Stoicism might constitute a culmination of Ancient Greek thought on the art of living well as a human being, but the early Stoics were a notoriously technical bunch. Most of what we know about the early Stoic school – centred on the works of Zeno and his subsequent school leaders, Cleanthes and Chrysippus – shows them working away on abstract questions about logic and language. There’s a certain irony in this, given Stoicism’s decidedly practical reputation. Later Stoics will speak critically about this early tendency towards technicality, pointing out that Stoicism is and ought to be, at its heart, an art of living and not merely a collection of purely theoretical arguments.
I join the later Stoics in that criticism. But perhaps our impression of this early Stoic preoccupation with technical discussion isn’t entirely accurate. Perhaps it’s just that, in the philosophical record that survives through documents and stories, we (and later Stoics) see only the technical works that the early Stoics used primarily to define themselves, as a relatively new school, in amongst the other philosophical schools of the day. To do that, they had to engage in the kind of technical philosophical discussion characteristic of the time. They had to work with what they had. And besides which, they had to work out what they were. Presumably in amongst all this technical ferment there was a lot of Stoical living going on, behind the scenes and between the lines, but would these examples have been recorded for posterity? The Cynics were offering comparatively ‘louder’ examples of philosophical living. Perhaps the Stoics’ quieter way couldn’t be heard over the Cynic din; perhaps it went without saying. Socrates didn’t write anything down, after all, and yet we can still infer that he had a certain art of living that seemed to him to be of utmost importance. His followers were good enough to record Socrates’ arguments for the historical record, but let’s not forget that the bulk of Plato’s dialogues is dedicated to Socrates’ philosophical investigations and not stories about his way of living. We have to infer Socrates character, and a shallow reading of Plato will easily miss this entirely because it is not given to us on the surface.
But whilst it might be safe to assume there is a certain Stoic way of living from the outset, what we see in the early Stoics is a tendency towards strict logical argumentation and fine-grained conceptual distinctions. Through meticulous argument, we learn that the Stoics are not sceptics, because they think there can be knowledge, but they don’t think perceptions or observations count as knowledge; they are not logical determinists, but they are material determinists; they say that pleasure is not ‘good’ but it is to be ‘preferred’; etc., etc. In short, they walk a line of defining themselves amongst and against the various philosophical schools of thought that formed the context of the time. In those technical distinctions they carve our their distinct identity.
Some of these fine-grained technical distinctions are quite helpful; some of them are not and can be ignored without great cost. The difference between logical determinism and material determinism might be interesting but it is not, in practice, going to make a tiny bit of difference to how you live the Stoic way of life. However, the difference between what is ‘good’ and what is ‘preferred’ or what is ‘internal’ and what is ‘external’ certainly will. For that reason it’s important to have some technical grounding.
Another irony abounds here. In amongst this off-putting technicality is a Stoic argument that says this is actually the easy way into the discipline. Because it’s very difficult to live like a Stoic; it requires practised discipline, practical wisdom, independence of mind, intense focus, immense strength of will. These are not easy things to achieve or even make a tentative start on. It’s comparatively much easier to read books about Stoicism, to learn and understand their arguments, to talk about and repeat those arguments to others, and to think a little about the consequences of these arguments. It’s easier to talk the Stoic talk than it is to walk the Stoic walk. And so the technical side of their philosophy is the easy way in; it’s a wide gateway to a far narrower road. And if you wanted to make a start on this road, offered the choice between the easier or the more difficult, shouldn’t you start with the easier thing?
Stoic Physics
In terms of physics, the Stoics were materialists. This means they thought, like the Epicureans, that only physical stuff exists; they didn’t think there were immaterial things like Plato’s ‘Forms’. As with the other materialist schools of thought that we’ve seen, the Stoics’ materialism keeps their feet firmly on the ground and stops them drifting off into other-worldly speculations. But it also has significant consequences for their philosophical art of living. Because as far as the Stoics can see, physical reality follows some very strict laws. If you throw a stone up into the air, it will fall back down, every time. If you do not throw a stone, it will not fly up into the air of its own volition, ever. There is no ambiguity here. The physical world absolutely adheres to physical laws, without exception. Material objects can only act and react in certain ways, according to their physical nature: stones fall, water flows, fire burns, hot air rises and cold air sinks.
And what’s more, we can see that these actions and reactions impact on one another in ways that are so predictable that they seem to be as exceptionless as the laws that govern them. Push a round stone down a hill and it will roll. Pour water and it will conform to the shape of whatever you pour it into, or else flow in the path of least resistance. Release air in water and it will rise to the surface. This is the nature of material reality: it is law-governed. And since there is no reality beyond material reality, that means that reality itself is law-governed.
The law-governed nature of material reality leaves no room for manoeuvre. A stone cannot choose to fly; water cannot choose to form hard edges. Things in reality can only behave according to their nature, as the laws allow. There are no exceptions. Every movement of a physical object must conform to these laws. And each movement can impact on another, which we call ‘causation’, and these causal events must also conform to the laws of material reality; they can only go as they must go. If you push a round stone down a hill it will roll because it must roll because you pushed it.If you link one causal event with another causal event, you will see a chain of causation: like a line of dominoes. If the stone rolls down the hill and into a passing car, the stone will smash into the car. If the impact causes the car to swerve, the car will swerve. If the car swerves into a tree, the car will hit the tree. If the car hitting the tree causes the passengers within to come to a too-abrupt stop, they will suffer the consequences. Each event is causally determined by the preceding event, as a result of its material nature. Philosophers call this ‘material determinism’. The Stoics’ materialism forces them to accept material determinism. As far as they’re concerned, if you understand the material nature of reality and the chain of cause and effect, you will see that things can only go as they must go.
But what does that mean for us? After all, we are real and a part of reality. Any materialist must say that we are material beings if we are anything at all. We have bodies; many modern materialists would go so far as to say that we are our bodies, since what else could we be when there is no reality beyond material reality? And as material beings we are subject to the law-governed nature of material reality. Push us off a cliff and we will fall; put us in salt water and we will float; expose us to fire and we will burn. This is the nature of our material reality. It is our nature as physical things.
But because of that, we too must be subject to material determinism. Everything that happens to us must happen as it does, and cannot happen any other way, because it is a part of an exceptionless and unbreakable chain of causation. And what’s more, everything that we do must be done exactly as it is done, according to our natures, because we too are a part of this exceptionless unbreakable chain. There is no escape from our fate. We cannot change our course in life any more than a stone can change its course as it’s rolling down a hill.
The cold hard logic of this line of reasoning compels the Stoics to accept a simple truth: everything that happens must happen exactly as it happens. In a reality composed only of physical things, governed by exceptionless laws of nature, the only way any event could happen differently would be if its preceding cause were different. But the only way that preceding cause could be different would be if its preceding cause were different. This forms an infinite regress, a chain of effect and cause, stretching right back to the first moment of space and time. The only way any event could have gone differently is if the initial conditions of the universe had been different. It’s possible that the initial conditions of the universe could have been different, but they weren’t. (Incidentally, the possibility that the initial conditions of the universe could have been different is what makes the Stoics material determinists and not logical determinists. But this technical distinction doesn’t make much difference to us.) In our universe, as it is, everything having happened as it has up to this point, everything that now happens must happen exactly as it happens and cannot happen differently.
