PHASES

The history of the Stoic school is conventionally divided into three phases:

• Early Stoicism: from Zeno's foundation of the school, c. 300, to the late second century b.c.: the period which includes the headship of the greatest Stoic of them all, Chrysippus

• Middle Stoicism: the era of Panaetius and Posidonius

• Roman Stoicism: the Roman Imperial period, dominated by Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius

Although the Stoic tradition’s continuity is at least as important as any resolution into distinct phases, the traditional divisions do reflect key changes which no school history can afford to ignore. The following account will, in fact, assume a rough division into five phases, despite acknowledgment of extensive overlaps between them:

1. the first generation

2. the era of the early Athenian scholarchs

3. the Platonising phase (‘Middle Stoicism’)

4. the first century b.c. decentralisation

5. the Imperial phase

The primary ground for separating these is that each represents, to some extent, a different perspective on what it is to be a Stoic – that is, on what allegiances and commitments are entailed by the chosen label.

The phrase 'traditional grammar' refers to the body of knowledge about the correct use of word-forms and syntax transmitted in the West at least since the early Middle Ages for the study of Latin and Greek and whose categories were used as a template for the study of other languages. It has long been recognised that traditional grammar shares numerous terms and concepts with the linguistic studies of the Stoics, and this chapter examines the relations between them.

SOURCES

As is so often the case with Hellenistic philosophy, the dearth of reliable, high-quality, first-hand material is a serious obstacle to reconstructing Stoic thought in this area. No Stoic grammatical treatise of any period survives; indeed, only one text with what can be called, broadly, grammatical interests is extant in even something like its original form; in any case this book of Chrysippus’ Logical Questions (PHerc 307) belongs rather in what moderns would call philosophical logic and the philosophy of language – although this overlap is significant in itself (see Section 2.2).

INTRODUCTION

According to Diogenes Laertius, most of the Stoics - beginning with Zeno of Citium - divided philosophical doctrine into three parts: one physical, one ethical, and one logical. Diogenes also reports three homely similes concerning the relation among these parts of philosophy: (1) philosophy is like an animal, with logic corresponding to the bones and sinews, ethics to the more fleshy parts, and physics to the soul; (2) philosophy is like an egg, with logic corresponding to 'the outside' (shell), ethics to 'what is in between' (the white), and physics to 'the innermost part' (yolk); and (3) philosophy is like a productive field, with logic corresponding to the enclosing fence, ethics to the crop, and physics to the earth or trees.

Whatever the precise import of these similes might have been, it seems clear that the Stoics held that physical doctrine stands in an intimate relation to ethics. For the Stoics, the end of human life is ‘to live conformably with nature’ (to homologoumenon têi phusei zên). Consequently, physics – that part of philosophy that pertains to nature and that reveals the import of living ‘conformably with nature’ – obviously has ethical import. Logically distinct from this aspect of the relation of physical doctrine to ethics is a second point of connection between the two: the common contemporary assumption that it is both possible and desirable to undertake a ‘valueneutral’ investigation of nature is quite foreign to Stoic thought. Indeed, it is common to find what might be termed large-scale Stoic philosophical themes influencing physical doctrine – including some of the rather technical aspects of Stoic physical doctrine. In particular, the Stoic themes of the unity and cohesion of the cosmos and of an all-encompassing divine reason controlling the cosmos are of fundamental importance to Stoic physics.

The object of Stoic theology was the governing principle of the cosmos, insofar as this could also be labeled 'god'. The Stoics accordingly regarded theology as part of physics, more specifically as that part which does not focus on the details and the purely physical aspects of cosmic processes, but rather on their overall coherence, teleology, and providential design, as well as on the question of how this cosmic theology relates to popular forms of belief and worship. Issues covered by Stoic theology include the nature of the divine principle of the cosmos, the existence and nature of the other gods, our proper attitude toward the gods - that is, the virtue of piety (eusebeia) and the opposite vice of impiety (asebeia), including our attitude toward traditional myth and ritual - and issues relating to fate and providence, including the way the providential ordering of the cosmos can be known by mankind by means of oracles and divination.

Whereas the founding father of the school, Zeno of Citium, still appears to have published his theological views in the context of his main cosmological work On the whole, his successors accorded a more prominent position to theology as a subject in its own right. Cleanthes explicitly set off theology from the rest of physics, or from physics in the narrow sense (DL VII 41), and wrote a separate work On the gods. Persaeus wrote a work On impiety. Sphaerus appears to have been the first Stoic to have written a separate work On divination. Chrysippus published not only an On the gods and an On Zeus, but also works specifically devoted to fate, providence, divination, and oracles. He appears to have followed in Cleanthes’ footsteps in treating theology as a separate subdiscipline. At any rate he claimed that it was the part of physics that was to be treated last, thus putting it at the final stage of the curriculum (the study of physics as a whole coming after logic and ethics).

