Stoic paradoxes
My take on Cicero’s classic about some strange aspects of the philosophy of the Stoa
The ancient Stoics were known for some pretty strange ideas. Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism, said it was okay to practice cannibalism, under certain circumstances. Oh, and wives should be held in common, whatever that means. Later Stoics moved away from those particular suggestions.
Still, there are some well known mainstream ideas in Stoicism that have always made people, including some Stoics, feel uncomfortable, so much so that they have been labelled “paradoxical.” Mind you, the word “paradox” in this sense comes from the Greek paradoxon, meaning “contrary” (para) to common opinion (doxa). In modern logic, of course, paradox means a statement or proposition from an acceptable premise and following sound reasoning that yet leads to an (apparently) illogical conclusion (Etymology Online).
Around 46 BCE, Marcus Tullius Cicero (who was then 60, and would be assassinated three years later) wrote a book entitled Paradoxa Stoicorum (i.e., Stoic Paradoxes), and dedicated it to Marcus Junius Brutus, the guy who killed Caesar.
Cicero seems to have meant the Paradoxa Stoicorum as both an exercise in rhetoric on his part, meaning that he didn’t necessarily endorse all the opinions defended in the book, and as a way to popularize Stoic philosophy in the Latin language. Indeed, in two other works, De Finibus (IV.74–77) and Pro Murena (60–66), Cicero is critical of those very same paradoxes.
The treatise, together with Cicero’s On Duties, was so famous during the Renaissance that it was one of the very first books to be printed, in 1465, when Johann Fust and Peter Schöffer took over the original printing press founded by Gutenberg.
What I propose to do here, then, is to take a look at the Stoic paradoxes and see what we can make of them, a little over two millennia after Cicero. To be clear, in this post I am presenting my opinions about the paradoxes, not Cicero’s. For the latter, you may want to read him directly. Here is the excellent translation by Quintus Curtius (aka George Thomas), one of my guests in the “Meet the Greco-Romans” series. Also, this essay I wrote about Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations makes for an excellent companion piece to the present one.
The six paradoxes are:
Virtue is the only good;
Virtue is the only thing needed for happiness;
All good deeds are equally virtuous and all bad deeds equally vicious;
All fools are mad;
Only the wise are free, whereas all fools are enslaved;
Only the wise are rich.
Let’s take examine them briefly, one by one.
(I) Virtue is the only good
This notion is actually rather easy to defend, I think, though we’d have first to agree on what we mean by “virtue.” I take the word to be the English rendition of the Greek arete, meaning excellence, and specifically human excellence. As such, to be virtuous just means to be the best human being you can be. Which, according to Stoic philosophy, in turn means to be rational and prosocial, because that’s who we are as a species by nature.
One argument to defend this particular paradox was articulated by Socrates in the Euthydemus. At one point (279-282), Socrates explains that the important thing in life is not to acquire more and more things, but rather to use well whatever we have. Epictetus, in Discourses I.1, puts it this way:
“The reasoning faculty … is the only one we have inherited which will take knowledge both of itself—what it is, and of what it is capable, and how valuable a gift it is to us—and likewise of all the other faculties. For what else is it that tells us gold is beautiful? For the gold itself does not tell us. Clearly it is the faculty which makes use of external impressions.”
For Epictetus, the reasoning faculty, prohairesis, when used properly is identical with virtue, and moreover it is the only thing that is truly “up to us,” as he explains in Enchiridion 1.
Another way to put the point is to draw on Aristotle’s distinction, in book I of the Nicomachean Ethics, between instrumental and ultimate goods. A good is instrumental when we want it in order to achieve something else. Money, for instance, is instrumental. Only some mentally deranged individual may want money for its own sake, most people want money because they can buy and do things with it. An ultimate good, by contrast, is valuable in its own right. Virtue, wisdom, or prohairesis are (essentially equivalent) ultimate goods, so if we draw the distinction that the Stoics adopt between true goods and “indifferents” (which may have value), then it is true: virtue is the only good, everything else is an indifferent, though it may contribute positively or negatively to our life (depending on how we use it).
(II) Virtue is the only thing needed for happiness
This second “paradox” is a consequence of the first one and of the Stoic view of “happiness.” The Greek word, of course, is eudaimonia, which is sometimes translated as flourishing. For the Stoics, eudaimonia is best rendered as the life worth living. Just like for a cactus the life worth living is whatever constitutes a good life for a cactus (lots of light, little water), for a human being eudaimonia depends on living according to human nature.
But we said above that this means to live rationally and prosocially, which is just another way to say virtuously. We have also seen that other things, so-called “externals,” may have value but are, fundamentally, indifferent—in the specific sense that they make no difference to our ability to be virtuous, the only thing truly up to us according to Epictetus. So yes, virtue is the only thing needed for happiness. A nice villa in Tuscany adds value to our existence, but is not needed.
(III) All good deeds are equally virtuous and all bad deeds equally vicious
Ah, this one is a bit tricky, but I think I devised a decent way to defend it, by way of a geometric analysis, of all things. First, let’s be clear about what the Stoics mean. The basic assumption here is that virtue is all or nothing: one is either virtuous (and therefore everything she does is virtuous) or not (and therefore everything she does is vicious, that is, lacks virtue).
The Stoics often presented this notion by way of the metaphor of the drowning man. If you are drowning, it doesn’t make any difference whether you are inches or dozens of feet underwater: you will still die. Notice, however, that the metaphor itself suggests that, potentially at least, being inches from the surface is indeed better. The Stoics, after all, referred to themselves as “proficientes” (literally, those who make progress), so there must have been a way in which they thought both that all lack of virtue was vicious and that nevertheless it was possible to improve. How? Look at the following diagram:
