13
A Stoic Critique of Cosmopolitanism
PHILLIP MITSIS
In the sum of the parts, there are only the parts.
—Wallace Stevens, “On the Road Home”
The Stoics lately have become poster boys for various kinds of benign cosmopolitan theorizing. They also, however, have become philosophical heroes for Wall Street and for the American military.1 Although it is no doubt true that philosophers often become more important for what they are thought to have said rather than for what they thought they were saying, the incongruity of these two receptions of Stoic thought is particularly ironic—and not only from the vantage point of the ancient Stoics themselves, who could be so tiresomely ostentatious about their not wanting to be all things to all people. Although a few moments’ reflection on the central tenets of Stoicism should make it pretty clear why neither of these particular receptions carries much historical plausibility, the notion of liberals on safari, apostles of universal brotherly concern, CEOs, and generals all waking up and discovering themselves to be philosophical bedmates certainly seems ripe for a certain kind of wry ideological exploration. We will leave these ironies, however, for others to explore and here focus instead on a few more limited questions about why cosmopolitanism and ancient Stoicism make for such strange bedfellows. In so doing, I hope to make this not just an entirely pedantic and depressing exercise of exposing instances of willful misreading, sloppy history, clubby scholarly conformity, and so on—although there is certainly plenty of blame to go around. Rather, this exploration will turn some common arguments about Stoics as cosmopolitans on their head and suggest why the ancient Stoics actually provide an important point of departure for criticizing many of the going forms of contemporary cosmopolitanism, indeed, often the very forms that most insistently claim them as intellectual forbears.
First, though, to get our bearings, it might be useful to take a tour of the remaining ancient evidence, which by any measure is exceedingly meager. Our single most reliable and detailed piece of evidence, by far, is provided by Diogenes Laertius (fl. c. 3rd century C.E.), who is writing more than half a millennium distant from the founders of Stoicism:
[S]ome people, including the circle of Cassius the Sceptic, criticize Zeno [the founder of Stoicism] extensively: first, for declaring at the beginning of his Republic that the education curriculum is useless; and secondly, for his statement that all who are not virtuous are foes, enemies, slaves, and estranged from one another, including parents and children, brothers and brothers, relations and relations. They criticize him again for presenting only virtuous people in the Republic as citizens, friends, relations, and free, so that for the Stoics, parents and children are enemies, since they are not wise.2
We have good independent reasons for thinking that Zeno strictly limited citizenship in his Republic to the wise, but whatever precise form of a non-cosmopolitan political view one decides this particular passage evinces, it really is striking how little airplay it gets from those scholars—many of whom should know better—who claim the ancient Stoics as forerunners of cosmopolitanism. The Stoics, moreover, held that the appearance of a wise man is exceedingly rare—as rare as the Ethiopian Phoenix; hence, this vision of the great mass of humanity being endlessly condemned to relations of enmity at every stratum of personal and public life suggests a more dismal view of human political possibilities than that of even, say, the anti-cosmopolitan Carl Schmitt, who mainly restricts himself to political enmity and creates, rather optimistically from the perspective of this passage, an important space in political life for relations of friendship. Thus, given this darkly cacotopic fantasy about human relations rising up out of our best evidence about ancient Stoic politics, one might reasonably wonder whence cometh all the recent fuss about Stoic cosmopolitanism.
Before turning to this question, however, it might be helpful to continue Diogenes’s report, since it rounds out the correlative vision of Zeno’s best society:
and [they criticize him again] for his doctrine, set out there concerning community of wives, and his prohibition at line 200 against the building of temples, law courts and gymnasia in cities. They also take exception to his statement on currency: “The provision of currency should not be thought necessary either for exchange or travel,” and for his instruction that men and women should wear the same clothes and keep no part of the body completely covered.”3
These further features of life in Zeno’s Republic serve as essentially a kind of antinomian laundry list aimed at eradicating from the Stoic city of the wise the most important traditional features of life in a Greek polis. Of course, a Stoic sage, unlike the philosopher king in Plato’s Republic, is able to live in any kind of city and still be perfectly happy, since he can be blissfully happy even on the rack. But, if a group of wise Stoics did live together—and again, in contrast to Plato’s account, it is not exactly clear why they would either need or want to—their dwelling place, according to Zeno, would have no temples or statues of gods, no law courts, no gymnasia for training young men for the military, no weapons, no money, and presumably no private property. This is because the wise have no need of such external things in order to be morally virtuous. General education too would be abolished and with it, the need to memorize Homer and, more important, the possibility of imbibing the traditional Homeric worldview, with all its supporting institutions. For the Stoic, such institutions are based on irrational religious fears, on unnecessary worries about material goods and status, and on mistaken anxieties about defending one’s life or goods from the incursions of others. As such, they should be eliminated.