Ordinarily, when people are faced with the concept of ‘determinism’, the intuitive reaction is that it leaves no room for human free will. If everything that happens must happen exactly as it happens and cannot happen any other way, then what about my choices? Are my choices determined, like every other event in the universe? Yes they are, says the determinist, and therefore your experience of free choice is an illusion. It seems to you as if you are choosing freely, but in truth your choices are no different from any other event in the universe: they are an effect following from a cause.
You face a choice about what to have for breakfast: toast or cereal. You think this is a free choice and that you freely choose to have cereal for breakfast. But if you understood the causes of your choice you would see that you were never going to choose any other way. You aren’t aware of what made you choose that way, but rest assured, there are causes for this effect. There must be, because it’s a material event in a material universe: the rules of that universe are absolute, and this single event is not an exception to those rules. It’s only your ignorance about what made you choose as you did that allows you to preserve the illusion that your choice is free. If you investigate the nature of reality, you will see that reality is material and is governed by exceptionless laws of nature. It follows from this that there is a chain of cause and effect that led you to make your choice. If you accept this then you will see that it was, in a sense, fated since the initial conditions of the universe that you would choose to have cereal for breakfast on this day. You are no more free to make a different choice than a stone is free to not roll down a hill when it is pushed.
Most people find this to be an unsettling thought. The tremendous value that we place on our free will is often enough to cause people to reject determinism outright. Not only is the illusion that we are free to do as we will a powerful illusion, it is also a pleasant one. We don’t like to think of ourselves as being slaves to our fate; we like to think that what we choose to do makes a difference. And further, if our choices are determined and not free, how could there be any moral accountability? If I push you and you fall into someone else, causing them to fall off a cliff and die, are you a murderer? Of course not: it wasn’t your fault and it wasn’t your doing. You were a victim of my actions, no different from the unfortunate deceased. Your falling into them was just an effect of a cause that originated in me. But if we are determinists, then we would have to say that my pushing you into them was also an effect of a cause beyond myself. The true cause of my actions is nothing less than the initial conditions of a material universe! And I can hardly be held accountable for that.
And so, if reality is only physical, then it would seem that determinism is true; and if determinism is true, then there is no free will. And if there is no free will then there is no moral accountability. Nothing is really our fault. But then, what is there for ethics to work with? How can we sensibly ask the question ‘how should I live?’ when you have no choice but to live exactly as you do, and have, and will, because you are a material being in a deterministic universe?
If you want to preserve free will then it would seem that you have to reject the Stoics’ line of reasoning or else the premise on which it is based: the material nature of reality. This is a common response, prompting various forms of ‘dualism’ (like Plato), all of which will assert that there is more to reality than material reality. The deterministic laws of the universe only apply at the material or physical level, but in the mental, spiritual, or otherwise transcendent realms of reality, the laws of material reality do not apply in the same way. This opens up the possibility of free choice. And so if we, as human beings, have an immaterial soul, then it must be this soul that is free and can exert its will on the body in order to make things go differently. A stone cannot choose, because it doesn’t have a soul, but we can, because we do. And you could argue that, since we observe ourselves making free choices, we must therefore have some immaterial part of ourselves that is not subject to the deterministic laws of the material universe.
Philosophers call people who believe that we have free will ‘libertarians’. They are contrasted with ‘determinists’, which is what philosophers call people who believe that we do not have free will. The choice between the two positions is often understood to be what logicians would call an exclusive disjunction: it’s one or the other and it can’t be both. So you must choose where you stand: Either we have free will, in which case there must be more to reality than physical reality, or there is not more to reality than physical reality, in which case we do not have free will. Many philosophers see this as an unavoidable ‘either/or’ because they understand free will to be incompatible with a deterministic physical universe. But according to the Stoics, this is all a big misunderstanding.
Compatibilism
The Stoics believe that free will is compatible with a deterministic physical universe. They think we still have the power to choose, and that we can be held accountable for our choices, even though things in the world will go as they will go. Because of this, their theory (and others like it) has come to be called ‘compatibilism’. The Stoics say that everything that happens must happen exactly as it happens, because there is no reality beyond material reality, but they also think that we are free in spite of this. We are free in amongst the chain of cause and effect. We cannot change how things go, but we can choose how to beas we go along with it. Because of this, how we live is still our responsibility; it’s still ‘up to us’ whether we live well or badly. It is this small insight that unlocks the great wealth of the Stoic art of living.
Push a stone down a hill and it will roll. If the stone is perfectly spherical and the hill is perfectly constant in its decline, with no obstacles or changes in its surface angle, then the spherical stone will roll down the hill in a straight line. It rolls according to its nature, as that plays out in its circumstances. But what if you roll a cone down a hill, or a non-spherical stone, or a stone that is weighted on one side? It will roll down the same hill in a curved line. It rolls according to its nature. If we asked ‘why did the stone roll as it did?’, we say it is because of the stone being the way it is. In a sense, the stone is responsible for its own trajectory down the hill. It didn’t get to choose how it was made, and it didn’t choose to be pushed, but nonetheless it is the reason for its trajectory. We could say it is the stone’s fault that it rolls as it does. Can’t we say the same of human choices?
I choose cereal for breakfast rather than toast. Why do I choose this? It is my nature, formed by my experience, playing out as it will in those particular circumstances. According to a deterministic universe, things were always going to play out exactly in this way, but why are they playing out this way rather than any other? What is the reason for my choice? The reason is me; I choose according to my preferences. Like the stone, my nature determines my trajectory, according to the circumstances. I am the reason for my choice. And so how can you say the choice is not mine?
Adopting this perspective, the Stoics find a way to preserve a sense of agency and freedom alongside a commitment to the deterministic nature of the physical universe. The combination of these two things is what gives their philosophy its power. Because of the deterministic nature of the universe, you are powerless to change anything ‘external’ to yourself: things will go as they will go. But because you are a will and a perspective and a thinking thing, equipped with the power of reason and the capacity to govern your desires and aversions, you have absolute agency over your ‘internal’ world.
The distinction between what is ‘internal’ and what is ‘external’ is very important in Stoicism. The line is drawn on the basis of what is or is not in your power to change. As we’ve seen, according to the Stoics the universe is materially determined and so everything that happens in it is beyond your power to change. These are ‘externals’ because they are literally ‘beyond’ you. They include all physical events in the world, like the weather or the seasons or natural disasters, but also more typically human concerns like other people’s opinions, your reputation, or being rich or poor, ugly or good-looking, and even the security of your own body, because who can stop getting sick or injured, or old, or dying? What remains in your power is your judgement, your opinions, your desires and your aversions. If you investigate the ideas that we have about these things, you will see that it’s always within our power to govern these ‘internal’ things.
