A Little Book of Stoicism
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A GUIDE TO STOICISM
by St. George Stock
TEN CENT POCKET SERIES NO. 347
Edited by E. Haldeman-Julius.
FOREWORD
If you strip Stoicism of its paradoxes and its wilful misuse of
language, what is left is simply the moral philosophy of Socrates,
Plato and Aristotle, dashed with the physics of Heraclitus. Stoicism
was not so much a new doctrine as the form under which the old Greek
philosophy finally presented itself to the world at large. It owed
its popularity in some measure to its extravagance. A great deal
might be said about Stoicism as a religion and about the part it
played in the formation of Christianity but these subjects were
excluded by the plan of this volume which was to present a sketch of
the Stoic doctrine based on the original authorities.
ST GEORGE STOCK M A
_Pemb. Coll. Oxford_
A GUIDE TO STOICISM.
ST GEORGE STOCK
PHILOSOPHY AMONG THE GREEKS AND ROMANS.
Among the Greeks and Romans of the classical age philosophy occupied
the place taken by religion among ourselves. Their appeal was to
reason not to revelation. To what, asks Cicero in his Offices, are we
to look for training in virtue, if not to philosophy? Now, if truth
is believed to rest upon authority it is natural that it should be
impressed upon the mind from the earliest age, since the essential
thing is that it should be believed, but a truth which makes its
appeal to reason must be content to wait till reason is developed. We
are born into the Eastern, Western or Anglican communion or some
other denomination, but it was of his own free choice that the
serious minded young Greek or Roman embraced the tenets of one of the
great sects which divided the world of philosophy. The motive which
led him to do so in the first instance may have been merely the
influence of a friend or a discourse from some eloquent speaker, but
the choice once made was his own choice, and he adhered to it as
such. Conversions from one sect to another were of quite rare
occurrence. A certain Dionysius of Heraclea, who went over from the
Stoics to the Cyrenaics, was ever afterward known as "the deserter."
It was as difficult to be independent in philosophy as it is with us
to be independent in politics. When a young man joined a school, he
committed himself to all its opinions, not only as to the end of
life, which was the main point of division, but as to all questions
on all subjects. The Stoic did not differ merely in his ethics from
the Epicurean; he differed also in his theology and his physics and
his metaphysics. Aristotle, as Shakespeare knew, thought young men
"unfit to hear moral philosophy". And yet it was a question--or
rather the question--of moral philosophy, the answer to which decided
the young man's opinions on all other points. The language which
Cicero sometimes uses about the seriousness of the choice made in
early life and how a young man gets entrammelled by a school before
he is really able to judge, reminds us of what we hear said nowadays
about the danger of a young man's taking orders before his opinions
are formed. To this it was replied that a young man only exercised
the right of private judgment in selecting the authority whom he
should follow, and, having once done that, trusted to him for all the
rest. With the analogue of this contention also we are familiar in
modern times. Cicero allows that there would be something in it, if
the selection of the true philosopher did not above all things
require the philosophic mind. But in those days it was probably the
case, as it is now, that, if a man did not form speculative opinions
in youth, the pressure of affairs would not leave him leisure to do
so later.
The life span of Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, was from B.C. 347 to
275. He did not begin teaching till 315, at the mature age of forty.
Aristotle had passed away in 322, and with him closed the great
constructive era of Greek thought. The Ionian philosophers had
speculated on the physical constitution of the universe, the
Pythagoreans on the mystical properties of numbers; Heraclitus had
propounded his philosophy of fire, Democritus and Leucippus had
struck out a rude form of the atomic theory, Socrates had raised
questions relating to man, Plato had discussed them with all the
freedom of the dialogue, while Aristotle had systematically worked
them out. The later schools did not add much to the body of
philosophy. What they did was to emphasize different sides of the
doctrine of their predecessors and to drive views to their logical
consequences. The great lesson of Greek philosophy is that it is
worth while to do right irrespective of reward and punishment and
regardless of the shortness of life. This lesson the Stoics so
enforced by the earnestness of their lives and the influence of their
moral teaching that it has become associated more particularly with
them. Cicero, though he always classed himself as an Academic,
exclaims in one place that he is afraid the Stoics are the only
philosophers, and whenever he is combating Epicureanism his language
is that of a Stoic. Some of Vergil's most eloquent passages seem to
be inspired by Stoic speculation. Even Horace, despite his banter
about the sage, in his serious moods borrows the language of the
Stoics. It was they who inspired the highest flights of declamatory
eloquence in Persius and Juvenal. Their moral philosophy affected the
world through Roman law, the great masters of which were brought up
under its influence. So all pervasive indeed was this moral
philosophy of the Stoics that it was read by the Jews of Alexandria
into Moses under the veil of allegory and was declared to be the
inner meaning of the Hebrew Scriptures. If the Stoics then did not
add much to the body of Philosophy, they did a great work in
popularising it and bringing it to bear upon life.