It has sometimes been suggested that by eliminating specifically Greek political and religious institutions, the Stoics are envisioning a more cosmopolitan conception of political arrangements that goes beyond the narrow confines of the Greek city-state. Such a claim strikes me as dubious, since what Zeno conceives of instead is insufficiently inclusive to support any tenable conception of cosmopolitanism. He offers sole membership in his polis to a perhaps nonexistent group of the wise, and their invulnerable virtue is sufficient in itself to vitiate the need for common institutions, even of a very tepid sort that can help coordinate common efforts, much less those that on a grander scale attempt to protect differences and ameliorate potential conflict.
By the same token, Chrysippus (an early successor of Zeno who is presumably following him doctrinally) advocates in his Republic total sexual polymorphism. Sex, for the Stoic, is a matter of moral indifference and involves nothing more than bits of flesh rubbing against one another. Such rubbing might involve the flesh of one’s mother, daughter, sister, or anyone else male or female. From the perspective of the Stoic wise man, Oedipus and Jocasta should just kick back and dote on the fine children they produced,4 though given that neither is wise, they still are likely to become embroiled with their children in familial hatreds unconnected to their particular history of rubbing. In Plato’s Republic, sexual communism is carefully controlled as a means of breeding the best citizens and there are built-in riders aimed at avoiding incest. The Stoics disagree. For them sex is an indifferent external consideration of the flesh that in no way touches inner moral autonomy or has any relevant political consequences.
Not surprisingly, their unconventional views on this score attracted much attention in antiquity and often proved an embarrassment to later Romans who, in trying Stoicism on for size, were attracted, like Stockdale, to the more muscular side of Stoic virtue. I mention these rather sensationalist features of their doctrines, however, not in the spirit of the tabloids, but because it can be useful to keep such Stoic attitudes in mind when reading recent claims about their careful attention to practices rooted in local familial and gender justice.5
This studied indifference to the body as a site of cultural construction or signification led the Stoics to further claim that institutions surrounding the burial of the dead are also to be eliminated. Giving members of the community a proper burial was taken throughout the Greek tradition to be one of the most crucial sociopolitical functions of the city-state.6 Thus, Herodotus, for instance, argues that what marks Greek culture off from Indian culture is that the Greeks burn their dead while the Indians have the custom of eating them.7 The Stoics argue, on the other hand, that the treatment of the dead is a matter of utter indifference. The dead are just so much flesh and, if one does not want to waste the meat, it is perfectly in keeping with nature to eat them. Notice in this context, however, that although at first glance the Stoics might seem to be endorsing the indigenous religious practices of Herodotus’s reputed Indians against those of their own culture, in fact they are keen to reject a Herodotean conclusion about the importance and divergence of rooted local customs. They are not, that is, recommending eating the dead out of any regard for the religious beliefs of others. For Herodotus, custom (nomos) is king and with that recognition comes toleration for the ways of others and a lack of chauvinism about one’s own. For the Stoics, conversely, reason is king, and the variability of custom is merely a matter of indifference. Indeed, they linguistically override such particularist claims by arguing that nomos is to be identified only with God’s rational moral law, which is the same everywhere. We will need to take up their conception of the moral law more fully, but for now some of these further details of the Stoic position can serve to provide an initial glimpse of what I would characterize as a uniform Stoic hostility to arguments based on local or “rooted” customs, attitudes, and institutions.
Readers not conversant with the details of ancient Stoicism should now be in a better position to approach the two main ancient texts that are most frequently trotted out as evidence for their cosmopolitanism, typically in isolation from this more reliable evidence. Both come from authors already deeply embedded in a Roman imperial context and while I do not necessarily agree with Anthony Pagden’s claim that so-called cosmopolitan thinking in this period is strictly in the ideological service of Roman imperial goals,8 it is doubtlessly misleading to read these passages entirely independent of their Roman intellectual and political context.
