Ethics in stoic philosophy

Phronesis

Volumn 52, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 58-87

  Annas, Julia ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA   (United States)

Author keywords

Ethics; Foundations; Holism; Metaphysics; Nature; Physics; Virtue

Indexed keywords

EID: 34548731985     PISSN: 00318868     EISSN: 15685284     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1163/156852807X177968     Document Type: Article

References (62)

1. Diogenes Laertius VII40
2. Marcus is writing a diary for himself, and the works of Epictetus that we have arc most plausibly seen as records of his teachings to students who were also learning logic, physics and ethics in more technical ways.
3. Diogenes Laertius VIII 39-41; cf. Sextus PH II 13.
4. Sextus, M VII 20-23
5. translation from Sextus Empiricus, Against the Logicians, translated by Richard Bett, Cambridge University Press, 2005 (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy). In the corresponding short passage at PH II 12-13 Sextus reports, without rationale, a Stoic order logic-physics-ethics, which is also the order which Sextus himself follows in both his works.
6. Plutarch, de St. Rep. 1035 A-B. The passage will be discussed below. Chrysippus introduces the division as one of different kinds of theoremata.
7. Diogenes Laertius VII 84; the whole passage is 84-116. The division of Eudorus (Stobaeus II 42.7-45.10) differs in its organization, and appears to cover a variety of theories, but the topics covered are similar: impulse, action, ends and objectives, virtue and preferred things, as well as more specific topics such as skills and practices, friendship and love, pleasure, reputation and relationships.
8. The Diogenes and Arius passages are compared, and parallel passages listed, in my Introduction to Ario Didimo, Diogene Laerzio: etica stoica, a cura di Carlo Natali, introduzione di Julia Annas, Laterza, 1999.
9. Cicero, De Finibus III, 73, Diogenes Laertius VII 85-89.
10. Katerina Ierodiakonou, 'The Stoic Division of Philosophy,' Phronesis XXXVIII/1 (1993), 57-74.1 have learnt much from this excellent article.
11. Ierodiakonou pp. 58-61 for the evidence. We are told that Zeno of Tarsus thought philosophy itself to be tripartite, presumably into logical, physical and ethical virtues of the philosopher.
12. Ierodiakonou pp. 61-67, especially p. 67.
13. Stoic metaphors for philosophy bring out just how closely unified the parts are, comparing philosophy to an egg, with logic as its protecting shell, and different pairings of physics and ethics with the yolk and the white, or to an animal, with logic as its supporting bones and different pairings of physics and ethics with flesh and animating spirit. See Ierodiakonou, pp. 71-74.1 agree with her that the metaphor of a garden (and that of a city in the Diogenes passage, which she does not discuss) is less satisfactory for representing the unity of Stoic philosophy.
14. I am very grateful to Brad Inwood for pointing out to me this very important passage, and for extensive helpful discussion of the issues raised in this paper.
15. Rem utilem desideras et ad sapientiam properanti necessariam, dividi philosophiam et ingens corpus eius in membra disponi. Facilius enim per partes in cognitionem totius adducimur. Utinam quidam quemadmodum universa mundi fades in conspectum venit, itaphilosophia tota nobis posset occurrere, simillimum mundo spectaculum. Profecto enim omnes mortales in admirationem sui raperet relictis its, quae nunc magna magnorum ignorantia credimus... Sapientis quidem animus totam molem eius amplectitur nee minus illam velociter obit quam caelum ocies nostra; nobis autem, quibusperrumpenda caligo est et quorum visus in proximo deficit, singula quaeque ostendifacilius possunt universi nondum capacibus. Seneca, Letter 89,1 -2. The idea of philosophy as a view of the big picture also dominates the following Letter 90, where Seneca relics on it to refute Posidonius' view that it was philosophy which discovered technological devices to improve human life. Far from this being the case, Seneca claims, philosophy judges whether such devices when invented do in fact improve, rather than corrupting, human life. The need to integrate our beliefs in order to achieve knowledge is also stressed more informally in Letter 84.
16. He criticises the Peripatetics for redundancy, the Epicureans and Cyrenaics for claiming to reject parts which they recognized in practice, and Aristo of Chios for wrongly limiting the philosopher's sphere of concern.
