Early Stoicism

The claim

Only virtue is good and only vice is bad. Health, wealth, reputation and life itself are indifferent — preferable, often, but never good, because none of them can make a person better.

What it held

The early Stoics built a complete system and meant its three parts to hold each other up: logic, physics, ethics. The physics is a materialist pantheism. There is one world, entirely corporeal, ordered throughout by a rational fire the Stoics called logos and were content to call God, or Zeus, or fate. Everything follows necessarily from what came before.

The ethics falls out of the physics. If the world is rational and ordered, then living well means living in agreement with it, and the only thing genuinely up to a person is their own assent — what they judge, and what they choose to want. Emotions are not weather that happens to us but judgements we make, which is why they can be wrong and why they can be corrected. Distress is the judgement that something bad is present. Since nothing bad can be present except one's own vice, distress rests on a mistake.

The consequences are severe and the Stoics accepted them. Virtue is all-or-nothing: you are either wise or foolish, and almost everyone is foolish. The sage is so rare that Chrysippus doubted he had ever met one.

How it argued

Argument by strict logical entailment, with the ethics presented as following from the physics and the physics from the logic. The Stoics invented propositional logic to do it, and their work on conditionals was not matched until the nineteenth century.

What it was arguing against

Epicureanism, which made pleasure the good and the gods indifferent to the world; the Academic sceptics, who denied that any impression could be reliably distinguished from a false one; and Aristotle, for holding that external goods are needed for a happy life.

Where it disagreed with itself

Whether the passions can be moderated or must be extirpated entirely — Chrysippus held the harder line. Whether the sage may take part in politics under a bad regime. Whether preferred indifferents give any real reason for action, which the school never satisfactorily settled.

Common misconceptions

That Stoicism means suppressing emotion. It means holding that emotions are judgements and can therefore be false — the wise person still feels joy, caution and rational wish. And the school was not politically quietist: Zeno's Republic imagined a world without law courts, temples or money.

How it began

Zeno of Citium arrived in Athens after a shipwreck around 312 BCE, studied under the Cynic Crates, and began teaching in a public colonnade rather than a private garden — which is why the school has an address for a name and no founder's name attached to it.

What became of it

Panaetius and Posidonius softened the system in the second century BCE, admitting Platonic and Aristotelian elements. Almost nothing survives of the early school in full: Chrysippus wrote over 700 books and not one is extant. What we have is quotation by hostile witnesses.

Lasting influence

Roman Stoicism, which is the version everyone reads. Christian ethics took conscience, natural law and providence from it. Spinoza's necessity is recognisably Stoic. Kant's insistence that only a good will is unconditionally good is the Stoic claim in another vocabulary.

Why it still matters

Cognitive behavioural therapy is built on the Stoic account of emotion as judgement, and its founders said so. The distinction between what is and is not up to us is now common self-help currency, usually without the metaphysics that made it coherent.

Put another way

A play in which you have been cast without consultation. You do not choose the part, only whether to act it well.

Where to start

Do not start here. Read Epictetus first, then come back and see how much of the system he is compressing.

The surprising bit

Zeno's ideal city had no temples, no law courts, no gymnasia and no coinage, and held that men and women should wear the same clothes. The later Stoics found this so embarrassing that some claimed it was juvenile work.

In their own words

Connections

Answers

Cynic school

Opposed by

Epicureanism, Academic Skepticism

Influenced

Roman Stoicism

The verdict

The most complete philosophical system of the ancient world, surviving almost entirely in the words of people arguing against it.

Sources

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy