Aristotle vs the Stoics: part II, ethics

Were the Stoics just copying Aristotle? Spoiler alert: not really.

Aristotle (left) and Zeno of Citium (right).

Did the Stoics come up with an innovative, powerful philosophy of life? Or did they just take Aristotle’s stuff, changed the language here and there, and called it a day? The possibility has often been raised, all the way back to Cicero’s On the Ends of Good and Evil, that Stoicism may differ more in wording than in substance from its Aristotelian counterpart. Is that true?

I have explored the issue at a recent workshop in practical philosophy that I have co-organized in Athens together with my colleagues John Sellars and Rob Colter. In the first installment of this two-part series we have seen some of the significant differences between Stoicism and Aristotelianism in terms of metaphysics (the nature of the cosmos, god, and the soul) as well as in the area of logic (term vs propositional). Time now to turn to the third classical field of study of ancient philosophy, providing us with the most crucial comparison: ethics.

Ethics: virtue and all that jazz

Ethics, for the Stoics, is the most important aspect of their system, though I’m not sure Aristotle would say the same in his case. And that may be the crucial difference between the two: the Stoics really aimed at a practical philosophy of life, while Aristotle was more concerned with theoretical inquiry into metaphysics, logic, and ethics.

Let’s begin with the most controversial similarity / difference: for Aristotle, the chief good in life, what constitutes eudaimonia is a combination of virtue, in the sense of moral excellence, and “externals” such as health, wealth, education, reputation, and so forth. Both these things are necessary, and jointly sufficient, for a flourishing life. For the Stoics (just like for the Cynics), virtue is necessary and sufficient to insure a life worth living. Externals, however, do have value (unlike for the Cynics), in the limited sense that they can make our life more pleasant.

Most importantly, the Stoic attitude toward externals is that those are the means by which we exercise our virtue, as Epictetus puts it by way of his analogy with playing ball:

“You see skilled ballplayers doing the same thing. None of them is concerned about the ball, as though it were good or bad, but they are concerned about how they throw and catch. It’s in throwing and catching that their deftness, skill, speed, and responsiveness are manifest, with the result that while I may not be able to catch the ball even if I make a pouch out of my toga, an expert ballplayer can catch any ball I throw.” (Discourses, 2.5)

The ball in the metaphor is an external, for example money. Money in itself is neither good nor bad, despite popular misconception. What you do with the money you have is good or bad. Money, Epictetus would remind us, is ultimately not up to us, because it depends on a number of factors that are not under our control. But how we handle money is up to us, and constitutes the focus of our efforts. To use the famous (or infamous, it depends) Stoic phrase: virtue is the only good, vice is the only bad, and everything else is indifferent (to virtue) and may be preferred or dispreferred. This is where Cicero becomes downright sarcastic in his criticism of Cato:

“According to [Zeno], all these things which the ancients called good, were not good, but ‘preferred’; and so also with bodily excellences, it was foolish of the ancients to call them ‘desirable for their own sakes’; they were not ‘desirable’ but ‘worth taking’; and in short, speaking generally, a life bountifully supplied with all the other things in accordance with nature, in addition to virtue, was not ‘more desirable,’ but only ‘more worth taking’ than a life of virtue and virtue alone. … What acuteness of intellect! What a satisfactory reason for the creation of a new philosophy!” (De Finibus, 4.21)

But the fact is that, pace Cicero, that difference in emphasis is crucial. If you noticed the way I characterized the contrast above, I said that for Aristotle virtue and externals are necessary for a flourishing life, while for the Stoics virtue by itself is sufficient for a life worth living. The implication is that Aristotle and the Stoics defined eudaimonia differently: there is no question that flourishing requires externals. But it is equally valid to suggest that a life of sickness, poverty, and so forth may still be worth living if one behaves virtuously. The upshot is that the Aristotelian life is only accessible to a relatively small group of privileged people, while everyone—from slaves to emperors—can be a Stoic. (To be a Cynic, as Epictetus says in Discourses 3.22, requires a special call from God…)

It follows that Aristotelianism and Stoicism also differ in terms of their telos, that is the ultimate goal that leads to a eudaimonic life. For Aristotle, there are two kinds of good life: the chief one is the contemplative life of a philosopher or scientist. The second choice, if one can’t take the first path, is a life of political involvement, meaning making significant contributions to one’s polis. Again, you can see how this is a rather aristocratic view of things, which leaves most human beings unable to be eudaimon.

The Stoics were far more ecumenical: for them the goal of life is to live in agreement with nature, by which they mean especially human nature. As I’ve explained in another essay, this translates to a life in which we put to use the two characteristics that define the human animal: our social nature and our ability to reason. And pretty much everyone, except psychopaths and those who are severely mentally disabled, can use reason to solve problems while at the same time acting cooperatively and prosocially with respect to other human beings.

The remains of the Stoa Poikile in Athens, where Stoicism began. Photo by the Author.

We have talked about virtue a lot, so let’s take a look at how the two schools of thought regarded this fundamental concept. The main difference is that for Aristotle there are many, clearly distinct virtues. Twelve, to be specific, and they are defined as the golden mean between two excesses. For instance, courage is the ideal between cowardice and rashness; magnanimity lies between pusillanimity and vanity; wittiness is between boorishness and buffoonery; and so forth.

The Stoics, instead, thought that there is only one virtue, wisdom broadly construed, and that individual virtues are just particular aspects of it. They singled out four such aspects, the so-called cardinal virtues: practical wisdom, courage, justice, and temperance. (Though see table 2.1 from this article by Matthew Sharpe about a number of sub-virtues within each of the cardinal ones.)