The Stoics seem to understand a separation between the body and the will, such that the body is external to what I am and the will is internal to what I am. I can control my will, but I cannot really control my body. Taken at face value, the Stoics’ dividing line between ‘internals’ and ‘externals’ can appear simplistic and outdated. To say that my ‘body’ is somehow external to who and what I am would go against the standard medical understanding of psychology, for example. But this would misunderstand the philosophical point that the Stoics are making. They are trying to teach you an important truth about yourself and your human nature. If you follow their line of reasoning and investigate the idea then you will come to understand, with them, that you are a thinking thing. You think, therefore you are, and this thinking is what you are. You are your will, your mind, your capacity to govern yourself. This is the only thing that cannot be separated from you. We find Stoics saying that you can imprison my body, chain my foot, even cut it off, and you do not harm me because those things do not define what I am. Obviously these things will hurt, and they will harm my body, but that’s not the point. I am not those things. I am the thing that gets to decide how to react to those things. If my body decides to get sick or old, there’s really nothing I can do about it. But I can always decide whether or not to be upset about my body getting sick or old.
And there’s another important misunderstanding to avoid. Sometimes the Stoics’ emphasis on ‘things within our power’ gets mangled into a self-help cliché of ‘control the controllables’. Whilst there’s nothing essentially wrong with this mindset in its modern self-help form, it’s not really Stoicism. For the Stoics, only these things are within your power: your opinions, your aims, your desires and aversions, and, in short, your activity as a thinking thing. These you can control. Everything else is not in your power, including body, property, reputation, and what they would call ‘office’, which means something like your employment or position in society. These you cannot really control. It’s intuitive enough to place these things as ‘externals’: your job doesn’t define who and what you are, and neither does your house, your body, or what people think about you. We know this because we can have these things taken from us and remain whole. Lose your job, your house, you are still you. Lose your foot, now you are you with one foot, but you are still you. Lose your good name, your place and standing in society, it can feel like you’re losing everything that matters and makes you who you are, but if you are attentive to your inner life you will find that other people’s opinions do not define you.
The ‘control the controllables’ cliché shows itself to depart from Stoicism because it is applied to things like your work or your diet or your financial situation. When life is spiralling out of control, we are encouraged to ‘control the controllables’ and work hard, eat well, invest wisely, and the like. But the Stoics are determinists. They don’t think these things can go any other way than the way they will go: it doesn’t matter what you do. In a sense, you’ve already done it; in a sense, you are now just along for the ride. The only thing the Stoics think you can control is your attitude to these things. Your opinion is within your control, but the rest is up to fate.
Most people aren’t happy to commit to such a fatalistic determinism. But this means they aren’t really Stoics. They are probably Peripatetics – followers of Aristotle – whether they realise it or not. The challenge for the modern appropriation of a Stoic way of living, as I see it, is to save the great strengths of the Stoic approach without the deterministic foundations on which Stoicism, real Stoicism, is based. And this is a challenge, because it’s only as a result of their commitment to determinism that the Stoics locate everything of philosophical or ethical value in what is ‘internal’ to you, since it’s only there that you can exercise your powers of reason, judgement, or choice, which is what philosophy and ethics require. In a materially-determined universe, what is ‘external’ to you is not in your power to change, so there are no choices for you to make about these things, and therefore they have no ethical relevance; the Stoics follow Socrates and say that if it isn’t ethical then it is of no real value, and so you are free to be indifferent to these ‘external’ things. That studied indifference to ‘externals’ is what allows the Stoic to practise their art of living and remain untroubled no matter what happens. But what if you could affect a change in the material world? This would bring these ‘external’ things into your sphere of influence, making them ethically relevant for you. You now have choices to make. They cease to be indifferent; they become valuable. They become controllables that you can control, and so why shouldn’t you try to control them? If determinism isn’t true and your choices make a material difference, why should you be indifferent to things that you could so easily improve? But this is not the Stoic way; it is the way of Aristotle.
The Stoics accept material determinism and because of this they accept their fate. All that remains is to exercise your will as far as you are able within these constraints. If someone locks your leg in chains, you will be unable to move your leg, because it is not in your power to defy the laws of physics. But must you complain about it? Can anyone force you to complain or not complain as you are chained? No; that remains your choice. If you recognise the chaining of your leg as an ‘external’ event, something that must go as it will go, and therefore a matter of indifference to you, why must it bother you? You are free to react to this event as you choose, like Epictetus (a Roman Stoic of the 1st and 2nd century CE): ‘You can chain my leg, but not even Zeus can chain my will.’
Whether you agree that the kind of freedom or agency that the Stoics preserve is significant enough to do any useful work, or not, very much depends on whether you can join them in their compatibilist perspective. Many find they cannot: for example, the 17th century philosopher John Locke imagines a sleeping man taken unaware and placed into a locked room. As it happens, a good friend of the sleeping man is also locked in the room. The sleeping man awakes to find he is in pleasant company, and so he has no desire to leave the room. He stays willingly and does not investigate the matter further; for all he knows he is perfectly free to leave, because he never tries the door to find it locked. Whilst this man is staying in the room of his own preference, would we say that he is free? Locke says: no, of course not. He couldn’t do anything other than what he does, and that means he is not free, regardless of his preferences.
By contrast, a Stoic would say that this man is as free as he needs to be. Does he not have a choice? He is locked in a room, of course, and he can weep and wail and curse his fate. Or he can enjoy the company of his friend and remain contentedly. Either way he is locked in the room and will remain so until his circumstances change, but he has a choice about how to be as he is locked in the room and how to greet the change in circumstances when it comes. Understanding this point is the first small step towards achieving a great philosophical ideal. Having been sentenced by the courts, Socrates voluntarily went to prison, remained in prison, and accepted his fate contentedly: because Socrates acted in this way, he preserved his freedom even in prison and in death. Socrates acted in accordance with his judgement, regardless of any ‘external’ judgement that came his way. That is what it means for a philosopher to be free.
The Stoics say that we are in this life like a dog tied to a cart. The cart is going to go where it will go and we will go along with it; but we can be dragged along, or we can trot along cheerily. The choice is entirely free and entirely ours. If we want to go along in this life contentedly, all we need to do is apply ourselves to learning philosophy, learning to recognise the difference between what is ‘internal’ and what is ‘external’ to our will, learning that what is ‘good’ lies only in the governance of our own will and judgement, and that anything beyond this is a matter of indifference to us. Internally, we should want to have good judgement and to know the truth. Externally, we should want things to go exactly as they will go. That is the only way that we can be truly free and make ourselves invulnerable to misfortune.
Stoic Epistemology
In terms of their epistemology (theory of knowledge), unlike the Epicureans, the Stoics didn’t think that our interactions with the physical world, through our senses, were particularly reliable. The Stoics take this lesson from the Sceptics. Our senses often deceive us, so just because it seems a certain way to us doesn’t mean it is that way in reality. And this is true of ethical and non-ethical things. Pleasure might seem good, for example, and pain might seem bad, but that doesn’t mean pleasure is always good and pain is always bad, because our perceptions are unreliable and we are easily deceived and led astray by others or ourselves.
But unlike the Sceptics, the Stoics didn’t think our senses were totally unreliable: we are capable of knowledge about the physical world. Like Socrates and the Platonists, the Stoics understood that rational thought needs to step in and correct our sense impressions to discern what seems from what is, to turn mere ‘impression’ or ‘opinion’ into ‘knowledge’. But unlike the Platonists, the Stoics didn’t think we needed to appeal to immaterial Forms in order to get this knowledge.
