Stoicism

STOICISM. - Philosophical school founded in the "Stoa" (Portico) of Athens by Zeno of Citium around 300 B.C. Its successors were Cleanthes (d. 233-32), author of a famous hymn to Zeus, and Chrysippus of Soli (d. around 206). To this school, called the Old Stoa, also belong Ariston of Chios, Heraposthenes of Cyrene, Zeno of Tarsus... Then follows the Middle Stoa, which had its greatest center in Rhodes: its most distinguished representatives were Boethus of Sidon (d. 119 B.C.), Panaetius of Rhodes (180-110) and Posidonius of Apamea (135-51), with whom Stoicism opens itself eclectically to the influence of Plato and Aristotle and accentuates, especially in the last, the religious sense of speculation, announcing Neoplatonism (v.). The work of Panaetius, Περὶ τοῦ καθήκοντος, would serve as a model for Cicero's De officiis. Of the New Stoa, or Roman Stoa, of which Panaetius was the principal founder and which flourished in the imperial age, there form part L. A. Seneca (v.), Musonius Rufus and his disciple Epictetus (v.), the emperor Marcus Aurelius, with whom original Stoicism loses much of its systematic rigor, indulging in not a few motifs of Platonic dualism. The same philosophical school founded in Rome by Q. Sextius around 40 B.C. can be considered a derivation from Stoicism, even if Pythagorean influences are evident in it, especially in Sotion of Alexandria, Seneca's teacher.

The Stoics divide philosophical inquiry into the three fundamental parts, logic, physics and ethics, while nonetheless recognizing their intrinsic connection and unity (Arnim, op. cit. in bibl., II, 38). In the physical conception Stoicism, reacting decisively against Platonic and Aristotelian dualism, renews certain fundamental aspects of Heracliteanism and constructs a rigorous naturalistic monism (v.). The incorporeal does not exist; only bodies are substances, since only what is material acts and produces effects. Place, time, motion and everything that "can be enunciated" (τὸ λεκτόν) of substance are incorporeal. Through a critical revision of Aristotelianism the Stoics reduce the fundamental determinations of the real, or categories, to four: substance, quality, modality, relation. Substance or substratum (οὐσία, ὑποκείμενον) is the prime matter of which every thing is constituted; essential quality (τὸ ποιόν) is what differentiates substances and is inseparable from them; modality (πῶς ἔχον) is accidental quality (such as being seated) that does not subsist in itself; relation (πρὸς τί πῶς ἔχον) exists only in function of another thing (such as right and left). The last two, unlike the first two, are therefore not entities, but mere incorporeal "enunciables." Two are the original principles of every thing: the passive, which is substance deprived of quality, or matter, and the active (no less corporeal than the other), that is, the reason (λόγος) which produces in that matter the individual beings and is inseparable from it. God is the logos, "industrious and artificer fire" (πῦρ τεχνικόν) that informs matter from within; it is spirit (πνεῦμα) that pervades every living being and confers on it unity and consistency; it is "like a seed (λόγος σπερματικός) that has in itself all the reasons of the beings that were, that are and that will be" (Aristocles, in Eusebius, Praep. ev., XV, 816 d) and therefore is providence (πρόνοια), necessity (ἀνάγκη), fate (εἰμαρμένη) and immanent principle of finality, of cohesion in the mineral world, of vegetative power in plants, of sensibility in animals, of reason in man. As such, God assumes many names; the gods, that is, the elements and natural phenomena, are born and die, but Zeus, the inextinguishable fire, persists through the changing vicissitudes of the world. Thus the Stoics interpret traditional mythology naturalistically. The cosmos is spherical and therefore finite (even if the space surrounding it is infinite), animated, perfect, blessed, divine: it is generated from fire and in fire is resolved in a general conflagration (ἐκπύρωσις; Seneca [Nat. quaest., III, 29] considers it of Babylonian origin) and then is reborn like the mythical phoenix and repeats exactly the preceding cycle (ἀποκατάστασις). The souls of men (of the best only, according to Chrysippus) survive until the ekpyrosis, since the soul too is a corporeal breath congenital to man.

Closely connected to the naturalistic principles is Stoic logic, which aims to be a logic of the concrete. Hostile to every form of innatist epistemology, the Stoics see in sensory experience the beginning of all knowledge: it begins with sensation, which is an impression (τύπωσις) of the object on the soul, or, as Chrysippus maintained, an alteration (ἀλλοίωσις); once sensation has occurred, there is the representation (φαντασία); from the repetition of representations experience is formed, from which intellectual knowledge, or science, derives, which is an organic connection of concepts. Of concepts, moreover, some are formed spontaneously in all men, and are therefore called "anticipations" (προλήψεις) and "common notions" (κοιναί ἔννοιαι); others instead are the result of reflection and mental operations. Although sensation is a passivity (πάθος), the Stoics, not wishing to reduce knowledge to a mere registration of empirical data, bring to light, with the theory of "assent" (συγκατάθεσις), the active aspect of knowledge: no "comprehension" (κατάληψις) without assent (v.). But here the solutions are equivocal: now assent conditions comprehension, and in this case the intellectual act is the work of a free intervention of the subject and, as such, is distinct from sense (voluntaristic thesis); now comprehension is the presupposition of assent, insofar as sensation is considered as already endowed with its own evidence (ἐνάργεια), that is, as a "catalectic representation" (φαντασία καταληπτική): one thus tends to unify sense and intellect, or, in any case, to minimize their distinction (intellectualistic thesis). In short, Stoicism, which has full confidence in the value of perception, lacks a critical theory of experience. Consequently, the criterion (v.) of truth was placed now in the "catalectic representation," now in the "common notions," now in the "coherence" among representations. Without doubt, once the world was conceived as an organic and living being, intimately pervaded by the divine unifying Force, knowledge too had to be conceived as "relation" and as "accord" between subject (v.) and object (v.). This metaphysical dogma, while it conferred on particular things that unity and that connection which seemed compromised by the naturalistic presuppositions, further induced the Stoics to recognize a very special importance in hypothetical and disjunctive syllogisms at the expense of apodictic knowledge, not so much in order to introduce a motif of contingency (antithetical, moreover, to their determinism), as in order to adapt the movement of thought more closely to the various and manifold aspects of experience.

