7he Sourhern Journd of Philosophy (1985) VoI. XXIII, Supplement

THE ROLE OF PHYSICS IN STOIC ETHICS Nicholas White University of Michigan

I

The Stoics were famous in antiquity for having claimed a strong sort of coherence for their doctrine. Cicero has its advocate exclaim about the admirabilis compositio and incredibilis ordo of their system (De Finibus 111.74). That seems reason enough for an attempt to see how the various parts of Stoicism in fact fit together, and indeed for more of an attempt than one might make for other philosophical doctrines that are less boastful of their coherence. It is surprising, therefore, that commentators on Stoicism have done so little to press the question whether it actually fits together as well as the Stoics said it did. In particular, the various departments of Stoic thought-ethics, physics, dialectic, and others that we might divide it into-are generally accepted as fixed, and little effort is made to see why the Stoics thought that all of them were necessary. This essay represents a first attempt to pursue this issue.

The question that I wish to discuss is, Why were the Stoics interested in cosmology, and more generally in the theory of the natural world, or physics in the broad ancient sense? I am concerned here with the philosophical motivations for their interest in physics. 1 shall leave out many important related issues about the historical background, philosophical and otherwise, leading to their being subject to these motivations.

There is a particular reason why it makes sense to ask this question within the context of a description of Stoicism. For one thing, there are later Stoic writers who show little or no interest in physics and cosmology, and it has been claimed that Zen0 was not much interested in them either. Asking why any Stoics were interested in these matters is pertinent to understanding differences among adherents of Stoicism, and to learning which figures are abberations. For another thing, even within the thought of Stoics manifestly interested in physics, it is not entirely easy to see why an interest in physics should have been required by philosophical considerations-as opposed to such extra-systematic considerations as that, because most influential philosophers had theories of physics, it might appear de rigueur to include physics in your doctrine if you wanted it to be done up right. The problem is that although most Stoics took their primary aim to be to formulate an ethical doctrine, an ethical doctrine need not be thought to require a physical doctrine, let alone a cosmological doctrine, to go along with it.

Now of course the first reply to this is that for all or almost all Stoics, ethical doctrine included the proposition that the end or telos is to live “in agreement with nature,” and by “physics” we mean here, as I have said, the study of nature in general; so it would appear that an adherent of Stoic ethical doctrine would have to take physics to be required for an explanation of this specification of the telos. This consequence, however, is far from being as straightforward as it might appear. One question that arises is, howjullaspecijkation of “nature”is required for adequate understanding, given the aims of Stoic ethical theorizing, of their specification of the telos? Only certain sorts of specification will require anything like a full-scale study of nature, a physical doctrine in the ancient sense, let alone a cosmology of a technical sort. For some purposes, the specification of the telos might require only a very vague or general or brief description of nature, far short of what would take a developed doctrine to explain.

We have a context within which to ask certain questions, some of them standard questions, about particular Stoics, by asking whether their attention to and view about physics (or of course, mutatis mutandis, other parts of philosophy) were on philosophical grounds required by their conceptions of what ethics needed to do, or were instead pursued for some other reason, such as some other systematic consideration than ethics, or intellectual background, or prevailing intellectual fashion, personal taste, or whatever.

I1

I shall begin the discussion by moving back a few steps to some prior issues that are generally neglected. One of the chief parts of Stoic ethics from the beginning, and closely related to their description of the telos or end, was their account of the ideal human state, exemplified by the “Sage”. For various reasons, the description of this state was regarded as a description of what we can here think of as an allegedly ideal state of mind. (It is a bit misleading for some purposes to call it a “state of mind,” because it is rather a state of soul, which is different; but the difference will not affect present matters.) Now one way of finding out how physics comes into Stoic ethics is to raise the following question: when we describe the ideal state of mind of the Sage, what beliefs about the natural world must be ascribed to him, simply by virtue of his exemplifying the ideal state? That is, from the fact that someone is in the ideal condition for a human being to be in, what follows, on the Stoic view, about what beliefs he holds concerning the natural world? (The Stoics insist that the Sage has only episteme, “knowledge”, and not doxa, “belief”, but until sec. V the distinction will not matter.) I mean of course to allude here to the question in G. B. Kerferd’s paper, which I shall discuss later, “What Does the Wise Man Know?”’

I want to approach this question by asking first the broader question, what follows, from the Sage’s being in an ideal condition, about what

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beliefs he will have about anything whatever? What I shall try to show is as follows. First 1 shall argue that in the Stoic view, it follows that the Sage will have particular sorts beliefs about what is objectively good, objectively bad, and objectively neither of the two. Then I shall try to show just how the Stoics thought it follows from this that the Sage will have particular sorts of beliefs about nature. Finally I shall return to the issue of how detailed or specific these beliefs must be, given, once again, merely that they are held by the person in an ideal condition.

We might well wonder why the Sage need as such hold any particular beliefs, because it is easy to get the impression that what makes the Sage’s existence ideal is not that he holds one belief or another about anything, but that he adopts what we might call a certain attitude, an attitude torward whatever might be the case or whatever he might believe to be the case. It is easy to get this impression from Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius, for example, and also for that matter from the fragments of Aristo of Chios, who certainly seems to have been tryingto be a Stoic, that is, a follower of Zeno, even though the tradition since Chrysippus has deemed him heterodox.* And apart from these thinkers, the idea arguably catches what is central to the orthodox notion of a Sage, since it is certainly a crucial part of that notion that the Sage be free from pathe or “affections”, and since from our point of view (to leave aside for now Chrysippus’s contention that pathe are kriseis or “judgments”) being free frompathe can be described as having a kind of attitude, as distinct from the holding of beliefs.) But if this is so, why should being a Sage of itself entail holding any particular beliefs, let alone beliefs about nature?

