WHAT WAS THE attraction of this Stoic philosophy that Marcus embraced so avidly? Fully to penetrate the world of the Stoics, one needs a deep background in the theories of Plato and Aristotle, not to mention the so-called Presocratic philosophers, but certain guidelines are clear. To understand Stoicism, we have to appreciate that the ancients viewed the world in a fundamentally different way from most moderns. The notion that the universe, and human life within it, might be meaningless was to them almost incomprehensible; their mental world was obsessed with the quest for meaning, based on the conviction that there really were keys that could unlock the secrets of the cosmos. The philosopher was paid, and given university chairs, in the expectation that he could explain to lesser mortals what these secrets were. How did the world come about? What is the meaning of history? Who or what is God and what are his attributes? What should we do to be happy and live the good life? This was the ancient meaning of philosophy, which still survives in demotic usage today, but which is repudiated by all modern philosophers, who concern themselves with technical issues of no interest to the man in the street and expect each individual to answer the traditional questions himself. Ancient philosophers were all convinced that life must have some purpose – hence the ubiquity of the concept of logos, a favourite Marcus Aurelius notion (and one to which we will return later). Only after the Romantic movement could people conceive of unhappy endings as the natural end of human life and accept that the entire human experience might be meaningless; the most famous expression of this viewpoint is Friedrich Nietzsche’s ‘God is Dead’. Ancient philosophy, then – including Stoicism – was close to what we would think of as religion or theology.
Another fundamental tenet of ancient philosophy was that in some sense all phenomena must interconnect – the belief that in modern parlance would be called holism. Although the ethical dimension of Stoicism was its most important aspect, the founders of the doctrine thought it axiomatic that before you could proceed to ethics, you had to lay out a cosmological stall in which there would also be a complementary theory of physics and logic. The originator of Stoicism, Zeno of Citium (335–263 BC), whose writings survive only in fragments, said that philosophy is like an orchard, in which logic is the walls, physics the trees and ethics the fruit; or like an egg, in which logic is the shell, physics the white and ethics the yolk.1 It cannot be said that the Stoics ever did any important work in physics, apart perhaps from Posidonius (c. 135–51 BC), a Syrian Greek who did original work in astronomy (his estimate of the distance of the sun from the Earth is the best in the ancient world) and worked out that one could sail westwards from Cadiz and eventually reach India.2 There were many other early followers of Zeno: Cleanthes, Panaetius and Aristo of Chios, who caught the imagination of the young Marcus Aurelius. But it was Chrysippus (280–207 BC), to whom Fronto often refers disparagingly, who put Stoicism on a systematic basis. Supposedly the author of 705 books, he laid out the basic cosmology behind the theory. The fundamental element in the universe is fire, and the human spirit or soul is composed of fire and air (pneuma) – the breath of life; the body is made of earth and water.3 There was no uniformity among the Stoics on whether the soul survives death. Some said the bodily elements remained on Earth after death, but the fiery part of the soul would rejoin the fire burning in heaven; others, such as Zeno himself, were thoroughgoing materialists, impatient with all such speculation.4 But fire was a central motif in the metaphysics of the Stoics, which has led some scholars to believe that the origin of the doctrine was Eastern, and that Stoicism represented a syncretism of Chaldean religion and Greek philosophy. The fire motif is clear in the Stoic belief that the world would ultimately be destroyed by fire. But far more Eastern – Buddhist even – is the accompanying notion of eternal recurrence: after the destruction, the whole process would begin again, and so ad infinitum; everything that happens has already happened before hundreds of times and will recur in the future.5 Stoicism was at root a pantheistic belief-system, but there is a lack of clarity in the thinking about God and gods that is one of its internal weaknesses.
