From ancient to new Stoicism: VI—Steven Gambardella’s new modern Stoicism

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

Steven Gambardella, image from https://medium.com/@stevengambardella/about.

Stoicism famously got started around 301 BCE, when Zeno of Citium, a former Phoenician merchant, began to teach at the Stoa Poikile, or Painted Porch, in Athens. We have examined the basics of ancient Stoicism in three essays in this series, dedicated respectively to Stoic physics (i.e., science and metaphysics), logic, and ethics.

A good amount of time has passed since Zeno, and both science and philosophy have made progress. What would Stoicism look like today, if its organic development had not been interrupted by the rise of Christianity? That question has been posed by a number of modern authors, and so far we’ve seen the responses given by Larry Becker and Piotr Stankiewicz.

In this essay we are going to look at a third attempt at a new, more modern Stoicism, the one currently being developed by Steven Gambardella by way of a series of essays published in his Substack newsletter, curiously entitled The Sophist.

Gambardella has a PhD in history and writes as an independent scholar and essayist. His stuff (not only about Stoicism) is well worth reading. Concerning how to update Stoicism he has written a number of essays, including: The Stoic self, The fourfold root of Stoic virtue, Stoic autonomy, Stoic control, Stoic perspective, and Stoic objectivity. I will focus on the first two entries in the series, which lay out the basic ideas. The remaining four go into more detail especially on the subject of the second essay.

The starting point for Gambardella’s analysis is one that is shared by Becker, Stankiewicz, and myself: Stoic theology has to go. As we’ve seen early on in these posts, Stoic physics included the notion that the cosmos is a living organism endowed with reason, also referred to as God, Zeus, or simply Nature. It is this idea that allowed the ancient Stoics to claim that the universe is organized rationally and that it is governed by a sort of providence, albeit very different from the Christian variety.

Gambardella points out that very few people nowadays are pantheists or panentheists (the two standard interpretations of Stoic metaphysics). So on what basis does Stoic ethics endure, since it logically depends on the metaphysics?

“Stoicism is built on a dogma—that the universe is part of, and guided by, a supreme deity. Being part of the universe, human beings are also part of God.”

The idea is that while ancient Stoicism coherently built its ethics on its cosmology and metaphysics, modern Stoicism’s ethics hangs perilously on normative liberal-secular beliefs and values, as expressed and endorsed by most contemporary Stoic authors. As a result:

“Stoicism is like a religious icon stuck in a museum’s glass case, divested of its spiritual power.”

This analysis strikes me as fundamentally correct. When modern Stoics, rightly, do away with the ancient conception of a living cosmos characterized by the logos they risk leaving their ethics without foundation. The problem is that modern ethical beliefs, say, that we ought to behave altruistically, that we should recognize certain rights, or that we need to take care of the environment, are simply not connected with the rest of the Stoic system and cannot logically be derived from it.

As a result, Stoicism in its contemporary guise loses its universal value, featuring an ethics that is contingent, meaning that it depends on whatever current science and philosophy say is the case or ought to be the case, respectively. Gambardella claims that in this way Stoicism becomes a form of pragmatism (of the sort, for instance, endorsed by Stankiewicz), and is no longer capable of changing society.

I’m not sure Stoicism was ever designed to change society, as that may be a bit too much to ask from a personal philosophy of life. Usually we don’t ask what Christianity’s, say, or Buddhist’s political philosophy look like, so I don’t know that we should ask something of the sort from Stoicism.

But more importantly, I honestly don’t see what the problem is with contingent positions and values. Gambardella seems to take it for granted that this is a serious issue, but it is such only if we make the highly questionable (in my mind) assumption that values have to be universal and unchanging. That strikes me as a mistaken understanding of what a value is, and indeed of what ethics itself is.

Values are expressions of our priorities and attitudes toward life, and ethics is the field of study that is concerned with solving the problem of how human beings can live together and flourish both individually and as a group. It stands to reason that our conceptions of both values and how they are implemented (i.e., ethics) will change over time. Stoicism is a type of naturalistic philosophy, and it is bound, therefore, to be continuously updated so long as our science and philosophy keep discovering new things about nature and our place in it. I am, therefore, not afraid of contingency. Indeed, I embrace it as the only sensible understanding of how to live a good life.

