who has not achieved virtue is in a state of vice or moral badness. Most commonly - for example, in the work of Plato and Aristotle - vice was viewed as a state in which reason is dominated and deflected by strong irrational emotions, or 'passions' (pathē, singular pathos). But Socrates had established an enduring intellectualist alternative, according to which the soul has no irrational parts, and virtue is knowledge, so that its lack, vice, is simply ignorance: 'No one does wrong willingly. The Stoics are fully committed to developing Socrates' position, in particular the thesis that passions are really value judgments.

A passion is commonly thought of as disobedient to reason. Reason says that you should face some danger, but fear disobeys. Reason chooses to abstain from embezzlement, but greed wins out. This suggests that an emotion can hardly itself be a rational state. The Stoics accept the description of emotions as 'disobedient to reason', but redescribe what this amounts to.

An emotion is primarily a judgment - a false one. A fear may be the false judgment that some impending thing, say injury, is bad for you. The falsity lies in the fact that physical injury is actually not bad, just a 'dispreferred indifferent' (see §15) and therefore strictly irrelevant to happiness. Your belief that it is bad takes the form of an 'excessive impulse' to avoid it, and that impulse, as well as being a judgment, is like any intellectual state also a physical modification (in this case called a 'contraction') of the pneuma that constitutes the commanding-faculty of your soul. The new overtensioned and perturbed state of your mental pneuma is one that you cannot instantly snap out of. Were you to entertain the correct judgment that you should not shrink from the danger, your pneuma would not be able to respond. That is what makes the passionate state of fear 'disobedient to reason' - a status it can have while itself also being a piece of faulty reasoning. Chrysippus compared it to a runner who is going too fast and therefore cannot stop at will. (For a later Stoic's disagreement with Chrysippus on this issue, see Posidonius §5.)

The four main kinds of emotion are appetite, fear, pleasure and distress. Appetite and fear are faulty evaluations of future things as good and bad respectively. Pleasure and distress are corresponding mis-evaluations of things already present. Each has a variety of sub-species, and one of particular importance in Stoic discussions (see Seneca, On Anger) is anger, identified as a species of desire, namely the desire for revenge. Calling pleasure a passion and a vice may sound harsh, but the kind of pleasure envisaged here is one involving conscious evaluative attitudes, such that its sub-species include gloating and self-gratification. ('Pleasure' understood as that sensation of wellbeing which automatically accompanies certain states and activities is not a vice but an 'indifferent'. It is the view that pleasure - in this latter sense - and pain are indifferent that has given 'stoical' its most familiar modern meaning.)

It should not be inferred that a Stoic sage is feelingless. The wise lack the 'passions', which are overevaluations, but they do instead have the correct affective states, which the Stoics call eupatheiai, or 'good feelings'. Thus the sage has no 'appetites', but does have 'wishes', whose species include kindness, generosity, warmth and affection. Similarly, instead of 'fear' the wise have 'watchfulness', and so on.

The Stoics' conviction that emotional states, far from being mere irrational drives, are primarily specified by their cognitive content is one of their most valuable contributions to moral philosophy. Its most important implication in their eyes is that philosophical understanding is the best and perhaps the only remedy for emotional disquiet. In the short term strong emotions are disobedient to correct reasoning, but in the long term rational therapy can restructure the intellect and dispel all passions (see Emotions, nature of).

 

20 Fate

Socrates had been a firm believer in the powers of divination and in divine providence. Stoicism took over this outlook and developed it into a doctrine of 'fate' (heimarmenē), which by the time of Chrysippus had become a full-scale thesis of determinism.

That everything that happens is predetermined is a thesis which flows easily from all three branches of Stoic philosophy. Ethics locates human happiness in willing conformity to a pre-ordained plan (§17), and treats the use of divination as a legitimate means towards this goal. Physics provides the theory of the world's divinely planned cyclical recurrence, unvarying in order to maintain its own perfection (§5).

Physics also supplies a fundamental principle, regarded as conceptually self-evident, that nothing happens without a cause. This quickly leads to the conclusion that the world's entire history is an unbroken causal network. 'Fate is a natural everlasting ordering of the whole: one set of things follows on and succeeds another, and the interconnection is inviolable'. 'The passage of time is like the unwinding of a rope, bringing about nothing new and unrolling each stage in its turn.' A modern analogy might be the continual rerunning of a film.

Finally, logic offers the principle of bivalence: every proposition, including those about the future, is either true or false. Therefore, Chrysippus argued, it is true now of any given future event either that it will happen or that it will not happen. What does that present truth consist in? It can only lie in the causes now present, sufficient either to bring the event about or to prevent its happening. Therefore all events are predetermined by antecedent causes sufficient to bring them about and to prevent all alternatives from occurring. (Compare Aristotle §20 and Epicureanism §12, for escape routes from this argument.)

 

21 Responsibility

The greatest interest of this determinist position lies in the Stoics' attempts to meet the challenge it poses to moral responsibility (see Free will). They implicitly accept that a person is responsible for an action only if they could have done otherwise. But how could this latter be true in a Stoic world, where the actual action performed is causally determined and even predictable in advance? Chrysippus was the author of the main Stoic answers to this challenge. His task (see Cicero, On Fate) was to show that even in such a world 'could have done otherwise' makes sense: an action which I did not in the event perform may nevertheless have been possible for me, that is, my failure to perform it was not necessary. The strategy for securing this result included the following lines of argument.