An intense practicality was a mark of the later Greek philosophy.
This was common to Stoicism with its rival Epicureanism. Both
regarded philosophy as 'the art of life,' though they differed in
their conception of what that art should be. Widely as the two
schools were opposed to one another, they had also other features in
common. Both were children of an age in which the free city had given
way to monarchies, and personal had taken the place of corporate
life. The question of happiness is no longer, as with Aristotle, and
still more with Plato, one for the state, but for the individual. In
both schools the speculative interest was feeble from the first, and
tended to become feebler as time went on. Both were new departures
from pre-existent schools. Stoicism was bred out of Cynicism, as
Epicureanism out of Cyrenaicism. Both were content to fall back for
their physics upon the pre-Socratic schools, the one adopting the
firm philosophy of Heraclitus, the other the atomic theory of
Democritus. Both were in strong reaction against the abstractions of
Plato and Aristotle, and would tolerate nothing but concrete reality.
The Stoics were quite as materialistic in their own way as the
Epicureans. With regard indeed to the nature of the highest god we
may, with Senaca represent the difference between the two schools as
a question of the senses against the intellect, but we shall see
presently that the Stoics regarded the intellect itself as being a
kind of body.
The Greeks were all agreed that there was an end or aim of life, and
that it was to be called 'happiness,' but at that point their
agreement ended. As to the nature of happiness there was the utmost
variety of opinion. Democritus had made it consist in mental
serenity, Anaxagoras in speculation, Socrates in wisdom, Aristotle in
the practise of virtue with some amount of favour from fortune,
Aristippus simply in pleasure. These were opinions of the
philosophers. But, besides these, there were the opinions of ordinary
men, as shown by their lives rather than by their language. Zeno's
contribution to thought on the subject does not at first sight appear
illuminating. He said that the end was 'to live consistently,' the
implication doubtless being that no life but the passionless life of
reason could ultimately be consistent with itself. Cleanthes, his
immediate successor in the school, is credited with having added the
words 'with nature,' thus completing the well-known Stoic formula
that the end is 'to live consistently with nature.'
It was assumed by the Greeks that the ways of nature were 'the ways
of pleasantness,' and that 'all her paths' were 'peace.' This may
seem to us a startling assumption, but that is because we do not mean
by 'nature' the same thing as they did. We connect the term with the
origin of a thing, they connected it rather with the end; by the
'natural state' we mean a state of savagery, they meant the highest
civilization; we mean by a thing's nature what it is or has been,
they meant what it ought to become under the most favourable
conditions; not the sour crab, but the mellow glory of the Hesperides
worthy to be guarded by a sleepless dragon, was to the Greeks the
natural apple. Hence we find Aristotle maintaining that the State is
a natural product, because it is evolved out of social relations
which exist by nature. Nature indeed was a highly ambiguous term to
the Greeks no less than to ourselves, but in the sense with which we
are now concerned, the nature of anything was defined by the
Peripatetics as 'the end of its becoming.' Another definition of
theirs puts the matter still more clearly. 'What each thing is when
its growth has been completed, that we declare to be the nature of
each thing'.