Interesting as such ideas are to specialists, it was only the ethical ideas of Stoicism that enabled it to survive and not be simply another obscure mystery religion. The expression ‘virtue is its own reward’ has become a cliché, but to the Stoics virtue was the sole good; morality consisted in being virtuous, and virtue meant willing oneself to live according to Nature, to accept whatever happened as God’s providence, never to use a utilitarian calculus or think about the consequences of one’s actions. For example, if a wise (that Is, virtuous) man saw his child in danger of drowning, he would try to save it, but if he failed he would accept the outcome without tears, lamentation, distress or self-pity.6 Since everything that happens is governed by divine providence, his failure, and the drowning, must have been for the best, even if he could not see why. Since moral virtue is the only good, and wickedness the only evil, by definition the child’s death could not have been evil. Since moral virtue is the only good, the wise and virtuous man has already done all he could, so there is nothing for him to regret. From the point of view of virtue, suffering and joy are equivalent; there are lots of pleasures we prefer to pain, but they are not good in themselves. Happiness is virtue, it has nothing to do with pleasure or joy. Not losing one’s children does not make us more virtuous, therefore it does not make us happier. Stoicism is thus the extreme version of a morality of intention; consequences are unimportant from the ethical standpoint. Stoics do not believe that ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions’ because they consider intentions irrelevant, so they are at least immunised against the law of unintended consequences. The modern mind thinks of morality and happiness as being, at least potentially, in conflict, but the Stoics denied that happiness and morality could ever collide, for by definition you can only be happy if you live morally. The ‘holistic’ approach of the Stoics also found expression in collapsing discrete notions, so that happiness, security, morality and virtue all mean the same, whereas in modern philosophy their difference is a staple of philosophical analysis.7
It will be appreciated immediately that the modern word ‘stoical’ is very different in connotation from the Stoicism of the ancients. Common expressions that have come down to us in a transmogrified way from Stoicism are such as the following: ‘Be a man’; ‘take what’s coming to you’; ‘roll with the punches’; ‘what will be, will be’; ‘show some guts’; ‘make the best of it’; ‘go down fighting’; ‘don’t be a wimp’; ‘we had this coming to us’; ‘try to be philosophical’; ‘just my luck’; ‘go with the flow’; ‘don’t make things worse’; ‘you’d better face up to it’; and so on.8 But these are all bastardised forms of ‘stoicism’, to do with fatalism, realism and resignation rather than Stoicism properly considered. Stoicism does not require us simply to accept whatever happens, but to be happy about it – a completely different thing. The ancient idea of happiness was that it could never be self-assigned; it was what others – the state or your peers – said it was. In contrast to modern liberalism, which stresses relativism and self-definition, the ancients thought that notions like happiness were an objective category that had nothing to do with individual perception. Since the rise of the Romantic movement it has become axiomatic for the modern mind that happiness must be self-defined. The only modern philosophical dispensation, as opposed to organised religion, that shares the Stoic view of objective categories is Marxism. Under Stoicism, individuals were in effect exhorted to sacrifice themselves for the good of the cosmos, just as the revolutionists of the nineteenth century were urged by Marx to sacrifice themselves for the good of future generations.9 The modern liberal notion of self-interest would say that both propositions are nonsense.
Stoicism aimed at the elimination of the emotions, even though its defenders say it is only passions that they tried to abolish. Marcus Aurelius’s teacher Sextus fought hard to maintain the distinction, saying that one could be passionless, but still full of affection: in his book the passions to be avoided were fear, lust, mental pain (envy, jealousy, grief, pity) and ‘mental pleasure’ – by which he meant such things as the pleasures of serendipity, the misfortunes of others or pleasure caused by deceit or magic. It seems clear, though, that the Stoics went way beyond Aristotle, who wanted only to moderate emotion, because they thought of emotion as a kind of malfunctioning in the engine of reason. In the words of La Fontaine:
Ils ôtent à nos coeurs le principal ressort
Ils font cesser de vivre avant que l’on soit mort.10
Both Plato and Aristotle said that one part of the soul, reason, should keep passions within bounds, but the Stoics could not take up such an approach because for them the soul was unitary and could not be divided; once again their stress on ‘holism’ and the unity of everything worked against the reasonable compromises that might have avoided many intellectual cul-de-sacs. Plato had the dualism of appearance and reality, the contrast between the empirical world and the world of the Forms. Stoics committed the fundamental fallacy of thinking that the emotions could be the handmaidens of reason; as the great eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume later pointed out, the reality is the other way about: emotions are primary and reason is the moderator.11 The Stoic condemnation of pity has, rightly, been much criticised, but here again the Stoics were caught in the coils of their own doctrine: if sorrow is not allowed for one’s own misfortunes, logically it cannot be felt for those of others.