Stoic logic is in its core a propositional logic. Stoic inference concerns the relations between items that have the structure of propositions. These items are the assertibles (axiômata). They are the primary bearers of truth-values. Accordingly, Stoic logic falls into two main parts: the theory of arguments and the theory of assertibles, which are the components from which the arguments are built.

SAYABLES AND ASSERTIBLES

What is an assertible? According to the Stoic standard definition, it is

This definition places the assertible in the genus of self-complete sayables, and so everything that holds in general for sayables and for self-complete sayables holds equally for assertibles. Sayables (lekta) are items placed between mere vocal sounds on the one hand and the world on the other. They are, very roughly, meanings: ‘what we say are things, which in fact are sayables’ (DL VII 57). Sayables are the underlying meanings in everything we say or think; they underlie any rational presentation we have (S. E. MVIII 70). But they generally also subsist when no one actually says or thinks them.

The histories of philosophy and medicine in the ancient world are deeply intertwined. Some individuals we think of as philosophers had serious medical interests (Empedocles and Sextus Empiricus, for instance); rather more doctors exhibited a more than merely avocational interest in philosophy (Alcmaeon, Diocles of Carystus, Herophilus, Erasistratus, Asclepiades, Menodotus, and preeminently Galen). The treatises of the Hippocratic corpus are full of philosophy; and both Plato and Aristotle paid due attention to medicine.

Perhaps the most important single instance of the cross-fertilization of ideas between physician and philosopher consists in the great debate about the nature of science and the limits of epistemology conducted with equal vigour between the skeptical schools and their medical colleagues the Empiricists (and later the Methodists) on the one hand, and the various Dogmatic sects of both philosophy and medicine on the other. Indeed, even the terminology is revealing: anti-theoreticians in both the medical and the philosophical camps standardly refer to their opponents as Dogmatists.

INTRODUCTION

In one of the talks 'after class' given by the Stoic Epictetus, he is recorded as warning his audience against supposing that they can turn themselves into professional teachers of philosophy overnight, simply by rehearsing the principles they have worked up. His remarks include this intriguing passage (III 21.18–19):

Two things are immediately obvious: (1) In talking of Socrates, Zeno, and the Cynic Diogenes in this way, Epictetus is not doing history of philosophy. These great names – of thinkers who lived over four or (in Socrates’ case) five hundred years previously – are simply his authorities and paradigms. (2) Epictetus is not thinking of Socrates, Zeno, and Diogenes as authors or proponents of distinct although no doubt related philosophies, as they would standardly be presented in modern accounts of Greek philosophy. The implication is rather that there is one philosophy – or one thing, philosophy – but that the three of them each adopt a different mode of communicating it to others: a different mode of ‘care’, or what one might roughly and in generic terms call ‘therapy’.

Three Stoic doctrines have heavily influenced the course of later moral philosophy: (1) Eudaemonism: the ultimate end for rational action is the agent's own happiness. (2) Naturalism: happiness and virtue consist in living in accord with nature. (3) Moralism: moral virtue is to be chosen for its own sake and is to be preferred above any combination of items with non-moral value. These Stoic doctrines provide some later moralists with a starting-point and an outline that they try to develop and amplify. These moralists include supporters of the position that I will call 'Scholastic naturalism'. For other later moralists, Stoicism provides a target; they develop their own positions by explaining why they reject the Stoic position. Still others defend some of these Stoic doctrines and reject others.

For obvious reasons, my account of the influence of these Stoic doctrines will be highly selective. I will simply sketch Scholastic naturalism through a few remarks about Aquinas, Suarez, and Grotius. On the other side, I will examine Pufendorf’s reasons for rejecting Scholastic naturalism, and the attempts of Butler and Hutcheson to defend some Stoic doctrines while rejecting others.

My interest in these reactions to Stoicism and Scholastic naturalism is primarily philosophical. I hope to understand how different people argue for or against these doctrines, and to see how reasonable the arguments are. It will be clear that I cannot complete this task in this one chapter; I will simply try to identify the main arguments and to raise some relevant questions about them.