In order to show why the Stoics did think that being a Sage entailed holding certain beliefs, we must look at some facts about their views about psychology. Although these facts are part of the vulgar conception, ancient and modern, of what it is to be “stoical”, and scholars sometimes therefore neglect them out of a desire to avoid anachronism, they are also, when properly articulated, an important part of early Stoic philosophical doctrine.

It is important to understand that, certain misinterpretations notwithstanding, the Stoics did not believe that the person in an ideal condition would be without all distasteful feelings or experiences, such as physical pains, itches, and so forth. This is made clear in our accounts of what they called euparheiai.4 What is special about the Sage is rather his attitude toward such experiences. To put it vaguely, the Sage would not regard them as things that matter, and so in a sense they would not bother him (e.g., SVF 111 567,570, 574, 579-580). As Stobaeus reports Chrysippus as having put it, the Sage will experience pain (algein), but will not be tortured, since he will not give way in his soul ( I l l 574). And according to the Stoics, this is the way in which the Sage will treat anything of the sort that the ordinary, imperfect person would regard as bringing unsatisfactoriness into his life. Furthermore, according to the

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Stoics, this is the only way in which the unsatisfactorinesses of life can be eliminated, compatibly with being an embodied human being, which the Sage is declared to be. Therefore, they hold, a person will live an ideal life if and only if he adopts this attitude toward the kinds of things that people generally regard as bad.

But now why does this attitude involve holding beliefs? Because, on the Stoic view, one could adopt it if and only if one held certain beliefs about what is good. According to them, the sense of unsatisfactoriness that we have concerning many of our experiences, such as pains, arises only from the beliefthat those experiences, or the things that give rise to them, are badfor us in some objective sense.5 But they did not think that the sense of unsatisfactoriness could be dispelled either by coming to believe that these things are good, or by adopting the ancient Sceptics’ strategy of suspending all belief about what is good or bad.6 Instead they advocated a different way. It involved (so to speak) neutralizing the belief in the badness of the occurrence or experience, in two steps. It is claimed, first, that such local unsatisfactorinesses can always be seen to be parts of some larger pattern that is good, and, second, that the belief in the badness of the local occurrence can be somehow downgraded, so that it does not enter into one’s assessment of one’s own condition.7The seemingly bad occurrence is part of a good whole, and the seeming badness of the part is of no importance to one’s condition. The doctrine, then, is that holding the right beliefs about what is good will put one in this state. As I shall explain, this another way of putting, and a good way of explaining, the Stoics’ views on value and their notion of adiaphora or “indifferents” (sec. IV).

More specifically, the Stoic view is that the larger good whole, against the background of which any local unsatisfactoriness can be seen, is the entire universe or pattern of nature. Indeed, they claim that the universe is not merely good but perfectly so, and that all parts and local events can be seen as fitting into it in some way.8

Before I explore this view more fully, let me just illustrate what is involved in holding that adopting the attitude in question requires holding certain beliefs about what is good. Suppose that your small child is about to have his hand caught in a closing car door, and that you prevent this by grasping the door with your own hand, in such a way that your own hand is painfully struck, while the child is untouched. Sometimes, I believe, we feel the inclination (correct or not) to give the following sort of account of the situation: you experience the pain, but you do not mindit, because you believe that the pain is worth it, i.e., that given the situation, the outcome is a good thing, pain and all. In some cases, of course, it might occur to you to compare the whole, saving the child and being caused pain, with the whole, saving the child and not being caused pain, and you might on that basis conclude that the actual outcome, i.e. the former, is a bad thing. But in the case that 1 have in mind, you might simply not entertain this thought, and you might

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instead take the whole outcome, pain and all, as given and inseparable, and believe that it is overall a good thing, with the pain not detracting from the goodness of the outcome. Some will deny that it is ever reasonable to be in this sort of state of mind. I shall briefly raise some questions about that later. But I do think that reasonably or not, we sometimes find ourselves in something close enough to such a state to make it a useful illustration of what the Stoics had in view. The leading idea conveyed by it is that a certain attitude toward one’s own condition is supposedly gained by holding certain beliefs concerning what is good, and in particular concerning what is good about a state of affairs that in some sense includes one’s own condition.

But before we analyze this idea and its relation to Stoic doctrine more closely, let us look at some of the evidence about how they presented their views.

For this purpose, the most complete and most illuminating information we have comes from the account in Book 111 of Cicero’s De Finibus of the development in human beings of normative concepts. We need to concentrate on Cicero’s description in III.20ff. of how the notion of good, the notio boni, arises in us. From this account we shall be able to see the role of the ascription of goodness in Stoic ethics and how they think of it as allowing our ordinary negative evaluations of many local events and experiences to be in a certain sense neutralized.