17. Letter 89, 14-18. Ethics is divided into correct estimation of value, ordering of impulse and harmonizing of action with the first two. Physics is the study of the corporeal and incorporeal. Logic is divided into dialectic and rhetoric.
18. The MSS reading, has been restored in M. Marcovich's Tcubner text, and in Long and Sedlcy's text of the passage (26B in Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, vols 1 and 2, Cambridge, 1987). Cobct's conjecture has the merit of making the phrase concern a single issue, the mixing of the parts, whereas the MSS reading brings in two separate issues, that the parts are mixed and that none of them is preferred. There is no good reason, however, for rejecting the MSS reading, and no reason to think that the specifically Stoic doctrine of total mixture is at issue here.
19. I Plutarch, de St. rep.1050b.
20. The passage traditionally numbered 6 in Stobacus Eclogae II (75.11-78,17), pp 36.25-42.8 in Arius Didymus: Epitome of Stoic Ethics, translated and edited by A. J. Pomeroy, Society of Biblical Literature Texts and Translations 44, Graeco-Roman 14, Atlanta, Ga., 1999.
21. Stobaeus II, 75-11-76.8, Pomeroy 36.30-38.9 (however, I do not accept his 〈η〉 in line 76.3 (Pomeroy 38.2)).
22. Stobaeus II 77.16-78.6 (Pomeroy 40.11-32).
23. They can well be made from within one part of philosophy, as these are in the ethical part; they simply call attention to the need to study another part fully to understand these claims.
24. "The Stoics' eudaimonism is principally grounded in their beliefs about the relation in which human beings stand to a determinate and providentially governed world.' A.A. Long, 'Stoic Eudaimonism', pp. 179-201 of Long, Stoic Studies, University of California Press, 1996.
25. 'Stoic ethics is ultimately parasitical on physics,' A.A. Long, "The Stoic Conception of Evil,' Philosophical Quarterly 18 (1968), 329-43, 341.
26. 'The foundations of Stoic ethics are to be sought.... in cosmology or theology.' Gisela Striker, 'Following Nature', in Striker, Essays on Hellenistic Epistemology and Ethics, Cambridge, 1996, pp. 221-280, p. 231.
27. One example is A.A. Long in Hellenistic Philosophy, second edition, Duckworth, 1986, pp. 179-209. In contrast, R.W, Sharpies, in Stoics, Epicureans and Sceptics, Routledge, 1996, pp. 100-113, clearly discusses the topics of the ethical part of Stoic philosophy, in a eudaimonist framework, before raising the issue of their relation to Stoic physics.
28. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations XI, 10, translated ny Robin Hard in C. Gill (ed.), Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Meditations, Wordsworth Editions, Ware, 1997.
29. C. Gill (forthcoming) analyses passages from Epictctus in a similar way; in a recent paper on Marcus Aurelius he likewise analyses Marcus 3.11, in which he takes the propositions from the different parts of philosophy to be mutually supporting.
30. J. Cooper, 'Eudaimonism and the Appeal to Nature in the Morality of Happiness: Comments on Julia Annas' The Morality of Happiness', Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, vol. LV #3 (1995), 587-599, quotes from p. 596.
31. Similar claims can be found in N. White, Individualand Conflict in Greek Ethics, Oxford, 2002, p. 312: 'Grasping the goodness of the kosmos is essential, the Stoics maintain, for an understanding of the value of anything whatsoever', and Striker, 'Following Nature', pp. 230-231.
32. Cooper secs as very limited any revisions brought about within the motivational set one brings to philosophy, augmented only by a commitment to a eudaimonistic structure; this leads him to identify appeal to Providence as an 'external' as opposed to an 'internal' reason in Bernard Williams' sense (1995, p. 590). Williams' view, however, is that I have a reason to do something if there is a sound deliberative route to my doing this from the set of motivations I already have. 'Sound deliberative route' is not limited to instrumental efficiency, and 'motivation' is not limited to desire, but Williams explicitly holds that I do not have an ethical reason if my motivational set does not antecedently contain ethical motivations. For Williams, external reasons are reasons where there is no sound deliberative route to my motivational set so understood, and he doubts that there arc any. In the context of ancient Stoicism, we reach claims about Williams' external reasons well within the ethical part of philosophy, in conclusions about virtue and emotion, for example. Williams' 'external reasons', then, have nothing to do with appeal to the cosmos as opposed to eudaimonistic thinking, See Williams, 'Internal Reasons and the Obscurity of Blame', pp, 35-45 of Williams, Making Sense of Humanity, Cambridge, 1995, and 'Internal and External Reasons' (a reply to John McDowell), pp, 186-194 of J.EJ. Altham and Ross Harrison (cds.), World, Mind and Ethics, Cambridge, 1995.