We can turn to the first of these passages insofar as it has become the main prop for attributing a kind of “rooted” cosmopolitanism to the ancient Stoics. Martha Nussbaum, for example, has leaned on it heavily in lauding the Stoics’ attempt to combine what she describes as a rich recognition of individuals’ local affiliations with their universal respect for each individual qua human being. For the moment, I will bypass the question of whether this kind of picture of cosmopolitanism with a communitarian face is even coherent, but Nussbaum anchors her argument in a passage from Hierocles, a later Neo-Stoic (1st–2nd cent. C.E.), who describes each of us as being surrounded by an extending series of concentric circles beginning with our innermost self, family, relatives, neighbors, and so on, and ending with a final circle embracing humanity as a whole. On the basis of her interpretation of this particular image, she argues that the Stoics insist that we do not “need to give up our specific affections and identifications, whether ethnic or gender-based or religious. We need not think of them as superficial, and we may think of our identity as being partly constituted by them.”9
To begin with, as far as I can tell, the passage says absolutely nothing about religion or gender per se, but let me first set out the relevant excerpt. The text, it is worth noting, is from a treatise entitled How Should One Behave toward One’s Relatives?
For each of us, most generally, is circumscribed by many circles, some smaller, some larger, some surrounding others, some surrounded, according to their different and unequal relations to one another. The first and closest circle is that which each person draws around his own mind, as the center: in this circle is enclosed the body and whatever is employed for the sake of the body. For this circle is the shortest and all but touches its own center. The second after this one, standing further away from the center and enclosing the first, is that within which our parents, siblings, wife, and children are ranged. Third, after these, is that in which there are uncles and aunts, grandfathers and grandmothers, the children of one’s siblings, and also cousins. After this comes the one that embraces all other relatives. Next upon this is the circle of the members of one’s deme, then that of the members of one’s tribe, next that of one’s fellow citizens, and so, finally that of those who border one’s city and that of people of a like ethnicity. The furthest out and largest one, which surrounds all the circles, is that of the entire race of human beings. Once these have been thought through, accordingly, it is possible, starting with the most stretched-out one, to draw the circles—concerning the behavior that is due to each group—together in a way, as though towards the center, and with an effort to keep transferring items out of the containing circles into the contained. For example, in respect to love of one’s family it is possible to love parents and siblings and therefore, in the same proportion, among one’s relatives, to treat the more elderly men and women as grandparents or uncles and aunts, those of the same age as cousins, and the younger ones as children of one’s cousins. Thus, a clear recommendation has been set forth, in concise terms, for how one should treat relatives, since we have already taught how people should behave towards themselves, and how parents and siblings, and further toward wife and children: the charge is that one must honor, in a way similar to these last, those from the third circle, and must in turn honor relatives in a way similar to these latter. Indeed, a greater distance in respect to blood will subtract something of good will, but nevertheless we must make an effort about assimilating them. For it would arrive at fairness if, through our own initiative, we cut down the distance in our relationship toward each person.10
Hierocles has sometimes been taken to be offering an example of the Stoics’ theory of social oikeiosis—though the word does not occur in the passage—and as such the account has gathered both praise and blame. This claim is dubious, but for the sake of argument, let’s suppose this passage reflects a Stoic belief that we begin with a feeling of kinship, recognition, and the like to ourselves (oikeiosis) and then in the course of our psychological development begin to extend it to others. We have touched on Nussbaum’s praise,11 but it is easy to see how less communitarian minded critics would find much to criticize in a view that appears to base moral regard on relations of distance from one’s own personal desires and interests. As a social mechanism, such a tactic seems problematic if it merely involves projecting one’s self-regard onto others or of identifying with others only to the extent that they mirror one’s inner needs and self-concern. The worry, of course, is that such an account fails to give proper recognition to other individuals as being worthy of respect in their own right.12 Moreover, it is hard to see how this tactic of viewing others from the perspective of one’s own self-regard is supposed to underpin the psychological development of one’s sense of rational impartiality and the recognition of the equal dignity of every human being.13