Fundamentally, Stoicism was a narrow doctrine that elevated ‘virtue’ above all other considerations; most of the other goals, values, ideals of human beings were dismissed as ‘indifferents’. It taught that the ultimate end for rational beings was happiness, that this meant being virtuous and living according to Nature, and that virtue was always to be chosen for its own sake and preferred to any possible combination of items of a non-moral nature.12 Its flavour is best caught by listing a number of different tenets, which of course all turn out to be variations on the one central theme. So: do not bother about things that don’t depend on our moral liberty and free choice; to be bothered by such things is an illusion. Humans make themselves unhappy by desiring things beyond their reach – the world is at it is, and there is no changing it. The body, being in the realm of the physical and hence of determinism, is beyond our control: birth, death, pleasure and pain are all beyond us. The apparent goods and evils of the world – wealth, health, poverty, sickness – do not depend on us and are likewise part of the determinism of the universe, so we should renounce these illusions and concentrate only on moral good. Even if we acquire wealth and honours, we should understand that worldly success never depends on us, but on a series of events and factors superior to us; in this realm determinism will always trump so-called free will. It is the soul, not the body, on which we should concentrate, for that is the centre of moral operations and only there can true freedom and moral good be located.13
Politics, family, health are all ‘indifferent’ phenomena. Even if you are rich, healthy and brave, you will still be unhappy if you are unjust or intemperate. It is a fallacy that you can live an evil life, as tyrants do, but still have a lot of fun and pleasure along the way; this is because happiness and morality are indivisible. We should concentrate instead on the four virtues of temperance, courage, justice and prudence. All we really need – food, water, shelter – is readily at hand and we should not fear the gods. The only calamity is to have acted shamefully by choice; if you come to grief you get consolation from the thought that no real harm can come to a good man; the quest for moral improvement is a function of reason, which is itself a spark of the divine substance ruling the universe. The only happiness is ascetic happiness and the conviction that misfortune, humiliation and even death are nothing; ‘the only happiness worthy of the name is that which nothing can impair’.14 Suffering is either long but bearable, or hideous but brief. Grief over mortality is unseemly, as death is the most natural thing in the world and leaves the scheme of the universe unchanged. Death is anyway unreal: if we are dreading it, by definition we are still alive and death is absent; if death has come, then by definition we are no longer conscious. We should leave life with the same serene indifference that we leave a banquet where a boorish guest is in full flight or where the drink has run out. Again and again the Stoic writers insist that death should not be considered evil; moral evil is attributable purely to humans, for it is people who make irrational choices and assent to the wrong propositions. We cannot choose to be immortal or avoid death, and the only thing properly to be called evil is something whose elimination depends on us.15
If we accept that the Stoic world view, and its detailed presciptions for ethical conduct, are so at variance with common sense, we are entitled to ask how it is, in the Stoic view, that the majority of mankind sees things differently. This brings us to the favourite Stoic doctrine of ‘representations’ – seeing the world as other than it is – a forerunner of the many critiques of empiricism and ‘sense data’. The Stoics did not, like Plato, deny the ultimate reality of perception, but thought that the categories of the mind could easily warp the truth of what sense-experience presented. There is a famous story, often cited against the Stoics in the ancient world, but actually showing that their theory of perception was well warranted. The philosopher Sphaerus, a disciple of Zeno, was invited to dinner by King Ptolemy of Egypt, who offered him a pomegranate made of wax. When Sphaerus ate it, Ptolemy laughed at the absurdity of philosophers, their gullibility and unworldliness. Sphaerus answered gravely that he did not really think the pomegranate was real, but thought it unlikely that anything inedible would be served at the royal table.16 He was underlining the Stoic distinction between things that can be known with certainty by perception and those that are only probable. Most of the time, though, Stoics applied the doctrine of ‘representations’ to explain the ethical mistakes people made. Most so-called misfortunes, like death, are ‘representations’ or judgements that have no basis in reality; they are not objective, they are value-judgements. Most of these false perceptions or ‘representations’ arise from the failure to grasp the basic message that happiness is only to be found in moral virtue and misfortune in moral evil. Exercising proper judgement means making our ‘representations’ conform to objective reality: in conducting an inner dialogue we must never confuse the subjective with the objective. It is only our value-judgements that make us fear death. A proper stoical training will strip objects and events of the false values we attribute to them and which prevent us from seeing things as they really are.17
The Stoics preached what later thinkers called a morality of strenuousness – that is, they were not resigned and hermit-like, but combative in their goal of bringing mankind into conformity with Nature. Since this is a Promethean task, it calls for special gifts and special human beings, and Stoic literature is full of references to ‘the sage’ – the ideal-type of Stoic philosopher, a kind of super-guru or perfect master needed to teach his benighted mortal brethren. Seneca said that the true Stoic sage must have merits surpassing even God’s, for all God has to do is exist as He is.18 The sage is a figure conceived as being at the midway point between ordinary humans and God. The gods are wise and they know it, but men think they are wise and are not. The sage at the beginning is a kind of trainee Socrates, who knows he is not wise, but nonetheless strives for wisdom. At the end of his life the true sage should have evolved beyond the status of a mere philosopher. The philosopher is at a midpoint between the ordinary man and the sage; ordinary humans are foolish and the philosopher is not, but he has not yet acquired transcendental wisdom. The philosopher is someone who can fill public office, as Junius Rusticus would do in the