From ancient to new Stoicism: VII—Some modest suggestions

A conceptual map of where Stoicism came from and where it may be going

The Stoa of Attalos, in the Athenian Agora; notice the Acropolis in the background. Photo by the Author.

Well, it is now my turn! After having examined the ancient versions of Stoic physics (i.e., science), logic, and ethics, as well as three modern attempts to update Stoicism (Becker’s, Stankiewicz’s, and Gambardella’s), this essay is devoted to a series of modest suggestions by yours truly.

Let us begin with a couple of disclaimers. First, this is very much a work in progress, and therefore incomplete and likely not at all what it will look like by the end, if an end will at some point be reached. Second, though I did publish a book proposing an updated version of Epictetus’s Enchiridion, I have not written anything that is comparable to, say, Larry Becker’s A New Stoicism, which in my mind remains the mandatory point of reference. Fate permitting, I will.

Next, I wish to lay down two assumptions that are informing my thinking on the matter at hand. One is that, in proposing a version of Stoic practical philosophy for the 21st century (and, hopefully, beyond) I am trying to stick as close as possible to the original. This is because the original was so darn good that it has inspired people for close two and a half millennia, and there is no sense in changing things just to satisfy one’s own ego. After all, I ain’t neither Zeno nor Chrysippus.

Conversely, and this is my second assumption, I accept as a given that the ancient Stoics were wrong on a number of things, and that therefore there is nothing odd about suggesting improvements to their philosophy of life in the light of all the science and philosophy that has been developed since the time Zeno taught at the Stoa Poikile.

Let me give you just two obvious examples. Galen, the most famous medical doctor of antiquity and the personal physician of Marcus Aurelius, criticized the Stoic Chrysippus for locating the seat of the psychic pneuma, the basis of our “ruling faculty,” in the heart (specifically, oddly, the left ventricle), arguing instead that it is located in the brain [1]. Modern neuroscience has identified the seat of what we call the executive function in the brain’s prefrontal cortex. So the Stoics (and, for that matter, Aristotle) were wrong and Galen was closer to the truth.

A second example of the ancient Stoics getting things spectacularly wrong is their support for the notion of divination, the ability to predict the future on the basis of things like the entrails of sacrificed animals and the flight of birds. This was a consequence of their idea that the world works as a consequence of a vast web of cause-effect. If that is the case, then it stands to reason that carefully examining one aspect of such web will yield information about other aspects of it. Here too the Stoics were (harshly) criticized by their contemporaries, particularly Cicero, who mounted a devastating attack on the whole thing in his book On Divination, rightly considered by modern philosophers of science to be the first treatise on what we refer to as pseudoscience.

The rest of this inquiry, then, will be inspired by Seneca’s immortal words, which I noticed I keep quoting throughout my writings:

“Shall I not follow in the footsteps of my predecessors? I shall indeed use the old road, but if I find one that makes a shorter cut and is smoother to travel, I shall open the new road. Men who have made these discoveries before us are not our masters, but our guides. Truth lies open for all; it has not yet been monopolized. And there is plenty of it left even for posterity to discover.” (Letter 33.11)

There are, of course, many ways to go about the project of updating Stoicism, as we have seen when we examined three other attempts to do so. However, since I decided to stick as close to the original as possible, I will proceed by discussing which aspects, if any, of the three classical fields of study—physics, logic, and ethics—need to be revised and how. It will be convenient, therefore, for the reader to keep the first three essays of this series handy for cross-reference.

The Stoa Poikile, the birthplace of Stoicism; although it doesn’t look like much at the moment, excavations have resumed in recent years and are progressing at a good pace. Photo by the Author.

(New) Stoic physics

The ancient Stoics, in my opinion, got a lot right in their science and metaphysics. They were physicalists, meaning that they thought that everything that has causal powers is made of some kind of stuff. They were, of course, wrong about the specifics of such stuff, but the general idea is the same that characterizes the contemporary scientific image of the world. A modern Stoic should simply take on board whatever latest picture emerges from fundamental physics and treat it as the best bet currently available. Until a better bet comes into play.

Intriguingly, the Stoics adopted something that nowadays we call process metaphysics, which they inherited from the Presocratic Heraclitus of Ephesus. Fundamentally, this says that the world is not made of more or less static objects but of constantly fluctuating patterns resulting from ongoing underlying processes. Panta rhei, everything changes. The most daring contemporary philosophy of physics pretty much presents us with the very same picture, as argued in detail by James Ladyman and Don Ross in their Every Thing Must Go.

The Stoics were determinists, meaning that they believed that everything is the result of cause and effect. They were also naturalists: not supernatural stuff, no miracles. Again, exactly right, on both counts. As a consequence of their determinism, the Stoics were compatibilists about free will, thus embracing what is today the most widely accepted philosophical account of human decision making and moral responsibility.