Complaints against such a view of social oikeiosis are arguably justified, but they are aimed in this instance, I would argue, at a phantom, since only a reading driven by very particular theoretical goals could lead one to conclude that Hierocles is claiming that every group in an outer circle should eventually be brought into the innermost circle of one’s own identity and that this can be a method for achieving an all-encompassing rational impartiality. Hierocles merely says that one should always try to treat those from an enclosing circle as we do those from the circle it encloses and his primary focus seems to be on relations among relatives, which after all, is the topic of his treatise. What Hierocles envisions in each case, is trying to reduce distance, not to eliminate it entirely. He concedes, moreover, that even in relations among close relatives, goodwill is related to distance in blood, thus apparently recognizing grounds for obligation that are independent of any commonly shared rationality or humanity. Indeed, it is precisely for this seeming innovation that many scholars have thought that Hierocles has moved well beyond Stoic doctrine, perhaps under the influence of the Peripatetics in giving relations based on purely contingent relations and affection any moral grounding. But bracketing such scholarly niceties, this passage seems much more plausibly read as just a bit of homespun ethical advice of the sort we might expect to find in such a nontechnical, rhetorical work that has all the hallmarks of a popular self-help manual. Rather than propounding any deep claims about the nature of our cosmopolitan social identity, Hierocles’s image of the circles seems to be merely a vivid way of illustrating a commonplace bit of general, if not particularly taxing, practical advice about how to go about treating one’s family relations somewhat better. Accordingly, however much we think that such claims about the importance of family cohesion are driven by a larger Roman imperial agenda, it at least should be evident how far Hierocles has moved from Zeno’s and Chrysippus’s original Stoic conception of wise men having wives in common, indiscriminately rubbing their flesh against all and sundry, and of virtuously enduring the ineliminable enmity of their family relations, all of whom are mere fools. It is perhaps an interesting scholarly question for specialists how strains in Neo-Stoicism developed that wished to transform No Exit into The Brady Bunch; but the actual relevance of any of this to larger questions of cosmopolitanism is rather tenuous to say the least, and certainly does not portend a conception of “rooted” cosmopolitanism.
Our second passage is even more notorious and controversial, at least among classical scholars, but for all that it is fairly easy to defuse its relevance to discussions of cosmopolitanism. Again, we can begin with a view of the passage that Martha Nussbaum has thrown her support behind. In the course of arguing against Richard Rorty’s call for Americans to give up the politics of indifference and to embrace both patriotism and a common feeling of national identity, Nussbaum argues that we would do much better to adopt “the very old idea of the cosmopolitan, the person whose allegiance is to the worldwide community of human beings.”14 Appealing to a two-sentence summary of the main point of Zeno’s Republic by Plutarch (46–120 C.E.) for the Stoic notion of a world citizen, she claims that it is “the source and ancestor of Kant’s idea of the ‘kingdom of ends,’ and has a similar function in inspiring and regulating moral and political conduct. One should always behave so as to treat with equal respect the dignity of reason and moral choice in every human being.”15 Such a notion, she insists, can be appealed to in order to help ward off the many potential harms fostered by nationalism and partisan loyalties.
Here is the passage:
And, indeed, provoking much amazement, the [R]epublic (politeia) of Zeno, who founded the Stoic school of thought, strives to make this one main point, that (a) we should not dwell in cities and demes each (of us) isolated by distinct legal ordinances (dikaiois), but (b) that we should hold all men to be demesmen and citizens, and that there should be one form of life and organization (kosmos), just like a herd grazing together and brought up in a common pasture (or in a common custom or law).16 Zeno, for his part, wrote this down, having imagined it to be unreal or as a mere image of the lawful orderliness (eunomias) of the philosopher and of the politeia, whereas Alexander provisioned talk with deeds.17
First, consider a few brief features of its respective context. Our opening passage from Diogenes, like a work of modern scholarship, cites line numbers from Zeno’s text to support its argument, quotes parts of it apparently verbatim, and it occurs as part of a larger philosophical doxography whose intent is to describe and criticize ancient philosophical works. This passage from Plutarch, on the other hand, is from an essay on Alexander the Great’s accomplishments in which one of Plutarch’s passing leitmotifs is to contrast the actual deeds of a great man with the mere words of ineffectual philosophers (whose positions he regularly misdescribes). Plutarch, moreover, is also a vehement and often unreliable critic of Stoicism elsewhere in his more straightforwardly philosophical essays and there is no evidence that he ever had a text of Zeno’s Republic at hand. Given these differences in context and argumentative goals, it is easy to see why there are grounds for suspicion about the trustworthiness of Plutarch’s comments when they conflict with those of Diogenes.
It might be helpful to begin with one contrast between the two passages that is central for questions of cosmopolitanism. The passage from Diogenes claims that Zeno does away with law courts; wise men do not need them since they do not commit injustice, nor can anyone do anything to a wise man in ways that would need to be redressed in a court. In Plutarch’s telling, on the other hand, all men, rather than being subject to distinct legal ordinances, are to be subject to a common law. What seems abundantly clear, at least, is that the particular details of Plutarch’s comments are being driven by the comparison to Alexander, since unifying the world under one law is exactly what Plutarch claims Alexander actually managed to do. In making this claim, he is doubtlessly being anachronistic and reading back Roman imperial ideology onto Alexander’s conquests, since it seems fairly clear that Alexander was not hoping to realize some unified political ideal through his program of conquest. But for our purposes, it is sufficient to note that he discusses both Alexander and Zeno in the light of Alexander’s role as a conqueror and what resulted from it. It is therefore not especially surprising that his deeply Platonic and deeply unstoic simile of sheep grazing together seems to cry out for a shepherd—in this case, Alexander. It is almost impossible for us to imagine Zeno portraying his hyperrational sages who care only for their moral autonomy grazing together like a herd of sheep in their polis.
There is, moreover, a larger problem of interpreting the point of Plutarch’s contrast between Alexander and Zeno. The initial problem we face is that this text, when taken out of its context, might misleadingly seem rather exciting, as in Nussbaum’s cosmopolitan reading. When one reads it in the context of its comparison to Alexander, however, we must content ourselves with a much more deflationary reading. This is because in accordance with Plutarch’s overall conclusion, what Alexander accomplished historically was to break down distinct legal ordinances and to make everyone members of his empire. That Alexander was instrumental in joining communities together exactly in this way is one of Plutarch’s most common refrains in the work. Elsewhere he claims that whereas only a few have read Plato’s Laws, the myriads who previously were either living brutishly without laws or living under their own laws came to make common use of Alexander’s laws.18 Plutarch’s primary concern is to illustrate these characteristic results of Alexander’s actions. He makes a reference to an ineffectual philosopher like Zeno either on the basis of some rather tenuous and mostly irretrievable similarities, or in the same arbitrary way, for instance, that he does in the above reference to Plato’s Laws.
For those defending the kind of cosmopolitan reading Nussbaum offers, there are a host of formidable obstacles. When taken out of its larger context, it is easy to see how (b), for instance, might conjure up moral and political attitudes such as a cosmopolitan respect for universal justice, equality, and the intrinsic mutual respect of all individuals by reason of their common humanity—especially when one is looking back through the lens of the later history of political theory. This is indeed heady stuff, of course, but I doubt that a careful reading of the passage as a whole can support any of these claims. First, Plutarch hardly can be seriously concluding that what Alexander accomplished historically through his conquests is such an earthly realization of the kingdom of ends. Moreover, it would severely undercut his own argument to show that Alexander only accomplished something that is a pale reflection of what Zeno was imagining. In fact, it is Zeno, he claims, who is capable of imagining only an image of what Alexander has achieved. The direction of explanation, then, goes from Alexander to Zeno, and those who support a high cosmopolitan reading leave Plutarch with the odd result of making Alexander’s achievements rather second-rate compared with Zeno’s moral vision, which can hardly be Plutarch’s point.
By the same token, we have to be careful about how we read the moral claims in “we should not dwell in communities isolated by legal ordinances” and “we should consider all humans as fellow citizens.” Proponents of cosmopolitanism typically interpret this as distinguishing two communities, “the local community of our birth, and the community of human agreement and aspiration … that is fundamentally the source of our moral obligations.”19 They then assume that Plutarch must be referring to the latter. But here Plutarch is surely making a different point that is in line with his central goal of favorably contrasting Alexander with philosophers. Philosophers say that people should live in a particular manner, but Alexander through his actions makes it the case that people actually live in that manner. Plutarch is not signaling a distinction between a natural and conventional community. Rather, he is claiming (no doubt tendentiously) that Zeno could at best urge people in words to live in a way that Alexander made possible in deeds.
Similarly, Nussbaum interprets (a) as a deep moral command enjoining that we should consider all human beings our fellow citizens with respect to such basic moral values as justice. What Plutarch actually says, however, is far less morally dramatic and again, something readily achievable through territorial conquest rather than any deepened sense of moral recognition, that is, that people dwell together under a common law.
Of course, it might be objected that there must be some basis of comparison with Zeno’s views for Plutarch to be referring to him in this context. This is not necessarily the case, since Plutarch’s comparisons are often merely arbitrary. But one possible candidate in this passage is the Stoic notion of the koinos nomos, or common natural law pervading all things. Plutarch shows an awareness of this central Stoic doctrine elsewhere and may be alluding to it here.20 In Diogenes Laertius, we find a typical instance of this Stoic claim, for which there is much evidence:
living in agreement with nature comes to be the end, which is in accordance with the nature of oneself and that of the whole, engaging in no activity forbidden by universal law (ho nomos ho koinos), which is right reason pervading everything and identical to Zeus, who is the director of the administration of existing things. And the virtue of the happy man and his good flow of life are just this: always doing everything on the basis of concordance of each man’s guardian spirit with the will of the administrator of the whole.21
The Stoics think that the universe is governed by a divine providential law and that one will be both virtuous and happy only if one follows it. But even if we grant that (c) makes an allusion to the Stoics’ claim that we should live by the divine commands of natural law, we still need to be careful about how we approach the claims in (a) and (b), and also about the political conclusions we draw from the passage. First, it is clear that for Zeno only the wise and the gods can live in accordance with the koinos nomos. Everyone else, of course, is still subject to the koinos nomos and thus should not dwell in isolated judicial districts (a) and should regard all humans as members of the same community and as fellow citizens (b). However, it is not at all clear that living according to divine law requires from the Stoic the kinds of generalized moral attitudes to others that characterize Kant’s kingdom of ends, since although everyone may have the potential to take part in this moral community, precious few actually do—only the wise and gods. The rest remain in a condition of mutual enmity and irrational foolishness. Nor, as a consequence, does obedience to the koinos nomos necessarily require the kinds of political commitments Nussbaum links to a more generalized cosmopolitanism.
Moreover, it should be remembered that Plutarch’s main emphasis is on the difference between what Zeno could only imagine in words and what Alexander actually achieved through his conquests—bringing people to live together in common like a grazing herd. The Platonic image of grazing sheep, however, is consonant with Plutarch’s emphasis on how Alexander’s conquests helped to bring peace and order to a chaotic world. In other contexts, moreover, such an image typically suggests a Platonic notion that sheep graze most harmoniously and safely under the eye of a benign and watchful shepherd/ruler. So we should be wary about the political message we can draw from this image and from the passage in general. The fact that someone is a fellow member of my community or a fellow citizen does not by itself guarantee that I view him as my equal, if my community is arranged in various social and political hierarchies. While it is true that, for the Stoics, we are all rational sparks of god and equal in that basic sense, this does not lead them to make any straightforward inferences to universal political equality. Indeed, just the opposite seems to be the case. The surviving Stoic texts we have using the terminology of isotes or aequalitas all aim at capturing a notion of the impartial administration of law among individuals who are clearly assumed to belong to different levels of political and social hierarchies. Modern attempts to enlist Stoics in the ranks of cosmopolitan thinkers often merely assume that their cosmopolitanism entails a range of other political attitudes and ideals as well. The Stoics, however, typically argue that we may be given different social and political roles to play by fate, but it is a matter of moral indifference whether we play the role of, say, an Agamemnon or a Thersites.22 No matter the role we play, king or slave, we can still perfect our inner moral autonomy.
It is probably time to ask, however, what the upshot of this kind of philological detective work contributes to our understanding of cosmopolitanism. At the risk of trying the patience of those not familiar with the field, this examination has tried to offer a glimpse of the nature of the evidence that remains and the sorts of assumptions and arguments that surround it. I have argued that it is not very likely that this passage from Plutarch can carry the burden of even bland forms of political cosmopolitanism. But even if we granted a stronger cosmopolitan reading of the passage, we would still be left at best with a certain kind of thin, selective moral regard for others that may be ethically commendable, but that leaves questions of political engagement and state institutional power untouched. Nothing in this passage, therefore, is incompatible with a traditional view derived from Hegel that in the Hellenistic period philosophers turned inward, giving up their interest in questions of political participation, political goals, and non-individualistic forms of social relations.
