Ancient Philosophy
Hellenistic and imperial philosophy and stoicism.
Alexander the great establishes an empire that goes from Greece and the balkans up until the river indus. The enlargment of the horizon of the Greeks is enormous. And you must realise what is really happening. The whole of this region, the whole middle east is now Greek-speaking as a lingua franca. This is what we mean when we talk about hellenism. Greek culture is now part of the lives of non-greek speakers who have to use Greek. Of course local languages like Persian remain in places.
The east of the mediteranean will remain greek speaking for centuries to come. It will only be the position of the language of Greek which will be replaced during the arab conquests. It is a long period of Greek speaking culture, plus the west of Europe taking over the cultural achievements of the Greek world with the roman empire. What you find then is greek theaters all the way up until Kandahar, which was an alexandra. The cultural elite did their best to integrate local religions and culture with greek or macedonian habits. That is why you find a lot of Greek syncretism all over the world. The names in other religions are different, but are substantially about the same divinities.
With this enlargement of the cultural sphere, comes a new way of behaving, or of selfdefinition towards this empire.
You can see, and it is very contemporaneous, as we have seen happening in a globalising world, the rise of cosmopolitism people begin calling themselves ’polites’, civilillians. The horizon of one’s identity is now ’the cosmos’ the entire known world.
At the same time, this enlargement gives rise to an indiviudation of what makes me happy. In a city state, when aristotle describes what the virtues are, he relies on the norms and habits as revealing the ideal type of what an athenian should look like. When the city diminishes and a new empire rises, you need a new definition of what the good is in general. And so you start looking inwards, in yourself, they preach instead a retreat of the individual into themselves. The whole project of philosophy now becomes of a different orientation. What philosophy is about, is going to be a way of life. Philosophy is not Plato’s science or theoretical vision, nor even the presocratic quest of understanding nature, but rather how do I live my life; what needs to be done.
So knowing science and physics will therefore help. That is going to influence my sentiment of happiness, but these sciences are instrumental to becoming happy.
What we see is this strange combination of things that might look contradictory at first sight, cosmopolitanism on the one hand, and individualistic ethics on the other. But really this is the effect that growing enlargement has.
You find in the hellenic world a lot of rivalling schools telling you how to be happy. In much they are like rivalling shops who say that if you think like us you will find the happy life.
You might think that Plato and Aristotle remains forever in the generations immediately following aristotle. But this is not the case. The peripatetic school only became one among many smaller schools of thought.
The academy and the peripatetics become quite small in comparison to the others.
Mainly the stoics and the epicureans take over. Epicureanism is very bad known. We only know it through a couple of fragments, or collections of fragments of epicurus. But mostly about what adversaries of epicurus says about him. And many of them argue wrongly. The stoics are also badly known actually. The earliest stoic texts are more or less not preserved at all.
Then there is scepticism which is borne out of the academy. Scepticism is putting the emphasis on the aporetic nature of Socrates’ teaching. They claim that they know nothing; because there is nothing to be known; they suspend all judgement, and there is no access to the truth at all in regards to the most important questions. It is more like agnosticism, rather than the humean version of scepticism.
The most important thing from the presocratics is that their approach was a project of science, of physics, of mechanics. And only became more ethical in the 5th century.
Of these schools, the only really important one was stoicism.
According to them, we do philosophy in order to attain our own personal happiness.
Physics is very important to what the stoics explore, together with logic, and most importantly ethics. The earlier two are instrumental only to ethics, to make me a happy person. There is some kind of egotism in stoicism. They only reflect on what it means for me individually to become happy, how I relate to other people in order to be happy for myself.
Professor was in Australia last semester, talked to the ferry man, who saw that he was a philosopher, and he said I am reading his friend Marcus – Aurelius. Everyone knows stoicism now a days. A lot of people read stoicism in order to cope with the challenges put forth by globalisation. Be aware, the point is they are cherry picking what they actually are interested in stoicism. They don’t actually teach what the stoics taught. They get instead some generalised moral reflections. As philosophers instead we should know better, we should know the basic premises on which stoicism actually rests.