(1) A 'possible' proposition is defined in Stoic sources as 'one which (i) admits of being true, and (ii) is not prevented by external circumstances from being true'. Suppose that you have failed to pay a bill despite having the cash. Paying the bill was 'possible' for you. (i) It 'admits of being true': there is such a thing as paying a bill, unlike for example, being in two places at once. (ii) Nothing external to you prevented you: you did not lack the funds, you were not forcibly detained, and so forth. This account of possibility does allow that something internal to you may (indeed must) have prevented you from paying: for example, your meanness, forgetfulness or laziness. Still, it was possible for you to pay, in the sense that you had the opportunity to pay. Chrysippus seems to maintain that the 'could have done otherwise' notion of responsibility holds in his world, because alternative actions are 'possible' in just this sense: we regularly have the opportunity to do otherwise, and therefore have only ourselves to blame for what we actually do.

Stoicism resists the alternative that 'could have done otherwise' might entail our being actually capable of acting otherwise: surely the good, in order to claim credit for their conduct, do not have to be capable of wrongdoing, nor need the bad, if they are to be blamed, be capable of acting well.

(2) Much this same point was also expressed in terms of a causal distinction (one among many: the Stoics were accused of introducing a 'swarm of causes'). When a cylinder is pushed and rolls, the 'principal' cause of the rolling is its shape, the push being just the triggering or 'proximate' cause. From our point of view as agents, Chrysippus argues, fate functions as a series of mere triggering causes - the openings, provocations and so on with which the world presents us. Given our respective states of character, we are bound to respond to these prompts in just the ways we do. But the principal cause lies in our character. And that makes us, not fate, responsible for our actions.

Importantly, the Greek word for a cause, aition, literally means the 'thing responsible'. However, the Stoics' technical term for moral responsibility is eph' hēmin: our actions are 'within our power'. This is not a thesis of free will. What matters to them is not to posit an open future, but to establish the moral accountability of human action even within a rigid causal nexus.

(3) Divination might be thought to make the future necessary. Take an astrological law: if you were born at the rising of the dog star, you will not die at sea. Suppose you were born at the rising of the dog star. This is an unalterable fact about the past, and therefore, Chrysippus accepts, necessary. There is also a widely accepted law of logic that if the antecedent of a conditional is necessary so is its consequent. Therefore 'You will not die at sea' also becomes a necessary truth. One of Chrysippus' replies was that divinatory laws do not express conceptually indubitable truths, and are therefore not properly expressed as conditionals, but rather as negated conjunctions (see §11), in which this transmission of necessity does not occur.

(4) One remaining challenge was the Lazy Argument. Why, its proponents asked, should we bother to make decisions if the outcome is already fixed? Why call the doctor, if whether you will die or recover from your illness is already fated? Chrysippus' answer is that such sequences of events as calling the doctor and recovering are 'co-fated'. In most cases the outcome is fated via the means, not regardless of them.

Some landmark events, however, such as the day of your death, may be fated regardless of the means. Your character will cause you to decline numerous alternative actions to those you will choose, but even if, counterfactually, you were going to choose one of those alternatives, it would still be going to lead to your death on that same day. One example can be reconstructed from Cicero (On Fate 30): Socrates (in Plato's Crito) knew through a prophetic dream that he would die in three days' time, and his reasoned decision to stay and accept execution was willing cooperation with the rational world plan, where a bad person would have resisted by escaping but still died on that same fated day. Zeno and Chrysippus compared a human being to a dog tied to a cart: it can follow willingly, or be dragged.

In this way, morality is not simply argued to be compatible with determinism, but to require it. Only within a framework of rational predestination can moral choices have their true significance. There remains, however, the question why, in a world where it was pre-ordained that we would be precisely the kind of people we are, our choices should have any moral significance at all. Part of the answer is that goodness belongs primarily to the world as a whole (identifiable with god). It is from this that moral qualities filter down to individuals and their actions, as a measure of their cooperation with or obstruction of the rational world plan.

22 Later fortunes

Stoicism's success ran high in the first century ad. It was perceived by writers like Seneca and Lucan as embodying the traditional Roman virtues whose decline was so widely lamented. Roman Stoics formed the main resistance to the emperor's rule, and, following the earlier model of the Stoic Cato, made the principled act of suicide into a virtual art form.

In a way Stoicism's crowning achievement was in ad 161, when its adherent Marcus Aurelius became Roman emperor. Here at last was a genuine philosopher-ruler. When Marcus established chairs of philosophy at Athens, these included one of Stoic philosophy. Nevertheless, Stoicism was already on the decline in the late second century, eclipsed by the revived philosophies of Plato and Aristotle. By then, however, it had entered the intellectual bloodstream of the ancient world, where its concepts remained pervasive in such diverse disciplines as grammar, rhetoric and law, as well as strongly influencing the thought of Platonist philosophers like Porphyry, and Church Fathers such as Clement of Alexandria.

Through the writings of Cicero (whose philosophical works, although not Stoic, embody much Stoicism) and Seneca, Stoic moral and political thought exercised a pivotal influence throughout the Renaissance (see Renaissance philosophy). Early modern philosophers who incorporated substantial Stoic ethical ideas include Spinoza and Kant. The recovery of Stoic physics, epistemology and logic, however, has been largely an achievement of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.