ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY 14

ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY 14: STOICISM

Zeno (founder), Cleantes (first pupil), Chrysippus (second founder)

• positive doctrine, against the non-doctrine of the Skeptics
• in arguing with the Skeptics a highly elaborate doctrine emerged
• physics (ontology, cosmology, theology); logic; ethics
  [no metaphysics, everything is corporeal]

ZENO:

• encountered Xenophon’s Socratic dialogues, started calling himself a Socratic
• one of Polemon (final Academy head)‘s pupils, the other was Arcesilaus (Skeptic)

STOICISM:

[PHYSICS]

• CORPOREALISM: only bodies exist and can be causes (combined with a living cosmos)

• no obscure causes (Forms, participation), return to Presocratic causality (since bodily causality is clear)

• CYCLIC UNIVERSE: fire (conflagration), ordered arrangement (diakosmesis), followed by fire again

• fire is the generative principle, in condensing it becomes different elements, eventually turning so dry that it lights up again (fire, air, water, earth, fire)

• ONTOLOGY: existence is lesser than the something; things which subsist but aren’t like Space, Empty, Time, Sayables (meanings beyond language) [pure potencies, playing fields, universal constants, etc.]

• only what has causal power exists

• VITALISM & PROVIDENCE: God/Matter. God permiates and imbues matter; two principles, but one cause in God

• God is an intellect, matter is simply a corporeal entity that receives his causality (like Timaeus)

• so a similar project to Socrates’ Demiurge, but there is no transcendence

• in Timaeus soul is either passive or resistant (to order); for the Stoics all matter is passive

• SEEDING: God functions like a vitalist seed, his soul is not only in the heavens, but everywhere, he’s an embryo that grows and ungrows through the cycles, while also heralding them, and from the cosmic womb God generates all elements

• for them the causal processes of the universe are to be found in medicine (blood-water, fire-body heat, etc.)

• God is an internal moulding principle of the universe, unfolding with it like a seed, a Logos, a rational Heraclitian principle

• the primordial fire necessarily generates everything

• the Stoic God does not build like the demiurge, he plants once and everything afterwards is fated to develop as such (providence)

• providence is the unfolding of rationality

• this solves Plato’s choosing God (un-necessary world), thus God is an efficient cause, the world is necessary and good and the best of all

• in being burned up the universe returns to pure good

• GOD COINDICES WITH NATURE

• THE COSMIS SOUL: exhaltations from the sea, souls, keep us alive, its how God exercises his causality by giving us unity and form

• three forms: psyche (humans), phusis (plants), hexis/cohesion (inanimate beings)

• Plato’s world soul is heavenly, but the stoic one is everywhere

• TENSIONS:

• active principle vs fire? Is fire wholly God is everything a bit of the two; could God be simply an energy

• is God fate-blind and impersonal? But the stoics prayed to God

• if good is universal and cosmic, where does evil come from? what even is ‘good’?

[ETHICS]

• TELOS is living according to nature (but what is nature?)

• SOUL: Plato’s two part soul, Aristotle’s 3 part bio-soul and 2 part ethical soul

• Stoics posit a unitary rational soul, its ruling HEGEMONIKON part extends from the heart through tentacles (5 sense, reproductive faculty, voice)

• our soul is a crumb of the world soul, and is a body (pneuma)

• it has one virtue: knowledge of good and bad

• conflict of passions is between states of this singular soul, not between its parts (conflict is passages in sucession)

• all passions are rooted in the rational, passions are mediated by thoughts and can be overcome

• PATHOS/AFFECTION: wrong judgement through assent. Fearing a non-existent illness, for example

• Moral bad is being wrong, not knowing good

• Main passions: pleasure, pain, desire, fear

• APATHEIA: the stoic goal, not giving assent to pathe/pathos. We can feel them, but not judge them as true (I’m scared of something non-existent, but realize it to be so, etc.)

