Stoics: Apathy as the First Step to Virtue

THE STOIC MORAL PROGRAM consisted of a negative and a positive content.  The first, negative concern was control of the passions, to achieve a state of apatheia or passionlessness.  Once the passions were controlled and replaced with their reason-based opposites (eupatheia), the soul could be channeled to conform within the guidance of the four cardinal virtues.  Subject the soul to the guidance of the virtues once the state of apatheia was achieved was the positive part of the Stoic program.

In analyzing the passions, the Stoics rejected the teachings of Plato and Aristotle as to the composition of the soul.  They rejected Plato's famous teaching (in his Republic) that the soul was the city or polis writ small, and that it was tripartite, composed of a spirited (θυμητικὸν), concupiscent (ἐπιθυμητικὸν), and rational nature (λογιστικόν): two stallions being guided by the driver of reason into virtue.  They rejected Aristotle's view that virtue was a sort of harmony or mean among the virtues, an interrelationship of various parts.  They saw the passions as competitors with reason, not as something needing to be controlled by reason.  For this reason, the passions had to be suppressed and replaced with good passions, one's entirely in accord with reason.

Plutarch outlines the Stoic view of things as it came to the soul (which had no real parts) and virtue (which was equivalent to reason):

All [the Stoics] commonly hold that virtue is a certain character (diathesin) and power of command in the soul, generated by reason, or rather, virtue is reason, consistent and firm and unchangeable. And they think that the passionate and irrational part is not distinguished by some distinction in nature from the rational part of the soul, but the same part of the soul, which they call the reasoning and commanding part, when as a whole it turns or changes during passions or changes in character or habit it becomes vice or virtue. It has nothing irrational in itself, but is called irrational when a strong and dominant excessive impulse has carried it off toward something wrong and contrary to reason.

Plutarch, De virtute morali, 441c-d* (quoted in Houser, 22-23).  The logos or reasonable part of man was the chief of virtue.  The objective was to have the whole soul act in common with reason, and to avoid its opposite: that the whole soul instead should be under the guidance of passion.  The Stoics, of course, are famous for their recipe of control over the passions.  The recipe for virtuous living was to live a passionless life, the famous apatheia.

Apatheia by Don Michael, Jr. 

In categorizing the passions (so as to try to overcome them), the Stoics developed a sophisticated taxonomy.  For example, Diogenes Laertius identifies twenty-six different species of passions, but they can be placed within four main categories or types: desire (epithymia), fear (phobos), pleasure (hēdonē), and pain (lupē). (See Diogenes Laertius, Vitae 7.111-14).  Interestingly, they viewed these passions as intellectual judgments, kriseis, and therefore controllable.  Virtue was achieved, not by controlling the passions or subjecting the to the guidance of reason, but by routing them out of the soul altogether.  Then, one expected to replace them with their good opposites.

The good opposites of the passions, the "good passions" or eupatheia, were identified as proper willing  or rational appetite (boulēsis) which was the counterpart to desire  (epithymia), caution or rational avoidance (eulabeia) which was the counterpart to fear (phobos), and joy or rational elation (charan), the opposite of pleasure (hēdonē).**  (See Diogenes Laertius, Vitae 7.117)

Replacing the irrational and therefore bad passions with the reason-inspired and therefore good passions was the goal of the negative project of the Stoics.


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*κοινῶς δ᾽ ἅπαντες οὗτοι τὴν ἀρετὴν τοῦ ἡγεμονικοῦ τῆς ψυχῆς διάθεσίν τινα καὶ δύναμιν γεγενημένην ὑπὸ λόγου, μᾶλλον δὲ λόγον οὖσαν αὐτὴν ὁμολογούμενον καὶ βέβαιον καὶ ἀμετάπτωτον ὑποτίθενται: καὶ νομίζουσιν οὐκ εἶναι τὸ παθητικὸν καὶ ἄλογον διαφορᾷ τινι καὶ φύσει ψυχῆς τοῦ λογικοῦ διακεκριμένον, ἀλλὰ ταὐτὸ τῆς ψυχῆς μέρος, ὃ δὴ καλοῦσι διάνοιαν καὶ ἡγεμονικόν, δι᾽ ὅλου τρεπόμενον καὶ μεταβάλλον ἔν τε τοῖς πάθεσι καὶ ταῖς καθ᾽ ἕξιν ἢ διάθεσιν μεταβολαῖς κακίαν τε γίνεσθαι καὶ ἀρετήν, καὶ μηδὲν ἔχειν ἄλογον ἐν ἑαυτῷ.
**Diogenes Laertius does not give an account of the good passion associated with the bad passion of pain (lupē), but we might suppose that irrational pain would be replaced by some sort of rationally-inspired avoidance of what is harmful or vicious.  "Such an expansion [in avoiding the seeming good and acquiring the truly good] seems but another word for virtue."  Houser, 24.

The Stoics and Virtue: The Adiaphora

ALTHOUGH THE STOIC PHILOSOPHERS took their inspiration from Socrates, sidestepping the developments of Plato and Aristotle, their contribution to virtue theory was the addition of the notion of logos or reason underlying the entire virtue inquiry.  However, the Stoic thinkers did not disdain Plato or Aristotle in their entirety.

For example, the Stoic thinkers accepted the four-fold division of Plato, and thought it convenient to divide virtue into the four cardinal virtues that Plato had identified: fortitude, temperance, prudence, and justice.  They also followed the notion that these virtues were related to each other and mutually supported each other.  The Stoics found that the inter-relatedness of the virtues also applied to their corresponding vices.

The Stoics, however, rejected the Aristotelian moderation of virtue/vice distinction.  Whereas Aristotle saw vice and virtue as two extremes to a continuum, with most of mankind in between the two extremes, the Stoics saw virtue and vice as all-or-nothing qualities.  One either was virtuous in toto or not, and if not, one was vicious.  This led to a sort of moral rigorism for which the Stoics were famous.  As Diogenes Laertius put it in his work on the life of the philosophers (Vitae, 7.127), "'while the Peripatetics [Aristotelians] say that progress lies between virtue and vice,' the Stoics'believed there is nothing between virtue and vice.'"  Houser, 19 (quoting Laertius).

Cicero--himself a disciple of the Stoic moral school--described this Stoic position in his De finibus (3.14.48) thus:

For just as those who are submerged in the ocean cannot breath, whether they are so close to the surface that they are just about to emerge or they are down deep . . . so too whoever is making a little progress toward the habit of virtue is no less in misery than one who has progressed not at all.

(quoted in Houser, 19)

The Stoic Chrysippus

Another contribution of the Stoic school is that they did not adopt Plato's "philosopher king" (philosophos basileus) or Aristotle's "great-souled" man (spoudaios) as the exemplar of the virtuous soul.  These notions were too tied to the political life of the polis or were too practical in perspective.  Rather, consistent with their Socratic emphasis and their notion of the logos as the underlying standard, the Stoics looked toward the wise man or sage (sophos) as the paradigm of the virtuous human.

By putting a cosmic and cosmopolitan twist on Socrates' search for universal definitions, the Stoics thought [the sage's] single-minded devotion to the logos allowed [the sage] to submit with equanimity to death, seemingly the worse of evils . . . . The Stoic sages was conceived as a paragon of moral virtue.

Houser, 19.

It should be noted that the Stoic sage's equanimity before death in his devotion to the logos was a quality that was quite compatible with the martyr's devotion to the Logos made flesh, Jesus the Lord, which led him to spurn death and witness to the truth.  The heroism of the sage and the heroism of the martyrs were thus analogous.

The Stoics recognized that virtue was not only something that made a man extrinsically excellent (in his relations ad extra), but that virtue was something that pertained to the inner life and so made a man excellent in his interior life (ad intra).  Indeed, it was the inner aspect of virtue which was emphasized.  Thus virtue's intrinsic goodness is not necessarily measured by results, but rather by what is right and good.  The Stoics therefore came to see virtue as its own reward, irrespective of consequences or happiness.  The Stoic philosopher Zeno, for example, "concluded that virtues are not one among many things that are intrinsically good, they are the only things that are good intrinsically (agathon, kalon; honestum); and likewise th only thing intrinsically bad is vice (kakia; vitium)."  Houser, 20.

Diogenes Laertius (Vitae, 7.102-3) summarized the Stoics' view thus:

The virtues--prudence, justice, courage, temperance, and the others--are good (agatha); and their opposites--imprudence, injustice, and the others--are bad (kaka); neither good nor bad are those things which neither benefit nor harm, such as life, health, pleasure, beauty, strength, wealth, good, reputation, noble birth, and their opposites death, disease, pain, ugliness, weakness, poverty, bad reputation, low birth, and such things . . . . For these things are not good, but things indifferent (adiaphora) in the category of preferred things (proegmena).  For just as heating, not cooling, is a property of the hot, so benefiting, not harming, is a property of the good; but wealth and health do not benefit any more than they harm; therefore, neither wealth nor health is a good.