But let us return to Gambardella’s line of reasoning. He suggests that we need a new first principle to replace Stoic cosmology and providence. Again, I find myself in broad agreement, as I will explain in the next (and last) entry in this series. If Stoicism is to be a philosophical system, then its ethics has to be connected—via logic—with its metaphysics. The questions are: which metaphysics, and connected how?

Gambardella writes that “the human condition has emerged from a wide range of factors in the soup of our biological and cultural make-up.” This, too, strikes me as sensible, though as we shall see next time, I develop the same starting point in a very different direction.

Human exceptionalism does not bother Gambardella, because he recognizes that while the notion makes no sense at a cosmic level (human beings are just one of many species on Earth, and possibly only one of a number of sentient ones in the universe), it’s a coherent position to take from the perspective of conscious human beings. As the Sophist Protagoras put it, man is the measure of all things, meaning that it is up to us to decide what is and is not important or exceptional, since we are the only creatures on the planet capable to reflect on such matters and arrive at reasoned judgments. (Hey, maybe that’s why Gambardella’s Substack is entitled The Sophist!)

Here is where the crucial move comes into play: the idea is that the new connection between Stoic physics and ethics can be provided by the notion of the self:

“We are physical objects that think. That’s the first principle of a new Stoic physics.”

And what, exactly, do we think? We are happy when we are in control of things and not happy when we are not. Moreover, our happiness is linked to the functioning of our brains and to how we relate to others. Happiness is not found in any other part of our selves (like the stomach, liver, or heart). Therefore:

“A basis for Stoicism—a set of axioms that provide the grounding for ethics—without the need for a cosmology, is found in the relation between self and world.”

Okay, but what is the self? There are a number of options on the table. Religious people typically take a dualist route, separating the human body from the soul and identifying the self with the latter. Atheists and materialists, by contrast, deny the existence of an immaterial and eternal soul, reducing our consciousness to the activity of our brain and larger neural system. The ancient Stoics took a third path, articulating a view of the human individual as partly of the world (i.e., made of matter) and partly divine (i.e., infused with the logos).

Gambardella, by contrast, goes for a more modern, quasi-Buddhist notion of the self. He acknowledges that  most of our actions are automatic, not the result of conscious decisions, which means the self—whatever it is—has a fairly limited range. Moreover, fate (again, whatever that means) pre-empts our choices of things like family, nationality, ethnicity, gender, and so forth. All very important aspects of our lives. Epictetus would not have been surprised, since he famously limited his attention to what he thought was our true self: our ability to arrive at considerate judgment (prohairesis), residing in the famous “ruling faculty” (hegemonikon). For the sage from Hierapolis we are our judgments and decisions, and nothing else.

The upshot of Gambardella’s analysis is that the self can only be defined in a negative fashion, by virtue of what it does, not what it is. This conception of a non-self, or a dissolution of the self, is then proposed as the basis for a new Stoicism that drops the notion of a divine logos. The resulting view is ecumenical, meaning that it is not based on religion or even science, but rather on a certain understanding of the human condition. And what about the ethics? Gambardella writes:

“Stoicism, as a philosophy, urges us to act selflessly because there is no self.”

This is an interesting argument, but I think it’s a bit too easy. First of all, the idea of human nature and the self that I just sketched is itself rooted in a scientific and philosophical understanding of the subject matter, an understanding that is, of course, contingent! We may yet discover new things, or come up with new ways to reason about the things we think we know, and arrive at a different understandings of the self. Which means that Gambardella will not, after all, be able to escape from the contingency trap, something that, it appears, he feels very uncomfortable with. (As I said above, I don’t.)

