 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about the development of Stoicism with David Sedley, Lawrence Professor of Ancient Philosophy and a Fellow of Christ College at the University of Cambridge. Hi David, thanks for coming on. Hi Peter, glad to be here. Well, we're going to be talking about Stoicism now, and this is obviously one of the schools of Hellenistic philosophy, which I've been covering in the podcast. One of the striking things about Hellenistic philosophy is that it develops into several different schools – Epicureanism, Skepticism, Stoicism. But in the case of Stoicism, it seems that they differ from each other, so there's disagreement within the school, at least in terms of emphasis and, to some extent, in terms of doctrine. So what actually allows us to say that this is a single school as opposed to just a bunch of different people who we retrospectively call Stoics? Right, well that's actually quite a complex question, because there are certain features which we think of as characteristic of the Stoics which they in fact share with all the schools in their own day. One example is that by contrast with Plato, for whom the ultimate reality is at an immaterial and transcendent level, the Stoics think that fundamentally what there is is body, and they've got that in common with a few adjustments with the Epicureans, it's not really in dispute. So that's not a defining feature, or if you like it's a defining feature of the age rather than of the school. Then equally, and you were implying this in your question, there are some things on which the Stoics didn't even agree with each other. For example, some Stoics thought that the world ended in a periodic conflagration and started again. There are other Stoics- Everything turns into fire. Exactly, everything. That's right. There are other Stoics who denied that. So there were points which weren't really at stake when it came to school membership or school orthodoxy. But there were defining points of agreement. There were points on which you really had to sign on the dotted line if you're going to be a Stoic. And let's just think of some of those. Well, in physics, to be a Stoic was to believe that the world is a supremely rational, good, and indeed divine organism. That is a theory held by no other school at the time, and it's a point on which there's no significant disagreement. Even though that is something they would agree with Plato about, for instance. That's right indeed. In a sense, it's a development out of their reading of Plato's time here. So it's not entirely a novel doctrine. But in their day, they proclaim that position and they're in direct opposition to the Epicureans who take the absolute opposite position. The world is unorganized or self-organizing, but irrationally structured collection of atoms, any values are ones which have come out of it in an unplanned way. So one of the ways that their belief in the rationality of the world marks them off as a distinctive school is that it puts them in perfect antithesis to the main rival school, the Epicureans. In epistemology, all Stoics agreed that there is a kind of infallible grasp, which they call the cognitive or cataleptic impression. Although there were many variations on how that could best be defended against skeptical attacks, it remained an article of faith. And most important of all, and this really was the defining feature for any Stoic, in ethics, you could not be a Stoic without holding that only one thing is good, namely virtue. And so-called good, conventional goods like wealth and health, are in fact morally indifferent. They don't make your life any better or happier when you've got them. Although, according to most Stoics, there are still reasons for pursuing them, but these instrumental reasons rather than ways of actually fulfilling your own goal. So that really is ultimately in all ages, the indispensable component of Stoicism. The last example is an interesting one, I think, because there's kind of the overarching view, which is that only virtue is good, and you're not allowed to disagree about that, as it were, if you want to be a card-carrying Stoic. But you are allowed to disagree about the status of the indifference. Some Stoics think there are preferred indifference and some don't, although the standard view is that there are preferred indifference. That's right. Having preferred indifference, saying that there are prudential reasons for pursuing wealth and health, is a way of making the Stoic look quite awkwardly, pretty much like anybody else. The Stoic holds down a job, goes to the doctor, and generally pursues normal family values. So there were, admittedly, one or two Stoics, but only in the first generation, who disagreed on that and took the more extreme line, that there's literally no preferably of health over disease. It depends entirely on what you do with them. You might lead a much better life ill than somebody else could lead healthy. So that initially was a point of disagreement. But one of the things that may emerge as we go on is that actually there was more free thought in the first generation of the school than there was in subsequent generations. Is that partially because there develops some kind of feeling of allegiance to the school's founders, you know? I think it is. It's a pattern you see not just in the Stoic, but in all, at any rate, most of the major philosophical schools. There's a huge