This is, no doubt, a deflationary view of the Stoics’ political thought and perhaps much less interesting than what is on offer from several modern reconstructions. But since the ancient Stoics have been injected into contemporary debates about cosmopolitanism, I would like to raise in conclusion what I see as a strong objection on their part to an influential recent defense of cosmopolitanism by Anthony Appiah. For Appiah, friendship offers an important test case for thinking about cosmopolitan relations and the possibility of successfully negotiating between ethical obligations that “invoke community founded in a shared past or collective memory” and so-called thin moral obligations that “are stipulatively entailed by a shared humanity.”23 The Stoics too think that friendship is important for their city of the wise, but the difference in their respective conceptions offers an important window into a problem lurking for Appiah’s project. For Appiah, friendship is a particularist good. “My friend Mary is not simply an instantiation of the general good represented by friendship; she’s not like one first-class stamp on a roll of first-class stamps.”24 To think of friendship in this postage stamp way, Appiah asserts, is to confuse social goals based on impartiality with personal ties based on shared history and community. Invoking Debbie Boone (“It can’t be wrong/ When it feels so right”) to illustrate how we reject moral theories that don’t track actual existing empirical norms, Appiah attempts to carve out a space for friendships that elicits strong sets of obligations not reducible to those demanded by moral impartiality.
We can consider in passing the Stoics’ strong reservations about Debbie Boone’s feelings of rightness. As is well known, they reject decisions grounded in ordinary emotions because they think that most emotions, apart from a few special Stoic emotions, arise from mistaken views of one’s own good. It may feel right, but if those feelings are based on Johnnie’s dimple, his shiny Corvette, and the way he wears those Levis, Debbie may be letting herself in for some trouble down the line. The Stoics think that what is right must be grounded in attitudes that are neither contingent in this way nor based on false views of virtue and the good. To take another example from Appiah, we all, he suggests, can recognize the bonds of friendship among thieves. True, the Stoics reply, but we also recognize how we think someone is better off leaving a gang and graduating to pursuits that are better both for themselves and for society. Why is that? Like most theorists of friendship in antiquity, the Stoics believe that friendship worthy of a name requires a mutual commitment to virtue. Indeed, taking Aristotle’s conception to its logical conclusion, they argue that your best friend might be someone you have not yet met, since only virtue matters. Of course, we might find such a view that jettisons all claims of a mutually shared history deeply counterintuitive, but the Stoic view responds directly to a seemingly intractable dilemma facing any account of friendship. Derrida, reviving an ancient philosophical quandary from the Greeks, poses the following basic question. Why is it that we value friends? For themselves or for their qualities? If we value friends for their qualities, that is, for their abstract properties—Appiah’s postage stamp worry—it seems that we do not value our friends qua themselves as individuals. This is because if we value friends only for their abstract properties we might find ready substitutes. Sure, Sally has a good sense of humor, but Dolly has a better one, so why not trade up, if what I really value in my friends is a sense of humor? One might object that we value friends not just for one property, but for their uniquely individual set of properties. But it doesn’t take much imagination to see that once we concede that what we value in friends are abstract properties and not individuals per se, we still have reasons to trade up from one particular grab bag of properties to another, if in it we find more instantiations of those properties that we like. Appiah clearly would not be happy with such a view of friendships, but he fails to offer any explicit justification of friendships based on shared experience and community.
One possibility that might arise from a Debbie Boone justification is that “I love Johnny just because he is Johnny”—that unique individual who is Johnny. But in making this claim, one runs into the other horn of Derrida’s dilemma. How is it possible to love something without any properties? Or at the metaphysical level, how do we conceive of a bare particular with no properties? To love people for themselves alone also raises a further ethical and moral worry. Let’s call it the battered wife worry. “I love Johnny for himself alone. Of course, he beats me, is an alcoholic, and runs around, but aren’t I, as a good wife, supposed to love him for who he is?” If we are inclined to say no, we have to appeal to abstract properties, good and bad, over and above Johnny qua Johnny.
Appiah, of course, wants to maintain a delicate balance between particularist values and those of moral impartiality, but the Stoics would claim that the so-called particularist value of friendship he relies on quickly falls apart into its Derridean disjuncts of abstraction and bare particularism upon further analysis. Ironically, moreover, the particularism of the kind of friendship that Appiah defends turns out to be the particularism of the bare individual, and the values of community and history that he defends are therefore only defensible when they are grounded—or rooted, if you will—in those very abstract, postage stamp values that he rejects as explaining the value of friendship. This is the reason, in fact, that the Stoics maintain that the only friendships that are justifiable are those between virtuous friends who actually know how to benefit one another in light of the good. You may not have met that virtuous person yet, but if there is such a good person in the world, he is benefiting you more, as the Stoics say, by moving his finger, than all the Johnnies you may have grown up with and hung around with for reasons having nothing to do with the good.
