Free will and the problem of evil

The great logician Chrysippus tackles both, and comes a bit short

A cylinder, the geometric solid chosen by Chrysippus of Soli to explain his theory of free will. Image from Wikimedia, CC license.

One of the standard “spiritual” exercises that constitute my personal philosophical practice is what the ancient Greeks called anagnosis, that is the reading and studying of ancient texts, to remind ourselves about the roots of our wisdom, such as it is.

In that context, for the last few weeks I’ve been reading a delightful gem known as Attic Nights, by the second century writer Aulus Gellius, a contemporary of Marcus Aurelius. It’s an example of hypomnema, a notebook where one jots down ideas that crossed one’s mind because of experiences, conversations, or readings. Marcus’s own Meditations is considered an example of hypomnema. In the case of Aulus’s book, the title comes from the fact that he started keeping this peculiar philosophical diary one cold night during a period he spent in Attica, the region of Greece where Athens is located.

At any rate, I recently read two short entries, numbered 1 and 2 in book VII of Attic Nights, that caught my attention. They are both about the Stoic Chrysippus of Soli, one of the major logicians of all time and the third scholarch of the original Stoa. Both entries concern Aulus’s notes about one particular book written by Chrysippus and now lost, except for fragments: On Providence. As it happens, I’ve written recently about the Stoic concept of Providence, within the context of my ongoing diatribe with so-called traditional Stoics who maintain—impossibly, in my opinion—that unless one believes exactly what the ancient Stoics believed one cannot therefore refer to oneself as a Stoic at all. So I figured it would be time well spent to meditate a bit on what a master like Chrysippus had to say about metaphysics.

Aulus focuses on two related issues discussed by Chrysippus: the problem of evil and the compatibility (in his mind) between moral responsibility and determinism. Let’s take a look in the same order in which Aulus treats them.

The problem of human evil

The first entry in book VII of Attic Nights begins by summarizing the problem of evil: those who wish to deny the notion of a providential universe argue that the very notion of Providence is antithetical to the existence of evil. Either there is a providential God who cares about us, in which case why would he set up a universe that contains evil, or there is evil but no providential God.

This, of course, is a problem that has plagued Christian thinkers since the historical beginnings of their religion, but Chrysippus’s book shows that the issue was alive and well at least three centuries before Jesus was born, and several centuries more before it became the focus of serious theological discussions within the Church.

Chrysippus distinguishes, as Christians do, between human and natural evil, tackling the human variety first. Here is the excerpt reported by Aulus:

“There is absolutely nothing more foolish than those men who think that good could exist, if there were at the same time no evil. For since good is the opposite of evil, it necessarily follows that both must exist in opposition to each other, supported as it were by mutual adverse forces; since as a matter of fact no opposite is conceivable without something to oppose it. For how could there be an idea of justice if there were no acts of injustice? Or what else is justice than the absence of injustice? How too can courage be understood except by contrast with cowardice? Or temperance except by contrast with intemperance? How also could there be wisdom, if folly did not exist as its opposite? Therefore, why do not the fools also wish that there may be truth, but no falsehood? For it is in the same way that good and evil exist, happiness and unhappiness, pain and pleasure. For, as Plato says, they are bound one to the other by their opposing extremes; if you take away one, you will have removed both.” (Attic Nights, VII.1)

The reference to Plato is interesting, because it pushes back the origin of this discussion by at least another century. Chrysippus may be correct that we wouldn’t have the concept of good without the symmetrical concept of evil. Just like, again maybe, we wouldn’t have the concept of courage without the opposite one of cowardice. But that by no means implies that it is impossible to build an actual world where there is no evil or no cowardice.