years 162–8, and is merely someone who lives in a certain way and according to certain tenets. He is not necessarily a writer or even someone with original thoughts.19 The true sage goes far beyond this, and the Stoics themselves were uncertain whether such a person had ever existed or ever could: he remained nonetheless an aspiration and an inspiration. The would-be sage must live within himself as in a fortress under a permanent state of siege. Every day must be spent building up ‘character armour’ to reinforce the idea that poverty and death are nothing, and his reading should inculcate the same lesson. Since every second is precious, the sage must never waste time – on this basis Pliny the Elder, the ancient world’s most famous workaholic, was on the road to sage-hood, though not a Stoic. Understanding true happiness means asceticism, self-training and self-restraint; the sage should always metaphorically live on bread and water, even if not actually. The would-be sage must undergo spiritual exercises (of the kind later made famous by Ignatius Loyola), read philosophy books, attend lectures, write philosophical tracts, conduct a daily examination of conscience and keep a journal of meditations. The sage must be like a courtier to a queen who allows her entourage no absences from her presence. Finally, when his consciousness is raised to the highest level and our understanding is fundamentally transformed, he becomes a god in his own right; he realises that there are no beings superior to him and becomes co-equal with God.20
The doctrine of the sage obsessed Marcus Aurelius and he strove to put it into practice, and to become this godlike creature. But was it plausible to think that a Roman aristocrat, trainee emperor and heir apparent to world dominion could be such a person? Marcus took comfort from the example of Seneca, a man he disliked personally, but who provided a role-model as the Stoic oligarch. Like Marcus, Seneca (c. 3 BC–AD 65) was a Roman Spaniard and, like him, was immensely rich. Where Aristotle had had Alexander the Great as a pupil, Seneca was unlucky enough to get Nero, a byword for tyranny. When Nero’s excesses gradually got out of hand, Seneca fell from favour, was accused of being complicit in a conspiracy to assassinate the emperor, and was eventually invited to commit suicide in the famous Roman way, by opening his veins in a hot bath.21 Because of his aristocratic status and the fact that he wrote in Latin, Seneca was the most influential of all the Roman Stoics, and his martyrdom under Nero recommended him to the Christians, who even concocted a supposedly genuine correspondence between him and St Paul. Seneca’s importance to Marcus was that he purported to show how a man could be both rich and a Stoic, though no two individuals could have been more dissimilar.22 Just as rich bishops caused moral problems for ancien régime France, so the conundrum of a wealthy philosopher puzzled Stoic theorists. Seneca grasped this bull by the horns and explicitly declared there was no conflict, adducing a number of arguments. First, to refuse the gifts of an emperor, such as those of Nero to Seneca, was both dangerous and a political insult. Then there was the fact that in all societies before the nineteenth century occupants of high political office expected to benefit financially from it; Seneca pocketed several bequests on the ground that it was considered praiseworthy in Roman culture to be rich. Since banking in the Roman empire was primitive and there were no banks in the modern sense, Roman society thought that the rich and powerful performed a public service by lending money at interest. It is certainly true that attitudes to interest-bearing loans have fluctuated enormously over the centuries: a person who would be considered a shameless usurer by medieval scholastic philosophy would today be considered a ‘wealth-creating’ entrepreneur.23
Seneca could also use in his defence the undoubted fact that Chrysippus, the great codifier of Stoicism, authorised materialism and profiteering, and also advocated private property and the market.24 The notion of the rich Stoic was one part of Seneca’s original (if dubious) contribution to the movement’s theory. Another was the justifiability of suicide, which Seneca was the first to emphasise; the Stoics hitherto had been ambivalent about it, justifying it in principle as against, say, Plato, but never making it a central plank in their programme.25 Seneca argued for suicide in all the following cases: if your fatherland or friends required it of you; if a tyrant forced you to do dishonourable things; if, afflicted by an incurable disease, the body was letting the soul down; if you were destitute or indigent; or if you went mad.26 The Stoics in general tended to say that the issue of self-slaughter was open-ended: in some circumstances it could be the right thing, but they were reluctant to issue moral blueprints. The fact that different Stoics gave different answers to common everyday ethical questions showed that there was always an uncertainty in their doctrine between clear moral objectives and the appropriate actions needed to attain them.27 Chrysippus seemed to think that suicide was inappropriate for wise men, but Diogenes Laertius thought it was permissible to kill yourself for your country or friends. Cicero, more a Stoical fellow-traveller than a paid-up Stoic, argued that it was sometimes the duty of the wise man to depart from this life, while Epictetus, the great influence on Marcus Aurelius, remarked gnomically on suicide: ‘the door stands open’.28 Seneca argued that opening one’s veins was the final, instantaneous way to achieve wisdom; trying to become a sage was a utopian dream, but dying one had an immediate, permanent and irrefutable reality.29 Some have argued that the doctrine of suicide as the act par excellence of the wise man was an idiosyncracy of Seneca himself and not typical of Stoicism in general.30 It may in some sense have been his rationalisation of the high levels of suicide in the Rome of the first century AD that are reminiscent of the cult of hara-kiri or seppuku in Tokugawa Japan. It is clear, however, that Seneca’s prescription of suicide is not Romantic melancholy avant la lettre, but simply common sense when considering the alternative in Nero’s Rome.