For us as for the Stoics’ opponents, the hardest problem in understanding their views on human motivations and their relation to the good has been to see why they do not think that the good for a human being consists simply in the satisfaction of desires or appetitions that are in us by nature. As is well known, Cicero begins his account with a description of the process of oikeiosis in early life, in which the organism has a natural tendency to seek those things that preserve it and to avoid those things that destroy it. It turns out, however, that conformity with these natural tendencies is not is not the good or the end of life. (The view that it is is more like what one finds in the only superficially similar view described in De Fin. V, due to Antiochus of Ascalon.9) Instead, an important development takes place at a stage at which the person comes to value something else, the good, whose relation to the satisfaction of natural tendencies it is vital to understand, because the difference between the two sorts of value, although the Stoics insisted on it, seemed to opponents to be illusory. Indeed the difference is a subtle one, and even though it can certainly be seen in Cicero’s account, commentators have found it as hard to see as the Stoics’ opponents did.10

Here is the shift that the Stoics hold takes place, when we pass from desiring only those things that our first natural impulses seek, theprota

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kataphysin, t o appreciating the good. It takes place, they think, when we reflectively become aware of apattern exemplijiedin our own innate tendency to seek those things that preserve our existence. This is what Cicero calls the rerurn agendarurn ordinern et . . . concordiarn, which the Stoics say we value more highly than the objects of the impulses themselves. But why, their opponents ask, should our esteem for this pattern not consist simply in, and entail, precisely the same esteem for the objects of the impulses figuring in the pattern, contrary to the Stoics’ claim that the former is good whereas the latter are simply preferred indifferents?

The Stoics’ answer begins with a version of what G. E. Moore calls the “Doctrine of Organic Unities”, according to which the intrinsic value of a complex whole is independent .of the sum of the intrinsic values of its parts. In the present case the pattern is taken as the whole, and the impulses and the like are taken as the parts.” The Stoics are then claiming that goodness ascribed to the pattern is quite independent of the values ascribed to its constituents. The pattern is that we have impulses toward things that are the same as the things that our living is encouraged by our getting. Take the constituents, then, t o be our having impulses toward things, or getting those things, and our living. (The notion o f a constituent here is pretty unclear, but we shall have to put up with that.12) Then the point is that ascribing goodness to the pattern, i.e., that of our having impulses toward things that encourage our living, need not rest on ascribing goodness to particular parts of it, such as either our getting the things toward which we have impulses, or even our living. Another way of putting the point is t o say that granted the relevant version of the Doctrine of Organic Unities,

( I ) I t is a good thing that X want what X needs in order to live

does not entail

(2) I t is a good thing that X get what X needs in order to live,

nor even

(3) I t is a good thing that X live;

nor does (1) in conjunction with

(4) X needs to eat in order to live

entail

(5) I t is a good thing that X eat;

nor is the goodness of the state of affairs in (1) necessarily affected by what is in (3) or (4)-(5).

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It is perfectly true that (1) would ordinarily be asserted on the basis of (3), i.e., on the basis of goodness ascribed to X’s living. But under the Doctrine of Organic Unities, the pattern represented in ( I ) could also be thought to be good on quite different grounds, arising from the nature of the pattern itself rather than merely its constituents.

The Stoics then go on to claim that not only is it consistent, in view of the foregoing, to ascribe goodness to the pattern in question but not to its constituents, but in fact it is true to do so. Here, it seems to me, is where they go wrong, but it is important to be clear that their mistake involves just the falsity of this claim, not any inconsistency in their position. ‘ 3

It is probably worth remarking by the way that there is another reason why the Stoics are not committed, by the view expressed in De Fin. III.20ff., to attributing goodness to the things themselves that people naturally seek. For the pattern that the Stoics hold we come to regard as good, the ordo et concordia mentioned above, is a fitting of our initial natural impulses toward what we need in order to live, not a fitting of our getting what we need in order to live. So in a substantial sense our getting what we need to live is not a part of that pattern, and so attributing goodness to the pattern need not on that account require attributing goodness to that.

Given the general point about the goodness of wholes and parts, the Stoics went on to maintain, as I indicated earlier, that the pattern that was best or most perfect was that of the entire universe. The idea is plain in De Fin. 111.20-21, 74, and also in other evidence that the Stoics held the universe to be perfect (SVF I1 550,549), that it is more perfect than anything else (I1 641, 1178), and that none of its parts is perfect (I1 550). This is not to say that there are no parts of the universe exhibiting orderly patterns. We have just seen an example of such a thing in De Fin. III.20ff., and the Stoics also claim that human nature can be seen as a pattern that is part of the larger pattern of nature as a whole (D. L. VII.87; De Fin. 111.63-64). Still, the universe is the only fully perfect whole, a “system”(systerna) in which all parts (or perhaps most, SVF I1 1178, 1 179) have their roles (cf. nn. 7-8). Theascription of goodness to it is the result of the development of the notion of goodness that Cicero presents.

IV

Being in the best possible state, then, is a matter of having a certain attitude toward the putative unsatisfactorinesses of life, which is in turn a matter of having certain beliefs. The beliefs include the belief that nature is a perfect whole into which all parts fit. The ordinary person’s assessment of local sources of dissatisfaction is somehow neutralized by seeing them as parts of the perfect pattern of nature, in a manner roughly illustrated by our example of the child and the car door.

