We are now in Stoic week, a new period of ancient philosophy, which is now influenced by the political changes of the Greek world.
Alexander the Great conquers a large part of southern Asia, an empire that goes from Greece to the West, including some parts of the Balkans, up util the river Indus - the borders of present-day India.
The horizon of the Greeks thus grows and becomes enormous. The whole middle east and beyond is now going to speak Greek as lingua franca. Hellenes means Greek → Hellenism means Greek culture being part of the culture of non-Greek speakers.
This will only be displaced by the Arabic conquests much later.
What you find is literally Greek theaters up to cities in Afghanistan → Kandahar is derived from the name Alexander.
For the Greeks, with this enlargement of the cultural sphere comes a new way of behaving and defining themselves towards this empire emerges. People will say that I am a polites of the entire cosmos (cosmopolitanism): my horizon is the entire cosmos.
When Aristotle describes what the virtues are, he can rely on existing habits and views of what Athens should look like; but when the city diminishes and the empire rises, you need a new definition of what it is.
People start looking for what happiness is in themselves.
People generally start saying that what philosophy is about is a way of living. Not Plato’s theoretical wisdom or theoretical science, nor the pre-Socratic quest of understanding nature as such, but rather ‘how do I live my life?’
Of course knowing science or physics will help, but the point is that those things are instrumental to becoming happy.
We see a strange combination of things that might contradictory at first sight: cosmopolitanism vs. privatization. But this is how expansion influences individual minds.
The school of Aristotle which needs to become a school next to others (or the school of Plato, or the peripatetic school, referring to Aristotle’s habit of walking around while explaining things).
digression: stoa is the Greek word for colonate.
Epicureanism is only really known through a few fragments and what the enemies of it would say about it.
The stoics are also poorly known, despite the success of the stoic school, but that’s how it is. The early stoic texts are very badly preserved just due to reasons of historical hazard.
Skepticism is born out of the Academy, and it puts emphasis on the apparatic nature of Socrates’ teachings. Following them, there is no judgement, we have no access to the truth, or the most important questions we might raise in our philosophy. Not Humean skepticism though.
Per the stoics, the reason we need philosophy is to attain happiness; all the other disciplines that are part of philosophy, philosophy was a project of science, it is really a ‘becoming’ thing. It only became broader in the 5th century.
This project of physics as part of philosophy remains, but they add a lot of things about theory of argumentation, sound reasoning, which brought forth the discipline of Logic.
Physics and logic are only instrumental in making one a happy person. There is a certain selfishness/egotism in the reflection of ‘what things mean for me individually,’ how one relates to other people instrumentally, for the person in question to obtain happiness.
It is now [in the actual present] extremely fashionable to talk of stoicism, it is a booming business. There’s a website called the daily stoic which the professor warns us off “cave canem.”
People derive a whole comprehensive worldview out of stoicism, but it’s cherry-picking.
Zeno came to Athens, then taught at the stoa poicile ‘the painted stoa,’ thus founding stoicism, then it was re-founded by Chrysippus who explained some denouncements of Zeno, and thus made it better [somehow?] .
Posidonius, Panaetius, the latter being the teacher of Cicero. Panaetius Platonized stoicism.
Famous stoics → Seneca was the advisor of Nero, and when he was compromised, and forced to commit suicide (as a stoic he would take that, part of what fate demanded him to do). Epictetus was a slave, and taught to all classes that wanted to hear him. Then there’s Marcus Aurelius, who was emperor obviously.
‘did everyone die in 1 BCE, and then rebirth in 1 CE’ (no, there was a gradual transition)
Middle stoicism is Platonizing, and the late period is returning to the sources but adding emphasis on ‘what happens to us.’
There is a 4-volume collection on stoicism, but it’s just short fragments, quotations, and paraphrases.
Happiness is more significant not just for the stoics. The demand for products and good produce is booming; and in Antiquity, larger demand is not necessarily met by larger supply. By advertising things nowadays we enlarge the demand, but that means that somewhere in the world this must be produced. This is not how it worked prior to early XXth century.
Until then, demand depended on supply. If you were a very rich Roman in Rome, you could ask for very expensive and rare things, and get stuff from far away brought to you; but you would have to pay a lot. So, how do you come to be happy about the things you desire? You manipulate the demand. Basically, adjust your expectations and needs to what is there.
If you are thirsty for the most expensive French wine, well, what are you going to do? Die of thirst? Just drink something else. [lol] Make sure that your thirst can be met by drinking clear water, something easy and ready to consume.
