From ancient to new Stoicism: III—Stoic ethics

A conceptual map of where Stoicism came from and where it may be going

Ethics, image from clipart-library.com.

Let us continue our exploration of what a possible Stoicism for the 21st century and beyond might look like by finishing first to survey its ancient forerunner. So far we’ve looked at Stoic physics and logic, it is now time to turn to the crucial topic of ethics, which is supposed to be the fruit of studying the other two fields of inquiry. What we want is to arrive at an understanding of how we can live a life worth living (ethics), and in order to do so, according to the early Stoics, we need to grasp something about how the world works (physics) and to reason correctly about it (logic). As in the previous two occasions, I’m going to refer the reader to the excellent treatment by Marion Durand and Simon Shogry, published in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, if you are interested in digging deeper.

Stoicism as eudaimonism

To begin with, Stoicism is a type of eudaimonism, i.e., a philosophy that posits eudaimonia, or happiness in the broad sense, as the telos, or goal, of life:

“The end, for the sake of which everything is done, but which is not itself done for the sake of anything else.” (Stobaeus, Anthology, 2.77)

Now, according to the Stoics most people are simply mistaken about what is and is not good. To claim that something is good is to say that it is a constituent of happiness, and it is common opinion that goods include things like health, wealth, reputation, career, and so forth. Not so, argue the Stoics.

We need to remember that the various Hellenistic schools can be distinguished primarily on the basis of what they thought the telos of human life is. For instance, Epicureans and Pyrrhonist thought it was ataraxia, or tranquillity of mind, though they argued that it can be achieved by different means (lack of pain for the Epicureans, suspension of judgment for the Pyrrhonists). Or take the Cyrenaics, for whom the telos was to experience as much immediate physical pleasure as possible.

What about the Stoics? They said that one can be eudaimon by living in agreement with Nature:

“Zeno, in his work On Human Nature, said that the goal is to live in harmony with nature, which means to live according to virtue; for nature leads us to virtue.” (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, 7.87)

Agreeing with Nature means also agreeing with oneself, which leads to what Zeno called a smooth flow of life. Notice, in the quote above, the equivalency between this and living virtuously, because “nature leads us to virtue.” How so? Because we are naturally social animals capable of reason, so we are born with a prosocial instinct, and we are naturally capable of enhancing that instinct by reflecting on the most appropriate actions to take. In a sense, then, the only thing we need in order to align ourselves with Nature is virtue, which is—according to the Stoics—the perfected condition of human reason and the only true good [1]:

“Perfect reason is called virtue and it is identical to rectitude.” (Seneca, Letters, 76.10)

The argument that virtue, or wisdom broadly construed, is the only or chief good is articulated by Socrates in Plato’s Euthydemus (279-282): happiness is rooted not in having external goods, but in using them properly, which requires wisdom. For instance, money may appear to be a good, but it is such only if we use it well; if we squander it or, worse, use it for nefarious purposes, it becomes an evil. As I’m sure readers will agree if they reflect for a moment on things like political or corporate corruption.

Following this approach, the four cardinal virtues are understood as forms of knowledge: practical wisdom is knowledge of what should be done; courage is knowledge of what should be endured; justice is knowledge of what is fair; and temperance is knowledge of what is choiceworthy. This is why ignorance is the root of all evil, a quote often attributed to Plato but that actually doesn’t show up in the known corpus. He would have said it, though.

The four cardinal virtues, from left to right: temperance, practical wisdom, courage, and justice.

Happiness is up to us

A crucial consequence of the Stoic view is that happiness / eudaimonia is entirely in our hands, since virtue is the only good and we can freely choose to practice it.

But we can naturally ask: what about other things that most people (including the rival philosophies of the Academics and the Peripatetics) consider goods, like health, wealth, etc.?

Famously, those things fall under the broad category of “indifferents” (adiaphora in Greek, indifferentia in Latin), which does not mean that we don’t care about them. They do have value (axia in Greek, aestimatio in Latin), but only insofar as they are the raw materials by which we exercise virtue. They are indifferent in the specific sense that they do not affect our character and judgment. Epictetus comes up with some wonderful imagery to make the point:

“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. … In fact, Socrates was an expert ballplayer. What do I mean? He knew how to play in the law court [i.e., act virtuously at his trial].” (Epictetus, Discourses, 2.5.15-18)

Socrates playing ball. The player in the photo is not the ancient philosopher, but Sócrates Brasileiro Sampaio de Souza Vieira e Oliveira, one of the best Brazilian soccer players of all time. Image from espn.com.

Appropriate actions

A major component of Stoic ethics is found in the issue of so-called appropriate actions (kathēkon in Greek, convenentia in Latin). The middle Stoic Panaetius wrote an entire book on this topic, now lost. Fortunately, we have Cicero’s On Duties, which is largely based on Panaetius’s work.

The contention is that since virtue is exercised by acting in certain ways, appropriate action becomes crucial to Stoic living. For example: justice requires the right amount of indifferents to be distributed to each individual (Stobaeus, Anthology, 2.59), so Stoics should both engage in charitable activity and work toward a fair redistribution of resources across society.