difference between the first generation, when the doctrine is forming, and subsequent generations. So in the first generation, let's take Plato's school, the Academy. We have pretty good evidence that Plato's leading colleagues, who included, by the way, Aristotle, disagreed with him pretty fundamentally on issues like are their forms. But it was after Plato's death that his thought became canonized. Once the founder of the school is dead, followers in subsequent generations feel a commitment to studying his text, interpreting it in the best possible light, and developing his ideas. That happened in the Academy. It happened in the Epicurean school. And it happened in the Stoic. So we've got lots of evidence that first generation Stoics disagreed on many issues, including the one you mentioned, because in particular, one leading Stoic, probably in his own day as important as Zeno, nor called Aristo of Chios, did defend the view you mentioned that there's literally no difference of value between so-called indifference. And he was a very independent thinker. It was only after Zeno's death that it became quite clear that Zeno had really won. And he was written by the winners, so subsequent generations really made Zeno the fountainhead of Stoicism. It might very well have gone the other way. It might have been the Aristonians. I guess one thing that's unusual, though, about the Stoics is that even though they have this allegiance to a school founder like the Platonists and the Epicureans, in the case of the Stoics, we actually credit someone else with systematizing Stoicism in its full glory, namely Chrysippus. So to what extent is the core of Stoic doctrine really Zeno's work, and to what extent is it, as it were, Chrysippus's interpretation of Zeno? I know that's a pretty difficult question given the set of the sources. It's difficult, but it's the key question. Well, there's no doubt—I don't think anybody disputes that Chrysippus was the person who really turned Stoicism into the major philosophy of the age, as it was, as it came to be, partly because Chrysippus wrote a huge amount, 705 scrolls, his works were said to amount to. All of which are lost. All of which are lost. A huge tragedy of ancient philosophy. Well, there was an eminent scholar, F.M. Cornford, who said that if the excavators of Herculaneum were to turn up the entire 705 scrolls of Chrysippus, any student would gladly swap them for one scroll of Heraclitus. But I think this has caused shock in more recent generations, and I don't think many of us would accept that. These included many, many works on logic, and although Chrysippus didn't invent Stoic logic out of nothing, he was clearly the person who turned it into a major logical system, one which could actually rival Aristotelian logic. It's a different kind of logic based on relations between propositions rather than individual terms, but it has won enormous admiration in recent generations since it's been reconstructed. So there's no doubt that Chrysippus was the major figure, and you could repeat that point for other areas of philosophy too. But still, we just need to ask the question, how did this relate to Zeno's original input? And I think the answer is roughly as follows, that Zeno didn't write a lot, and he wrote with more flair than rigor. So there was lots of daring stuff in Zeno's writings, but he hadn't really worked out the system in a very rigorous way. Once Zeno was dead, his successor Cleanthes, and then subsequent Stoics, including Chrysippus, the next Stoic head, had the task of debating exactly what the meaning of Zeno's philosophy was. Now they never, as far as we know, said Zeno got this bit wrong. It was a primary assumption that Zeno got it right. In this respect, philosophical schools are a little bit more like religious movements than we tend to think the philosophy department ought to be. Zeno must have been right, but there was a lot of scope for reinterpreting what he'd said, and there were many debates between Cleanthes and Chrysippus as to what was actually the right way to interpret Zeno. But although they're cast in these terms, which are more reminiscent of biblical scholarship perhaps than of philosophy as we know it, they did turn into very valuable philosophical debates. So just to give you one example, the unity of virtue. This was a thesis which in one form or another had been held by every major philosopher since Socrates, it would seem. If you've got one virtue, you've got all of them. Now what did Zeno say about this? Well he said that any virtue you like is just wisdom in a certain relation. So courage is wisdom in the face of danger, justice is wisdom in the face of matters of distribution and so on. Now what did that mean? Well according to Cleanthes, that meant that there's really only one virtue, namely wisdom, and when you put it into this situation, it's called courage, when you put it into that situation, it's called justice. Oh no, said Chrysippus, he doesn't have to mean that. What he really means is that there are several different kinds of wisdom and each of them specializes in one area of conduct. Perfectly legitimate debate and I think probably it was Chrysippus' view that it eventually prevailed. But the terms in which it was cast were what did Zeno really mean? That was the way the games played. But when they talk about that, is what they're doing more of an exegetical task or is it more like this is the true view