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But how exactly are these local unsatisfactorinesses “neutralized”? Offhand it would seem that one could believe the universe to be perfectly good as a whole, and still believe that parts of it were bad, and so it would seem that the advice to recognize the goodness of the whole would be no help in getting one to discount the seeming badness of the parts.14 But it is striking that in Cicero’s account, it seems clearly indicated that ceasing to regard local unsatisfactorinesses as bad ensues automatically on the realization that nature’s pattern has a goodness not arising from any value of its parts (111.21-22). For the Sage regards most actions and local events (with the exceptions, to be discussed in sec. VII below, of virtue and vice exemplified in particular Sages, if there are any, and actions actually done from virtue and vice, and some other things) as neither good nor bad but “indifferent”, that is, neutral as far as goodness and badness are concerned. On the Stoic doctrine of indifferents, this neutrality attaches even to those things that fit into the pattern of nature, even in the sense of comporting with the regularities that most clearly manifest nature’s orderliness. The actions of this type are the kathekonta, the “appropriate” acts (the word should not be rendered by “duties”). These are emphatically declared not to be good, but are instead evaluated in another way, as (in general)proegrnena, or “preferred”. 15 And the kind of value that a thing has by virtue of being in accordance with nature is not goodness but axia (SVF 111 124), which is whatproegrnena have (111 127), and which may be translated “worth”. The “worth” that things in accordance with nature have is held to be incommensurable with goodness proper. The Sage could ascribe “worth” and its contrary, “unworth” or apaxia, to events and experiences, but this worth or unworth could not be added to or subtracted from or compared to the goodness of anything good (De Fin. 111. 33-34).

I can not here give a complete explanation of the doctrine of indifferents, but to begin to understand it one must first distinguish two of its component theses. One is the contention that the scales of goodness and preferredness are distinct scales which are in some sense incomparable with each other (De Fin. 111.34; SVF 111 118). Call this the Incomparability Thesis. The second thesis is that in spite of this, being good is in some sense more important than being preferred. In what way it is supposed to be more important is a difficult question, but the aspect of the matter that affects our discussion is this: in order for local unsatisfactorinesses to be “neutralized”, one must take the final assessment of one’s own state to be determined not by thevalue ascribed to them, but by that ascribed to the universe as a whole. Even if it seems paradoxical, that is, the “bottom-line” answer to the question, “How are things going for me?” has got to be based not on a judgment recording the local unsatisfactorinesses, but on a judgment recording the goodness of the universe. Call this second view the Superiority Thesis.

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The key to the Incomlfarability Thesis is the fact that according to the Stoics, ascriptions of “worth” are in two ways relational, whereas ascriptions of the fundamental kind of goodness, per se goodness, are non-relational.16 Worth is explicitly and emphatically defined as a comparative concept, of a value of something as against something else (SVF I11 124-126), andproegmenon is explained interms of worth (122, 127), and explicitly itself in comparative terms (128-129), as well as being morphologically a comparative term by virtue of its prefix. It is also clear that being comparative in this way is a distinctive feature of worth as opposed to goodness (e.g., De Fin. 111.34). In addition to being relational as a comparative notion is relational, moreover, worth is relational in another way too, by attaching to things only relative to certain contexts but not others. Whereas the good is defined as what benefits (ophelei) ~ategorically,’~ something that can be either well or ill used is indifferent, which must apply to proegmena since they are indifferent. A type of thing has worth, therefore, only in certain types of context but not in others (cf. n. 15). Worth is thus a kind of value attached to things that one chooses over other things within a certain sort of context, while goodness is a kind of value ascribed to a thing noncomparatively and not relative to a context. The incomparability of the two ascriptions, then, consists merely in this difference of logical form. A rough illustration can be provided by comparing two kinds of judgments that could be made about sugar. One could say that sugar is good-tasting, and one could say that sugar is better-tasting in coffee than salt is.

But aside from this difference of logical form between ascriptions of goodness and ascriptions of worth, the Stoics also claim a substantive difference between the things to which ascriptions of them can be truly made. According to them, only the pattern of the universe as a whole (and, as we shall see, virtue in Sages) is in fact good, because, as we saw, it is alone held to be in some sense complete or perfect (sec. III,$n.). Some sorts of things within the universe, however, are held to be choiceworthy by comparison to other things within certain sorts of contexts, i.e., to have some worth, though they are not complete and so not good.

Consider now the Superiority Thesis. Given that the two scales of value are as described, why should we say that one is more important than the other, or more rational to adopt for the final accounting of one’s condition? I suppose that we can see some kind of appeal in the idea that the point of view that assesses the whole universe is somehow more “authoritative” than the point of view that does not, though it is obviously not clear why this sort of authoritativeness should be thought relevant to the issue at hand, since what one is trying to assess is, after all, one’s own condition.18 Rather than pursuing this issue here, however, I shall turn to a different point that is more important for present concerns. Remember that our question is what sort ofbeliefs the

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person in the ideal condition will have as such. Now if we grant that it is really possible for a human being finally to assess his own condition by assessing the value of the universe of which he is a part, as some would doubt, then it seems pretty reasonable to hold that a person in an ideal state will do this, given that the universe is in fact held to be perfect. For of course this view guarantees you an assessment of your condition that is as favorable as can be, and moreover is the only view that guarantees you that if we assume that there are inevitably going to be what I have called local unsatisfactorinesses. So we can see why the Stoics would attribute this view to the Sage.19

But before we go further, there is an important loose end remaining that we must deal with. So far I have generally spoken as if the Stoics must have thought that the pattern of nature is the only thing that is good, and that all of its parts are indifferent. But although there is some evidence, already cited, that they held the universe to be the most fully perfect thing, they were clearly willing to countenance ascriptions of goodness to parts of it, namely, to virtue as possessed by individual Sages, if such there be.20 How can this fact be taken account of’?

We can do it by bringing to bear two facts. In the first place, we have to recall that what is supposed to be good about the universe is the pattern or organization that it exhibits. What can make an individual soul good (and by extension the actions that it brings about) is that it can exhibit this very same pattern. In the second place, we must recognize that the soul’s exhibiting this pattern is not to be confused with its merely acting in accord with nature, in thesense of merelyfitting into nature’s pattern-a very common misinterpretation of the Stoic formula for the telos or end, homologoumenos (teiphyseg Zen. Parts of the universe can be good only by having the same property of order that it is, not by exemplifying only one part of that order.