When it came to their psychological theories, the Stoics got quite a bit right, though of course, not everything, and certainly not the details (see above about the location of the ruling faculty!). Their idea that our “impressions” are automatic reactions to sensory data or to internal thoughts, and that we have the capacity to slow down, examine such impressions, and give or deny assent to them, is essentially the basis for modern cognitive behavioral therapy, as well as backed up by research of psychologists like Daniel Kahneman. The latter’s distinction between system I (fast, imprecise) and system II (slow, accurate) ways of thinking would not have surprised Epictetus in the least. The Stoics were even aware of the importance of sub-conscious mental processes, though modern science has shown just how pervasive they really are.

One bad move on their part, I think, was the their denial of akrasia, or weakness of the will, a phenomenon first recognized and described by Aristotle. This means that it is not enough to just know what the right thing to do is in order to actually do it. That said, acknowledging akrasia doesn’t mean denying that emotions are at least partly cognitive and that, consequently, we can “talk” to them and, with practice, align them with reason. Again, this is the basis for CBT, which works very well.

The big thing the Stoics got wrong in their science-metaphysics is the notion of the cosmos as a living organism endowed with reason (the famous logos). There simply is no such thing, according to modern physics and biology, notwithstanding currently fashionable and very annoying speculations about panpsychism. Nothing in modern physics or biology warrants either the conclusion that the universe is akin in any way to a living organism or the idea that consciousness (and therefore the ability to reason) is a fundamental property of the cosmos. That stuff simply has to go, unless and until modern science should embrace such ideas. I am willing to bet a significant portion of my retirement that it won’t.

As we shall see below, rejecting the hypothesis of a living cosmos cum logos does have major consequences on modern Stoic ethics. But first, let’s talk about logic!

(New) Stoic logic

Basic Stoic logic, which is zero order, propositional logic, has reigned unchallenged from antiquity until the end of the 19th century, and a strong argument has been made that the famous logician Gottlob Frege, who developed the foundations of modern logic, actually plagiarized the Stoic Chrysippus. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on ancient logic puts it: “The many close similarities between Chrysippus’ philosophical logic and that of Gottlob Frege are especially striking.” That’s one way to put it…

At any rate, even though logic has of course further expanded throughout the 20th century, we ordinary human beings do not need anything beyond propositional logic as an aid to reason about what to do or not to do. Here is an example of what that looks like:

Premise 1: If it’s raining then it’s cloudy.
Premise 2: It’s raining.
Conclusion: It’s cloudy.

Which has the general form:

Premise 1: If P then Q
Premise 2: P
Conclusion: Q

There is much more to it, of course, but this is certainly not the place to go into any further details.

Where I think the Stoics went wrong is in parts of their epistemology. I have covered this territory before, but briefly the Academic Skeptics were correct, I believe, in rejecting the possibility of absolute truth or knowledge, which the Stoics attributed to the sage. There is no special mark of true impressions (“katalepsis”) and the best human beings can do is to assess the subjective probability that a given notion is or is not true. The best way to do so proposed in antiquity was Carneades’s filter, and the best current one is a quantified version of the same, stemming from Bayesian analysis. Both these concepts are discussed in the essay linked at the beginning of this paragraph.

(New) Stoic ethics

And we finally get to the crucial bit: the ethics. The Stoics were, again, correct in thinking that ethics has to be grounded in a naturalistic fashion, informed by our best science, and arrived at by our power of reason.

Once more, they got much right, beginning with the notion that “virtue,” that is excellence at being human, is necessary and sufficient for a life worth living. Externals such as health, wealth, reputation, and so forth, have value but they are neither necessary nor sufficient for a life well lived. Which means—and this is not stressed enough—that pretty much everyone has access to a eudaimonic life, so long as they do their best. Luck has nothing to do with it, though of course it does give (and take away) externals.

The argument for this major aspect of Stoic ethics is the same as in antiquity, and it was first put forth by Socrates in Plato’s Euthydemus: externals acquire value (or disvalue) as a function of what we do with them, and what we do with them depends on our virtue and nothing else. Epictetus (Discourses, 2.5) memorably came up with the analogy of Socrates playing ball with his life: the important thing is not the ball itself, but how skillfully we play with it.

The ancient Stoics were also correct that our moral developmental psychology is grounded in nature. We are naturally social animals, and therefore we come equipped with a basic set of prosocial instincts that allows us to form bonds and to cooperate with our care takers and later on with an expanding circle of others. At some point we reach the age of reason, when we begin to think in a more abstract manner and to extrapolate from our previous experience. It is this ability to reason that allows us to further enlarge our circles of concern, ideally all the way to encompass humanity at large. The Stoics gave this process the name of oikeiosis, and its logical endpoint was their doctrine of cosmopolitanism.

The early Stoics famously introduced the notion that we should live in agreement with Nature, by which they meant that we are at our best when we act prosocially and reasonably. Modern evolutionary biology and comparative primatology very much confirm this view, recasting it in post-Darwinian terms. This is also what some modern moral philosophers, like Philippa Foot, have been arguing, albeit from an Aristotelian perspective (which, I think, is actually more difficult to defend because of Aristotle’s reliance on teleology).