In Seneca’s defence, it should be said that he was not a total humbug and did try, albeit unsuccessfully, to live out the meaning of the Stoic creed. He famously faced his own worst fears and tried to conquer his claustrophobia when passing through the dark and gloomy tunnel connecting Naples with Pozzuoli. He once arrived at his villa faint with hunger and, finding no white bread there, forced himself to eat the coarse brown loaves of his tenants. He contented himself with the thought that enduring unexpected trials was more of a challenge than those for which one had time to prepare. On one occasion he deliberately set out in a peasant cart with just two slaves, dressed like a poor peasant, so that he could experience the contempt of those who looked down on him, thinking this was his real station in life. Another time he tried to emulate the great sages who had proved themselves indifferent to noise (Buddha was famously supposed to be able to meditate while tigers roared around him) by renting an apartment next to a bathhouse in Naples, but was soon driven out by the hubbub and confessed himself defeated in his Stoic principles.31 Always a faint-hearted Stoic, Seneca knew that his money was an obstacle to the life of a philosopher and tried to meet the obvious objections. He was personally generous, lived austerely, requested a simple funeral and handed over perhaps half of his wealth to Nero to enable him to rebuild Rome.32 But he was always vulnerable to the charge that he had obtained much of his wealth from the tyrant-emperor in the first place and must have listened in horror in the year 58 when a man on trial tried to inveigle him by exclaiming: ‘What philosophical principles had caused him to acquire three hundred million sesterces in less than four years of imperial favour?’33 His accuser did not exaggerate. Seneca’s fortune was seventy-five million denarii, perhaps one-tenth the annual revenues of the entire Roman state. The fact that much of it came from usury was often held against him. The historian Cassius Dio claimed that the famous British revolt of the Iceni under Boudicca was caused because Seneca made the Britons a loan of ten million denarii at usurious rates, and then called it in all at once.34
Seneca’s would-be Stoic humanism also evaporates when put under the microscope. He burst into laughter at the decrepitude of an old slave who had brought him up lovingly, jeering at the old man as if he were dealing with a dog.35 The best he ever rises to is to say that we should treat slaves as humble friends, but he echoes Chrysippus’s formula that slaves are merely ‘wage workers in perpetuity’, that Providence has assigned us all our roles and there is nothing to be done.36 As has been well said: ‘If the Stoics had been masters of society and could have remodelled it to their liking, they would have retained slavery, albeit under another name.’37 The Stoic Musonius thought it better to spend money on human beings rather than architecture and public works, and Seneca agreed; but his notion of charity did not extend to the poor and needy and never transcended the limitations of clientelism.38 He expounded the very convenient doctrine – which all societies have espoused – that what is murder in an individual case is a public duty when the state says so; it is quite clear that pacifism formed no part of Stoic doctrine. He believed in ‘pre-emptive’ warfare and said, ‘The best way to love Asian barbarians is for Rome to maintain them under her hegemony, for their own good.’39 He even iced his own cake, so to speak, by putting forward a doctrine of Roman ‘particularism’: Roman conquests were always good, but those of Alexander the Great were always wicked.40 Although Marcus Aurelius never surmounted the basic limitations of Stoicism and accepted many of Seneca’s ideas about the relationship between Stoic theory and Roman state power, he disliked the man himself, much as he had disliked Hadrian, because he saw them both as apologists for tyranny. He pointedly ignored Seneca’s writings, as did Epictetus.41 He allowed Fronto to inveigh against him at full throttle. Fronto thought Seneca a humbug, insincere, a windbag who repeated the same stock sentiments a thousand times, but dressed them up in different language. ‘There are certainly some acute and weighty sayings in his books,’ he wrote to Marcus. ‘But little pieces of silver are sometimes found in sewers; and is that a reason for us to undertake the cleaning of the sewers?’42
The basic problem with Marcus Aurelius’s embrace of Stoicism was that all his objections seemed to be ad hominem, directed at particular practitioners of the theory he did not care for, such as Seneca. He never questioned or even seemed to appreciate the glaring self-contradictions in the doctrine. Some of them are obvious, some less so, but, properly considered, even more damaging to the overall system. At the very simplest level, Stoicism threw up large numbers of phoneys, charlatans and confidence men; even Seneca admitted that the doctrine attracted too many tricksters on the make.43 Lucian, who basically thought all philosophy spurious and its practitioners humbugs, often has fun with a rogues’ gallery of ‘sages’, ‘sophists’ and ‘perfect masters’ and singles out the Stoics as egregiously absurd for spending their entire lives trying to learn how to live – an obviously self-defeating and self-contradictory process. In the Hermotimus he lashes out at a rebarbative Stoic philosopher who preaches poverty, but sues his pupils when they don’t pay his fees.44 A man named Antiochus, realising that there was money to be made from an affectation of Stoicism, won both cash and honours from the emperor Septimius Severus in the early third century by rolling in the snow, demonstrating his indifference to physical discomfort; he repeated the feat for Septimius’s successor Caracalla.45
Beyond the bogus credentials of so many ‘Stoics’ who were individual charlatans, critics fastened on an essential dishonesty in the Stoics’ social thought, if we may call it that. Stoicism was supposed to be an egalitarian doctrine. It stressed that slaves were reasonable and, in a masterpiece of condescension, announced that even women – creatures of emotion par excellence – were educable, even if the process was strenuous.46 Yet all this is in conflict with an elitism that is imbricated into the very system of Stoicism, with its emphasis on the sage as the highest form of human life. If value is to be accorded to human beings strictly in accordance with the moral excellence of each individual, it follows logically that Stoicism can never be a creed for all men.47 Where Plato, in The Republic, was concerned with the training and discipline necessary to be a Guardian, which he envisaged as a real social possibility, in the writings of the Stoics the figure of the sage is an ideal as remote as Plato’s Forms. Given that the search for the perfect sage is the quest for an impossible dream, what emerges is the paradox of an ideology (Stoicism) existing without any real practitioners (Stoic sages). If the ideal is beyond human nature, what does that tell us about the project in the first place? The Stoic Musonius ‘solved’ this dilemma by saying that sages do not yet exist, but they may – some day.48 We have already mentioned the conflict between the actual Stoic attitude to slaves and what the doctrine really requires that attitude to be. If the human race is one, and all men are equal by virtue of possessing reason, how can there be slaves? Stoicism provides no answer. Cicero pointed out that there was a flat contradiction between the allegedly ‘universal’ views of Stoicism and the privileges of Roman citizenship itself; this special privilege, he alleged, destroyed ‘charity, liberality, kindness and justice’.49 The reality is that Stoicism operated a dual system: an elitist doctrine for the ruling class and a cut-price version for the masses. In the cut-price version slaves, women and other ‘inferiors’ could be accepted as equals, but in the true doctrine it was only rich, educated Romans who could aspire to ultimate truth. Stoicism, which by its implications preached political quietism as well as a bogus egalitarianism, was, not surprisingly, a favourite doctrine both with the Hellenistic kings who succeeded Alexander the Great and with the Roman emperors.