To walk this fine line between the Platonists, the Sceptics, and the Epicureans, the Stoics appeal to a distinct term of art: the ‘cognitive impression’, which is a technical way of saying a clear and distinct idea of something. Some things appear to us a bit loose and vague; other things appear to us very clearly and distinctly. The vague things are unreliable and we should withhold judgement from these things, like a Sceptic. But the clear and distinct things can be taken as a source of knowledge, like a Platonist’s ‘perfect idea’. This hybrid epistemological theory recommends a hybrid philosophical approach: If something seems vague, we shouldn’t trust it as a good source of knowledge and we should react like a Sceptic; but we can work away and try to clarify the idea, investigating it like a Platonist, and that might lead to knowledge.
What’s doing the work here is clarity. When an idea is unclear or vague, you cannot be sure what it means, and so you cannot take it as a good source of knowledge. Therefore, if you want knowledge, you must first have clear ideas and not vague impressions. Set yourself to task, then, on clarifying your vague ideas.
Zeno offered a helpful illustration: A hand held out flat and open is like a perception or a sense impression: it’s open to interpretation. Closing the fingers together into a point, like that famous Italian gesture, is like assenting to that sense impression: it’s holding it, but only lightly. Closing the fist is like a ‘cognitive impression’: it has a firm grasp. Finally, placing the other hand over the closed fist is knowledge: it grasps what is grasped. Firstly we say it seems (an impression), then we say it is (an opinion), then we say we know that it is (a true opinion or ‘cognitive impression’), then we say we know how or why it is (knowledge). Though there isn’t an explicit connection, there is a clear similarity with Plato’s epistemology here, which reaches up into the other-worldly realm of the Forms in order to move from ‘opinion’ to ‘knowledge’. But the Stoics’ epistemology never leaves this earthly realm. All they will say is that knowledge, real knowledge, is achieved by seeing something clearly and distinctly and being able to offer an account of what makes it true.
It sounds something like common sense really, but what’s crucially ruled out, in contrast to the Platonists, is the idea that there is some kind of special secret other-worldly knowledge that we need to find in order to make sense of things here in this world. Because of their materialism, the Stoics believed we have everything in front of us. There is no other world, only this one, right here and now. This already has therapeutic implications: There is no escape from your world and nothing is going to save you, so if you are to be saved then you must save yourself; and what’s more you have everything you need to save yourself, right here, right now. Nothing is hidden from you. You just need to apply yourself and see things clearly. And this is always true. You can be happy now, or you will never be happy.
The Stoic philosophical ideal is a human being perfected in their knowledge and understanding of themselves and of the world. And in order to perfect your understanding of yourself and the world, you need to clarify your ideas.
A Brief Introduction to the History of Logic
Following their physics and epistemology, logic comes to play an essential role for the Stoics’ philosophy because it is logic that gives clarity to otherwise vague ideas. Logic provides an account of what makes something true, and in that way it turns mere opinion into real knowledge. Or at least that was its original intention.
‘Logic’ comes from the Ancient Greek word ‘logos’. Socrates (via Plato) had already drawn the distinction between ‘mythos’ and ‘logos’, two ways someone can offer an account of why something is the case. If I ask you why something is the case, you can offer me a nice story about how the gods made it so. You can give me a myth, which will be fun and pleasing to the ear, but Socrates will complain that this myth doesn’t really explain anything. It just sort of re-tells the situation in a mythical light. Why are some humans by nature more angry than others? ‘Because the gods made them with fiery spirits.’ But if we take ‘fiery spirit’ to be nothing more than a mythical way of saying ‘angry nature’, then your explanation of why some human beings have an angry nature is that they have an angry nature. This is hardly informative. What is it that makes them angry? Why are they angry in that way? That is what we want to know.
What our understanding strives for is not ‘mythos’ but ‘logos’. The etymology of the word ‘logos’ suggests that it means ‘word’ or ‘thought’ or ‘discourse’ or ‘reason’ or ‘account’ or ‘reasoned explanation’. It is not only ‘word’, in the bare sense of ‘a sound or string of letters that represents something’, because the Greeks had other words like ‘lexis’ for that purpose; and neither is it only ‘thought’, since the Greeks had other words like ‘énnoia’ for that purpose; so the meaning of ‘logos’ carries added explanatory weight.
Etymology can be confusing and misleading, especially when dealing with words in translation. But occasionally looking into the origin of the meaning of a word can put you on the right track to understanding a concept. It can offer some clarification. The word ‘etymology’ offers us a helpfully self-referential example here. The etymology of the word etymology is from the Ancient Greek ‘etymos’, meaning ‘true sense’ or ‘real meaning’, and ‘logos’ meaning ‘account’. So ‘etymology’ is ‘an account of true meaning’. An etymology is an attempt at explaining why a word means what it does, not only what it means. It is not just a description, such as you would find in a dictionary definition. A ‘logos’ is not only a description, like a ‘mythos’, it is also an attempt at an explanatory account. It is not just a ‘what’ but also a ‘how’ and a ‘why’. A mythos says that human beings have free will because they have been given a spark of the divine or were made in God’s image; a logos says that human beings have free will because they have the capacity for reason: we can choose freely because we can think. The logos offers more than just a nice story: it offers a rational explanation.
In Ancient Greek philosophy the word ‘logos’ comes to stand for a rational explanation, but because there were different ways of interpreting what ‘rational explanation’ meant, and what limits it might have, it took on different meanings in different contexts. For the pre-Socratic Sophists, for whom there was no truth beyond what people believed, ‘logos’ just meant debate, any debate; for Aristotle, the inventor of ‘logic’, it meant not just any debate but specifically an appeal to rational argument, to be contrasted with ‘pathos’ (appeal to emotions) and ‘ethos’ (appeal to legitimate authority, such as being morally upright or having expertise); for many other Ancient Greek philosophers, ‘logos’ meant nothing less than the ultimate underlying structure of the universe, the reason why things are as they are and are at all. This reason invariably assumes some kind of purposiveness: not just the how but also the why of the universe. It is this meaning that survives into Christianity, such as the opening line of the Gospel according to John: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’ ‘Word’ here is an English translation of the original Greek ‘logos’. The choice of ‘Word’ obscures a mystery, but I suppose it scans better than the more literal: ‘In the beginning was the purposeful rational explanation, and the purposeful rational explanation was with God, and the purposeful rational explanation was God.’ (Though to my mind the more literal version makes a lot more sense.)
What the Stoics want is to perfect their knowledge. They want to make vague ideas more clear and distinct. Offering a ‘logos’ of their ideas is the way to achieve this. And logic is the method by which this is done.
As mentioned briefly, we say it was Aristotle who invented logic, mainly to serve his protoscientific purposes. But there are important differences between Aristotelian and Stoic logic. Aristotle’s logic moves amongst his system of categories, inferring particulars from universals, essentially telling you what you already know from what you already know. A lot of modern logic still keeps to this Aristotelian spirit. So if you know that all fish live underwater, and that this thing is a fish, then you already know that this thing lives underwater. You don’t have to go and check if its true in this particular instance, because you already know the universal statement is true. If I know that I am shorter than my brother, and my brother is shorter than his flatmate, then I know I am shorter than my brother’s flatmate; there’s no need for me to check just to make sure, because I know the relation of ‘being shorter than’ applies universally across any particular instance. Whilst it might be philosophical sacrilege to suggest as much, this way of using logic is not much more than a protoscientific shortcut. We could go out and measure my height against my brother’s flatmate’s height, just to confirm our inference, but logic tells us that we don’t need to because we can trust in the inference from what has already been observed. But that’s all logic is really doing here. For Aristotle, logic plays a subsidiary role to science. Ultimately, we must trust in our observations. Logic is only a tool to make that process a bit easier and quicker; and this is literally the case when we use computers to make our calculations for us. As such, it’s fairly low down on the list of philosophical priorities. Aristotle goes so far as to say that logic isn’t a proper part of ‘philosophy’ at all. You can outsource its function without any great loss in your own understanding.
