Ancient Philosophy
In stoicism there is still a moment of freedom in which our assent is what matters.
And we need to explain what the right thing to do in a generally determined world is. Whatever happens is already decided by logos from eternity.
If you know oidipus who was fated to kill his father and marry his matter, everything was done to escape this fate, yet the fate was determined, it still happened.
Logos is present in all things, everywhere there is an active principle there is logos. This logos is ours and yet we don’t know it. Logos has provided everything but at the level of the individual there is no knowledge.
The whole of logos is therefore developing itself in a knowing process of where it wants to get, yet the parts do not share in that knowledge. There are two levels: on the level of individual action, of logoi, and on the level of the universal logos, nature as it develops, logos itself.
Determinism and providence always presupposes this double perspective on things. The perspective of the whole which knows and does, and the perspective of the individual which doesn’t know. The stoic position is that even if we don’t know all things are precluded by the logos, whilst logoi only knows in hindsight.
Leibniz takes some of this over. Mutatis mutandis. The number of people needed to produce you as an individual is uncountable. It is such a high amount of people that you are unable to tell who everyone in your past family was, yet all of these people were necessary for your existence. All of them made completely arbitrary decisions in relation to me. The point is that as a consequence of people doing what they do without knowing the whole, and yet somehow these are necessary for my existence. My existence as a person was not decided by anyone specifically, because no one could foretell who I would be.
’if you comply you are guided by fate, and if you don’t, you will be forced anyways.’
Don’t go against your course of life. Like Seneca, if you are the advisor of a whimsical ruler like Nero, and you get too close to the oven and it burns, just go along with it. Your choice is only to assent to what happens or not.
Any stoic theory of morality and ethics is derived from nature, a qualification of good and evil. This means that nature already dictates what needs to be done, and it is our duty to listen to that. The object of our assent is always going to be qualified. What presents itself to us is either in accordance with nature, whereof it is good, or it is going against nature, and it is bad, or sometimes thing are neither good nor bad, and we are indifferent to them.
Our bodily nature has thirst as part of its fulfilment of needs. It is a natural event that is indifferent. So the need is equally indifferent. If I make drinking alcohol everyday a need for myself, I am making something that should be indifferent a good for myself. But this is obviously against nature.
If you pursue the wine for its own sake, you lose your freedom of choice by making the wrong choice in assent. If things are in accordance with nature you are in the correct state. This is the way to wisdom, your reason is able to make the right decision of what is needed for nature.
This becomes the cardinal virtues: justice, moderation, courage, and prudence. These four virtues we already found in Plato.
In stoicism living in accordance with nature is to live along your personal nature. Ethics is about becoming a good person in yourself. You need other things like friends to become happy yourself, but you can only be happy by yourself. Stoicism has been taken over by people like Spinoza, in which it is about living in accordance with nature, God. The ecological philosophy is in large part derived from Spinoza which in its turn is derived from stoicism.
Nature is something normative, it is designed to be good. But if my character is different from nature, my character is bad. Whether you are a good person is going to be part of following or going against your own nature. Fate will tell you that what it needs for you is always put out for you. It could be fated that I will have a bad decision making process. But you still have to make these decisions yourself.
Whatever I want I want it because I perceive it as good, phainomenon agathon. If the goal of my life is to be a thief it is because I find some perceived happiness in doing that kind of thing. If I didn’t see the point the story ends. Whether it is objectively good or not, doesn’t matter as according to my perception. I perceive that I need alcohol every day, but probably that means I’ve lost control.
Eventually you invest your energy in whatever you perceive as a good but it can turn against you.
Pathos. The word mostly means something positive, you speak with passion. But passion, means or refers to a passive state. Passion is something that you are undergoing, which means that you lose control. Passion is something bad, something you should avoid by its own nature. Addiction is something you should avoid. Having a passion for drugs is not great.
What happens with passions? When you make a wrong decision in your assent, you have decided something is good when in fact it is indifferent or bad. If you say something is good when it is bad, then the impulse that follows takes over and you lose control. You are lost to the course of events by your reason. It is your own rational decision to go there. Be a stoic wise instead. You need to say stop when this kind of assent occurs to you.
What the stoics reinstate after Aristotle, going back to something like Plato, is an intellectualistic perspective. A moral error, a wrong decision of what you need to do, is an intellectual error, your reason went astray. Reason is the kernel of all that happens. If reason is mistaken, if it makes a badly informed decision, it leads to a moral mistake.
