Carneades

(213-128 B.C.E.)

 

Carneades, a leader of the Academic Skeptics who as head of Plato’s Academy developed its antidogmatism far beyond the point to which Arcesilaus had brought it. As in the case of Arcesilaus, we have nothing written by Carneades. His philosophy as we know it is a set of criticisms of the Epicureans and the Stoics, especially of the Stoic Chrysippus.

Carneades was born in Cyrene, Cyrenaica (now in Libya) and lived to be about 85 years old, becoming blind in his old age. He dressed negligently and never accepted an invitation to dinner, so that he could keep at his work. It is said that while eating he would become so absorbed in his thoughts that friends had to move his hands for him. But he was unbeatable in argument and had great oratorical powers. About 156 B.C.E. he went on a mission to Rome with other Athenian notables in order to convince Rome to exempt Athens from a fine that had been imposed. At this time he illustrated the logic of Skepticism by delivering his two famous orations, one praising justice and proving that its foundations are in natural law, the other, with equal persuasiveness, praising injustice and reducing the notion of justice to utility.

Morality

Chrysippus and the other Stoics asserted that virtue, conformity to nature, is the sole good; vice, deviation from nature, the sole evil; and the rest of human actions adiaphora, morally indifferent. But, said Carneades, the Sage of the Stoics want certain things in nature other than virtue, and therefore these things are not indifferent; they are in fact good, along with virtue. He caused Antipater the Stoic to admit that a good reputation is good too, even though Chrysippus, in the traditional manner, had put it among the adiaphoroa. All that it is necessary to talk about is what men in fact pursue. The art of effectively pursuing what we want was designated the "art of living" by Carneades. This art uses common sense and probability, to pithanon, to attain the fullest satisfaction of one’s orge, or natural impulse, and eschews all arrogant, dogmatic claims to the Truth.

Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Skepticism all grappled with one of the basic problems of morality, the freedom of man to do good and evil. Carneades found that the Stoics had excluded this freedom from their tight, providential causal chain, despite their efforts to fit it in. He defended human freedom by asserting the following: 1) the will is caused, but it is caused by itself and moves by virtue of its own nature (like the Epicurean atoms, with their clinamen); 2) there are successions of events, human actions preceded by certain events and conditions, but a succession is not the same as an efficacious, causal relationship. Events precede a man’s action but do not force him to act; a man’s will always has the last move; 3) even if there were a rigid causal chain predetermined from all eternity, we could not predict with certainty particular effects, given the many fortuitous causes that are always entering the picture; so for all practical human purposes there is no such chain, only successions of events.