The Stoics disagreed. They saw logic as essential to philosophy and inseparable from a proper understanding of the other elements of philosophy: physics and ethics. Logic doesn’t just tell us what we know from what we already know, it can help us to clarify our ideas, and clarifying our ideas is how we make knowledge from mere opinion. In this way, logic can teach us something new and important. Logic is not just a tool to help us make scientific inferences, it can be a tool to help us understand ourselves. Logic is, after all, constructed out of our words, and our words are what we use to represent what we mean to say. Logic is composed of meanings. And meaning means everything to us.
And what does it mean to say ‘all fish live underwater’? This is a ‘universal’ claim since it applies to ‘all’ fish. What makes it true? How do we claim to know this; how do we claim this as an item of ‘knowledge’? We have observed many fish, and we can ‘point at’ each of them and say truly ‘that fish lives underwater’. How is it that we can get from these ‘many’ observations to the universal claim that ‘all’ fish live underwater? It’s convenient to say as much, but does that convenience make it true? Have we seen all the fish?
Do we mean to say that there is something ‘essential’ about fish that means they must live underwater? How do we find this ‘essence’? Can we see it in any one of our observations? Presumably you cannot see the ‘essence’ of a fish from just one trout. So two? Three? How many do we need to see in order to recognise the ‘essence’ of a fish?
And if we did, somehow, come to recognise the ‘essence’ of a fish, that essence would exist beyond any one instance of a fish. The essence of a fish, what makes a fish a fish, must exist in all fishes. So there is, in all fish, something extra, something beyond the individual fish: an ‘essence’ or ‘fishness’ that they all share. Plato calls this a ‘Form’ and says it is immaterial; Aristotle calls this a ‘universal’ and says it is multiply located in all fish.
And we could say this of anything, not just fish. We could say there are universals of shoes, blues, colours, and cakes. Do we mean to suggest that these ‘universals’ exist? Where do they exist, and how? Because these universals are not the things themselves, but something more: a shoe is a shoe, but it is not, in itself, the ‘essence of shoeness’. So that ‘essence of shoeness’ must exist in a way beyond the individual shoe.
Very quickly we are led down a path where we are required to commit to something more than we intended. We just wanted to say something about the common features of fish or shoes; now we’ve constructed an immaterial realm of ideas. That’s not really in the spirit of Aristotle’s protoscientific intentions or the Stoics’ desire to clarify their ideas. Our logical method is failing us here.
What this shows is that logical inferences, or assumptions or rules, are not innocent. Through them we can unwittingly commit to things that we did not intend. The Stoics don’t want to commit to the existence of Platonic Forms or Aristotelian universals. What they want is to perfect their knowledge by clarifying their ideas. For them, the Aristotelian approach to logic has taken a wrong turn.
The Stoics take a different approach to logic, one that doesn’t imply or rely on Aristotle’s system of categories or Plato’s theory of Forms. Logic, for the Stoics, works with individually meaningful statements: what are called ‘propositions’. A proposition is a statement of a thought in its simplest form; it is an attempt to capture what you mean to say in the most direct way and no more or less than that. This appeal to clarity and sincerity is the legacy of Socrates’ ‘conversation with questioning’, developed by the Dialecticians and handed on to the Stoics. In stating our thoughts in this simple and direct way, we don’t want to hide behind vagueness and ambiguity, we don’t want to lead ourselves or others astray by asserting what we don’t really mean, and we certainly don’t want to unwittingly assume a system of categories or a realm of Forms. We just want to understand our ideas, to know ourselves, and that means we want to capture the meaning of our thoughts as clearly as possible. That’s all that logic should do. We don’t want this method to commit to extra meanings that we did not intend.
What emerges is an entirely different way of doing logic, which would come to be called ‘propositional logic’ because it deals in ‘propositions’ (logicians like things to be clear and literal). The Aristotelian system – which is sometimes called ‘term logic’ because it deals in ‘terms’ – shows us ‘what follows from what’ for the types of statements that fall within its system of categories, serving its Aristotelian purposes, but it limits us to only working with the types of statements that the system allows. You can do a lot within that system, though, and it’s for that reason it was the dominant system of logic for 2,000 years. Aristotle invented logic and his followers kept it alive into the medieval period, which saw philosophers and theologians further codify and organise Aristotle’s logical method, and this became the standard form of logical education. Many people still introduce the subject using Aristotle’s methods because, whilst it might not do all that a modern system of logic can do, it can still help teach you to think logically, and that’s no bad thing.
But the Stoics’ logical method proved to be more adaptable, in the long run. This isn’t the time or place to go any further into the history of logic, and so I will leave an exploration of Leibniz and Frege to your leisure. Nor is this an introduction to logical method, since that task would require a book and not just a part of a chapter. Suffice to say that great developments were made over the 17th to 20th centuries, and the logical method now available to students is extraordinarily well-worked-out and has the potential to be incredibly useful. To my mind it is a terrible, terrible shame that so few are given the opportunity to learn it, and that those few who are given the opportunity to learn it are rarely given any reason to appreciate why it is so valuable. Logic was once a practical skill with an ethical purpose. I think it can be again. I would like every introduction to logic to contain a reminder of how all philosophy was once oriented towards the task of understanding what it is to live well as a human being and making some attempt to do so, and that logic was understood to be an essential part of that task. Logic helps you to clarify your thoughts and assess them for consistency and contradictions. If you apply that method to yourself, you can come to understand yourself clearly and learn to live in a way that is consistent with yourself. If you do not do that, you will forever be vulnerable to living in contradiction with yourself. And, as any logician knows, a contradiction can never be true.
Logicians use the word ‘consistent’ to describe a set of propositions that are not contradictory. An ‘inconsistent’ set contains at least one contradiction; a ‘consistent’ set does not. In the end, thinking well is all about consistency, in the logicians’ sense, and avoiding contradiction. And this is what the Stoics aim for in their logical method. They look to express their thoughts in the clearest possible terms. They then look for contradictions within those thoughts, or between those thoughts and others that they might have. They look to see which thoughts are consistent with one another, such that they can form a coherent set. This is their route to knowledge. Perfect knowledge will be a consistent set of thoughts and judgements – the set of thoughts that contains no contradictions, since contradictions can never be true. Perfect living will be to live in alignment with those judgements. These are aims that we are unlikely to reach but must nonetheless aspire towards. Like Socrates, we put our life and thoughts to the test and subject them to examination, looking for contradictions.
