Brad Inwood (Ed.)
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
ISBN 052177005x (hardback), 0521779855 (paperback).
438 pages.
$70.00 (hardback), $27.99 (paperback).
As with most of the volumes in this series, the new Cambridge Companion to Stoic philosophy is a fine and comprehensive collection of essays on the most important aspects of the movement by the leading scholars in the field. It should, at a minimum, be noted on the reading list of any upper-division undergraduate or graduate course concerned with post-Aristotelian ancient philosophy.
This volume does a better job than many others in the series, moreover, of avoiding an anachronistic imposition of our own era’s conception of how to carve philosophy up into its various subdisciplines. Much effort is made, indeed, to impart a conception not of how some reconstructed version of the Stoics conceived, e.g., ‘philosophy of mind’, but of how they conceived philosophy itself, and of the ways in which this is both continuous and discontinuous with today’s taxonomy of topics.
Stoic philosophy is tripartite, dividing into ethics, logic, and physics. It is the first of these that will be most familiar to the new reader, since, as with Epicureanism and Skepticism, the modern, derivative meaning of the label ‘Stoic’ captures only a very small part of the concerns and insights of the ancient school itself. For many today, ‘stoicism’ denotes first and foremost a strict set of prescriptions for conduct, and for the cultivation of a certain disposition to one’s circumstances, that if followed correctly will lead to the diminution of suffering.
Stoic practical philosophy is noteworthy for the high demand it places on its adherents to overcome, by reason and discipline, feelings that could seem all but unavoidable if one is to continue to live in this world as a human being rather than as a robot or a Vulcan. The Stoic teaching on happiness --best summed up in the motto, ‘do not try to have what you want, but try to want what you have’-- could easily seem to lead to the acceptance of objectively horrid circumstances, for oneself and, more problematically, for others, where a more tempered moral philosophy would concede that at times it is best to seek to change those features of the world one finds displeasing. It is, one might think, laudable to react ‘stoically’ when one’s DVD player goes on the fritz, but demented to treat the case of one’s own child’s death in the same way. Malcolm Schofield, in his characteristically excellent piece on ‘Stoic Ethics’, acknowledges the inherent dangers in the view that everything external to oneself ought to remain irrelevant to the question of one’s happiness, but nonetheless effectively argues that the Stoic teaching about ‘indifferent’ externals is much more subtle than the caricature with which it is usually invoked would suggest.
One of the greatest contributions of this volume is that it will serve to introduce the newcomer to Stoicism of this movement’s importance in ancient theoretical philosophy, and particularly in physics and logic. Of course, a good case can be made that the Stoics are only concerned with the natural world to the extent that knowledge of how it really is may help contribute to their therapeutic project of inculcating equanimity in an uncontrollable world, and thus that physics and logic are not of any interest in themselves, but only as handmaidens to practical philosophy. But this does not set them radically apart, arguably, from other ancient schools of philosophy, since more or less everyone, in some way, presumed that the pursuit of knowledge about the world is not a morally neutral endeavor. Though of course we find relatively more theoretical and more practical concerns in different parts of the oeuvre of a philosopher such as Aristotle, the preoccupation with a dichotomy between these two is a distinctly modern one, and in important respects Aristotle saw what he had to say about, e.g., the motion of the celestial spheres as being of just as much relevance to the understanding of what is best for humans as the Stoics would take the study of the physical world to be for the study of ethics.
Physics and ethics overlap perhaps most clearly in the issue of Stoic determinism. Dorothea Frede writes on this topic with characteristic clarity and insight, also admirably emphasizing at the outset that the title ‘determinist’ may be a latecomer in history, but that nonetheless a number of distinct varieties of the position may be discerned in antiquity. Beyond determinism, for the Stoics the most important lesson to learn about the physical world is that it is entirely corporeal, and entirely divine. Whereas the Epicureans want to show that the natural universe is free from divine influence, Seneca, for example, as Christopher Gill explains in his chapter, emphasizes the divinity of the world itself. This divinity consists in nothing other than the world’s rational intelligibility, or in the fact that it is everywhere permeated by logos.
Stoics are thus corporealists, but their conviction that everything that is is corporeal is nonetheless a far cry from the much more recent mechanist ontology of the 17th and 18th centuries. It is important to bear in mind in this connection how recently concocted is the situation in philosophy which would have us choose between idealism and materialism. In the ancient setting, one could also conceptualize reality as fundamentally physical, much as Descartes would, while nonetheless, in contrast with Descartes, conceiving this fundamental physical reality on the model of living, ensouled beings rather than of the brute, inert res extensa which the mechanists would fundamentally oppose to all that is mental and living. Here as in so many other ancient schools of thought, we see that for the Stoics in an important sense it is what would later come to be called ‘biology’, and not physics (in the modern sense of the word), that serves as the most foundational science of nature.
From here, it is not hard to see why for the Stoics theology is a subdomain of physics. Indeed, Diogenes lists the gods as among the following five topics specifically pertaining to the science of physics. As Michael J. White notes in his essay on Stoic natural philosophy, Stoic physics is for this reason much broader than that of Aristotle, who conceived it as the conceptual investigation of motion or change and whatever is implied by this. Finally, we shall just note that this volume treats with clarity and depth the third aspect of Stoic philosophy, logic. There is only one piece in the volume dedicated entirely to Stoic logic, by Suzanne Bobzien, though many of the other chapters illuminate aspects of the Stoics’ rich contribution to this field as well.
In addition to doing a fine job of reconstructing the range of concerns of the Stoics, this volume also clearly charts the ways in which the movement changed over the course of several centuries, from its foundation by Zeno of Citium around 300 bce, through its Greek apex in Chryssipus, the Middle Stoicism of such relatively minor figures as Posidonius, and into the perhaps most well known Stoicism of the Roman Imperial period, associated with such towering figures as Seneca and Marcus Aurelius. The two chapters offering a straightforward historical survey, David Sedley’s opening piece on the school from its foundation through Arius Didymus and Christopher Gill’s on Roman Stoicism, show very well not just how Stoicism changed over time, but also quite a bit about how it changed in relation to contemporaneous social and political developments. In this and other ways, Inwood’s volume rises above most of the other Cambridge Companions to historical figures and movements in philosophy in its success at two difficult and often opposed tasks: making the history of philosophy comprehensible to relative newcomers, without in so doing reconstructing and distorting it to a degree that would make it all but unrecognizable to its original expositors.
Comments