33. Long, 'Stoic Eudaimonism', p. 201.
34. Panactius, for example, rejected divination and the conflagration (Testimonia 130-140, in Panezio di Rodi, Testimoniame, ed. F. Alcsse, Naples, Bibliopolis, 1997);
35. sec chapter 3 of F. Alesse, Panezio di Rodi e la tradizione stoka. Panaetius' orthodoxy is vigorously defended in T. Tieleman, 'Panaetius' place in the history of Stoicism', forthcoming in the Proceedings of the Tenth Symposium Hellenisticum.
36. As we shall see below, this thought encourages the assumption that physics will be the way to present Stoic ethics.
37. The appeal, or not, of Providence to moderns is an entirely different issue. As we shall see below, one attraction of the foundationalist interpretation of Stoic ethics is that it enables scholars to make a neat contrast between Stoic ethics, taken to depend on accepting Providence, and modern ethical theories which do not, and thus to represent Stoic ethics as entirely distinct from modern ethical theories.
38. Does this point support the position argued for here, as opposed to that of the foundationalists ? It certainly explains why many modern scholars have thought that physics, particularly Providence, should be in some way essential for 'Stoic ethics' (an area which then no longer corresponds to the ethical part of Stoic philosophy as described in the ancient sources).
39. I have not here considered the possible role, in interpreting ancient Stoicism, of widespread assumptions in modern ethical debate to the effect that ethics should have foundations of a metaphysical kind. It is possible that scholars have brought these assumptions to the ancient texts. Modern debates about ethical foundations are too dissimilar to ancient concerns to be themselves usefully applied.
40. A.A. Long, 'Stoic eudaimonism', p, 186 and later; the phrase is repeated and emphasized, The phrase 'radical intuition' is on p, 185.
41. For example, T. Tieleman refers to 'repeated statements by Chrysippus to the effect that morality trickles down from the cosmic order and that philosophical ethics starts from theology', Chrysippus'On Affections, Brill, Leiden, 2003, p. 143.
42. Diogenes Laertius VII 87-88; I use the Teubncr text of M. Marcovich (Stuttgart, 1999).
43. This is a real contrast with the Arius passage, in which this topic is not treated. This may be due to clumsiness in the way the original has been abbreviated, however, and we should not draw far-reaching conclusions from it about the passages original structure and approach. Malcolm Schoficld, in 'Stoic Ethics' (pp. 233-256 of B. Inwood (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Stoics, Cambridge, 2003) finds the Arius passage to be an example of 'working through the key concepts of Stoic ethics' as opposed to explaining and arguing for some key Stoic thesis (as Cicero does in deFinibus III).
44. Diogenes VII 87-88.
45. It has been under-appreciated that argument is needed to establish that the explication here in physical terms amounts to providing a foundation - perhaps because of a widespread modern assumption that explanation provides foundations, As we have seen, not only has no suitable notion of foundation been argued for here, but foundations do not fit into the Stoic project.
46. Of course there are modern foundationalist theories which do claim this, by reducing or eliminating one kind of item in favour of its foundation, but this modern concern has no footing in ancient Stoicism.
47. Cf. C. Gill, "The Stoic Theory of Ethical Development: In What Sense Is Nature a Norm?', pp. 101-125 of Jan Szaif and Matthias Lutz-Bachmann (eds.), Was ist fur den Menschen Gutef/What Is Good for a Human Being?, dc Gruytcr, Berlin/New York, 2004.
48. One example suggested to me in discussion of the paper at Oxford is the way that Cicero's De Fato opens with a fragmentary reference to ethics, followed by a fuller one to a problem arising from fate within logic. Gill's work stresses the way that the treatments of fate and determinism in the different parts of Stoic philosophy are mutually fortifying; cf, article in n, 43, pp. 114-116.