Consider the examples that were used by the Sceptics; those cases in which the Sceptics would say that there manifestly cannot be any knowledge about the matter because there are contradictory impressions or opinions. Pleasure seems to be good to Epicurus, but indifferent or bad to Antisthenes. The oar seems bent when in water, but take it out of the water and it seems straight. But pleasure cannot be both good and bad, and an oar cannot be both bent and straight, because these are contradictory. But since there seems to be no way to tell which is the correct answer, the Sceptics conclude there is no answer.
The Stoics disagree. They apply their logical method. They say that you can find knowledge if you investigate the matter logically. Say you see a bent oar in water. Express this thought in its most basic terms: ‘The oar is bent.’ Say you see the same oar out of water: ‘The oar is not bent.’ The oar cannot be both bent and not bent; this is a contradiction; it cannot be true. So we must have misunderstood something. Apply the method again; try to further clarify the idea; that is how we improve our understanding. As it stands, there are contradictory impressions, so we don’t know whether the oar ‘is’ or ‘is not’ bent. All we can talk about is what ‘seems’ to be the case. In the water, we can say ‘the oar seems bent’. Out of the water, we can say ‘the oar seems straight’. We have two different impressions; one of the oar bent, another of the oar not bent. What is it that accounts for the difference? Clearly, it’s whether or not the oar is in the water: in the water, we see an image of a bent oar; out of the water, we see an image of an oar not bent. Which is the true image? How can we tell?
The Stoics have already given you the answer. Apply your logical method: further clarify your ideas and assess them for consistency. Out of the water, we see the image of a straight oar. But don’t we also touch and feel a straight oar? Don’t we put it alongside other straight things and see it line up? These impressions are all consistent: they do not contradict one another. But in the water, we see an image of a bent oar. This image is inconsistent with what we touch, or what we measure when we compare the oar with other straight objects. The image of the bent oar is the one that ought to be rejected because it is the one that is inconsistent with the rest of our thoughts. It doesn’t stand up to rational scrutiny. We resolve the apparent contradiction of the bent oar by saying that whilst in the water ‘the oar seems bent’, but in reality ‘the oar is not bent’. The apparent contradiction only arises because it seems other than it is, which means it is an illusion.
What accounts for the illusion? The water. And – to cut a long and obvious story short – if you further investigate your impressions and ideas about these things then you will come to the correct answer about the refractive properties of water and such (and you can go as far as a developed scientific understanding will allow). This is what the Stoics were aiming for: a rational account of their impressions. It’s their logical method that’s got them there. By clarifying their vague ideas and assessing them for consistency, they have turned vague and unreliable impressions and opinions into something that they can firmly grasp. They form a clear and distinct idea of something – a ‘cognitive impression’ – and then they offer a rational account of that idea, turning it into knowledge. The cycle of logical appraisal will continue to search for contradictions and vagueness, emulating the Socratic ideal that we ought to live the examined life and put our thoughts to the test, but we have escaped the apathetic pull of the Sceptics and made some way towards knowledge and understanding and, ultimately, wisdom.
And this applies to ethics just as much as physics. Epicurus says that pleasure is good but Antisthenes disagrees. What can we know, and how? Investigate the idea, clarify it, and look for contradictions. Epicurus says that ‘pleasure is good’ and Antisthenes says that ‘pleasure is not good’. But pleasure cannot be both good and not good; this is a contradiction, just the like the oar cannot be both bent and not bent. And so in light of this contradiction, just like the bent oar, we cannot say that ‘pleasure is good’ but only that ‘pleasure seems good’ to Epicurus and that ‘pleasure seems not good’ to Antisthenes. We have two images, two ‘seemings’; which is the true image?
Hold it alongside other images and ideas that you have; compare it to other things that seem ‘good’. Does pleasure contradict with any of these? For example, Socrates (for one) might point out that temperance – the willing denial of pleasure – seems good because it is virtuous and often in our interest to moderate our desires. But if pleasure really were good, then wouldn’t the denial of it be bad? And so if temperance (the denial of pleasure) really is good, then it would seem to be contradictory to say that pleasure is good. Either pleasure is good, in which case we should pursue it, or the denial of pleasure is good, in which case we should not pursue it. Which is it to be?
Or consider other virtues like courage. There is nothing pleasurable about throwing yourself into a military campaign. If pleasure is good, and pain is bad, then wouldn’t it be bad to go into battle, with all its attendant pains? But then, in pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain, you would not be courageous. And courage is understood to be good. So which is it to be that we call good and rightly to be pursued: courage, or pleasure?
Does the goodness of pleasure contradict with itself? Picture the pleasure of the rapist. Would we call this ‘good’? Surely not. But can we deny that the rapist experiences ‘pleasure’? We cannot, but we say that this pleasure is bad: it’s the wrong kind of pleasure. But then pleasure is in contradiction with itself; it seems different depending on the moral circumstances: pleasure is good when it is right and bad when it is wrong. What accounts for this difference?
As with the oar in the water, the answer is obvious: it’s the value of virtue. If we investigate these ideas for clarity and consistency, like Socrates we will understand that virtue is the only thing that is always clearly and consistently good. Virtue is good and is never bad, whereas pleasure only seems good (sometimes). And so the goodness of pleasure is revealed to be an illusion: something that seems but isn’t. This is the lesson that Socrates taught Antisthenes, which is why he says that ‘pleasure is not good’. (Antisthenes is perfectly aware that pleasure seems good; it’s his understanding of the power of that illusion that motivates his saying ‘I would rather go mad than experience pleasure’.) But this is the lesson that Epicurus rejects, because Epicurus, the hedonist, doesn’t acknowledge ethical value beyond pleasure and pain. The value of goodness beyond pleasure and badness beyond pain is what accounts for the difference between the two views, offering us a rational explanation for the apparent contradiction.
The Stoics, sharing the legacy of Socrates’ method and teaching, come to the same conclusion as Antisthenes. And therefore they can resolve the apparent contradiction by saying that ‘pleasure seems good’ to Epicurus, but in reality ‘pleasure is not good’. Like the bent oar, the goodness of pleasure is an illusion. It doesn’t stand up to rational scrutiny. The Stoics can see this very clearly and distinctly, and they can offer a rational account for their impression, so they will say that they know that pleasure is not good. Once again they have escaped the apathetic pull of the Sceptics and made a way towards wisdom.
What’s doing the work here, whatever the subject matter, is logic. It is the drive to investigate your ideas and hold them to account, subjecting them to rational scrutiny, taking vague ideas and making them clear, looking for contradictions or inconsistencies. This is how we get knowledge and understanding and true ideas about how to live well as human beings. All that remains is to make some attempt to live in a way that is consistent with these ideas.
Stoic Ethics
Stoic ethics is inseparably entwined with Stoic physics and Stoic logic. Which is no surprise, really, since those three parts are what Zeno considered to be essential to philosophy.
According to Stoic physics, we live in a deterministic material universe in which everything that happens must happen exactly as it happens and cannot happen any other way. The only freedom we have is the exercise of our own wills: as thinking things, we can use our reason to reflect on our desires and aversions and govern these things according to our judgement. But this freedom doesn’t extend to action. We act according to our natures, like a stone rolling down a hill. We cannot change any physical event in the universe – we cannot change what happens – but we can decide how we will be as it happens. We can manage our attitude and opinions. We are like a dog tied to a cart: the cart is moving regardless of what you do, and you can go along cheerily or else be dragged along, the choice is yours.