so it must be the one Zeno had because they have a principle of charity or fidelity to their school founders so whatever the truth is must be what Zeno said. It's not quite as bad as that because that would mean they could have meant anything they liked for Zeno. They had to go by the letter of the text. Many important questions Zeno had simply left open in the sense that he hadn't texted and fully determined it. Sometimes Zeno had sensed something quite explicit that there was no way they could get out of and they were left with a defending. And sometimes that caused embarrassment. The most embarrassing case is that in Zeno's own day, medical opinion tended to favor the view that the rational mind is in the chest rather than the head. And Zeno was so confident of this that he produced a syllogism to prove it. Where your voice comes from is where reason is. Your voice comes from your chest so reason is in your chest. Well okay. QED. QED. Unfortunately, within a generation or two, medical science had proved that was false and that actually the rational mind was in the head. But even after that, even the most scientific of Stoics felt committed to defending Zeno's view against all the medical evidence. So it could have its downside, but again, this is reminiscent of Biblical literalism. There are many analogies which fall outside the history of philosophy as we understand it. QED. And I guess that one of the ways that Stoics developed the ideas of their founder is not merely in internal debate about the meaning of Zeno's words and writings, but also external debate, and particularly with the skeptics. So that skeptical attack on Stoic position seems to have had a lot of influence on the way that Stoicism itself develops. QED. That's right. I mean, earlier I mentioned the Epicureans as the natural enemy, but there was another enemy as well. And what you refer to as the skeptics, indeed they are often referred to as the skeptics, but I think one should actually use that word with some care. Later on, starting in the first or possibly second century AD, there was a school which actually called itself the skeptics, Hoi Skeptikoi, and that was another name for the Pyranists. They were quite independent movement. What we talk about as skeptics in the Hellenistic period are not people who call themselves by that name. The word skeptic is a lowercase s, and it's just our word skeptic means somebody who subjects every proposition to systematic doubt. The people we call the skeptics with a lowercase s in the Hellenistic period are in fact the academics. Now, who are the academics? Well, they are the school of Plato. The school founded by Plato started out, as I've already said, trying to develop Platonic doctrine out of a close study of Plato's dialogues. But in the early to mid third century BC, there was a complete change of direction ahead of the academy called Arcesilaus took the view, which many of us would share actually, that the real spirit of Plato's dialogues doesn't lie in the doctrines you can extract from them. It lies in the way that Socrates is shown challenging every philosophical conceit that he's presented with. And this is what we should be doing as philosophers, said these new academics. We should be challenging every claim to certainty. And so a systematic attack on stoic convictions was started in the academy. And over the next two centuries, that's what philosophical debate was largely about. It was academic attacks on stoicism, stoic responses, trying to patch up the doctrines, and then further set of moves by the academics. And this picture of inter-school debate and the entrenchment of positions among the schools, I think is nicely symbolized for us by this famous story of the embassy of the philosophers to Rome in 155 BC. So can you sort of tell us about that? Yes, it does illustrate the point in a way. Of course, it's a famous occasion because it marks a transition as philosophy moves out of the Greek world and into the Roman world. The event was that the Athenians had been subjected to an enormous fine for the sacking of aropas. And they were fined 500 talents. This was a huge sum. And they had the idea of sending to Rome to appeal against this fine to the Senate, none other than the three heads of the major philosophical schools, the head of the stoa, the head of the academy, and the head of the peripatetic school. They didn't send an Epicurean, and this is probably because the Epicureans were notoriously anti-political. So the three heads of schools went off as ambassadors. They did a pretty good job. They got the fine reduced from 500 to 100 talents. But they also did something with much greater historical significance while they were there. They took the opportunity to gather Roman audiences and present their philosophical wares to them, although it wasn't literally true that no philosopher had ever been in Rome before. This was the first time philosophers had a real impact. And Carniades, who was the great head of the academy, the skeptical school at this time, really shocked his Roman audience by doing the following. One day he gathered an audience and launched a passionate defense of justice. The audience goes away satisfied. Next day he calls another meeting and makes a speech denouncing justice. Well, the Romans really had no idea what to make of this. No doubt this was part of his skeptical methodology, which is, as many of us believe about all the best