This fact about the Stoic telos has been obscured by persistent misintepretation that began in antiquity.*’ Certain parts of Stoic doctrine do involve the idea of fitting into nature’s pattern, and this fact, together with the fact that the notion of homologoumenos Zen is a difficult one, have been seriously misleading. But of course it is perfectly obvious once one thinks about it that the Stoics cannot possibly mean that the end of human life, and the condition that constitutes the ideal, is simply a life that fits in with nature’s pattern, quite simply because in their view, everything must fit into nature’s pattern, whether it wants to or not.22 This means that although homologoumenos tei physei Zen means “to live in agreement with nature,” “agreement” here cannot mean simply mere conformity or agreement in the sense of fitting into the pattern. What it means is agreement. homologia, in the sense of consonance of one’s logos with the logos of nature, where that means

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that one’s soul actually reflects the pattern of nature, in the sense of comprehending it, and one’s activities are ordered by that condition of soul.

Some of the confusion is caused by Stoic terminology. I leave aside the question whether Zeno’s original telos formula was homolog- oumenos Zen, not homologoumenos tei physei Zen, but if it was, the occurrence of homologoumenos in it obviously cannot mean mere conformity. It is important, too, that the Stoics do not use the word homologein in any connection to describe the relation to nature of anything other than human beings, which of course they could easily do if the term meant simply conformity or fitting in. Less frequently used in telos formulae are akolouthos and akolouthia, and the sources usually write as though homologein, not akolouthein, were really the standard expression (e.g. Cicero up. SVF I 179, vs. Philo, ibid.). In fact akolouthein is in Stoic usage a very broad term, which can express such things as causal result (SVF I 98) and also the somewhat vague connection that the Stoics claim to hold between the antecedent of an “if‘-“then” conditional and its consequent (e.g., I1 223)*3. Thus, akolouthos teiphyseizen is a far less precise description of the telos than homoloumenos teiphysei Zen is. Moreover, when akolouthia was given a strict role in expounding ethical theory, plainly it was originally part of the description of kathekonta, not of katorthomata (acts done actually out of virtue) or virtue or the telos. Thus, we are told by Diogenes and Stobaeus, to kathekon was defined as to akolouthon en (tei) zoei(SVF I23 1). This makes sense: as we have seen, kathekontaare indeed actions falling under regularities that are (roughly) part of nature’s pattern, but are not, assuch, done out of a virtuous state of soul (though if they are, they count as katorthomata).24 It looks, then, very much as though homologia, in the sense that I have described, was the original and strict word for the telos, and that akolouthia, originally a broader word for “fol1owing”in a general sense but used in the sense of “conformity” for kathekonta, was extended so as to be used in the telos formula too. At any rate, its use in the formula goes nowhere toward supporting the idea, impossible in itself, that the Stoic telos was mere conformity with nature’s order, as opposed to the life arising from comprehension of it.

Another reason for confusion about the telos is the fact that the notion of conformity with nature does play an imporatnt role in Stoic ethics. For one thing, Cicero makes clear that conformity with nature is the first stage of a human being’s development, and the pattern noticed there is what stimulates our comprehension of the notion of goodness (De Fin. III.20ff., and supra, sec. 111). But it is only the first stage, and is clearly stated not to be the telos. But a related source of confusion is the fact that the capacity to comprehend the pattern of nature is held by the Stoics to be a part of specifically human nature, as a matter of the kind of general regularity attaching to kathekonta, and so the person who

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comprehends nature will be acting in conformity with this general natural regularity, and thus in conformity with both nature as a whole and that pertaining specifically to human beings (cf. Diog. Laert. VII.87, in SVF I11 4). I t is wrong, however, to think that falling under such a natural regularity and so being kathekon is what lends goodness to the state of the person who comprehends the pattern of nature. (This mistake was made by Antiochus of Ascalon and has been continued in modern accounts.25) Nor can being kathekon, therefore, be what makes such a state to be the telos or end. Being kathekon, or part of the regularities or other aspects of the pattern of nature, clearly is not as such enough, in the Stoic view, to make something either good or a telos.

Why then, do the Stoics maintain that comprehending the pattern of nature is good, if not because doing so is to fit into the pattern itself? 1 alluded to the answer when I said that the Sage’s soul “reflects” that pattern when it comprehends it. A complete discussion of this matter here would take us too far into Stoic epistemology, but the fundamental idea, which commentators have seen, is that according to the Stoics, the understanding of a pattern of organization amounts to something roughly like a reproducing or “encoding” of that pattern in the soul (SVF I1 641). As G. B. Kerferd puts it,

The truth that is in all things is the Taxis or principle of order, and what the wise man, who alone achieves the goal, is doing is contemplating . . . its structure. In so doing he joins in bringing this structure into being (in himself).26

So it is because the understanding of the order of nature is an exemplifying of it, which the Stoics identify with what they call arete or “virtue”, that it is a good thing. The pattern, in other words, is good wherever it is exemplified.

1v Our aim has been to find out how much in the way of beliefs about

physics and cosmology the Sage would have to have, by virtue of being in the ideal condition. We now have enough information before us about that condition to try to answer our question-though it turns out that we cannot answer it as determinately as we might expect. We started with the idea that a person is a Sage just in case he adopts a certain attitude. We found that in the Stoic view one can adopt that attitude if and only if one holds certain beliefs, that nature’s pattern exemplifies perfect goodness and that all parts fit into it. But how much full-blooded physical theory does one have to have in order to hold these beliefs?

