Stoicism

Distinguishing Between What We Can and Cannot Control

Stoicism as a school of philosophy includes some of the most distinguished intellectuals of antiquity. Founded by Zeno (334-262 B.C.E.), who assembled his school on the Stoa (Greek for porch, hence the term stoic), this philosophical movement attracted Cleanthes (303-233 B.C.E.), Aristo in Athens and later found such advocates in Rome as Cicero (106-43 B.C.E.), Epictetus (60-117 C.E.), Seneca (4 B.C.E.?-65 C.E.) and the Emperor Marcus Aurelius (121-180 C.E.). Zeno had been inspired as a youth by the ethical teachings and particularly by the courageous death of Socrates. This influence helped to fix the overwhelming emphasis of Stoic philosophy upon ethics, although the Stoics addressed themselves to all three divisions of philosophy formulated by Aristotle’s Lyceum: logic, physics, and ethics.

Wisdom and Control versus Pleasure

In their moral philosophy, the Stoics aimed at happiness, but unlike the Epicureans they did not expect to find it in pleasure. Instead, the Stoics sought happiness through wisdom, a wisdom by which to control what lay within human power and to accept with dignified resignation what had to be. They were profoundly influenced by Socrates, who had faced death with serenity and courage. This example of superb control over the emotions in the face of the supreme threat to one’s existence, a threat of death, provided the Stoics with an authentic model after which to pattern their lives. Centuries later the Stoic, Epictetus, said that "I cannot escape death, but cannot I escape the dread of it?" Developing this same theme in a more general way, he wrote, "Demand not that events should happen as you wish; but wish them to happen as they do happen, and you will go on well." We cannot, that is, control all events, but we can control our attitude toward what happens. It is useless to fear future events, for they will happen in any case. But it is possible by an act of will to control our fear. We should not, therefore, fear events—in a real sense we have "nothing to fear but fear itself."

There is an elegant simplicity to this moral philosophy, and yet it was a philosophy for an intellectual elite. The conclusion was simple enough, to control one’s attitudes, but how did the Stoics arrive at this conclusion in a philosophical way? They did it by creating a mental picture of what the world must be like and how man fits into this world. The world, they said, is an orderly arrangement where humans and physical things behave according to principles of purpose. They saw throughout all of nature the operation of reason and law. The Stoics relied upon a special idea of God to explain this view of the world, for they thought of God as a rational substance existing not in some single location but in all of nature, in all things. It was this kind of God, a pervading substantial form of reason, that controls and orders the whole structure of nature, that the Stoics said determines the course of events. Herein lay the basis for moral philosophy, but the direction in which Stoic thought moved on these matters was set by their theory of the nature of knowledge.

Human Nature

The Stoics knew that to build a moral philosophy it is necessary to have a clear view of what human nature is like. They shaped their view of human nature by simply transferring to the study of humanity the very same ideas they had used in describing nature at large. Just as the world is a material order permeated by the fiery substance called reason or god, so also a person is a material being who is permeated by the very same fiery substance. When the Stoics said that people contained a spark of the divine within them, they meant that in a real sense a person contains part of the substance of god. God is the soul of the world, and each person’s soul is part of god. This spark of the divine is a very fine and pure material substance that permeates a person’s body, causing it to move and to be capable of all sensations. The soul is corporal, comes from god, and is transmitted by parents to children in a physical way. The Stoics thought that the soul was centered in the heart and that it circulated through the blood steam. What the soul added to the body was the delicate mechanism of the five senses as well as the powers of speech and reproduction. But since god is the Logos, or reason, the soul of man is also rooted in reason and consequently human personality finds its unique expression in its rationality. For the Stoics, however, human rationality did not mean simply that people are able to think, or to reason about things, but rather that a person’s nature participates in the rational structure and order of the whole of nature. Human rationality represents a person’s awareness of the actual order of things and of his or her place in this order. It is the awareness that all things obey law. To relate human behavior to this order of law was the chief concern of Stoic moral philosophy.