Another example: since life itself is a preferred indifferent—as counterintuitive as it may be—sometimes the virtuous thing to do is to sacrifice one’s life for the sake of others:

“They [the Stoics] say that the wise man will commit a well-reasoned suicide both on behalf of his country and on behalf of his friends, and if he falls victim to unduly severe pain or mutilation or incurable illness.” (DL, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, 7.130)

If you are interested in a fuller explanation of this delicate aspect of Stoic ethics you may consult Seneca’s 70th Letter to Lucilius, “On the proper time to slip the cable,” as well as Epictetus’s frequent treatment of what he calls “the open door,” his metaphor for suicide (Discourses 1.9.20; 1.24.20; 1.25.18; 2.1.19–20; 3.8.6; 3.13.14; and 3.22.34).

One word of caution at this point: it may seem from what I’ve just written that the Stoics followed some kind of ethical optimization rule, like modern Utilitarians who think that we ought to maximize most people’s happiness and minimize most people’s pain. This is definitely not the case, as Stoicism is a type of virtue ethics, centered on the agent’s character, not on universal directives. The Stoics realized that life is too complex for simplistic all-encompassing solutions, and instead empowered the individual agent to make decisions depending on her own best assessment of the situation and on the specific circumstances.

Cosmopolitanism and oikeiôsis

The Stoics were cosmopolitans, i.e., they—like the Cynics—considered themselves citizens of the world, not bound by national borders. Accordingly, the demands of justice extend to all human beings:

“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.” (Epictetus, Discourses, 1.9.1)

In turn, Stoic cosmopolitanism is the result of their understanding of the process of oikeiôsis, often translated as “affiliation,” stemming from the same root, oikos, meaning home, which gives us the English words ecology and economics.

The idea is that we are born with a natural affinity for other human beings, especially our care takers and close relatives. Later on, with the onset of the age of reason (about 7 yrs old, also according to modern developmental psychology), we begin to expand our concern to others, initially our friends and then our fellow citizens. Those who really grasp the notion of a brotherhood / sisterhood of humanity continue the process of oikeiôsis until they regard every human being on Earth as a relative and friend. This is the famous passage linking cosmopolitanism and oikeiôsis in the 2nd century Stoic Hierocles, from his Elements of Ethics:

“Each of us is, as it were, circumscribed by many circles. … The first and most proximate circle is that which everyone describes about his own mind as a centre, in which circle the body, and whatever is assumed for the sake of the body, are comprehended. … The second from this, and which is at a greater distance from the centre, but comprehends the first circle, is that in which parents, brothers, wife, and children are arranged. The third circle from the centre is that which contains uncles and aunts, grandfathers and grandmothers, and the children of brothers and sisters. … Next to this is that which contains the common people, then that which comprehends those of the same tribe, afterwards that which contains the citizens; and then two other circles follow, one being the circle of those that dwell in the vicinity of the city, and the other, of those of the same province. But the outermost and greatest circle, and which comprehends all the other circles, is that of the whole human race. … It is the province of him who strives to conduct himself properly in each of these connections to collect, in a certain respect, the circles, as it were, to one centre, and always to endeavor earnestly to transfer himself from the comprehending circles to the several particulars which they comprehend.”

Hierocles’s circles of concern.

The ethics of emotions

We have talked about Stoic psychology in the first installment of this series. Now it’s time to use that background and examine the ethical aspects of the Stoic treatment of emotions.

According to the Stoics, the virtuous person arrives at a state of apatheia, or lack of disturbance from the passions. Although the word is the root of the modern term apathy the two are not at all the same. Remember that “passion” in this context is not synonymous with emotion but only indicates a subcategory of the latter. The Stoics recognized a crucial distinction between healthy emotions (eupatheiai) and unhealthy emotions (pathē, from which the word pathology comes). There was also a third category of emotions, the propatheiai, or pre-emotions. These are involuntary reactions, like blushing, or the very onset of anger, and therefore are not “up to us,” as Epictetus would say.

“They [the Stoics] say that passion is impulse which is excessive and disobedient to the dictates of reason, or a movement of soul which is irrational and contrary to nature.” (Stobaeus, Anthology, 2.88)

So by definition an unhealthy emotion is one that goes against reason, while a healthy emotion is one that aligns itself with reason. For instance, it is unhealthy for me to lust after another woman given that I am happily married. It is, by contrast, healthy to love my wife.

When we undergo a passion, therefore, we go against the dictates of Nature, understood in the sense explained above. As a consequence, instead of experiencing Zeno’s smooth flow of life we experience “fluttering,” and a general sense of unease.

At bottom, a passion is the result of two cognitive mistakes: (i) we think that something is good (e.g., money) when it really isn’t; (ii) we think that a particular course of action (e.g., a greedy one) is appropriate while it really isn’t.

Overall, the Stoics recognized four main types of passion, yielding the following classification:

There is also a near-corresponding classification of the healthy emotions, as follows:

You will have noticed that there is no present-oriented equivalent to distress, because the wise person, at least, doesn’t make mistakes about what is good, and therefore doesn’t experience bad things in the present. For the rest of us, however, it’s another story…

In a sense, the whole point of Stoic practice is to move away from the unhealthy emotions and to mindfully cultivate the healthy ones, something that is accomplished through the regular practice of a number of spiritual exercises.

[Previous installments: Stoic physics; Stoic logic. Next time: Larry Becker’s New Stoicism.]