Following out this conception the Stoics identified a life in
accordance with nature with a life in accordance with the highest
perfection to which man could attain. Now, as man was essentially a
rational animal, his work as man lay in living the rational life. And
the perfection of reason was virtue. Hence the ways of nature were no
other than the ways of virtue. And so it came about that the Stoic
formula might be expressed in a number of different ways which yet
all amounted to the same thing. The end was to live the virtuous
life, or to live consistently, or to live in accordance with nature,
or to live rationally.
DIVISION OF PHILOSOPHY.
Philosophy was defined by the Stoics as 'the knowledge of things
divine and human'. It was divided into three departments; logic,
ethic, and physic. This division indeed was in existence before their
time, but they have got the credit of it as of some other things
which they did not originate. Neither was it confined to them, but
was part of the common stock of thought. Even the Epicureans, who are
said to have rejected logic can hardly be counted as dissentients
from this threefold division. For what they did was to substitute for
the Stoic logic a logic of their own, dealing with the notions
derived from sense, much in the same way as Bacon substituted his
Novum Organum for the Organon of Aristotle. Cleanthes we are told
recognised six parts of philosophy, namely, dialectic, rhetoric,
ethic, politic, physic, and theology, but these are obviously the
result of subdivision of the primary ones. Of the three departments
we may say that logic deals with the form and expression of
knowledge, physic with the matter of knowledge, and ethic with the
use of knowledge. The division may also be justified in this way.
Philosophy must study either nature (including the divine nature) or
man; and, if it studies man, it must regard him either from the side
of the intellect or of the feelings, that is either as a thinking
(logic) or as an acting (ethic) being.
As to the order in which the different departments should he studied,
we have had preserved to us the actual words of Chrysippus in his
fourth book on Lives. 'First of all then it seems to me that, as has
been rightly said by the ancients, there are three heads under which
the speculations of the philosopher fall, logic, ethic, physic; next,
that of these the logical should come first, the ethical second, and
the physical third, and that of the physical the treatment of the
gods should come last, whence also they have given the name of
"completions" to the instruction delivered on this subject'. That
this order however might yield to convenience is plain from another
book on the use of reason, where he says that 'the student who takes
up logic first need not entirely abstain from the other branches of
philosophy, but should study them also as occasion offers.'
Plutarch twits Chrysippus with inconsistency, because in the face of
this declaration as to the order of treatment, he nevertheless says
that morals rest upon physics. But to this charge it may fairly be
replied that the order of exposition need not coincide with the order
of existence. Metaphysically speaking, morals may depend upon physics
and the right conduct of man be deducible from the structure of the
universe but for all that, it may be advisable to study physics
later. Physics meant the nature of God and the Universe. Our nature
may be deducible from that but it is better known to ourselves to
start with, so that it may be well to begin from the end of the stick
that we have in our hands. But that Chrysippus did teach the logical
dependence of morals on physics is plain from his own words. In his
third book on the Gods he says 'for it is not possible to find any
other origin of justice or mode of its generation save that from Zeus
and the nature of the universe for anything we have to say about good
and evil must needs derive its origin therefrom', and again in his
Physical Theses, 'for there is no other or more appropriate way of
approaching the subject of good and evil on the virtues or happiness
than from the nature of all things and the administration of the
universe--for it is to these we must attach the treatment of good and
evil inasmuch as there is no better origin to which we can refer them
and inasmuch as physical speculation is taken in solely with a view
to the distinction between good and evil.'
The last words are worth noting as showing that even with Chrysippus
who has been called the intellectual founder of Stoicism the whole
stress of the philosophy of the Porch fell upon its moral teaching.
It was a favourite metaphor with the school to compare philosophy to
a fertile vineyard or orchard. Ethic was the good fruit, physic the
tall plants, and logic the strong wall. The wall existed only to
guard the trees, and the trees only to produce the fruit. Or again
philosophy was likened to an egg of which ethic was the yolk
containing the chick, physic the white which formed its nourishment
while logic was the hard outside shell. Posidonius, a later member of
the school, objected to the metaphor from the vineyard on the ground
that the fruit and the trees and the wall were all separable whereas
the parts of philosophy were inseparable. He preferred therefore to
liken it to a living organism, logic being the bones and sinews,
physic the flesh and blood, but ethic the soul.