Ethics and the Human Drama

Moral philosophy in Stoic thought rested upon a simple insight, wherein each person was viewed as an actor in a drama. What Epictetus meant when he used this image was that an actor does not choose a role, but on the contrary it is the author or director of the drama who selects people to play the various roles. In the drama of the world, it is God, or the principle of reason, who determines what each person shall be and how he or she will be situated in history. Human reason, said the Stoics, consists in recognizing what one’s role in this drama is and then performing the part well. Some people have "bit parts," while others are cast into leading roles. "If it be [God’s] pleasure that you should act a poor person, see that you act it well; or a cripple or a ruler, or a private citizen. For this is your business, ", says Epictetus, "to act well the given part." The actor develops a great indifference to those things over which he or she has no control, as, for example, the shape and form of the scenery as well as who the other players will be. The actor especially has no control over the story or its plot. But there is one thing the actor can control, and that is his or her attitude and emotions. The actor can sulk because of a bit part, or be consumed with jealousy because someone else was chosen to be the hero, or feel terribly insulted because the make-up artist has provided a particularly ugly nose. But neither sulking nor jealousy nor feeling insulted can in any way alter the fact that he or she has a bit part, is not a hero, and must wear an ugly nose. All these feelings can do is rob the actor of happiness. If he or she can remain free from these feelings, or develop what the Stoics called apathy, a serenity and happiness that are the mark of a wise person will be achieved. The wise person is the one who knows what his or her role is.

The Problem of Freedom

There is, however, a persistent problem in Stoic moral philosophy, and this concerns the nature of human freedom. The whole Stoic analysis of the structure of nature as being fixed, that is, caused or ordered by god’s reason, is rather easy to follow, especially when we think of this grand scheme as a cosmic drama. It may be true that actors do not choose their roles. But what is the difference between choosing your role in the drama, on the one hand, or choosing your attitude on the other? If you are not free to choose one, how can you be free to choose the other? It could very well be that god not only chose you to be a poor person, but also cast you as a particularly disgruntled poor person. Do attitudes float freely waiting to be chosen by the passing parade of humanity, or are they as much a part of a person as eye color?

The Stoics stuck doggedly to their notion that attitudes are under the control of a person’s choice, that by an act of will we can decide how we shall react to events. But they never provided a satisfactory explanation for the fact that providence rules everything while at the same time providence does not rule our attitudes. The closest they came to an explanation was to imply that whereas everything in the whole universe behaves according to law or reason, or the Logos, it is the special feature of human beings that they behave according to their knowledge of the law. For example, water evaporates from the heat of the sun and later condenses and returns in the form of rain. But one drop never says to the other, "Here we go again," as if to register disgust at being uprooted from the blue sea. A human being undergoes a similar process of change when he or she begins to age and face death; but people know what is happening, for in addition to the mechanical process of aging, they "know" that it is happening. No amount of additional knowledge will change the fact that a person is mortal, but the Stoics built their whole moral philosophy on the conviction that if someone knows the rigorous law and understands one’s role as inevitable, he or she will not strain against the inevitable but will move cheerfully with the pace of history. Happiness is not a product of choice; it is rather a quality of existence, which follows from acquiescing or agreeing to what has to be. Freedom, therefore, is not the power to alter our destiny but rather the absence of emotional disturbance.

Cosmopolitanism and Justice

It was inevitable that the Stoics also developed a strong notion of cosmopolitanism, the idea that all persons are citizens of the same human community. To look at the world process as a drama was to admit that everyone had a role in it. Human relations were viewed by the Stoics as having the greatest significance, for human beings were the bearers of the divine spark. What related persons to each other was the fact that each person shared a common element. It was as though the Logos were a main telephone line and all people had their own telephone and the entire circuit was on a party line, thereby connecting god to all people and all people to each other. Or, as Cicero put it: "…since reason exists both in man and in god, the first common possession of god and man is reason. But those who have reason in common must also have right reason in common. And since right reason is Law, we must believe that men have Law also in common with the gods. Further, those who share Law must also share Justice, and those who share these are to be regarded as members of the same commonwealth." Universal brotherhood and the doctrine of a universal natural law of justice were among the most impressive contributions made to the Western mind by the Stoics. They had injected the basic themes into the stream of thought that were to have a decisive impact, particularly upon the development of Christian philosophy in the next period.

Although Stoicism shared many of the characteristics of Epicurean philosophy, it had made some radical innovations. With the Epicureans, the Stoics put their chief emphasis upon the practical concerns of ethics, regarded self control as the center of ethics, viewed all of nature in materialistic terms and sought happiness as the end. The most significant variation injected by the Stoics was that they viewed the world not as the product of chance but as the product of an ordering mind, or reason. This view involved the Stoics in a highly optimistic attitude regarding the possibilities of human wisdom. Yet it was against this claim to wisdom, a claim that we can know so much about the detailed operation of the world, that there developed the critical philosophy of the Skeptics.