According to Stoic logic, we get knowledge and understanding by clarifying our vague impressions and ideas and rejecting any that are contradictory or inconsistent. If we want to improve our understanding, we must set ourselves to the task of clarifying the ideas that we have about things, investigating them much as a Platonist would.
When the Stoics apply their logical method to ethics, looking for the most clear and consistent set of thoughts, they agree with Socrates that ethical virtue is the only thing that we call good without exception. Everything else that we might identify as good can be called both good and bad, and can be made good by virtue and bad by vice, but virtue is always good in and of itself. Pleasure, for example, is good when it is virtuous but bad when it is vicious; strength and intelligence are good when are used virtuously but bad when they are used viciously; wealth is good when it is earned and used well but bad when it is not deserved or used badly. If you were to try to assert that ‘pleasure is good’ or ‘strength and intelligence are good’ or ‘wealth is good’, you would find this thought to be contradictory with itself or with other thoughts that you have about goodness. Because of this contradiction it cannot be true and so must be rejected. But if you assert ‘ethical virtue is good’ you will find it to be an idea that is consistent with itself and with other ideas that you have about goodness. This idea passes the logical test; it stands up to rational scrutiny.
As a result, the Stoics join Socrates in prioritising the ethical. The only thing that really matters, the only thing of real value, is ethical virtue. Everything else is indifferent and only inherits its value from the absolute value of ethical goodness.
But an obvious problem arises for the Stoics: their logic compels them to be consistent with themselves, and their ethics compels them to be good, but their physics says that they cannot do anything other than what they do. If they are to be consistent with themselves, they would have to accept that any ‘goodness’ cannot be expressed in outward actions, since their actions are materially determined. What, then, is virtue? What does it mean to live well? Since it manifestly cannot be a matter of doing the right things.
What the Stoics realise is that virtue is an internal and not external matter. Being virtuous is about how you live, not what you do. They separate an appraisal of the cause from its consequence. If an evil tyrant gets upset, and in their upset maliciously and unjustly takes a citizen’s money and throws it into the sea, there’s nothing to suggest that they do anything virtuous. Does it help if it turns out that, unbeknownst to the tyrant, the citizen had embezzled the money? And that, as it turns out, some fisherman find the money and distribute it amongst the poor? The tyrant has inadvertently upheld justice and produced a good outcome here: are they worthy of praise because of this? Surely not. They behaved selfishly and maliciously; it’s only by chance that their bad behaviour brought about a good outcome. The good outcome came from a cause beyond themselves, and so they cannot be held morally accountable for it, whether good or bad.
But this is exactly what the Stoics think is the case in any outcome within a deterministic universe. Everything that happens will happen as it does regardless of what we do, since everything we do is just an effect from a cause that is beyond ourselves. The only thing we can do is govern ourselves as we are going along with things. We can go along contentedly, or not; we can accept our fate, or we can complain about it; the choice is ours. For the Stoics, virtue can only lie in this internal world, since anything beyond this is beyond our control. And because it’s beyond our control, we can hardly be held accountable for it. You can only do what you can and you can only be held accountable for what you can do, which is those things over which you have some control: your will, your judgement, your opinions, your desires and aversions. These are within your power to change, not external events. And so if you want to improve the world, improve yourself, because that is all you can do. That is what it means to be virtuous, for the Stoics. It is the only form of ethics that is consistent with their physics, and their logic compels them to be consistent.
What can you do to improve yourself, in a deterministic universe? You cannot act differently, but you can think differently. You can desire differently. You can use your reason to govern your desires and aversions. You can choose to align your will with nature, and want things to go exactly as they will go. You can work to have good judgement, and to want to have good judgement, and so be averse to having your thoughts fall into vagueness or inconsistency. You can want to be a philosopher, and you can be a philosopher. You can pursue knowledge and understanding and wisdom, rejecting contradictory ideas, withholding judgement from vague ideas, and assenting only to those ideas that stand up to rational scrutiny. In this pursuit you are totally free. Not even Zeus can force you to accept something as true when it is false or contradictory.
A common reaction to the Stoics’ very ‘internalised’ model of virtue is that it doesn’t match up with our idea that being good is often about ‘doing the right thing’. But the Stoics will say this idea is just an illusion – something that seems true but isn’t – and only comes from being ignorant about the deterministic nature of the universe. Those ideas are inconsistent with one another, and of the two ideas, the deterministic nature of the universe is the one that is consistent with our wider understanding of ourselves and the world. Virtue cannot be about doing the right thing, because it is not in your power to change what happens in the world. Things will go as they will go. In being beyond your power to change, you can hardly be praised or blamed for how things go. Virtue can only be about what you can control – what is ‘in your power’ or what is ‘up to you’ – and those are only your judgement, your will, your desires and aversions. These are where virtue will be found because it is only these things that are in your control. This makes virtue an internal matter, not external.
But because virtue is an internal and not external matter, that also means it doesn’t depend on any external things. Unlike certain other schools of thought, particularly Aristotle’s, you don’t need anything in the world to happen in any particular way in order to be virtuous. You are always free to be virtuous, no matter what happens to you. It doesn’t matter if you’re ugly, or poor, or born to a bad family, or sick or injured, or persecuted, or enslaved, or killed. These are all external matters – things over which you have no control – and are therefore not things that can have any bearing on your virtue. Being good-looking cannot give you virtue. Can being ugly take it away? Say you are ugly. Should you be unhappy about this? You are free to investigate the idea and decide what the correct judgement is in this case. Who can force you to say ‘looks are important’? Must you value looks enough to dislike being ugly? If you judge, having investigated the idea, that good looks are nothing to be proud of, then no one can force you to assent to the truth of the contrary. Virtue is expressed only by having the right judgements about these things, and then living in a way that is aligned with these judgements. If you don’t think good looks are anything to be proud of, or ugliness anything to be ashamed of, then why would you be unhappy to be ugly? You live in contradiction with yourself to be so unhappy about something that you don’t think really matters!
Once again, it all comes back to consistency and avoiding contradiction. If you investigate the physical world, you must accept material determinism; and if you accept material determinism, then you must reject the idea that you can change the physical world. If you investigate your nature, you will see that you are a thinking thing, with a capacity for judgement and desire and aversion, and you are free to use your judgement to govern your desires and aversions. If you investigate your ideas about goodness and virtue, you will see that virtue is more valuable than anything else. We cannot change the world; we are free to govern ourselves; virtue is most valuable. Put these ideas together and you will see that you have absolute freedom to be virtuous by bringing your judgements into alignment with the truth, and your desires and aversions into alignment with your judgement. This forms a perfectly consistent set of ideas. It stands up to rational scrutiny.
Logic, physics, ethics. The three parts of the Stoic system come together in perfect accord, offering us a way to live in harmony with the world as it is and with ourselves as we pass through it. What it means to live well as a Stoic is just that: to live in accordance with nature and have your judgements, desires, and aversions align with the world as it is. Want only to have good judgement and for things to go exactly as they will go, then you will be happy, free, wise, and invulnerable to misfortune.