philosophical problems, there's a great deal to be said on both sides. That's what makes them good philosophical problems. This was, I think, was Carniades' idea, and it's also his way of promoting suspension of judgment. So Carniades perhaps had the greatest shock value, but Diogenes of Babylon, who was the head of the stoa at the time, had a terrifically positive impact as well. And you do get the feeling that it's really from that day that stoicism kind of enters the Roman intellectual bloodstream. Sort of like the Beatles going to America and kicking off rock and roll. Exactly so. So what happened then in the following generations? As you said, this event symbolizes the transition of the Hellenistic schools into the Roman world. Is there, in fact, an immediate kind of knock-on effect where stoicism and the other schools develop within Roman society? Not an immediate effect, but an educational trend, first of all. Romans sending their sons to Greece to be educated, willing to want to include philosophy in the education. Roman politicians and other kinds of dynasts and generals like to have a philosopher, usually a stoic, in their own household as a kind of personal advisor. And we see that again and again. Cicero, though he himself belonged to the academy, in fact, he had a resident stoic. Augustus, the future emperor, had a stoic called Athenodorus in his household. And the way it culminates is that you end up in the second century AD with a Roman emperor who is his own philosophical advisor. Marcus Aurelius actually wrote a book, which we still have, called To Himself, where he acts as if you were the stoic counselor to the emperor because he has both roles. Right, so we're heading towards this period which is sometimes referred to as Roman stoicism with Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius. But there are major stoics in the period and the time running up to Cicero as well, right? So what's distinctive about stoicism of that period, sometimes called middle stoicism? Yes, we do have this term middle stoicism. Do you like that? I don't like it very much, but I am sometimes forced to use it. There were two stoics in particular who earned this label, Panitius, who was head of the school until 110 BC, the time of his death, and his pupil, Posidonius, who never became head of the school in Athens. Indeed, this Athenian school had more or less finished that date. But he moved to Rhodes, the island of Rhodes, where he ran a very successful school. This was part of the decentralization of philosophy away from Athens. Now there are ways in which these two are different. In many ways, the amount of variety they bring to stoicism is no different from the sort of differences that had been rife in the school before that. But one thing that's very well known about them is that they took a new and very close look at the writings of Plato. They really tried to bring Plato into the Stoic fold in a way that nobody had done before. This wasn't a radical break, however, because even before Panitius, his predecessor Antipater, had written a book arguing that all the major stoic theses were ones that they shared with Plato. The idea of forming an alliance with Plato was already present in the school. But Panitis took that further, and Posidonius took it a very long way. Indeed, there's one famous, or some would say notorious, fact about Posidonius, which is that he actually abandoned Chrysippus's main thesis in psychology and replaced it with a Platonic one. Now what was this? Well, according to Chrysippus, and he claimed that he was developing the views of Zeno here, that the passions, strong emotive states, are in fact intellectual states, they're states of judgement. So let's say you're celebrating a lottery win, you're jumping for joy, you're doing things that lottery winners do, spraying champagne over everybody. This either is, or is a function of, the belief that having a lot of money is a good thing, which is false, and also that this kind of behaviour is appropriate to somebody who's had that happen to them. Chrysippus had an impressive and very successful psychological theory of that kind, which could be derived ultimately, especially from Socrates, who had been himself a great intellectualist. But Posidonius took the view that this was quite inadequate, because actually the emotions don't always keep pace with our judgement. So it may be a year down the road, the lottery winner still thinks it was a good thing to win the lottery, but he no longer feels elated. So the emotion has some degree of psychological independence. There were various illustrations of that kind to show that it's much better to treat emotion and reason as having some degree of separation. And so, what did Posidonius do? He reverted to Plato's theory. Plato had, in the Republic and also in the Timaeus, introduced the idea that the soul in fact has three parts, two of which are non-rational. And Posidonius reverted to that Platonic doctrine. So it sounds like one thing that marks this period of Stoicism, then, is a kind of syncretism, maybe even an aggressive move against other schools, where you try to claim that all of their insights can kind of fit under the teaching of your own school. Is that part of the motivation for what they're doing? I don't think it's a case of aggression, but rather of forming an alliance. And syncretism can be seen as a kind of alliance. I like the word syncretism better than