49. The whole passage is at De Stoicorum Repugnantiis, 1035 A-F, I use the text of H. Cherniss in the Loeb edition, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1976.
50. Russian source
51. Russian source
52. Even Long, a staunch foundationalist, accepts that 'we may be reading a good deal of Chrysippus in Arius Didymus', in passages which discuss ethical topics with no mention of physics. A. A Long, 'Arius Didymus and the Exposition of Stoic Ethics,' in Long, Stoic Studies, pp. 107-133.
53. 1035 C-D. Note that Cherniss translates in a way which builds Plutarch's view of the last quotation into the translation; see below n. 55.
54. Ierodiakonou, "The Stoic Division of Philosophy', p. 71. I do not know what Ierodiakonou has in mind by strict and highly scientific account', but, as we have seen, for the Stoics a 'scientific' account is not one in which ethics has foundations in the modern sense, but rather one in which ethics and physics arc integrated in a way ultimately progressing towards the viewpoint of the wise person.
55. The phrase is Chcmiss translates 'as opportunity offers'
56. Russian source
57. Though it is oddly introduced as a worse problem
58. There is an under-scrutinized oddity in the fourth quotation, which says that we should attach the account of goods and evils to these things, for there is no other better starting-point and point of reference for them. Chemiss translates as Plutarch wants us to read this: 'since good and evil have no better beginning and point of reference' - presumably 'than these things', assuming 'these things' to be physical principles. Yet this is followed by oδ which should introduce another consideration to the same effect as we have had - and what follows is a reason for giving ethics some kind of primacy: physical theorizing is undertaken for nothing other than discriminating goods and evils, What precedes the oδ should thus likewise be a reason for giving ethics, not physics, some kind of primacy. This is what we get if we read ov as referring not to goods and evils but rather to the preceding (whatever they are). This gives a much less convoluted reading of the Greek sentence. If this is right, then Plutarch is forcing this quotation to appear more parallel to, or supportive of, the previous two than it really is.
59. Long puts extraordinary weight on the Diogenes passage, especially in "The Logical Basis of Stoic Ethics,' where he says (p, 153) that it 'is almost certainly our most authoritative testimony for the primary principles'. I have myself countered that what we find in Cicero 'is a normal ancient presentation of Stoic ethics, different in kind from the metaphysically based discussions of which we have some fragments,' p. 607 of' Reply to Cooper, Philosophy and PhenomenologicalResearch LV #3 (1995), 599-610, on the grounds that Cicero is our most intelligent ancient source and his presentation is the result of debate and argument. Both approaches try to privilege one text over the other, a project which now seems to me a mistake.
60. As for example in 'Stoic Ethics' by Brad Inwood and Pierluigi Donini, pp. 675-738 of K. Algract al. (cds.), The Cambridge History of Hellenistic Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999. Gisela Striker (n. 25) introduces physical foundations for Stoic ethics by way of meeting what she takes to be requirements on ethical theory. I critically discuss her reconstruction of Stoic ethics, which she judges harshly, in 'From Nature to Happiness,'Apeiron XXXI # 1 (1998), 59-73.
61. We should remember that 'mixed' presentations are in themselves no guarantee that the author has achieved this level of understanding. Physical and ethical propositions can be discussed together in mutually illuminating ways without the author having a full grasp of either of the parts of philosophy concerned. Marcus' Meditations illustrates this; see my 'Marcus Aurelius: Ethics and its Background'. Rhizai 2 (2004), 103-119.
62. I am very grateful to Brad Inwood, Christopher Gill, Bob Sharpies, Eric Brown and Clerk Shaw for discussion and written comments on earlier versions of this paper, I am also grateful to my audience for the version of this paper presented at the fiftieth meeting of the Southern Association for Ancient Philosophy at Corpus Christi College, Oxford in September 2005, and in particular Peter Adamson, Gabor Betegh, Sarah Broadie, David Sedley, Malcolm Schofield and David Charles.