Oikeiosis

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Oikeiosis is the Stoic term for the process by which a living thing recognises what is its own and is drawn toward it — a recognition the Stoics placed at the foundation of all motivation, animal and human alike. The word has no clean English equivalent; translators reach for “appropriation,” “affiliation,” “familiarisation,” or “endearment,” each catching one face of it. It derives from oikeios, “belonging” or “akin,” and behind that oikos, the household: what is oikeion is what is one’s own, as a member of the family is one’s own.

The Stoics argued that nature equips every animal, from birth, with an affinity toward itself rather than toward pleasure. The first thing a creature finds congenial is its own constitution; it perceives what preserves that constitution as belonging to it and what threatens it as foreign, and acts accordingly. The argument is reported by Diogenes Laertius and laid out at length by Cicero, who renders the idea in Latin as conciliatio and treats it as the Stoic answer to the question of where ethics begins: not in a rule imposed from outside, but in a drive already present in the living thing’s relation to itself. As reason develops in the human being, this self-directed affinity is held to mature into something the animals never reach — the recognition that virtue, the rational ordering of one’s own nature, is the only thing truly one’s own and truly good.

A second movement extends the same affinity outward. The Stoics taught that the care a creature has for itself reaches naturally to its offspring, then to kin, and in principle to every rational being, since all share in the same logos. The second-century Stoic Hierocles pictured this as a set of concentric circles drawn around the self — body, family, fellow citizens, humanity — and described the ethical task as drawing the outer circles inward, treating distant others more nearly as one treats one’s own. Whether the personal oikeiosis of self-preservation and the social oikeiosis of widening concern form one continuous drive or two distinct ones is a question the ancient sources leave unsettled, and modern scholarship has spent considerable effort reconstructing the doctrine from its scattered, second-hand witnesses; no Stoic treatise on it survives whole.

The concept carries weight beyond its school. It is one of antiquity’s most worked-out attempts to derive an obligation toward strangers from a fact about nature rather than a command, and the image of the contracting circles has been taken up repeatedly in later moral philosophy. What the Stoics claimed to have found was a single thread running from an infant’s grasp at self-preservation to the cosmopolitan’s regard for an unknown human being — the same recognition, they held, widening as reason widens.

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→ Related: Logos · Personhood