In his dialogue Laelius On Friendship, which explores the friendship and the self-understanding of two noble Roman statesmen, Cicero expounds a more promising variant of Montaigne's view of friendship as both noble and unsurpassably good. Cicero has chosen Gaius Laelius, a respected leader and devoted friend to his colleague Publius Scipio Africanus the Younger, as the aptest vehicle to set forth a rich and pleasing but also revealing praise of friendship. The dialogue was written in 44 b.c., after the Republic had fallen and Cicero had been driven into retirement, in a world in which great friendships among eminent leaders of a thriving political life had become impossible. It is set in 129 b.c., when the Republic was still vibrant and full of brilliant leaders, if not wholly healthy: The troubles that were eventually to bring it down were already in evidence, as Cicero reminds us with hints throughout the dialogue, and especially with the story of Tiberius Gracchus.

This is the same Gracchus whose loyal friend Gaius Blossius is praised with such unreserve by Montaigne. Montaigne's source for the story is Cicero's dialogue, although what Montaigne does not report is that Laelius himself bitterly condemns Gracchus for his sedition and Blossius for his loyalty.

In opening his thematic discussion of the relationship of justice to friendship, Aristotle says, “It seems, then, just as we said at the beginning, that friendship and the just deal with the same things and involve the same persons” (1159b25–26). In fact, what Aristotle said at the beginning of his treatment of friendship was somewhat different: “When men are friends they have no need of justice, but when they are just they need friendship in addition, and justice in the highest sense seems to involve an element of friendship” (1155a26–28). The first clause of this earlier statement is ambiguous, for although it might be taken merely to mean that successful friendship must include justice, it encourages the more pleasing thought that friendship dispenses with the need for justice altogether, or at least that it automatically produces justice without effort. Aristotle's new formulation of the relation of justice to friendship suggests that these more hopeful readings would be unjustified. Friendship would automatically include justice if mere goodwill were enough to secure justice, but Aristotle has shown that even the most ardent goodwill is not enough to equalize benefits where capacities are highly unequal, and that goodwill alone is often too thin a reed to rely upon.

In the Lysis, Socrates' dialogue with two young friends about friendship, Socrates pursues the unsettling idea that all friendship is rooted in human neediness and defectiveness and is treasured only because and only to the extent that we hope to get from others things that we are unable to provide for ourselves. “He who is good … be[ing] to that extent sufficient for himself … would be in want of nothing,” Socrates argues, and hence would neither treasure nor love anything or anyone else. The radical claim advanced in the central section of the dialogue is not merely that human love begins in need – this alone would be a rather unremarkable claim about human development – but that love begins and ends and is wholly driven by need. Moreover, the Lysis explores the possibility that the most important needs that cause us to love are not needs for the pleasures and activities of friendship as such, but are directed to other things that act as remedies for our defects in the way that medicine does for the defects of the body, and to which the human beings we call our friends are merely the means.

In the remaining chapters of Book 9, Aristotle will spell out in detail the implications of his concept of friendship as extended self-love that he introduces in 9.4. In 9.5, he will analyze the elements of friendship that consist in wishing for the friend's life and well-being, or goodwill, and discuss how this crucial root of friendship comes into being. In 9.6, he will turn to friends' agreement in practical choices, or concord, and the resulting common activity and sense of solidarity that promote goodwill and that form the core of political friendship. In 9.7, he will explore the roots of benevolent activity and the ways in which it strengthens goodwill and affection. After taking up again the question of self-love in 9.8, Aristotle then in 9.9, 9.10, and 9.12 discusses the desirability and best conditions for friends' spending their days together, and in 9.11, he gives his final reflections on the possibilities of friends' sharing their sorrows and joys.

Goodwill

Aristotle makes a fresh beginning in 9.5 with the theme of goodwill, the utterly indispensable basis of friendship, the necessary beginning that is barely a beginning, the critical impulse of selflessness that remains, when left to itself, passive, idle, and weak, but without which none of the beauty and none of the joy of friendship could ever exist.

In Chapter 9 of Book 9, Aristotle gives his deepest reflections on the relationship of friendship to human neediness. As he does so, he brings his discussion of friendship onto a new plane. He mentions happiness for the first time in Books 8 and 9, and mentions it repeatedly. In connection with the new focus on happiness, several other themes now come prominently to the fore, including those of nature, pleasure, human self-sufficiency, and the philosophic life. Gently but persistently, Aristotle presses the question of why a truly happy man will need friends, clearly implying that if he feels no such need, he will not love. This need may not be a need for anything separable that arises out of friendship; it may be a simple need to love, an inclination to concern oneself with and contribute to the happiness of others. We have hitherto regarded this inclination or need as an irreducible part of human nature. But Aristotle now asks how such a need can be explained, and how its satisfaction fits together with the satisfactions of the other wants and needs that collectively constitute human happiness.

The question becomes important at this point because of Aristotle's argument in 9.4 that good men can be their own best friends and especially because of what he has shown in 9.8 about the self-love of noble souls.