What kinds of objections could there be to the idea that the Sage must have substantial beliefs about nature, enough to count as a full-scale physical doctrine? I have already alluded to one type of objection, but it

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will be helpful to spell the matter out a bit here. Our first step was the claim that one would be in an ideal state if and only if one had a certain attitude toward various things in life that most people take to be bad or unsatisfactory, the attitude of “not minding” them, in some sense. This view is subject to serious objections, including those indicated at the end of section IV. But it is an interesting attempt to represent the ideal condition as a genuinely human condition, i.e., a condition of an embodied human being in the physical world, where it is taken for granted that local unsatisfactorinesses, such as pains and death, for example, will inevitably occur to everyone. The second step was the thesis that a person will adopt this attitude if and only if he holds certain beliefs about what is and is not good. This says that the holding of certain beliefs about what is good is both a necessary and a sufficient condition of adopting the attitude in question. One can approach this claim either by asking whether the holding of any set of beliefs about what is good could be a necessary and sufficient condition of adopting any such “attitude” as the one in question, or by asking whether the particular beliefs proposed are necessary and sufficient for the attitude. On both fronts there are obviously very serious objections to the Stoic view. In particular, it seems to me very doubtful that a belief in the perfection of the universe is either a necessary or a sufficient condition either of adopting the approved attitude, or of being in an ideal state. More generally, attitudes, as typified by the one in question, do not seem to be fully determined by beliefs about what is good, nor to be determined only by beliefs.

Chrysippus obviously had something to say about this last- mentioned issue. He is notorious for having claimed, in something like the intellectualist tradition of Socrates, that pathe or “affections” are kriseis or “judgments”.*7 This claim seems to me wrong, as it apparently does to most people nowadays and also did to Posidonius and others, but if we look at it in the present context we can both understand it more clearly and also see what Chrysippus’ motivation was for making it. Anyone who wants to convince you that to adopt a certain attitude it is necessary and sufficient for you to adopt certain beliefs will do well to deny that there are any other psychological states that you could be in that would prevent the beliefs from producing the attitude. Puthe threaten to be just such states. Chrysippus tried to disarm the threat by claiming that pathe just are beliefs, and beliefs to the effect that certain things-mostly experiences that one is undergoing-are good or bad. As we saw earlier, and as seems now to be generally agreed, he was not claiming that such (relatively) bare experiences as pain are judgments or beliefs, since he did not deny that the Sage would undergo such things, whereas the Stoics did deny that the Sage would undergo pathe.28 Rather, the pathos would be, for example, what you might call “minding” the pain. This the Sage would not do, and Chrysippus held that this is tantamount to the Sage’s not believing that the pain is a bad thing.

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The last step of the argument, though, is the one in which some Stoics hold that one will believe the requisite things about what is good just in case one has a full-blown system of beliefs about nature, physics, cosmology, and all. The most obvious objection to this idea needs only to be mentioned here, that factual propositions are not equivalent to evaluative ones, and that a person's factual beliefs about nature and the like can, certainly in the present instance, vary independently of one's beliefs about what is good. Here A. A. Long seems to me right to say that the Stoics would not accept a sharp distinction between factual and evaluative beliefs,29 and in fact I would go further and doubt whether they would have accepted the distinction at all, particularly as it might apply to beliefs about the large-scale pattern of nature. But I do not think that they have anything interesting to say on this matter, and so I shall ignore it in what follows.

Let us turn, then, to this final step and see how the attempt was made to take it.

VII

Once the aforementioned issue is put aside, the important question remaining is not whether some beliefs about nature will be held by the Sage, but whether there will be enough of them to amount to any real physical doctrine.

The historical development of Stoic answers to this question can be delineated only quickly here. Some scholars have had doubts about Zeno, but it seems to me that he clearly took physics seriously, and clearly the subsequent doctrine of the older Stoa includes much detailed theorizing about the universe, and the same can be said, though with different emphases, about Posidonius. Later thinkers, though, and notably Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, certainly seem to place far less emphasis on physical theory. Partly this change may be due to the fact that these Stoics were less interested in physical theory and philo- sophical accounts of the Sage's ideal existence than they were in telling ordinary people how to make some slight progress in the direction of that ideal. It therefore need not mean that they would attribute to the Sage any less full-blown physical theory than Cleanthes or Chrysippus might have, but only that they did not think of physics as the medicine to be prescribed for their particular patients. Nevertheless I think that there is a reason to think that later Stoics accorded a less important role to serious study of nature than earlier figures had.30

If this was the position of later Stoics, then although we might just try to pass it off by saying that they were lesser thinkers we might instead try to explain why they took it. For even if one accepts the steps taken so far, as I think even the later figures did, it is not indefensible to deny that the Sage must know a great deal about the structure and workings of the universe. Believing that the universe exemplifies a perfect pattern does

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not automatically require views about how it is put together, nor views concerning any particular part about how it fits into the pattern. So one might hold that the later Stoics were reasonable to neglect physics and cosmology after all, and that the earlier ones had no good reason, at least in their ethics, to include it.

Unfortunately, our evidence does not seem to be sufficient, as far as I can see, to make clear what the earlier Stoics said or might have said in response to this, and so we are reduced to educated guesses. I can see two likely possibilities, one epistemological and one psychological.