• GOOD is that which always benefits (things which can harm and benefit are not good)

• INDIFFERENS: those things indifferent to virtue (health, wealth), can affect it in many ways, but if not there the sage will still be happy
  [Skeptic argument: but if a sage’s kids are killed how can he be happy? Well, its actually a bit of an unrealistic system, which makes it more coherent but less applicable]
  [this is why Aurelius, Seneca, Epictetus (imperial stoics) became such, even if you’re tortured and the empire is falling apart you can still be happy because that’s external to it, indifferent to it]

• the whole point is choosing which passions to give assent to, basically; all passions are rational, so unlike in Plato, you’re choosing between two rational things

The System: Stoics have the first proper system (not even Aristotle did); they study the same cosmos, without transcendence, from many perspectives and brances

VIRTUE:

• only the sage is virtious (unlike with Plato, for whom laypeople also had certain virtues, for the Stoics everyone but the sage is drowning)
• Socrates was a sage, but how to become one is dubious
• the more stretched out your pneuma is, the more likely you are to be virtious
  [Plotinus reads the indifferens as making you contemplative, but the Stoics only cared about how you ACTED]
• this is a strange kind of corporeal asceticism, there is no desire to transcend the physical
• we are morally culpable, because although causes are fated to act upon us in certain ways, we nevertheless can react differently depending on our nature/predisposition
• so no control over fate, but control over your reaction

OIKEISOSIS:

• appropriation, acting proper to your nature
• we all have a proper nature
• the Socratic tendency towards goodness is explained biologically: we simply tend towards it, that’s our nature
• politics is also proper to our nature (being good to your family, neighbourhood, city state…)
• so cosmopolitanism: all humans tend towards the same, we’re all tending towards caring for each other
• this is also cosmic, the cosmic rational intellect, which we live according to as well
• and our natures (anxious, etc.) can be improved so we’re sage-like

[LOGIC]

• ethics is dependent on knowledge, so epistemology is central

• SAYABLES: don’t exist, but subsist

• composed on the body carrying meaning, the thing meant, the way its expressed (‘YOU’, you the person, written text)

• incomplete (jumble of words) and complete (sentence, proposition)

• only complete assertive sayables are true or false

• these are PROPOSITIONS!

• STOIC LOGIC:

• Aristotle’s terminal syllogisms are thrown out, this is proper propositional logic

• universals are non existent, phantasms (for Plato it was this world that was a phantasm, and the universals that are real)

• but we can still use them, since they’re useful

• Chysippus: ‘a human is a rational animal’ is not refering to a universal human, but is simply generalizing universally, there’s no essential force at play

• accidents make you who you are, not genuses or species

FOUR GENERA:

• stoic categories, but not really, just analytic tools
• SUBSTRATE: the body being qualified, empty husk of potentialities
• QUALIFIED: individual qualities
• DISPOSED: said of something already qualified, its emergent properties
• RELATIVELY DISPOSED: disposition in regards to another, etc. (in relation to another person, for example)

[EPISTEMOLOGY]

• PHANTASIA: image-representation, what presents itself to us, something we passively receive

• we never receive single qualities like white/rough/harsh, all of these are already structured, predicated of a substrate (a wall)

• corporeal soul makes these impressions simple to imagine

• not every phantasia is an ascent, just a suggestion we can filter out or not

• a phantasia becomes belief when I give assent to it

• some phantasias are so absolute that we give immideate assent to them (the chair I’m sitting on right now, etc.)

• we can always suspend ascent, suspend belief (that Husserian epoche)

• the stoic sage suspends assent for all un-kataleptic (i.e. absolute) impressions, thus reaching REAL knowledge

• CRITERION: only the phantesiai kataleptikai are a criterion of truth

• those things that impress us as utterly self-evident

• with repetition we form memories, anticipations, notions we deem correct

• knowledge is a system of integrated memories of this kind

• only the sage has this knowledge (ofc)