To put it another way, Stoicism as a social doctrine was vacuous. As a social philosophy, the creed suffered from the unconquerable disability that it never viewed human beings as social animals, but merely as atomic individuals. That was why it had so little to say about politics and unthinkingly accepted slavery as a datum, as if it were equivalent to the law of gravity. Even the Cynics, allegedly the ‘left-wing Stoics’, did not believe in ‘share the wealth’ or any form of communitarianism or socialism; they simply restricted themselves to saying that Mammon was an obstacle to self-realisation. Stoicism prescribes no solution to any of the problems of social organisation or says what kind of society would be just.50 The total lack of any political theory placed the Stoics in the same kind of untenable position as Dickens and the benevolent Victorians: while deploring poverty and recommending individual charity, they drew the line at any radical restructuring of society that would eliminate indigence (or, in the Roman case, slavery). Even worse, Stoicism was vacuous when it came to Rome’s self-interest. The monomaniacal emphasis on individual morality and virtue, and the disregard for consequences, was part of the political nullity of Stoicism. Since winning victories over Rome’s enemies (like losing one’s children to sudden death) does not make us more virtuous, it follows that whether or not Roman arms prevail in the field against its enemies is unimportant: it can make no difference to our happiness because only virtue can do that.51 Once again we see the dual system in action: Stoics prescribe actions that, if universally adopted (which they would have to be if the doctrine was egalitarian), would inevitably lead to the destruction of Rome. It is more than a little curious that a trainee emperor would imbibe a doctrine with such baneful implications: one can only assume that the young Marcus Aurelius did not spot this contradiction.
At a more general philosophical level, Stoicism was impaled on the classic free will/determinism dilemma. If the world is completely deterministic, as the doctrine says it is, the freedom that virtue is supposed to provide is not possible. On the deterministic view, natural laws will decide whether an individual is virtuous or not; if he is wicked, this is because Nature has compelled him to be wicked. An allied point is that if the world is determined by divine Providence, as in Stoic doctrine, why is it that there so many sinners in the world, so much cruelty and injustice? The determinism of Providence certainly does not seem to be aimed at producing virtue, yet according to the Stoic, virtue is the only good. Paradoxically, a malevolent Providence makes more sense of the world as we experience it, since the existence of cruelty and injustice gives the good man or the sage more opportunities for being virtuous. There is therefore a contradiction both between the idea of perfect freedom through the exercise of virtue and a deterministic universe and between virtue as the supreme good and a divine Providence that produces so little of it. Both dilemmas are ultimately insoluble, but modern defenders of Stoicism, whether explicit or implicit, have tried to square the circle in a number of ways. One is to attack the very idea of determinism as an intellectually vacuous concept, on the ground that it breaks down into heterogeneous components: physical determinism – the relationship between cause and effect; logical determinism, dealing with reasons and conclusions; ethical determinism, stressing the preconditions of human decisions; and teleological determinism, or the determination by an overall end or purpose.52 The suspicion arises here of a desire to rescue Stoicism by mere verbal legerdemain, and a similar criticism applies to those who espouse ‘compatibilism’ – the idea that there is no necessary conflict between free will and determinism, that the entire problem results from semantic confusion. According to the compatibilists, a free action is one where the agent could have chosen otherwise, and in such a case the agent is morally responsible even if determined; this is because there is not one true definition of ‘free’, but merely two different conceptions.53 It will be clear that ‘choice’ does nothing to dispose of the essential problem of determinism, so the Stoic’s dilemma remains.