LOGIC
The Stoics had a tremendous reputation for logic. In this department
they were the successors or rather the supersessors of Aristotle. For
after the death of Theophrastus the library of the Lyceum is said to
have been buried underground at Scepsis until about a century before
Christ, So that the Organon may actually have been lost to the world
during that period. At all events under Strato the successor of
Theophrastus who specialized in natural science the school had lost
its comprehensiveness. Cicero even finds it consonant with dramatic
propriety to make Cato charge the later Peripatetics with ignorance
of logic! On the other hand Chrysippus became so famous for his logic
as to create a general impression that if there were a logic among
the gods it would be no other than the Chrysippean.
But if the Stoics were strong in logic they were weak in rhetoric.
This strength and weakness were characteristic of the school at all
periods. Cato is the only Roman Stoic to whom Cicero accords the
praise of real eloquence. In the dying accents of the school as we
hear them in Marcus Aurelius the imperial sage counts it a thing to
be thankful for that he had learnt to abstain from rhetoric, poetic,
and elegance of diction. The reader however cannot help wishing that
he had taken some means to diminish the crabbedness of his style. If
a lesson were wanted in the importance of sacrificing to the Graces
it might be found in the fact that the early Stoic writers despite
their logical subtlety have all perished and that their remains have
to be sought for so largely in the pages of Cicero. In speaking of
logic as one of the three departments of philosophy we must bear in
mind that the term was one of much wider meaning than it is with us.
It included rhetoric, poetic, and grammar as well as dialectic or
logic proper, to say nothing of disquisitions on the senses and the
intellect which we should now refer to psychology.
Logic as a whole being divided into rhetoric and dialectic: rhetoric
was defined to be the knowledge of how to speak well in expository
discourses and dialectic as the knowledge of how to argue rightly in
matters of question and answer. Both rhetoric and dialectic were
spoken of by the Stoics as virtues for they divided virtue in its
most generic sense in the same way as they divided philosophy into
physical, ethical, and logical. Rhetoric and dialectic were thus the
two species of logical virtue. Zeno expressed their difference by
comparing rhetoric to the palm and dialectic to the fist.
Instead of throwing in poetic and grammar with rhetoric, the Stoics
subdivided dialectic into the part which dealt with the meaning and
the part which dealt with the sound, or as Chrysippus phrased it,
concerning significants and significates. Under the former came the
treatment of the alphabet, of the parts of speech, of solecism, of
barbarism, of poems, of amphibolies, of metre and music--a list which
seems at first sight a little mixed, but in which we can recognise
the general features of grammar, with its departments of phonology,
accidence, and prosody. The treatment of solecism and barbarism in
grammar corresponded to that of fallacies in logic. With regard to
the alphabet it is worth noting that the Stoics recognised seven
vowels and six mutes. This is more correct than our way of talking of
nine mutes, since the aspirate consonants are plainly not mute. There
were, according to the Stoics, five parts of speech--name,
appellative, verb, conjunction, article. 'Name' meant a proper name,
and 'appellative' a common term.
There were reckoned to be five virtues of speech--Hellenism,
clearness, conciseness, propriety, distinction. By 'Hellenism' was
meant speaking good Greek. 'Distinction' was defined to be 'a diction
which avoided homeliness.' Over against these there were two
comprehensive vices, barbarism and solecism, the one being an offence
against accidence, the other against syntax.
The famous comparison of the infant mind to a blank sheet of paper,
which we connect so closely with the name of Locke, really comes from
the Stoics. The earliest characters inscribed upon it were the
impressions of sense, which the Greeks called "phantasies." A
phantasy was defined by Zeno as "an impression in the soul."