Yet another important innovation of the ancient Stoics, due mostly to Panaetius and Epictetus, was the introduction of role ethics, the idea that we play different kinds of roles in life and that a well balanced existence consists in navigating the resulting trade-offs while keeping the right priorities in mind (which results in appropriate actions, kathēkonta). For much more on this see the excellent The Role Ethics of Epictetus: Stoicism in Ordinary Life by Brian Johnson (and perhaps also read Cicero’s On Duties, which is based on one of Panaetius’s lost books).

Crucially, and contra much modern lore, the Stoics also got their ethics of emotions correct: it is our duty as human beings, a duty we have toward both ourselves and others, to attempt to bring our emotions in line with reason. This means that “I can’t help it, I just feel that way” ain’t gonna cut it. Yes, we can help it. It requires work, but it can be done. If need be, with the help of a cognitive behavioral therapist.

Famously, there were two major ways to articulate Stoic ethics in antiquity: by way of the four cardinal virtues (wisdom, courage, justice, and temperance) or by way of the three disciplines of Epictetus (desire and aversion, action, assent). While both work, I much prefer the Epictetean approach, which lends itself to a number of what Pierre Hadot called “spiritual exercises” and which arguably distinguish Stoicism as one of the most practical philosophies of life ever conceived, either in the West or anywhere else.

Let me now consider a potential problem with both ancient and modern Stoic ethics: the status of other species and of the environment at large. In ancient Stoicism the universe was characterized by a kind of providence, which implied that non-human species were there for the purpose of serving our interests. This, obviously, isn’t going to cut it in the 21st century, and some modern Stoics are very aware of it (see, for instance, Chris Gill’s recent book on the topic).

The problem is that to simply extrapolate the process of oikeiosis described above to include other species and the environment does not work, because the idea lacks any kind of foundation in Stoic physics. Why should we be concerned with other species or the environment, exactly? Common, but very vague, talk of the “intrinsic value” of the environment, or of our duty toward other species is incoherent. The concept of intrinsic value, seems to me, is nonsense, because values are human inventions, they are not inherent into anything. As for duties, we need to spell out where these come from, we can’t just postulate them to arrive at a pre-ordained conclusion, no matter how friendly to our current cultural sensitivities.

I need to think more about this, but it seems to me that the (New Stoic) way out of these problems is a recognition of the nowadays very unpopular notion of human exceptionalism. We are a very special kind of biological species. Yes, we did evolve by natural processes, of course. And yes, we can find the traces of almost every human attribute in other species, especially those most closely related to us. I’m an evolutionary biologist, I get it. Nevertheless, we are also very different, quantitatively, if not qualitatively, from anything else on the planet. Among many other things, we are the only ones that can think about our own actions and whether they are appropriate, according to certain criteria and values that we choose. It is this ability that invests us with the ethical responsibility to reduce suffering in other animals (we ourselves don’t want to suffer, so why would we impose that on others?). The same ability to reflect on the import of our actions leads to the concept of being stewards of the environment, which both we and other species need for survival and flourishing. As I said, I realize that much more needs to be said, but this is enough for my purposes here.

Finally, the big whopper: Stoic providence, which is inextricably linked with the notion of a living cosmos capable of reason, has to go. Contra to what some self-professed “traditional” Stoics have argued, this leaves Stoic ethics almost unchanged. But there is one crucial difference. When Epictetus famously says: “If you kiss a child of yours or your wife, tell yourself that you’re kissing a human being, because then you won’t be upset if they die” (Enchiridion 3) he is not talking like a psychopath. He is talking like someone who believes in the providential nature of the universe. When someone dies this, somehow, is part of the general scheme of things, and the dying person is fulfilling a role to ensure the wellbeing of the entire cosmos. If you believe that, you really shouldn’t get upset when a loved one passes away. On the contrary, you should embrace and celebrate it.

A modern Stoic who doesn’t believe in providence can’t do that, though. If my wife or child should die while I’m still alive I will most definitely be upset. But I will also remind myself that death is a natural phenomenon that, sooner or later, affects everyone. So I will do my best to accept and endure. This is the way the universe actually works, regardless of our wishful thinking. And it is the mark of a mature human being to face reality for what it is.

Finally, since the above is long and somewhat complex, here are two summary tables—one for physics and logic, the other for ethics—for orientation and further reflection:

[Previous installments: Stoic physics; Stoic logic; Stoic ethics; Becker’s update; Piotr Stankiewicz’s Reformed Stoicism; Steven Gambardella’s new modern Stoicism.]

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[1] R.J. Hankinson, Stoicism and medicine, in: The Cambridge Companion to the Stoics, ed. by B. Inwood, Cambridge University Press, 2003.