In many ways the ancients wrestled more honestly with the age-old conundrum of free will and determinism, but then they did not suffer from the modern delusion that all philosophical problems are verbal ones. Cicero tried to argue his way out of the dilemma by a contrast between the données of our birth and our roles in life. He claimed that all humans have four roles: the common identity as human beings; the differences in physique, looks, abilities and temperaments; our lot in life – what Fate throws up – which has nothing to do with innate abilities; and the specific person we choose to be: in jobs, professions, attitudes, lifestyles (needless to say, he was speaking of the experience of the free-born Roman). We are all constrained by our parental, genetic, nurtural, cultural and environmental legacy, but we are not rigidly determined: there are good emperors and bad emperors; the son of a pauper can have extraordinary abilities; and even the slave Epictetus became a Stoic philosopher.54 Marcus Aurelius himself later attempted his own version of ‘compatibilism’ by stating that a roller or cylinder, if started, will roll down a slope because its motions are determined by its shape, but, when set free in this way, will pursue its own path; within limits, therefore, it is free.55 Others tried to argue that Stoic providence applies only to the cosmos, but not to persons. It guarantees the prosperity of the cosmos, but not of individuals, cities, kingdoms or empires. God, or the ruling principle of the universe, supervises everything, but has no time to deal with particulars. It (He) organises Nature for the good of mankind and gives him the gift of reason, but is otherwise non-interventionist. However, all attempts to differentiate between levels of reality (atomic/human, appearance/reality, providence/determinism) founder not only on the Stoic insistence that reality is unitary, but on the simple logical principle of the law of excluded middle: something is either the case or it is not, it cannot both be p and not-p. Stoics habitually emphasised the need to play well the cards you were dealt.56 But if everything is written, it is not just that Destiny hands you your cards; it must also have predetermined how you are going to play them. Moreover, it is far from clear how there can be a doctrine that is supposedly centred on individuals and human morality, but which at the same time stresses a universal, impartial reason that makes no allowance for individuals.
The free will/determinism, providence/morality conundrum is the most serious intellectual flaw in Stoicism, but it is far from the only one. The mind/body problem, one of the constants in the history of philosophy, is never addressed systematically by the creed, which tacks in and out of different perspectives, at one moment materialist, at another Gnostic; nor is there any agreement on where the core of the human personality should be located.57 There is also a contradiction between the idea that a genuinely good action should be spontaneous, like an animal instinct, and the countervailing Stoic idea that you should be acutely conscious of what you are doing. The conscious pursuit of virtue seems to rule out the famous Christian attitude expressed in the Gospels: ‘When you give alms, let not your left hand know what your right hand is doing.’58 There is also the central contradiction in Stoicism that its practitioners assert simultaneously that natural goods such as health are desirable if we are to be happy, but that reason shows we can do without them. But surely either man is an animal and cannot forego animal pleasures and remain happy, or he is pure reason and his animal nature does not matter. Seneca tries to evade this trap by remarking lamely that because we are at the top of the animal chain we must become paragons of rationality.59 To say that it is more natural to be healthy, but health does not guarantee happiness – the usual Stoic answer – is simply an evasion of the self-contradiction in the doctrine.60 Moreover, the ‘elitist’ conception of Stoic doctrine, which allows it to reinforce official Roman culture, holds that to be honoured and sublime in the state or to be a military hero is also to be happy – a notion in glaring contradiction to the usual tenets.
Another source of interminable confusion is the Stoic conception of God. Stoicism is basically a pantheistic creed, but this simple approach is vitiated by any number of caveats and cavils that different Stoics enter in their explication. First of all there is the conflict between theism and pantheism, and then between monotheism and polytheism. The Stoics sometimes referred to the ruler of the universe as God, but also as Zeus, to be carefully distinguished from the Olympian deity of that name, synonymous with Roman Jupiter. Seneca, out of deference to the official polytheism of the Roman state religion, liked to say that the Olympian Zeus was a real being, but he was subordinate to ‘Zeus’, aka God or the supreme ruler of the universe. But if God is the spirit that informs the universe – the pantheistic logos – it is difficult to see how he can be personalised, whether we call him Zeus or by some other name. Even worse intellectual chaos is introduced by the idea that God is not really a transcendental being, but part of our soul – properly understood, God is the ‘god within us’ – the notion that so appealed to the Buddhists and modern-day mystics like C.G. Jung.61 Moreover the Stoic sage is supposed to be equal to God, but elsewhere we are told that humans are distinct from gods, and in any case how could the sage equal God if we understand the deity as ‘god within’? Stoicism uses so many different conceptions and meanings of ‘God’, and slips between them without ever explaining the elision from one sense to another, that the entire doctrine bids fair to become gibberish. Even the most enthusiastic defenders of Stoicism have been inclined to throw up their hands in despair at this point. Here is the most eminent modern authority on Stoicism:
Stoic theology was a complex amalgam of pantheism and theism . . . God was conceived as being both an omnipresent physical force embodied in fire or fiery breath [pneuma] and the world’s governing mind or soul . . . This combination of pantheism and theism raises enormous questions . . . Such pantheism makes it hard to understand how God can be present in an exemplary or specially refined way in the human mind. Moreover, if our minds are simply and directly ‘parts’ of God’s mind, it is hard to see how we individuals are capable of thinking for ourselves and able to assume responsibility for our own lives.62