Is this another potential examples of the Stoics making up a whole new philosophy out of a semantic caveat? Not at all. For Aristotle, someone may be, for instance, courageous yet unjust. Not for the Stoics, because courage is specifically moral courage. There are no courageous Nazi, in the Stoic way of looking at things, though there may be Nazi who launch themselves into battle without care for their physical safety.

Stoicism and Peripateticism also differ in one crucial aspect of their psychology, in part as a result of their diverging conception of the soul, as we saw last time. The Stoics followed Socrates in adopting what is referred to by modern scholars as an intellectualist approach to moral action. If we know that something is right, we do it. Period. Which implies, as Socrates famously said, that ignorance is the root of all evil, because people do bad things only out of lack of knowledge of what is good and evil. This being, incidentally, the very definition of the virtue of phronesis, or practical wisdom, hence the superlative title of Cicero’s book: On the Ends of Good and Evil.

“Ignorance” here doesn’t mean that people who go to college act morally and while high school dropouts don’t. It’s moral knowledge we are talking about, and that one can easily cut across levels of formal education. There is something very appealing about the Stoic take here, because it results in compassion toward the mistakes of others, as well as our own. As Epictetus puts it:

“‘Shouldn’t a thief or an adulterer be eliminated, just for being who he is?’ No, and you’d do better to phrase your question like this: ‘Should we do away with this person because he’s mistaken and misled about matters of supreme importance, and because he’s become blind—not in the sense that he’s lost the ability to distinguish white and black by sight, but because he’s lost the mental ability to distinguish good and bad?’ If you put the question like this, you’ll realize how inhumane it is, and see that it’s no different from saying, ‘So shouldn’t we kill this blind person, or this deaf person?’ If a person is injured most by the loss of the most important things, and if the most important thing in every individual is right will, what’s the point in getting angry with someone if he loses it?” (Discourses, 1.18)

Aristotle sees things differently, though, and he also has a point. He famously said that many unvirtuous people suffer from what we would call a psychological condition: akrasia, or weakness of the will. They know what’s good for them, but they can’t bring themselves to do it, through a sort of moral laziness. For instance, I do know that it would be good for me to get up and go to the gym. But I’m sooo comfortable laying on the couch and munching in front of the tv. I’ll tell you what, I’ll go to the gym tomorrow…

The distance between the two conceptions, though, may be less than it at first appears. A modern behavioral psychologist, for instance, would tell you that what we really think is better reflected by our actions than by our words. So I may say that I know the gym is good for me, but my actions betray the conviction that, really, munching on the couch is truly good. The difference between intellectualism and akrasia could also be bridged by the observation, made by Socrates, that people tend to engage in what modern psychologists call hyperbolic discounting, underestimating future benefits (or negatives) while overvaluing present ones, as if we were looking at the future through a distorting mirror that may make things appear further than they really are. If this is right, I don’t truly grasp that the gym is good for me, because the benefits are into the distant future. By contrast, the advantages of engaging in a bit of couch-potatoeing right now are pretty obvious.

The last point of contrast that John Sellars, Rob Colter, and I have identified during the Athens seminar concern social and political philosophy. Here the difference is rather stark: Aristotle’s interest was centered on the polis, the Greek city-state as a model for the world. At its most expansive, Aristotle attempted to articulate (and instill in his pupil, Alexander the Great) a sense of Hellenism, that is of Greek cultural identity. The Greeks, for him, were superior to the barbarians, though the latter had their own specific and even admirable cultural traits. Compare that to the Stoic concept of cosmopolitanism, derived from the Cynics and articulated by Epictetus:

“If what the philosophers say about the kinship of God and men is true, we can only follow the example of Socrates, and if someone asks where we’re from, never say ‘I’m an Athenian’ or ‘I’m a Corinthian,’ but ‘I’m a citizen of the universe.’” (Discourses, 1.9)

Because human beings are connected by kinship, we are all members of the same universal family (the literal meaning of “cosmopolis”). A major ethical consequence of seeing things this way comes when Epictetus articulates his role ethics (e.g., Discourses 3.23). He says that although we play different roles in life (father, friend, son, colleague, citizen) the overriding role, the one that has priority over all others, is that of a human being, a member of the cosmopolis. Or, as Marcus Aurelius puts it:

“As [emperor], my social community and my country is Rome, but as a human being it’s the universe. So it’s only things that benefit these communities that are good for me.” (Meditations, 6.44)

To summarize what we have been talking about in these two essays, here is a table quickly recapping the whole shebang:

What are we to conclude from all of the above? It seems clear in my mind that Aristotelianism and Stoicism, although related, are sufficiently distinct philosophies of life. Moreover, of the two, Stoicism is both the more useful and the one that is more in sync with a modern outlook.

There are, of course, things that I would reject in both philosophies. I don’t believe in a Prime Mover any more than I accept the notion of a living cosmos. There are also elements that I would keep from both sources: term and predicate logic.

But when it comes to the ethics, the Aristotelian approach is impractical (only a contemplative or, secondarily, a political life are worth pursuing), elitist (you need wealth and good looks to live a eudaimonic life!), and parochial (Hellenism). By contrast, everyone can live a Stoic life, so long as they try to be the best human beings they can be. Even serious adversity resulting in a dearth of most externals will still not mean that your life is not worth living. And—perhaps most important of all—Stoicism aspires to a true brother/sisterhood of all of humanity, which is the only way I can see the human species to survive into the distant future.