Limit your desires rather than try to find happiness in having more and more and more.
Maybe that’s part of the attractiveness of stoicism today, instead of wanting more and more in the rat race, try to limit your desires and be satisfied with less rather than more.
If you can’t access the most expensive food, just don’t want it. This is also what you find in Epicureanism. Pleasure is the highest good - thus, you must satisfy your needs, but be measured about it.
Stoicism goes further in this direction by saying avoid falling prey to your desires at all.
Happiness is the perfect fulfillment of your desires; but make sure it is possible to render your desires fulfilled.
Happiness here is still Aristotle’s eudaimonia. Happiness is largely defined negatively → even positive definitions like that of a ‘calm sea’ is still just about the lack of disturbances.
“does this King lie in your bed when you sleep? that’s crazy”
“we Belgians, we are not Dutch, French or German” → negative definition.
Zeno’s basic premise is ‘live in accordance with nature.’ I.e., people are happy be default, and then deprived of happiness. Chrysippus is who (re-)defines what nature is.
The first point of stoicism is materialism. Which may be surprising, coming after Plato and whoever. But idealism is the exception in antiquity, materialism is dominant in Ancient philosophy.
Only a body can have causal activity. If there is change, causation, motion, or whatever, this can only happen by corporeal activity. By corpses/bodies interacting with one another.
If the prof. says something and we write it down, that is a totally material process. How words interact is going to be very difficult to understand.
Things that Plato or Aristotle would never be seen as corporeal will now be rendered such. F.e. the soul, the thing that gives the body life, is, itself, corporeal. But also emotions - the stoics say that when you’re afraid, for instance, your soul shrinks. Once you exhale and are free of fear, you are broadening again. You are elating again. There is a motion in your soul that goes with the emotions you experience.
Things like colors - ‘this object is yellow’ - perceiving it as that color and understanding what it is, is a corporeal process.
So, the class of corporeal things is much larger than it was before, but it’s not atomism. It’s not saying that matter is some kind of substrate that is everywhere. That would be present-day materialism. What the stoics say, is that different corporeal things can mix together, interact, or even be together in the same place at the same time. Your body is at the same time as your soul is, as body. The soul has the possibility to be present in the corporeal state of your body without enlarging or changing it.
The seal permeates the body fully; could maybe be well-seen as the solution of salt in water. Not Descartes’ locus of the soul as the pineal gland or whatever.
The soul is the installation of Logos in our body; but Logos is much broader, it is everywhere. It is a corporeal thing that is everywhere in the cosmos, which gives it order, makes it coherent, etc. The logos is a subject, it is a form of providence that we don’t know, but we can in hindsight say that ‘this is what had to have happened.’
Sayables ‘lekta’: words + propositions
The communication you hear is not the words themselves; kind of Husserlian.
There are words we use to speak of things that don’t exist (the void, for example, the nihil negativum).
The theory of action is also the stoics’ theory of ethics. You can establish any theory of action as the relation between stimulus and response.
(S) → representation (fantasia) → assent (synkatathesis) → impulse (horme) → (R)
The things of the outside world produce a representation in one’s mind. These things are indications of the fact that outside things have causal influence on one’s own mind.
One feels warmth, sees the sun, or sees an ice cream. This thing is then present in their mind as a representation. If you’re an animal, there will be nothing between the representation and the deed. The animal will immediately jump to action.
The impulse is the striving for the deed. In non-human animals, the jump is from fantasia to horme. The ‘storming’ towards the deed.
The professor doesn’t bite us because he doesn’t want to. He may concede to his animal nature, but chooses not to. This is something animals and minors cannot do. This informs our juridical system. This system is stoic in origin.
You need a mature, rational adult human being to have the rational decision-making process in place.
What is in between, this decision-making in-between fantasia and horme is assent: synkatathesis. We dictate over our animal nature through the ‘yes’ or ‘no’ produced during assent. Morality comes at the moment of assent being given or denied.
The basic principle that guides assent is the evaluation of whether something is good or bad.
There is no way to skip assent, regardless of anything (basically, mitigating circumstances must always be described to a judge and they will then see if that was a reasonable judgement).
Horme:
First natural impulse (or inclination): self-preservation, the preservation of our nature.
‘I did eat soap once, but that’s another story.’
‘Logos knows everything, including the brick that will fall from the library on your head and kill you.’
The object we assent to or dissent from is already qualified from nature.