Stoicism comes from the word stoa, meaning colonnade. The older and the middle stoa are badly preserved. The older stoa was founded by Zeno of Citium on Cyprus. He taught in Athens at the painted stoa. From Zeno we have very little, and his second generation successor was Chrysippus. He refounded the Stoa by explaining some dictats of Zeno, and systematising the school. Then there is the middle stoa with Posidonius, and Panaetius. Panaetius was in Rome and was the teacher of Cicero. Posidonius brought platonism into the stoa by referring to a tripartite soul like Plato does. He implies a lot of conclusions that are derived from platonic philosophy. And as Cicero defined himself as a platonist, he found a lot of inspiration in this platonised stoicism. The late period is much better preserved. Here we have Seneca, the advisor of Nero. Epictetus, who was a greek slave, taught all of the classes of the roman empire who wanted to listen. And Marcus Aurelius was the emperor. In the roman empire there was a doctrine then which went between the lowest and the highest classses of the empire.
Now what is the point of the quest of happiness, not just for the stoics. The point may be economic. If you have a larger empire, meaning that there is a larger economic sphere, then the demand of products, and of good produce, is booming. There is a much larger demand, and in antiquity larger demand is not met by larger supply.
What we do now a days is to enlarge the demand by advertising and so on. We have enough production, but not enough demand on average. By making the demand higher, and bringing in more products, you increase the general wealthfare of global society.
That is not what happens until very early in the 20th century. Before this, demand was entirely dependent on supply. If you were a very rich roman, you could ask for rare produce made in south russia, but it would cost enormously. So what do you do if you want to be happy by fulfilling your desires? If you cant manipulate the supply side, you have to manipulate the demand side. The message during the macedonian and roman empire is that you should adjust your expectations.
If you are thirsty, and you can only obey your thirst by having the most expensive wine from bourdeaux, are you going to drown yourself if you have no access? No you lower your expectations. Drinking clean water can also fix your thirst. What needs to be done is to limit your desires in stoicism. And that is part of stoicism’s attractiveness today. Instead of wanting ever more in the rat race of every day, the message is to be satisfied with less. You have to be satisfied with what fate has in store for you.
There is a similar message in epicureanism. Epicurus says pleasure is the highest good, but you have to be sober. If your need is thirst you should drink water, but if there is wine, then drink that if it gives you pleasure. But if it gives you hang over, don’t drink that much wine.
And again you will see that this model of happiness, remember in Parmenides, perfection is filling up every need and leaving nothing empty to the range of your enterprise. You find in the hellenistic time the same image, but the perfection of happiness is the perfect fulfilment of your desires, but then you have to make sure that your desires are such that they can be fulfilled. If you always want more, you will eventually become unhappy because you broaden the perspective of what needs to be there to satisfy you.
The Greek version of this always imply a rational choice. If you have to be indifferent for example, that means you have to know what indifference is by nature, and then choose to be indifferent. But you cannot be indifferent to things that are good.
They use happiness in the same sense as Aristotle. The opposite of happiness: if you need to reflect on your own situation and you find what makes you unhappy, it is usually a negatively derived term. They always talk about what happiness is not, and their definition of happiness is only metaphorical: the calm sea. Meaning that there is no disturbance, and so is still a negative definition. This definition of what happiness is about is a word preceded by an alpha, and an alpha privativa. Apatheia is the absence of passions, and this is good.
If you want to tell other people what defines you as a citizen of the country you come from, what defines you essentially? What is a flag? There is some symbolic identity, but the symbol is empty. No one can be proud of being Belgian. The positive determination of what a nationality is is difficult to express, but it’s easy to say what one is not in terms of nation. This happens all over the world. This is part of globalisation. The negative determination of our happiness is part of how you anthropoligically consider most important.
Zeno says live in accordance with nature, but what nature is for him is a bit unclear. The more you start defining what it is, you actually lose a lot that doesn’t seem to be in the definition. Negation actually keeps open what a broader definition entails.
The stoics are materialists. Suprising maybe because Aristotle and Plato takes distance from materialism. Idealism actually becomes the exception. Most ancient philosophers are materialists. The point is that only a body can be a cause. If there is change, if there is causation or motion, this can only happen by corporeal activity. If I say something, and we write it down, this is a totally material process. The chain of causal events is always corporeal.