In ethics (manifestly open to the influences of Cynic thought) Stoicism reveals the most vital tendencies and at the same time the most critical aspects of the Hellenistic age. Its categorical imperative is perfectly in conformity with its metaphysics: "Live according to nature"; naturam sequere. And since the world is governed by an unfailing law, that is, by the divine Logos, man, the only one among living beings capable of knowing that law and of accepting it consciously, has the duty (τὸ καθήκον) to conform to it: "Grande solacium est cum universo rapi" (Seneca, De prov., V, 8). Therefore to live in conformity with nature is equivalent to "following reason," to "living consistently" (ὁμολογουμένως ζῆν); for the Logos is one and immutable. Stoic wisdom is born first of all from this lyrical contemplation of the cosmos lived in a pantheistic sense, from this sympathetic relationship of the individual with the Whole: knowledge, lucid and unmoved, of the universal order, is translated into disinterested actions that know no compromises with the passions. Now the passions (which Zeno reduced to four fundamental ones: desire, pleasure, fear, pain) are not the consequences of an irrational part of the soul, opposed by nature to the good (which Stoic pantheism cannot admit), but are disordered movements of the soul, produced by false judgments of value, by erroneous opinions. Virtue, the only true good, is therefore perfect reason, arrived at the highest degree of knowledge: it is therefore also "impassibility" (ἀπάθεια). All the virtues, having common principles and an identical end, are different names for one and the same fundamental virtue. And since virtue is one, whoever truly possesses one possesses them all; and whoever possesses one vice possesses them all. There is no intermediate state between virtue and vice. Stoicism exalts the dignity of the sage who stands free and imperturbable before reality, serenely and heroically enduring the blows of fortune. "Abstain and endure" (ἀνέχου καὶ ἀπέχου). All those things are indifferent (ἀδιάφορα) to him, such as health, beauty, wealth, glory, which are in themselves neither vices nor virtues; even life is an ἀδιάφορον, from which the sage may free himself by suicide (ἔξαγωγή) in cases of extreme necessity (Marcus Aurelius, III, 1; Epictetus, Diss., I, 29, 29; Seneca, Ep., 80, 34-36; 70, 6.17). But this ethical rigorism was not always kept within such narrow limits: indifferent things were in turn distinguished into "preferred" (προηγμένα), "non-preferred" (ἀποπροηγμένα) and "neutral"; between the virtues and the vices there found a place the fitting actions (πρέποντα), and one even came to admit a "progress" in the moral life. Although egocentric and exquisitely individualistic, the ethics of Stoicism proclaimed the solidarity of all men; it affirmed a universal natural law that makes every man a citizen of the world; it fought slavery and advocated, against the narrowness of nationalisms, the cosmopolitan ideal; under the prompting of its pantheistic monism it polemicized against polytheistic religions and irrational cults, upholding, on the basis of a consensus gentium, a universal original religiosity.

In the Roman world Stoicism spread especially among the educated classes and, in the general decadence of traditional religion, constituted the nucleus of a more intimate and more solid ethical spirituality, pruning away a good part of the logical and physical problems; its natural-law theory became the ideal basis for a theory of the Roman Empire understood as universal sovereignty. In this sense, its civilizing work stands alongside that of Christianity, with which it has in common the soteriological interest and the cult of interiority. But the human dignity that Stoicism exalts does not emerge from the coordinates of naturalism (v.), nor is it strengthened in the light of an operative charitas. In the history of thought Stoic ethics has always been the banner of autonomy and inner self-sufficiency, influencing now the Neoplatonists, now the rationalists (Descartes, Spinoza), now the moralists of the 16th-17th centuries (Lipsius, Vossius, Heinsius, Charron), now Kantian thought. Its natural-law theory matures in Grotius into the demands of an international law and penetrates into the political thought of Locke (v.); its religious naturalism develops the concept of natural religion and insinuates itself even into the Reformation (Zwingli). The rigorous demand for immanent unity inspires all the recurring forms of pantheism, as well as of any cosmology understood teleologically; it welcomes within itself the Orphic heritage only to flow back in turn into Orphism (Orphic hymns); it feeds the heroic frenzies of Bruno and his enthusiastic vision of the One-All; it spreads, strangely mingled with Neoplatonic motifs, in the Romantic climate and lives again in the pantheism of Schelling and in the poetry of Goethe and Hölderlin. On the other hand, Stoic logic, insofar as it is a logic of the particular and the concrete, in its commitment to overcome the Aristotelian difficulties without ever plunging into the shallows of nominalism (v.), deposits its experimentalist demands in modern empiricism (v.) (Bacon, Locke, Hume) and in positivism (v.), keeping vigilant, no less than Epicureanism, the insistence on concreteness and the polemic against essences in the name of functional relations.

Giuseppe Faggin