Stoic Cosmology
A brief word on Stoic cosmology. It will only be a brief word because, whilst it is interesting, very little depends on it. As mentioned, the Stoics understood the universe to be a material universe. They believed the material universe was not static but cyclical, eternally extinguishing and renewing itself in great ‘conflagrations’. The universe burns itself up from its own activity and then rises anew like a phoenix from its own ashes. This process of death and rebirth is overseen by a perfectly rational divine mind. Each time the universe is recycled, the divine mind (much like Plato’s Craftsman in the Timaeus) arranges the material of the universe into its distinct form in its initial conditions, setting it off on its deterministic chain of cause and effect. Because the divine mind is perfectly rational, it always finds the perfect arrangement of this matter, meaning each cycle is exactly the same as every other cycle. The universe is eternally renewing itself and eternally recurring in exactly the same way, time after time, for all of time.
The perfectly rational divine mind, that crafts order from chaos, is God. But it is a Stoic god, not quite the same as the God of our modern monotheisms. This god will not judge, nor forgive, nor listen to your prayers. The Stoic god is not a ‘personal’ god, in that sense. The Stoic god is a material god, meaning it physically exists and is composed of matter – which it must be, since the Stoics don’t believe that immaterial things can exist. But whilst god is material, god must also be that ultimate totality that all monotheistic divinities must be. If you delve into the philosophy of religion, you will find any number of arguments for the ‘necessary’ existence of such a being, and these arguments come with necessary consequences. God, in being necessary, must be perfect; and in being perfect, cannot be limited or constrained. There cannot be anything ‘greater’ than God. The Stoics understood all of this, as did Aristotle and probably Plato, and if you combine these ideas with a commitment to materialism then you offer up only one conclusion: For the Stoics, god is the material universe, in a very real sense.
Spinoza will renew this idea in the 17th century and call it ‘Deus sive Natura’ – God or Nature – and will stress that these two terms refer to exactly the same thing. Philosophers since Spinoza have come to call this view ‘Pantheism’, meaning something like ‘everything is god, and god is everything’.
The material universe is god, and god is the material universe. Existence is nothing less than god expressing its nature. All things that exist in the universe are just parts of god, playing their individual parts as they participate in the whole.
The Stoic god is a material god, but also a rational god. The Stoic god is a material mind: a thinking thing. Most parts of the universe do not knowingly participate in this, but as human beings, as thinking things, we have been given a special part of the divine: our capacity for rational thought. The Stoics talk about this metaphorically, as mythos, as Plato did, to refer to our ‘higher’ capacities of rational thought and with that the ability to govern our ‘lower’ animalistic tendencies. But the Stoics’ cosmology also compels them to talk about this in a literal sense. Our capacity for rational thought is literally a part of god expressing itself through us. It’s this that explains why we can be ‘free’ even in a materially-determined universe: we are free like god when we participate in god’s freedom, by exercising the divine part of ourselves, which is our capacity for rational thought. This also explains why reason is so powerful and why we should follow its commands. To follow the commands of reason is to follow the commands of god. It is (literally) a divine thing to rule yourself by reason.
It’s an expansive and elaborate cosmological theory. It moves far beyond the Stoic’s philosophical remit, I think. There’s a temptation to see parallels between Stoic cosmology and the theories about cyclical universes that we find in contemporary physics, but it wouldn’t be reasonable to say that the Stoics are coming to these theories in the same reliable data-driven ways as contemporary cosmologists. In truth, the Stoics are duped into their cosmology by a form of reasoning now understood to be faulty.
The Stoics inferred the cyclical nature of the universe from the fact that they observed motion and change in the universe. But nothing moves without being moved, and nothing changes without being caused to change. And so the Stoics infer backwards in time to the idea that there must have been a first point in time that kicked everything off: a first movement or first cause. But what caused this first movement in the first moment in time? It cannot be anything immaterial, since there are no immaterial things. So the first movement in the universe must have been caused by a material thing beyond itself. But the universe is the complete set of material things! There is nothing beyond the material universe. It follows from this that the universe must be the cause of itself. But how can something cause itself in the first moment in time when it is already moved away from that first moment in time? Time has a direction of travel, after all, from the past, through the present, and into the future. You cannot go backwards in time; you cannot cause something backwards in time. Causation happens ‘forwards’, from the present to the future. But the universe causes itself. How can the origin of the universe be ‘forwards’ from the universe itself? Only by circling back on itself. And therefore it stands to reason that the universe circles back on itself and causes its own beginning, again and again, in an eternal cycle.
But there can only be one universe: the universe is ‘everything’ or ‘all that exists’, the ultimate and absolute unity, and you can’t have more than one ‘all’. And so the only way one universe can begin is if there is room for it. It follows that the universe must expire in order to be reborn, and its expiration must be the cause of a new universe.
How can a universe expire in a way that creates itself anew? It must be an event full of enough energy or ‘motion’ and ‘change’ to bring about the origin of an entirely new universe. And the only thing that fits this description is the idea of a great conflagration: the universe burns itself up from its own excessive energy and movement, and from that fiery chaos comes renewed and perfect order.
And how does order come from chaos? There must be a reason. The only reason that stands to reason (for a mind pre-Newton and pre-Darwin) is that there is a divine mind that crafts order from chaos. And so this is what the Stoics believed. How else could you explain it?
Like many ancient thinkers, the Stoics took this inference to be perpetually confirmed by observation. Look around you: see the majesty and wonder of the world; see the movements of the heavens and the Earth; see Nature and everything in it in all its glorious detail. How intricate it is. How beautiful it is. How could this just happen by chance? It stretches comprehension to suggest as much. The universe is so complex and yet so ordered: it is like a fantastically complicated mechanism. Ordinarily, when we encounter complicated mechanisms, such as in watches or computers or internal combustion engines, we don’t think this specified complexity just ‘happens’. These things have a clearly-identifiable function – like telling the time or computing things or making cars move – and they are made to be well-suited to that function. This kind of thing doesn’t just happen by chance. We think someone must have made it happen. The mechanisms bear all the hallmarks of being the products of purposeful and intentional design. There must have been a designer or artificer, a watchmaker or engineer. It is natural to draw the analogy and say that the universe also bears the hallmarks of purposeful and intentional design, and from that analogy infer that there must be a designer of the universe.
But this is a faulty inference. We live in a post-Newton and post-Darwin world. We know now that many of the apparent ‘signs of design’ in the universe are explainable through entirely natural phenomena. Order and what seems like specified complexity can come from chaos if there is random variation and a process of evolution via natural selection. If we could see all the stars and planets that didn’t form, we might not be so surprised by those that did; if we could see all the random genetic mutations that were not adaptively useful enough to survive, we wouldn’t be so blown away by the accumulation of those that did. With these laws in mind, everything in the universe seems like an entirely unsurprising outcome from the initial conditions of a law-governed universe.
Because of this, there is no reason for the Stoics to reject a modern understanding of cosmology. In many ways it actually does them some favours, since we can offer a ‘rational account’ of the material universe without having to appeal to vague notions like a creative divine fire or a perfectly repeating cyclical universe. We can entertain these notions if we wish, but they are not necessary for the Stoic philosophy. It makes no difference if their cosmological theories are true or false, and so nothing depends on it.
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