The psychological one would involve the idea that in order to “neutralize” a local unsatisfactoriness, it is psychologically necessary not merely to believe or even know that the pattern of the universe is perfect and that the local event fits into it somehow or other, but instead to have a definite belief about how the fitting works in the particular case. Doing the latter would require a substantial account of the pattern of nature, and of the details concerning one’s own situation, though not all details concerning everything.

The epistemological response would hold that the Sage’s condition must rest not on mere belief but rather on the more stable condition of knowledge. The Stoics of course adopted very strong conditions of knowledge, involving a kind of certainty. They could have easily have held that the Sage would have to know, rather than merely believe, that the universe exhibits a perfect pattern, and since they were empiricists of sorts, they might conclude that the knowledge required a large amount of physical theory based on o b ~ e r v a t i o n . ~ ~ By the kind of linkage of fact and value mentioned earlier, the Stoics closely associated the perfection of the universe with its being unified (SVF I1 1127,549), and its being unified with its being subject to causal determinism (920,949, as well as its exhibiting connections among widely separated parts, supposedly illustrated by the effectiveness of forms of divination like auspices. In addition, they held that the unity of nature could be seen in the fact that it manifested a coherent plan, associated withpronoiu, whereby parts of the universe could be seen to be adapted to helping other parts (1 140, etc.). In all of these cases, they could have maintained that knowledge that nature does exhibit a pattern is required by the Sage, and must be supported by knowledge of what pattern it exhibits.

Plausible as this account may sound, we lack good evidence for it, and the picture is clouded further by what emerges from G. B. Kerferd’s paper, “What Does the Wise Man Know?” He shows that most of the evidence, though not quite all of it, goes against the idea that the Sage was supposed to be omniscient about all details of the universe. Furthermore-though Kerferd does not make this point--the evidence he gives does not seem to reveal any clear line at all between the amount of detail that is demanded and the amount that is not. Kerferd believes that when talking about appropriate actions, for example, the Stoics drew a distinction between what is appropriate in various circumstances

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and “detailed specifications, or . . . specificpraecepta or precepts”, but he does not show how they drew this distinction or that they had any clear way of doing it.32

Evidence on the psychological response is equally inadequate. What there is has to do with the Stoics’answer to what later came to be called “the problem of evil.”Part of their answer involves what we saw earlier, their claim that local unsatisfactorinesses fit into the pattern of the universe. But the Stoics also had to admit that some parts of the universe are not indifferent but actually bad, just as some parts are good. These parts are, respectively, the exemplifications of virtue and vice in people, vice being by far the more common (SVF Ill 97-97a). The Stoics have to explain how these (by their own account) genuinely bad things are compatible with the perfect goodness of the whole, and how the Sage may reasonably avoid taking them as lessening the value of his condition. It seems clear that Stoics realized that this problem had to be met by more than the mere claim that these things, too, fit into nature’s order, though they say this too (SVF I1 1176, 1178, 1127, 1131). Their second claim seems to have been, accordingly, that it is impossible, in what seems like a logical sense, that the universe might lack all bad things, mainly on the (weak) ground that good cannot be instantiated unless bad is also (e.g., SVF I1 1169, 1181, 1182). Now whatever one thinks of this argument, the relevant point now is that it does not seem like a way of trying to “neutra1ize”one’s recognition of a local bad state of affairs, such as one’s neighbor’s vice or one’s own. For it does not show that any particular exemplification of badness is necessary for the exemplification of goodness. So they would have to recur to the first claim and try to show, granted that some bad in the world is necessary, that rhis particular bad occurrence is required to make the overall pattern perfect. But here too, as in the case of the local unsatis- factorinesses that they hold to be indifferent, we have little evidence for their holding that the fitting of each such thing would have to be known in full detail by the Sage. On the other hand we have little evidence against it either.33

So far as I can see, then, we are not in a position to be sure why the early Stoics thought that detailed physical and cosmological theory would be required by their notion of the ideal human condition as exemplified by the Sage, or in general, I would say, why it would be required by their ethics. As noted, we can easily see why they plausibly might have held this, but I do not know of any actual statement of why or arguments for it. Moreover we can see at least some room for the later Stoics to deny, or to omit to believe, that physical theory was required by the ethical views that they retained from the early Stoa, without feeling forced to admit that they had thereby abandoned the central part of the Stoic position.

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NOTES

I G. B. Kerferd, “What Does the Wise Man Know?” John M. Rist, ed., me Sroics (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1978). pp. 125-136.

2 See now on this issue Anna Maria Ioppolo, Aristone die Chi0 e lo Sroicismo Anrico (1980). esp. pp. I I f f . and Ch. I .

3 I use “attitude” in a sense both broad and loose, to include emotions and other non-cognitive states. On Chrysippus see sec. VI.

4 See my “Two Notes on Stoic Terminology”, Americun Journul of Philology, 99 (1978). I 11-1 19, esp. 115-1 19. For a similar modern distinction, between the experienceof “pain” and the “suffering” that may or may not accompany it, see R. M. Hare, Morol Thinking (Oxford, 1981). p. 93.

5 If the Stoics knew of the modern drugs that supposedly allow one to feel pain fully without minding it, they would presumably have to claim that they do it by removing one’s belief that the pain is bad. (On Chrysippus’view that to mind the pain is irselfto judge that it is bad, see sec. VI.) See S V F 111 200, 200a, 256.

See Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism 1.12. See esp. S V F III 191; cf. I1 935, 1127, along with A. A. Long, Hellenisric Philosophy

(New York, 1974), pp. 179-1 84. *See,e.g. ,SVFII550(esp.p. 173, 11. 24-26), 1170, 1181.

