** The Stoics

[photo: Zeno of Citium]

Stoicism as a philosophy continued as an organised movement for some 500 years. With it, and through it, Western philosophy ceased to be specifically Greek and became international. This was a direct result of Alexander the Great's conquests having spread Greek culture throughout the so-called civilised world - the early Stoic philosophers were mainly Syrians, the later ones mostly Romans. The voices of the most famous of them came from an entire gamut of the social hierarchy, one even being a slave (Epictetus) and another a Roman Emperor (Marcus Aurelius). Stoicism seems to have had a special appeal for emperors. According to a leading authority, "nearly all the successors of Alexander - we may say all the principal kings in existence in the generations following Zeno - professed themselves "Stoics."

Zeno (334 - 262 BC) of Citium, in Cyprus, was the founder of Stoicism. The core of the Stoic philosophy lies in the view that there can be no authority higher than reason. By unpacking the consequences of that belief we arrive at most of the important tenets of Stoic Philosophy.

First, the world as our reason presents it to us as being, that is to say the world of Nature, is all the reality there is. There is nothing "higher." And Nature itself is governed by rationality intelligible principles. We ourselves are part of Nature. The spirit of rationality that imbues it and us ( and that is to say everything ) is what is meant by God. And thus conceived, God is not outside the world and separate from it, he is all-pervadingly in it - he is, as it were, the mind of the world, the self-awareness of the world.

EMOTIONS ARE JUDGEMENTS

Because we are at one with Nature, and because there is no higher realm, there canbe no question of our going anywhere "else" to die - there is nowhere else to go. We dissolve back into Nature. It is through the ethics evolved from this belief that Stoicism achieved its greatest fame and influence.

Because Nature is governed by rational principles there are reasons why everything is as it is. We cannot change it, nor should we desire to. Therefore our attitude in the face of our own mortality, or what may seem to us personal tragedy, should be one of unruffled acceptance. In so far as our emotions rebel against this, our emotions are in the wrong. The Stoics believed that emotions are judgements, and therefore cognitive: they are forms of "knowledge", whether true or false. Greed, for instance, is the judgement that money ia a pre-eminent good and to be acquired by every available means - a false judgement. If our emotions are made subject to our reason they will embody none but true judgements, and we shall then be at one with things as they actually are.

People who adopted the Stoic philosophy were often able to endure life's vicissitudes with calm and dignity. But even for them there might come a time when they would no longer wish to go living - for example in circumstances of personal ruin or disgrace, or in the agonies of a terminal disease. In those circumstances, they believed, the rational thing to do was to end one's own life painlessly, and this many of them did. So a high proportion of the well-known Stoics ended their lives by committing suicide.

The most vivid and compelling of all the expositions of Stoicism are to be found in the writings of the latter Stoics, which were all in Latin. The outstanding figures here are Seneca (c. 2 BC - AD 65) and Marcus Aurelius (AD 121-180). They were not original thinkers in the sense of adding significantly to already-existing Stoic doctrines, but they were such good writers that their works are read to this day by people who are not academics. It is to them that anyone who wants to study Stoicism at first hand should turn.

Stoic ethics have always been widely found to be impressive and admirable, even by the people who do not wholly go along with them. They are not easy to practise - but perhaps it is bound to be a characteristic of any ethics worthy of the name that they are difficult to put into practice. They had an unmistakable influence on Christian ethics, which were beginning to spread at the time when Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius were writing. And, of course, to this very day, the words "Stoic" and "Stoicism" are in familiar use in our language, with perhaps grudgingly admiring overtones, to mean "withstanding adversity without complaint". There must be many people living now who - even if they have never consciously formulated this fact to themselves - subscribe to an ideal in ethics which is essentially the same as that of the Stoics.

The fact that in recent centuries the best available school education in many European countries was based on the study of Latin literature had, as one of its side-effects, that many generations of well educated European males absorbed some of the values of Stoicism. The famous "stiff upper lip" of the public-school educated Englishman was precisely an example of Stoicism in practice and in action, partly rooted in a classical education.

~ The Story Of Philosophy - Bryan Magee