The Stoics thus offer an austere and pessimistic reminder that many of the values that contemporary theorists build on, especially in attempting to separate an ethical sphere of personal obligation in contradistinction to a thin moral sphere of universal obligation, rest on fragile foundations that are often merely assumed from empirical intuitions, common sense, and the like—the Debbie Boone syndrome. When we scratch the surface, they insist, we are likely to end up falling onto the other horn of Derrida’s dilemma, that of having to ultimately justify so-called personal “ethical” relations by appeal to thin moral abstractions.
Moreover, to the extent that the Debbie Boone syndrome spills over into political theorizing, of which one worrying instance are the many hybrid forms of contemporary cosmopolitanism that rest on it “just feeling right,” we are likely to face the impossible task of what the Stoics saw as founding a city made up of enemies and fools. In their view, even the thinnest forms of cosmopolitanism can only include a few virtuous wise friends, and the chances of that are, unfortunately, as rare as the Ethiopian phoenix.
NOTES
1 See the vivid book of Vice-Admiral James Bond Stockdale, Courage under Fire: Testing Epictetus’s Doctrines in a Laboratory of Human Behavior (Stanford: Hoover Institute, 1993). The laboratory referred to here is the infamous Hoa Loa prisoner of war camp (“Hanoi Hilton”). Stockdale’s account of his lived Stoicism often captures far more of the spirit of the ancient doctrines than that typically found in what he no doubt would describe as the tepid world of scholarly “yackety-yack.” However, while ancient Stoics are very adept at exerting their moral will in the face of adversity and at withstanding torture, they are also committed peaceniks and deny the need for weapons, military training, or organized combat even to save one’s own life or goods, much less to halt the spread of communism or to secure oil.
2 Diogenes Laertius 7.32 ff=LS 67B.
3 Diogenes Laertius 7.32 ff=LS 67B, continued.
4 Sext. Emp. 3.246; 1.491.
5 E.g., Martha C. Nussbaum, For Love of Country? A New Democracy Forum on the Limits of Patriotism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996).
6 Cf. Antigone, Pericles’s funeral oration at Thucydides, 2.35 ff, etc.
7 3.228.
8 Anthony Pagden, “Stoicism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Legacy of European Imperialism,” Constellations 7 (2000): 3–22. Pagden argues that the conception of cosmopolitanism that arose in this period is inextricably tied to the Roman imperial goal of imposing one political order on the world. Although such a view provides an important counterweight to those who extract cosmopolitanism from its historical context, it lacks nuance. Cf. Melanie Subacus, who shows how political cosmopolitanism arises in Rome from, among other things, particular worries about the nature of kinship ties and the extension of citizenship within the empire. Melanie Subacus, “Duae Patriae: Cicero and Political Cosmopolitanism in Rome,” Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 2014.
9 M. C. Nussbaum, “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,” Boston Review 19.5 (1994), 9.
10 Stobaeus, Anthology, 4.84.23, trans. Konstan.
11 Cf. Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 56 ff.
12 M. M. McCabe, “Extend or Identify: Two Stoic Accounts of Altruism,” in R. Salles (ed.), Metaphysics, Soul, and Ethics in Ancient Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005): 413-443.
13 Nussbaum, For Love of Country? 9.
14 Nussbaum, For Love of Country? 9.
15 See Nussbaum, “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,” 8.
16 There is a pun here on nó-mos (law) and no-mós (pasture).
17 Plutarch, De Alexandri magni fortuna aut virtute, i 329a8-b7, trans. my own.
18 328e5–8.
19 Nussbaum, For Love of Country? 9.
20 See Vander Waerdt 1994: 272 ff.
21 Diogenes Laertius.7.88, trans. Long and Sedley, 63C.
22 Diogenes Laertius.7.160.
23 Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 229–230.
24 Appiah (2005), 230 ff. On Stoic friendship, see Glenn Lesses, “Austere Friends: The Stoics and Friendship,” Apeiron 26.1 (1993), 57–75.