another one that's sometimes used, eclecticism. Eclecticism is a kind of mix-and-match idea that you just might pick ideas at random and put them together. Actually, the kind of move Posidonius was making in bringing Plato back into the Stoic fold was a kind of dynasty building. It's to do with philosophical ancestry and pedigree, because the question Stoics had to ask is, who was our founder? Whose ideas are we trying to develop? And the usual, certainly the earliest, I think the favorite one was Socrates. Socrates was the one person who was known to have lived a genuinely philosophical life. Stoicism, more than anything else, is an attempt to discover the theories that will enable us all to be like Socrates. So when early Stoics, where we say that they had an interest in Plato, well, what this really means is two things. One is they're reading Plato in order to find out about Socrates. And another is, as came up a little bit earlier, that Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, had started in the academy. So he actually absorbed quite a lot of the ideas from the Timaeus, and these became part of Stoicism, whether or not the Stoics recognized their Platonic pedigree. Now, what Posidonius was doing was going one step further than this. His idea was that it's Plato himself we should be reading, but not because Plato is the ultimate authority. You can go further back to find the ultimate authority. When Plato described the tripartite soul with its irrational parts in the Timaeus, Timaeus, his main speaker, was a Pythagorean. And actually, the reason why Plato is important is that we can get back to that very ancient or august authority, Pythagoras, sixth century BC, no surviving writings, if he ever wrote anything at all. The only way you could find out his views was by going through people you believe to have been influenced by him, and Plato was a conduit for that. So it's part of the game of creating an old and august philosophical pedigree. To some extent, that carries on through to the so-called Roman Stoics. In other words, the Stoics who work after the fall of the Republic, right? Because Seneca takes Plato as a kind of inspiration. There's been some discussion about Socrates' influence on Epictetus and so on. So well, I guess two questions. One is whether that's right, and the other is if that is right, then is there anything really distinctive about these later Roman Stoics, or do they take Stoicism in a new direction at all, or do they just kind of keep doing what Posidonius had been doing? Well, the answer to that is going to be quite a complicated one. Certainly Platonism is in the background to Seneca's writing. But I think the figure of Socrates is the more important one. These Roman writers, although they had some kind of interest in other areas of Stoicism, their greatest contribution to philosophy was undoubtedly ethical. Stoic ethical writing was the area in which it continued to have influence even after the demise of Stoicism. Others like Epictetus, Seneca, and even Cicero, whose Deifices is a kind of Stoic work, they were writing the best treatises on practical ethics that anybody wrote in antiquity, and this was not something that the Platonists were good at. So even when Stoicism disappeared, as it more or less did in second century AD, Stoic ethical writing, for example, the Handbook of Epictetus, they survive as part of Platonism. The Platonists recognized that Stoicism had this unique contribution to make in practical ethics. Now, where did that come from? Well, more than anything else from their own particular evaluation of Socrates. So Socrates remains an extremely important figure. And just let me give you one illustration. The Romans had a tradition of honorable suicide, and the great Roman Stoic hero, the younger Cato, committed a very Stoic and very Socratic suicide during the Civil War because he was preserving his integrity, and it seemed to him better to die than to accept Caesar's pardon. And in the buildup to his suicide, there were two things he did. One is he discoursed on the theme, only the wise man is free, and your ability to commit suicide is your ultimate guarantee of freedom to the Stoic. That's a very Roman use of Stoicism, and it becomes very prevalent. They didn't call it suicide. What they called it is a rational exit from life. And what that means is the reason you're free is that you can always choose to die rather than accept a compromise with a tyrant, for example, or perform some immoral act. That may involve suicide or it may involve simply not avoiding the death that's coming to you anyway. So that's the guarantee of freedom. Now, the other thing that Cato did on this occasion, and this is the second thing I was going to mention, is that he spent his last hours reading and rereading Plato's description of Socrates' death. So here's the point, that choosing your own moment to die and preserving your integrity by doing so is really a Socratic contribution. It's how Socrates had died. He didn't commit suicide, but he did rationally choose his moment to depart from life. Three of which were just about out of time, so we'll have to make a rational exit from this podcast. But I'd like to thank David Sedley very much for coming on. Thank you for inviting me. And next time we will start to look at these Roman Stoics, starting with Seneca. So please join me for that next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.