Finally we come to by far the most historically influential philosophical school of thought on the art of living well as a human being: Stoicism.
In the philosophy that exists beyond the world of Ancient Greece, of all the schools of thought that came to have a lasting dominance in the history of philosophy, not only would I say that Stoicism had exerted the most powerful influence, I would also say that Stoicism has the clearest claim to an authentic Socratic legacy. It is the Stoics who most exemplify the core Socratic philosophical virtues. The Epicureans had self-restraint and the rule by reason, but Socrates was no hedonist. The Cynics had the prioritisation of virtue and an alignment with nature, but Socrates was no beggar. Plato’s academic descendents, the Sceptics, like Socrates, knew that they knew nothing, but Socrates never surrendered his pursuit of truth or his accountability to reason.
The Stoics rule themselves by their reason, exert self-restraint, align themselves with nature, seek knowledge but endorse a healthy scepticism, and above all else prioritise virtue. And they do all this in the midst of society, not hiding away in gardens or academies. The name ‘Stoicism’ comes from the fact that the leaders of the school of thought taught at the Stoa Poikile, or ‘painted porch’, a part of the same Athenian marketplace where Socrates put his questions to the great and good.The Socratic influence on the Stoics is clear to see.
This is no accident, although Stoicism is reported to have come about by way of one. The origin story of the Stoic school of thought tells that its founder, Zeno (of Citium, an ancient city located on the island of Cyprus), a wealthy merchant, was shipwrecked and came by chance to Athens. Whilst there, down on his luck, he was browsing a bookshop looking for consolation and happened upon Xenophon’s Memorabilia.
Xenophon’s Socrates
Xenophon got a brief mention earlier in this book, in being another student of Socrates. Xenophon’s attempt to capture his teacher’s philosophy through his ‘recollections’ (i.e., his Memorabilia, but he also wrote some other Socratic dialogues) is generally considered to be less philosophically remarkable than the attempts of the more influential students, such as Plato (who exemplified and elaborated on Socrates’ teaching in his written dialogues) and Antisthenes (who exemplified Socrates’ teaching though his lived example, which resulted in the Cynic School of thought). Xenophon’s Socrates comes across as a bit of a flat moraliser, prone to arrogance and condescension, lacking the wit, irony, humble sincerity, nuance and depth that we see in Plato’s version, or the sheer austerity that we see in the Cynics. A tempting explanation for this difference is that Socrates taught Xenophon as Xenophon was capable of being taught, which is: without much sophistication.
There are plenty of times in Plato’s dialogues where Socrates alludes to teaching people only as much philosophy as is good for them. If you have philosophical potential, then Socrates will tell you to think for yourself, and he will go with you into an investigation of the more complex issues; but if you are slow of mind, or too rigid in your thinking, or lazy or ill-disciplined or insincere or arrogant, etc., etc., then he will tell you to obey the law and do as wise people tell you. By some accounts Xenophon seems to have fallen into the latter camp, being an exceptional military leader and writer but not-so-exceptional as a philosopher, and so in his Memorabilia he only recalled the version of Socrates that Socrates allowed him to see.
It seems to me that Socrates gives different lessons to his students, reflecting their differing natures and abilities – a natural product of their irreducibly personal conversations – and that the various portrayals of Socrates reflect these lessons. I think it represents a progression.
For example, in Xenophon’s portrayal, Socrates argues that reputation without reality is foolish: there’s no point pretending to be something you’re not because you’ll only get found out eventually, and the fall from grace will be all the greater because of your false pride. There’s no point pretending to be a great fighter or philosopher if you aren’t one, because you will fall at the first combat. The lesson is an age-old Socratic one: know thyself, and be honest. But in amongst this argument, as Xenophon presents it, Socrates still acknowledges the value of reputation and admiration, almost as if being admired and having a good reputation is the only reason to pursue being worthy of it. We want to be admired; that is only natural (and we should live aligned with our natures). But what we don’t always realise is that, if we really want to be admired, then we should want to be, in reality, what we want to be admired for. We shouldn’t want to be admired for being what we only pretend to be, because that is a very precarious situation. So aim to be whatever you want to be in reality and do not aim to cultivate your reputation beyond that reality. It’s as if Socrates says to Xenophon: ‘If you want to be admired, focus on being good at what you want to be admired for, then the admiration will come. So if you want to be thought of as being a wise philosopher, then try to be a wise philosopher.’ This is a way of motivating people to take their first step on the way to becoming a philosopher, by appealing to their natural desires for recognition and reward.
To Plato, it’s as if Socrates offers the next step: ‘To be a wise philosopher requires that we investigate the ideas that we have about things, regardless of recognition or reward.’ Because of this lesson, Plato portrays Socrates showing the more challenging position, that once you investigate the ideas that we have about things you will see that being admired is not as important as being worthy of admiration, and so being admired isn’t something a philosopher should aim for: instead we should aim to be worthy of admiration. But this still seems to acknowledge some value to being admired – it is a good thing that we can be worthy of – and if well-earned admiration comes your way then you are free to benefit from it. It’s not something you should be hostile to.
But to Antisthenes, it’s as if Socrates pushes a little further and says: ‘Once you get good at philosophy, at discerning the good and the true and the beautiful, you recognise that admiration means nothing.’ This is not just a step on the way to becoming a philosopher, this is what it is to be a philosopher (according to Socrates). Antisthenes doesn’t portray Socrates’ philosophy, he embodies it, and so he cares nothing for admiration or reputation.
