Stoicism

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Stoicism is the Hellenistic philosophical school, founded at Athens around 300 BCE, that held the cosmos to be governed throughout by an immanent rational order and the human good to consist in living in agreement with it. The name comes from the Stoa Poikile, the painted colonnade in the Athenian marketplace where its founder, Zeno of Citium, taught. From there it passed to Cleanthes and then Chrysippus, the systematizer to whom the school owed most of its logic and physics, and it remained a dominant philosophy of the Greco-Roman world for some five centuries.

At its center is the logos — reason, but also the active principle that pervades and structures all things, identified with God, with nature, and with a fiery breath running through the whole of matter. On this account nothing happens by chance; events unfold by an unbroken causal order the Stoics called fate or providence, and the wise course is to understand that order and consent to it. The texts draw a sharp line between what lies within a person’s power — judgment, desire, assent — and what does not — body, reputation, fortune, death. Virtue, the only true good, lies entirely on the first side; everything on the second is, in the school’s term, “indifferent,” to be handled well but never to be the ground of happiness. The figure of the sage, perfectly rational and untroubled, marks the ideal; the Stoics conceded that almost no one ever reached it.

Much of the early school’s writing is lost, surviving only in fragments and hostile summaries. What comes down whole belongs largely to the Roman period: the Discourses of Epictetus, a freed slave whose lectures were recorded by a pupil; the letters and essays of Seneca; and the private notebook of the emperor Marcus Aurelius, written in Greek to himself on campaign. These later writers turned the school’s attention firmly toward ethics and the conduct of a life, and it is through them that Stoicism has mostly been read.

Its afterlife is long. Early Christian thinkers absorbed the language of the logos and the vocabulary of conscience and natural law; the term “stoic” in ordinary speech, meaning unmoved by pain, preserves a thinned-out memory of the doctrine of indifference. Scholars caution that the popular image — emotionless endurance — distorts a system that aimed not at suppressing feeling but at correcting the judgments from which destructive feeling springs. What the school offered was a single claim worked out in full: that a person is disturbed not by things but by views about them, and that the work of philosophy is to set those views right.

→ In the library: Epictetus — The Discourses and Manual (Matheson, 1916)

→ Related: Logos · Neoplatonism · Nous