Cleanthes was content to take this definition in its literal sense,
and believe that the soul was impressed by external objects as wax by
a signet ring. Chrysippus, however, found a difficulty here, and
preferred to interpret the Master's saying to mean an alteration or
change in the soul. He figured to himself the soul as receiving a
modification from every external object which acts upon it just as
the air receives countless strokes when many people are speaking at
once. Further, he declared that in receiving an impression the soul
was purely passive and that the phantasy revealed not only its own
existence, but that also of its cause, just as light displays itself
and the things that are in it. Thus, when through sight we receive an
impression of white, an affection takes place in the soul, in virtue
whereof we are able to say that there exists a white object affecting
us. The power to name the object resides in the understanding. First
must come the phantasy, and the understanding, having the power of
utterance, expresses in speech the affection it receives from the
object. The cause of the phantasy was called the "phantast," _e.
g._ the white or cold object. If there is no external cause, then
the supposed object of the impression was a "phantasm," such as a
figure in a dream, or the Furies whom Orestes sees in his frenzy.
How then was the impression which had reality behind it to be
distinguished from that which had not? "By the feel" is all that the
Stoics really had to say in answer to this question. Just as Hume
made the difference between sense-impressions and ideas to lie in the
greater vividness of the former, so did they; only Hume saw no
necessity to go beyond the impression, whereas the Stoics did.
Certain impressions, they maintained, carried with them an
irresistible conviction of their own reality, and this, not merely in
the sense that they existed; but also that they were referable to an
external cause. These were called "gripping phantasies." Such a
phantasy did not need proof of its own existence, or of that of its
object. It possessed self-evidence. Its occurrence was attended with
yielding and assent on the part of the soul. For it is as natural for
the soul to assent to the self-evident as it is for it to pursue its
proper good. The assent to a griping phantasy was called
"comprehension," as indicating the firm hold that the soul thus took
of reality. A gripping phantasy was defined as one which was stamped
and impressed from an existing object, in virtue of that object
itself, in such a way as it could not be from a non-existent object.
The clause "in virtue of that object itself" was put into the
definition to provide against such a case as that of the mad Orestes,
who takes his sister to be a Fury. There the impression was derived
from an existing object, but not from that object as such, but as
coloured by the imagination of the percipient.
The criterion of truth then was no other than the gripping phantasy.
Such at least was the doctrine of the earlier Stoics, but the later
added a saving clause, "when there is no impediment." For they were
pressed by their opponents with such imaginary cases as that of
Admetus, seeing his wife before him in very deed, and yet not
believing it to be her. But here there was an impediment. Admetus did
not believe that the dead could rise. Again Menelaus did not believe
in the real Helen when he found her on the island of Pharos. But here
again there was an impediment. For Menelaus could not have been
expected to know that he had been for ten years fighting for a
phantom. When, however, there was no such impediment, then they said
the gripping phantasy did indeed deserve its name, for it almost took
men by the hair of the head and dragged them to assent.
So far we have used "phantasy" only of real or imaginary impressions
of sense. But the term was not thus restricted by the Stoics, who
divided phantasies into sensible and not sensible. The latter came
through the understanding and were of bodiless things which could
only be grasped by reason. The ideas of Plato they declared existed
only in our minds. Horse, man, and animal had no substantial
existence but were phantasms of the soul. The Stoics were thus what
we should call Conceptualists.
Comprehension too was used in a wider sense than that in which we
have so far employed it. There was comprehension by the senses as of
white and black, of rough and smooth, but there was also
comprehension by the reason of demonstrative conclusions such as that
the gods exist and that they exercise providence. Here we are
reminded of Locke's declaration: "'Tis as certain there's a God as
that the opposite angles made by the intersection of two straight
lines are equal." The Stoics indeed had great affinities with that
thinker or rather he with them. The Stoic account of the manner in
which the mind arrives at its ideas might almost be taken from the
first book of Locke's _Essay_. As many as nine ways are
enumerated of which the first corresponds to simple ideas--
(1) by presentation, as objects of sense
(2) by likeness, as the idea of Socrates from his picture
(3) by analogy, that is, by increase or decrease, as ideas of giants
and pigmies from men, or as the notion of the centre of the earth,
which is reached by the consideration of smaller spheres.
(4) by transposition, as the idea of men with eyes in their breasts.
(5) by composition, as the idea of a Centaur.
(6) by opposition, as the idea of death from that of life.
(7) by a kind of transition, as the meaning of words and the idea of
place.