(quoted in Houser, 20).  The Stoics therefore saw a great many goods as pre-moral goods to which a sage ought to be indifferent; whereas Plato and especially Aristotle tended to see man and his good (happiness) as more a blend of extrinsic and intrinsic qualities.  The Stoic man could be "happy" lacking all things but virtue.  The Aristotelian man could not be "happy" even if virtuous, if he was lacking health and a certain level of wealth.

As we shall see in the next posting, this scheme of the Stoics--which labeled a whole host of things seen as intrinsically good in the Platonic-Aristotelian analysis as morally indifferent.  In order to explain which humans gravitated to such supposedly indifferent goods and avoided such supposedly indifferent evils, the Stoics had to develop some explanation.  They therefore developed a sort of dualistic moral theory that distinguished between animal impulse and desire tied to man's animal nature and the higher reason-based nature of rational man.

Cleanthes' Hymn: A Stoic Knows the Eternal Law

The Hymn of Cleanthes

(E. H. Blakeney, trans.)

Most Glorious of Immortals, might God (Zeus),
Invoked by many a name, O Sovran King
Of Universal nature, piloting
This world in harmony with law (themis), – all hail!
Thee it is meet that mortals should invoke,
For we Thine offspring are, and sole of all
Created things that live and move on earth
Receive from Thee the image of the Word.
Therefore I praise Thee, and shall hymn Thy power
Unceasingly. Thee the wide world obeys,
As onward ever in its course it rolls
Where’er Thou guidest, and rejoices still
Beneath Thy sway: so strong an instrument
Is held by Thine unconquerable hands –
That two-edged thunderbolt of living fire
Which never fails. Beneath its dreadful blow
All Nature reels; therewith Thou dost direct
The Universal Reason which, commixt
With all the greater and lesser lights,
Moves thro’ the Universe. How great Thou art,
The King supreme for ever and for aye!
No work is done apart from Thee, O God,
Or in the world or in the heavens above
Or in the deep, save only what is wrought
By sinners in their folly. Nay, ’tis Thine
To make the uneven smooth and bring to birth
Order from chaos. By Thy power, great Spirit,
The foul itself grows fair; all things are blent
Together, good with evil; things that strive
Will find in Thee a friend; that so may reign
One Law, one Reason, everlastingly
O Thou most bounteous God who sittest throned
In clouds, the Lord of Lightning, save mankind
From baleful ignorance; yea scatter it,
O Father, from the soul, and make men wise
With Thine own wisdom, for by wisdom Thou
Dost govern the whole world in righteousness;
That so, being honoured, we may Thee requite
With honour, chanting without pause Thy deeds,
As is most meet; for greater guerdon ne’er
Befalls or man or god than evermore
Duly to praise the Universal Law.

Both the translation and the original Greek are taken from E. H. Blakeney, trans., The Hymn of Cleanthes (New York: MacMillan Company, 1921), 8-9. (The Greek text is found in pages 6 and 7 of the same book.)



Notes:
Cleanthes was a Stoic philosopher born at Assos in peninsular Troas, in what is now the northwestern part of Anatolia, Turkey, around 331 B.C. After a long life, he died around 232 B.C. He succeeded Zeno, who was the founder of Stoicism, and presided over the Stoa (the "Porch") for thirty years until he was succeeded himself by Chrysippus. Many years later, the Christian Lactantius was to note that Zeno had come upon many of the doctrines shared by Christians. "Zeno rerum naturae dispositorem atque opificem universitatis λόγον praedicat." ("Zeno preached that the Logos (Reason) established the order of things and framed the universe.") Divine Institutes, iv.9. Many have commented on the Stoic influence found in St. Paul's epistles and even in the Gospel of St. John (the "Word" or "Logos"). The Stoics, in particular in regard to their notion of the Natural Law, had a great influence on Roman law.

There are only scatterings of Cleanthes's teachings left, and no systematic restatement can be made from such disjecta membra, or scattered members. Like most Greeks that gravitated towards monotheism, his concept of God was pantheistic, and God was seen as in the world, sort of as its soul, the natura naturans and natura naturata sharing the same substance. To the Stoic, God was not also wholly "Other" or transcendent. And yet we see in this pagan philosopher, who had no benefit of the Jew and his Revelation, a remarkable sensitivity and grasp, however dark, of an Eternal Law, a "Deep Magic," underlying the entirety of creation, including man. Man had to hearken to that Law, and conformity to it was virtue, while disobedience to it vice.

The poem has been hailed as "the noblest expression of heathen devotion which Greek literature has preserved to us." (Blakesney, 6 (referencing Lightfoot)).