So what are our passions?
Perversions of our natural inclinations to strive for the good and avoid the bad. What is the natural inclination of striving for the good? Living in accordance with nature. The first inclination is self-preservation. So your nature is well-disposed, but by your individual freedom in your logos, you can make decisions that go against nature.
Desire is bad. There is no way around it. Desire is a passion and it does a perversion of a natural inclination. My desire is to be the wisest already shows that your not him.
Fear: I am avoiding things to not make something happen. I am investing energy to make something not occur. Desire and fear are two horns of decisionmaking that are always going wrong, which are passions that you should avoid. Being afraid of death is investing way too much energy that does not deserve it. Orexis natural inclination and Ekklesis avoidance of what you should not go for. Epithumeia desire but deemed as something bad. Phobos can take over and you don’t do what you should be doing.
Pleasure, hedone, is the fulfillment of that which has become a desire, but which is not at all choiceworthy and is a wrong decision of your mind.
Lupè is the pain felt when a fear is enacted.
Orexis → epithumeia → hedonè
ekklesis → phobos → lupè
Passions according to the stoics are irrational. Because there is only reason that should make a decision. If reason is not making the decision, it is by definition irrational. There are no parts of the soul like in platonism. The orthodox stoic doctrine is the unity of soul which is fully rational when human. It is the decision-making process is nothing but rational. But it is rationality itself that leads itself astray. The logos goes astray when it pushes itself outside of the bounds of what it is taught to do well. It is reason itself that makes the decision to go outside of what it is able. Once you are beyond the point of your logos, then passion takes over, and you lose control. And it is very hard to get out of that. It takes a very professional stoic wise to remedy this.
Hence you should entirely eradicate your pleasures. No pleasure, no pain, no fear.
In the end wisdom is called apatheia. Absence of passions. It is being outside of the world of passions. If we succeed in this we become wise persons. What is the emotional life of a stoic wise? How can you argue for the desirability of your life if you have no desire? What makes this life better? So they also have to come up with a theory that also involves the emotions of the wise itself. The apatheia becomes an eupatheia; that is the good performance of emotions and passions. So the passions will instead be switched to positive terms.
The wise person has wishes, cautions, and joys.
The stoic wise says: I would like to have food now, there is no unhappiness if it doesn’t become the case. It is a state of happiness in which you don’t really care if the object of your striving fails.
The same with fear. Don’t make it into something that you wish to avoid at all costs, but instead you caution around things which may harm you. But if it involves being forced to commit suicide, don’t really be afraid, because that’s what needs to happen. You have no influence over this evil person. But don’t be unhappy if it doesn’t work. The importance is to keep your eqanimity. Stoics may say that it is better for you to die now in the long run, it’s probably better to do so. It is better to be consequent to yourself.
Why isn’t there an equivalent to pain? If you don’t involve yourself in fear in the first place you won’t get to experience pain. The stoic wise life will always be able to avoid the thing he needs to avoid, and will do so without much care.
Epictetus was punished on the rack and said: beware you will break my leg, and it breaks, and he says I told you! But it does not affect his inner happiness. If it happens there is no pain because it was bound to happen.
What you gain is inner freedom. Detaching the kernel of your existance from the outside. Making sure whatever is you is not harmed by the whims of reality.
In later stoicism this is the main argument: detachment and so on. Avoiding getting attached to that which is not in our power (ouk eph’hèmin). You should instead take the perspective of the universe as a whole together with providence. The situations of revolutionaries getting locked up is not up to them, but they did so and tried to persevere together with the situation they’ve been given.
And as such, the perspective of the stoic wise should be the entire cosmos. If your happiness depends on your closest circles, you are actually cultivating your unhappiness. Don’t attach yourselves to those next of kin so closely that your happiness depends on them. But obviously that way of solidarity should be extended to all rational beings. The fates of different people should affect us just as much. But not enough to jeopardise your own happiness. So we get a theory of politics which involves cosmopolitanism in the strictest sense.
Primo Levi, a victim of the holocaust. ’Is this a man?’ What would you be prepared to give up by saying x is not up to me? Up to which point can you go to avoid the question if you are still human, and stoics would go very far in that direction. Perhaps too far.