For the difference, see my article, “The Basis of Stoic Ethics”, Harvurd Studies in Clussical Philology, 83 (1979), 143-178.

lo See esp. Max Pohlenz, Die Sroo, 4th ed. (Gottingen, 1970-72), discussed ibid. If G. E. Moore, Principiu Erhicu (Cambridge, Eng., 1903), esp. Ch. I. l2 1 shall do nothing here to try to clear up the notion, but for some pertinent discussion

see, e.g., Gilbert H. Harman, “Toward a Theory of Intrinsic Value”, Journal of Philosophy, 64 (1967). 792-804, and Allan Gibbard,“Doing No More Harm Than Good”, PhilosophiculSrudies, 24 (1973). 158-173. I should add that the inferences discussed here in connection with (1)-(5) involve particularly tricky difficulties for the notion of part- whole. But the points that I make about them can be made without casting them in that terminology.

l 3 What 1 think that they are wrong about is mainly this: many satisfactions are intrinsically good, not merely good as part of some pattern such as the Stoics focus on. The Stoics’opponents thought the same thing, but tended to confuse this charge of falsity with a mistaken charge of contradiction (see esp. the criticism of the Stoics in De Fin. 1V. 46-48).

I4 There is a substantial philosophical problem here, which is connected with a problem in interpreting Moore’s views, about whether payingattention both to the value of a whole and the value of a part, when the Doctrine of Organic Unities holds, is an illegitimate form of double-counting. F o r reasons too complicated to be discussed here, 1 shall be assuming that it is not.

In general we are talking here and throughout of types of actions and things, not tokens, but there are some difficult problems about this matter that I shall have to gloss over in this paper.

i6TheStoics haveanotionofgoodnessforconsequences(SVFII1 106-109),along with some other sorts of goods (95ff.), but none of these are to be confused with things that are preferred.

I f For an important clarification of this notion, see Hans Reiner, “Zurn Begriff des Guten (Agathon) in der Stoischen Ethik“, Zeirschrifrrjur Philosophische Forschung, 28

1 merely note here, without exploring, the obvious connection between these matters and those discussed in recent times by philosophers like Thomas Nagel, e.g., in “Subjective and Objective”, Morrul Quesrions (Cambridge, Eng., 1979), pp. 196-21 3, esp. 204-205, and Hare, op. cit., esp. chs. 5-6.

( 1974), 228-234.

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19 For a summing up of the different roles that the various theses have to play in the Sage's final assessment of his condition, see 11.33.

2o In sec. VII there will be occasion to take account of the fact that the Stoics also countenance ascriptions of badness to parts of the universe, namely, to vice possessed by individuals.

2 1 It is already rampant in De Fin. IV. 22 This in fact is pointed out by the Aristotelian commentator, Michael (SVF I l l 17).

though he uses it as an argument against Stoicism rather than a way of avoiding misinterpretation of it. Universal determinism is of course standard Stoic doctrine, but most relevant and graphic in the present connection is SVF 11 975.

23 See Ian Mueller,"An Introduction to Stoic Logic". Rist, ed., op. cif . , pp. 1-26, esp. p. 20.

24 See, e.g., SVF 111 516, 517. There are serious problems of interpretation here. See Rist, "Appropriate Acts", Stoic Philosophy (Cambridge, Eng., 1969), pp. 97-1 I I ; 1. G. Kidd, "Moral Actions and Rules in Stoic Ethics", Rist, ed., The Sfoics, pp. 247-258.

2s See above, n. 10. It seems to me that the same mistake is present in Long, op. cif . , pp.

26 Kerferd, op. cir., p. 132. 27 See SVF I l l 456,459 with 460 for Posidonius' view. 28 See ref. supra, n. 4. 29 A. A. Long, "The Logical Basis of Stoic Ethics", Proceedings o f f h e Arisiofeliun

Jo This seems to be the general view; see Long, Hellenistic Philosophy, p. 115. 3 1 See SVF 111 112, and the references, such as I l l 4, 12, and perhaps 14 (cf. 15), to the

fact that Chrysippus said that the felos involved empeiriu of what happens by nature. J 2 I think that this issue is connected with the question whether the Stoics always held

that absolutely all eventsare subject to fate, and the question of the status within Stoicism of the view that the world-cycles are not totally exact recurrences.

3 J Cf. n. 19. The Stoics' version of the Doctrine of Organic Unities tells us that the goodness of the pattern of the universe is not a function of the goodness of its parts. The lncomparability Thesiscould be viewed as an attempt to explain why the Sage supposedly cannot subtract the disvalue (in the form of dispreferredness) of local unsatisfactorinesses from the value (in the form of goodness) of the universe in calculating his assessment of his own condition. The Superiority Thesis is probably best viewed as an attempt to explain why, given the two distinct potentially competing assessments that might be yielded under the lncomparability Thesis (one involving the Sage's local situation, including pains, itches, etc., and the other involving only the goodness of the universe), the Sage should choose only the latter in assessing his own condition and setting his attitude. Finally, the Stoics'treatment of local budoccurrences is apparently meant to serve the purposes of all three of the aforementioned theses, especially the first (under which it falls in part). Although there is much more to be done to sort out all of these issues, the intended upshot is obvious: neither the existence of local bad things nor the existence of dispreferred indifferents is supposed to gainsay either the perfection of the universe or the Sage's capacity to assess his own condition by it alone.

188- I 89.

Sociefy, 70 (1970-71), 85-104.

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