Obviously then, the stoics have to redefine what a body is. The soul is now seen as totally corporeal. That which actualises the body that potentially has life, is itself corporeal. But also emotions. That is kind of what you feel the stoics saying, if you are afraid, the soul physically shrinks. And if you are free of fear, you are broadening again, your soul is elating. Things like colour, perceiving it as that colour, and understanding it like that, is a corporeal process. Colours are directly in corporeal things.
So the class of corporeal things is much larger. But this is not atomism. Matter is not a substrate that is everywhere. What the stoics say, which is a strange part of their concept of matter, is that different corporeal bodies can mix together, or even be together at the same place at the same time. Your body is at the same place as your body. Because the soul has the ability to be present within the corporeal state of your body, because they occupy the same area of space. This means that the soul is essentially omnipresent in the body. If you cut up the body as a stoic, you see the soul everywhere in the body. And it is going to be logos, the active principle everywhere in the cosmos. The theory is basically that if there is nothing that animates a thing, then it is passive. It does nothing. If something is moving, selfmotion, an exception to the greek world that lacked beginning or end, must be produced not by the thing that by itself is passive, but by a cause that makes it move out of itself. Self motion is double, a passive sustrate and an active mover that makes it move.
If you have taken that step, then you can see why the next step would be a return to presocratic philosophy. They argue like Parmenides that there can be no void, no empty place. Everything is corporeal, in a continuum of bodily elements. They permeate in one another sometimes, but there is no void.
If you say that everything is corporeal, and the body in its own nature is always passive, undergoing, there must be something active of the corporeal nature. This is always and everywhere logos. The soul is the installation of logos in our body. There is one corporeal thing that is everywhere in the cosmos that gives it its order, and that makes it eternal. This word, logos, which means word or account or explanation, now become a principle itself. It is actively present in the corporeal world. By being human, we show that there is logos in us. By being born we show that there is motion in the cosmos that causes sexual procreation. This is the divine principle in the world. It is a logic that does not know of itself. It is an active knowing principle, and it is also a principle of fore-knowledge, a determination of future events. It is a determining element, some kind of providence that we don’t know, but that we can in hindsight say that what happened must have been what had to happen because it was destined from the start. Kind of like predetermination. The explanation of what is actually the origin or the difference between nature and logos is only the passive and active principle. It is always going to be a kind of combination between passive and active principle. It is difficult to determine nature without it, because there is no nature without it.
Only bodies can have causal operation, but that does not mean that everything is corporeal per say. There are four causes of immaterial things. By being immaterial, they are deprived of causal force. We are talking about things that are emanations up and above things with causal force, but have no bearing or weight on the system as such.
The first one is to talk, sayables, lekta. Subdivided in propositions and words. Which in themselves are inactive. How can that be? The information of my lecturer is not like this. It does something to me. The stoics agree that if one communicates with words, then there is bits of body that is brought from mouth to ear which actively have an influence, but those are not the words themselves. The words are actually text-balloons of something that is going on underneath. The communication you hear is an active communication but it is not the words themselves that make that communication.
In our scientific theory it is not the meaning of the words that travel in the air, just vibrations. They mean something similar. This explains why communication can go wrong. I say one word, and it is understood elsehow, and there is miscommunication. There is an interaction that is causal, but it does not reside in the proposition itself. The proposition is just a textbaloon which we can render explicit to show what is meant. The lekta are immaterial and inactive. That language is an expression of underlying meaning is in the stoics. But the existance of different languages that speak of the same things, is already in some sense explained by their theory. That the underlying notion is there, and not the verbal expression.
A second kind of immateriality is empty space. It does not exist. Yet we refer to it somehow. We refer to an inexistent when we speak of it. So it is actually some kind of convention when we talk of these things. Void is the absence of fullness. If I say your bottle is half empty, the emptiness of the body is not something we can actually describe. Void is just a parasitic word we use to denote something that is not there. Insofar as the bottle is used so and so, the bottle is half empty. Void however does not have an active role in the cosmos.