The Stoic doctrine of ‘following Nature’ also engenders myriad problems. Does the prescription mean that we have to follow Nature, or only that that is preferable? Do we have a choice or not? The exercise of a virtuous will cannot affect Nature if it is predetermined. Stoics tend to say lamely that Nature has marked out an obvious path for humans, and those pursuing self-interest are bound to find it. But, as always with this doctrine, there is an element of wanting to have it both ways, to practise ‘compatibilism’.63 Once again one can see a resemblance between Stoicism and Marxism – we are enjoined to do what is going to happen anyway. At least Marxism, in urging revolutionary struggle towards an end that is historically determined, has the excuse that one could affect the timing of the revolution. With Stoicism there is the obvious problem that there is no proof that Nature acts in a benevolent and purposive way. Like all arguments from design, it assumes what has to be proved, but then the cynic (in the modern sense) would say that begging the question is the name of the Stoic game. ‘Following Nature’ does not solve the moral problem Stoicism sets itself by the dogma of ‘indifferents’. There is an innate self-contradiction in the creed that the things we are guided to do by reason, following Nature, must also be ‘indifferent’ since they do not depend entirely on us. Quite apart from the difficulty of identifying self-evidently ‘appropriate’ actions (and it is worth noting that any doctrine of ‘self-evidence’ is always suspect), we face the insoluble problem that, strictly speaking, all our actions will be ‘indifferent’ and thus incapable of generating morality.64 Stoics never face this implication of ‘following Nature’ head-on. Epictetus, for example, evades the issue by broad-stroke pragmatism, providing prescriptions that are fine as a guide to everyday life, provided they are detached from the general doctrine, and which do nothing whatever to elucidate the basic problems of Stoicism. ‘Eat like a human being, drink like a human being, get spruced up, get married, have children, lead the life of a citizen, learn how to put up with insults, tolerate an unreasonable brother, father, son, neighbour or travelling companion. Show us these things, so that we can see if you have really learned anything from the philosophers.’65 Fine, but what does any of this have to do with the finer points of Stoic doctrine? One could just as well derive this cracker-barrel philosophy from the maxims on old-fashioned tea chests.
Following Nature is vitiated by circularity. If you argue that whatever is, is right, and also argue for design in the cosmos, the only logical conclusion is that our minds must be in error when we see injustice in the so-called divine order. Stoics invented the idea that freedom is the recognition of necessity, and branded as absurd those who railed against the world as it was. Many modern notions of freedom are exactly contrary: for the existentialist, absurdity consisted in the recognition that the world was not determined, that it could be otherwise. To assent to the world as is is also potentially dangerous, for it means embracing the blind cruelty of the cosmos. Once you assent unquestioningly to what is, it becomes a moot point, especially in view of Stoicism’s ‘holistic’ view, why you should accept only the rational. Nietzsche, for one, accepted the logic of this and opted for the will to power, beyond good and evil. Galen, a Stoic fellow-traveller, professed himself furious with Epicurus, who said that the anus and the urethra would have been better placed on the foot than where they were – both more practical and more aesthetic.66 Galen, of course, shared the Stoic view of those who thought the body a marvellous organism rather than those, like Hume, who thought it the botched work of an ‘infant or superannuated deity’.67 The Stoics were neither humanists, dedicated to man’s mastery of Nature, nor sceptics who thought of the natural order as in some sense hostile. The idea of Nature being on mankind’s side was largely accepted until Voltaire devastated it in Candide (1759), but was not fully overthrown until the high noon of the Romantic movement (with Shelley as a notable critic). The modern sensibility finds ‘following Nature’ merely bizarre.
Although one can find dozens of objections to Stoicism at a theoretical level,68 the most telling criticism of the creed is that it discounts human nature and elaborates a theory that flies in the face of all the wisdom culled from art, literature and psychology. The entire discussion of happiness and morality in Stoic texts is a mess. A number of discrete propositions will, I hope, make this clear. Stoicism fails to distinguish necessary conditions – having what is necessary for happiness – from sufficient conditions, since it obviously does not follow that he who has everything necessary for happiness is thereby happy.69 The doctrine advanced the bizarre view that men and women attain happiness by satisfying certain approved criteria, regardless of whether they were actually happy. Stoicism assumes, with the utilitarians, that the search for happiness was the spur for all human actions and ignored other motivations: conscience, individual existentialist morality, altruism, masochism, love, the will to power, admiration, ideological zeal, libido, élan vital, and so on. As Nietzsche remarked: ‘Men do not seek happiness but power; that is, for the most part, unhappiness.’70 Stoicism advocates conquering passions, whereas the best minds of the ages, from Aristotle to Hume, have always considered this impossible; the best you can do is moderate passions by reason. The idea of the soul as unitary, with passion and reason working together, denies the entire history of the ‘divided self’ in cultural history, which can be illustrated with hundreds of examples, from Robert Louis Stevenson to Freud.71 The idea of love as mere friction between bodies is a joyless tenet and the enemy of all significant art and literature. Stoicism, with its ‘all-or-nothing’ approach to psychology and philosophy, lacks all nuance. It denies human nature by recommending what most sane people would regard as chimerical: braving torture, mocking death, conquering sexual passions.72 It subscribes to the dreadful doctrine that if someone suffers misfortune, he himself is responsible.73