Moreover, to say that the recognition that there is no self urges us to act selflessly appears to me to be a bit of a non sequitur. For one thing, we have not actually established that there is no self. At best we have only established that a good way to understand the self is by analyzing what it does. That’s not at all the same thing. Besides, there are different ways to conceptualize a self that is not a permanent essence. The ancient Stoics themselves adopted the philosophy of the Presocratic thinker Heraclitus of Ephesus, according to whom panta rhei (everything changes) and therefore there are no essences, only processes. And yet, the Stoics also managed to retain a strong notion of self.

Also, the “no-self => selfless acting” link is based on an ambiguity in the use of those words: one can act selfishly even without a self in the sense discussed here. If Gambardella’s analysis is correct, then no human being has a positively definable self. Yet this obviously does not preclude a number of allegedly self-less (i.e., lacking a self) people to nevertheless act selfishly (i.e., favoring their own interests at the expense of those of others). Just look around you, or check the morning news.

What we have seen so far is laid out already in the first essay by Gambardella, aptly entitled “The Stoic self.” He then further develops his line of thinking in a second essay, “The fourfold root of Stoic virtue.” There he presents a discussion of the famous three disciplines of Epictetus: desire and aversion, action, and assent.

Very briefly, the discipline of desire and aversion is about restructuring our values (“desires”) and disvalues (“aversions”) so that we go after, and stay away from, the right things. The discipline of action concerns itself with how to properly act toward others. And the discipline of assent focuses on refining our capacity for judgment so that it works properly even under suboptimal circumstances (e.g., when we are tired, sick, and so forth).

But Gambardella is not satisfied with the Epictetean system, which has been used for now close to two millennia:

“The problem with this tripartite system of Stoicism is that it is based on a fourth topos [i.e., topic], one at the centre of the ancient Stoic system—the assumed existence of divine providence.”

And since we have already seen that modern Stoicism does not provide us with an alternative to the providential cosmos of our forerunners, clearly we’ve got a problem. The way Gambardella articulates that problem is that modern Stoicism “outsources” its cosmology and normative aspect to science and secular beliefs, resulting in a kind of therapy, not a fully formed philosophy of life.

Maybe. I’m not convinced. Again, I’m not bothered by the contingency of the link between metaphysics and ethics that results from the acceptance of modern scientific findings. The fact that this acceptance apparently also yields the adoption of contemporary secular values is the consequence, I think, of the fact that most (though not necessarily all) such values are indeed in alignment with the findings of science as far as human nature is concerned.

“The modern Stoic would point to interpersonal respect as an obligation of a social existence, or perhaps suggest that rational altruism is evolved into human nature. While all these reasons are aligned with the desired outcome, the modern reasons are contingent and conditional, while the ancient reason is absolute and properly universal.”

Right. So much the worse for the ancient reason… But Gambardella insists:

“The goal here is a new Stoicism that’s not a matter of belief or received assumptions, but a matter of how one must conduct oneself, no matter what they believe.”

But that, I maintain, is simply not possible. There is no such thing as conducting ourselves independently of our beliefs. The real question is whether our beliefs are well founded and what sort of conduct is logically entailed by such beliefs. Nothing else.

Nevertheless, Gambardella ends up replacing Epictetus’s three disciplines with what he calls the four-fold root. It looks like this:

Where the new key terms are conceptualized as follows: objectivity is about seeing individual things as resulting from more encompassing processes; control concerns conscious decision making; perspective is about taking a broader view of things; and autonomy has to do with deliberative agency. The latter has no correspondence with any of the original disciplines. I will attempt to explain next time why we do not need such an apparatus, although my own answer to the question of what a modern Stoicism should look like will draw on ancient Stoicism as well as on both Becker’s and Gambardella’s analyses, while rejecting Stankiewicz’s ethics-centered pragmatism.

_____

P.S.: Gambardella has published an additional entry on his series for a new modern Stoicism, additional to those discussed / mentioned in the main text above: Running with the stars.

[Previous installments: Stoic physics; Stoic logic; Stoic ethics; Becker’s update; Piotr Stankiewicz’s Reformed Stoicism. Next time: Some modest suggestions.]