Place and time are also things we refer to just out of convention, and we understand the meaning, but they are not something real in themselves. Place is just the amount of space occupied by a certain body. But that does not make that space real. It is a way of referring without actually having any existential meaning to it. The same with time. Time is the measurement of the movement of bodies, the bodies are real and the movement is real, but the measure is not something real, it lacks any causal operation. Time is no cause.
The most important part of stoicism is their theory of motion. The theory of action is their theory of ethics. What happens in daily interactions with the world and what must happen to make me happy. So it is a derivation of their physical theory. Instrumental to establishing a theory of good action. And you can start any theory of action that we need a connection between stimulus and response. Now you have to define the content between those two. If you are an animal there will not be too much going on. But if you are human the interaction is going to be a lot more elaborate. They need an explanation of the whole theory of action which accounts for stimulus and reaction.
The first thing that happens is that the things of the outside world produce representation in my mind. That is very cartesian. The thing that I see is present in my mind as a representation (fantasia). If you are an animal, there will be nothing between representation and deed, or impulse (hormè, the storming towards the deed). When you are human things are a bit more complicated. I see someone, but that doesn’t mean I will bite them. I may decide not to, most likely actually. As human, as an adult, you should know better, you will be punished if you do. This makes us accountable for our deeds. Things that lack this ability cannot be held accountable. Children and animals are not accountable at all times. And our juridical system follows this kind of thinking. Our juridical system is stoic in origin. That you need a mature adult who is a rational being, so that the decision-process is in place, then you can punish the person in question.
That thing that comes between the stimuli, the representation, and the impulse/reaction is the assent (synkatathesis). There is an instance in us which decides yes or no. I should or I should not. This is normative for what we actually do. The theory of action for the stoics becomes moral at the point of assent/denial. The basic principle is the assessment whether something should or should not be done. And that is extremely complicated. All the deliberation takes place at this stage of assent. Adult humans cannot skip this moment.
Who is then making this decision? Our reason. The human soul is rational because the logos is prominently present there. Our being, once we become adults, and reason takes over, is determining the entirety of our lives. Whatever we do is mediated by rational capacity, decisionmaking of good and bad. We are like a computer with a 1 and a 0, opening of closing of gates, and all day we say 1, 0, 1, 0 etc. The decisionmaking is always bipolar. Either something is good or bad to us. Our reason is the place in which we become moral beings. No one willingly ers. We want to make decisions and the decisions we make constitute the moral value of our deeds.
So what is then good or bad? What guides the norm? Thus far it has only been a descriptive level.
At the level of reason, the point is that some things that we decide upon, is choiceworthy or not. Do I choose it or do I choose against it? Your reason is the judge. Now reason becomes active, and goes along with the representation and approves it or rejects it. Once assent is given, the impulse immediately happens and we do the thing. What is the preferable thing?
First impulse which is most proper to us, that we have from the start of our lives is to live in accordance with nature. The decision we make must be in accordance with nature; and the first natural impulse is self preservation. The epicurean opponents will say that the first impulse is to avoid pain and look for pleasure. You are hungry in stoicism because you want to stay alive.
They are not saying that there is no link between the representation and the thing in itself, but sometimes the representation is mistaken. And this misguides our action. But ideally reason should come in and advice that there is a possibility for this to be the case. The freedom to choose is part of our human nature. Animals cannot choose. It may make us bad or good, but at least we can choose.
But then again, this choice is actually guided. It is actually predetermined to say yes and no in certain circumstances. The first one is the level of providence. Logos knows everything in advance. But it is also present in the movement of the brick that is going to kill me. Logos knew that from eternity. Don’t complain that you don’t know it because it is not yours to know. Logos deceives us in that respect. The moral message is don’t be angry, don’t make it a guiding principle to be mad, because all is predetermined. You couldn’t have done anything about it. We have a moment of freedom but in reality the world is universally determined. Our freedom is a coloured freedom, it is already determined. The moment of choice as such exists, but it is foreknown.
So we get a normative system given by nature. The object of our assent is qualified. Either it is in accordance with nature, it goes contrary to nature, or you are indifferent to it.