If you were to ask me which was the ‘true’ portrayal of Socrates, I would have to say that I don’t know, but it seems to me that Antisthenes’ is the truest. Regardless, it’s Xenophon’s Memorabilia that caused Zeno of Citium to stumble upon Socratic philosophy and, being suitably impressed, asked the bookseller where in Athens he might find someone who could teach him as Socrates taught. By chance, so the story goes, Crates (the Cynic) happened to be walking by and so the bookseller pointed at Crates and says ‘follow him’. Zeno follows Crates (who, we recall, followed Diogenes, who followed Antisthenes, who followed Socrates) and tries to become a Cynic.
A Reluctant Cynic
As impressed as he is with the austere philosophical life that Crates lives, Zeno finds he cannot join him in going full Cynic. He is too embarrassed by the outrageous behaviour! And besides which he seems happy enough to remain wealthy. And so instead of becoming a full-blown Cynic, Zeno takes what is wise in the Cynics and supplements it with other philosophical influences, all of which are varied descendents of the splintered philosophical legacy of Socrates. Zeno studies Platonist philosophy (which we have already covered in this book), he studies under the ‘Megarian’ School (another branch of the Socratic legacy, the distinct relevance of which is now lost or else absorbed into bigger branches), and, most importantly, he studies under the ‘Dialecticians’, Philo and his teacher Diodorus Cronus. This particular branch of Socrates’ legacy made it their business to continue Socrates’ method of ‘conversation with questioning’ and looked to make a science of it. In the Dialecticians’ hands, Socrates’ simple but loose and informal method becomes more complex, more systematised, more rigidly dogmatic. There are certain ways to argue well and certain ways to argue badly, and if we want to make progress then we need to learn about these ways and stick to the good methods of argumentation, avoiding the bad. At this point these methodical developments are only seeds of ideas, and it takes a while for them to bear fruit, but this is the beginning of what we would now call ‘logic’: the science of rational argumentation. Aristotle takes the honour of being the one who we say invented ‘logic’, but these early Dialecticians, in advancing Socrates’ method, prepared fertile soil.
Zeno takes the Dialecticians’ ideas about argumentative method and the logic that results becomes a central component of his new school of thought. For Zeno, logic is no less essential to human understanding than ethics or physics. This was a new position in philosophy and it prompted a new focus on the study of logic.
The Stoics understood philosophy to have three essential parts: logic, physics, and ethics. In short they thought that human understanding requires that we understand how to think, that we understand how the world works, and that we understand how we should live. Our understanding is lacking if it lacks any of those three parts.
The Stoic tripartite division stood the test of time, lasting to the Enlightenment period in Europe and laying the foundations for our modern world. Other elements of the ancient philosophical canon, such as rhetoric or poetics, faded or came to be seen as non-essential. But physics became ‘natural philosophy’ and then the natural sciences, and who could dispute the impact they have had on our understanding of the world? And logic gave us computers, and where would we be without them?
For all the evident success of two of Zeno’s three essential parts of philosophy, there’s a sense in which ethics got left behind. There is a story to account for this – and this story will constitute the introduction to volume two of this series – but I think it’s a shame that nowadays ethics is rarely seen as essential to human knowledge. We rush to teach children how to understand science and maths and computers, and how to investigate and make use of these things, but do we rush to teach them how to do the same with virtue? What is the implication here? That we can’t do without science and maths and computers, but we can do without any developed understanding of virtue? How can we be surprised, then, when so many young people struggle to live well in the world?
Logic is also being left behind, sadly. Of the Stoics’ three essential parts of human understanding, we are inclined to teach children only about how the world works, neglecting any education of how to think or how to live well. In most systems of education, you have to wait until higher education to have any chance of studying logic, and even there it is becoming more rare. But how can we expect to live well if we don’t learn how to investigate the idea? And how can we think about how to live well when we don’t understand how to think?
Logic is the structure or framework of rational thought. Zeno says logic is like the shell of an egg: it holds everything together. (In this analogy, Ethics is the white and Physics the yolk, though some Stoics put them the other way around.) Without logic, you just get a sloppy mess.
Because of the important role that logic plays in human understanding, the early Stoics place a lot of emphasis on the study of it. This small divergent step from the path of any of the other philosophical schools of thought seems to be what sends the Stoics off in a new direction. In the early days – before the Stoics were called Stoics and were still call ‘Zenonians’ after Zeno – their school of thought constituted a hybridised culmination of all preceding Ancient Greek thought on the art of living well as a human being. Zeno surveyed the Greek philosophical world, sifting through all the philosophical arguments he could find – whether the argument was about physics, or ethics, or epistemology, or metaphysics, or politics, or religion, or any other topic that philosophers cared to talk about. He discarded the contradictory or incoherent arguments but preserved the consistent and coherent, separating the wheat from the chaff according to his logical method, taking what he saw to be good and true and rejecting what he saw to be inadequate or false. In this methodical logical appraisal, Zeno created a distinctive new school of thought from the synthesis of the best of all the schools of thought available to him. The hybrid theory that resulted offered up a new answer to the question of how to live well as a human being.
It would undersell it to say so, but you could see Stoicism as a kind of highlights package of Ancient Greek thought on the topic of how to live well as a human being. The Stoics’ logical approach is what sets them apart. But as with other philosophical schools of thought, in order to understand the Stoic answer to the question of what it is to live well as a human being, it is important to understand their philosophical foundations. For the Stoics, these foundations are Logic and Physics.
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