Stoicism, Language, and Freedom
Kurt Lampe
1 The Meaning(s) of the Stoic Tradition
What is the significance of the Stoic tradition? That, of course, is an unwieldy question: the concepts, arguments, doctrines, mental and practical techniques, and everything else that travels under the label “Stoicism” have meant different things to different people. Today we have an increasingly detailed understanding of the aspects of ancient Stoic theory preserved by surviving ancient Greek and Roman sources. The academic study of this evidence, which until the 1980s was concentrated in German and French scholarship, is now flourishing in anglophone universities as well. There is also a growing body of research about the reception of Stoicism from antiquity until today (e.g., Spanneut 1973; Colish 1990; Neymeyr, Schmidt, and Zimmerman 2008; Sellars 2016). Perhaps more surprisingly, in the last decade “modern Stoicism” has become a powerful international movement, bringing together scholars of antiquity, psychotherapists (especially from cognitive-behavioral backgrounds), and a broad public interested in living philosophically.1
Dwelling briefly on this movement will shed some light on how the reception of Stoicism in “continental (European) philosophy” enriches its significance. While it is hazardous to generalize, the following quotation from the front cover of Donald Robertson’s excellent Stoicism and the Art of Happiness is both concise and representative: “What is Stoicism? Practical wisdom and resilience building techniques. Take control—understand what you can and can’t change” (2013). Let me expand this a bit. The modern Stoic is enjoined to become mindful of the contents of her consciousness (e.g., words, images, sensory and bodily feelings, emotions, and impulses), to articulate these in propositional form, to weigh these propositions against a series of guidelines (e.g., that we must focus on what we can control, namely our thoughts, and that behaving virtuously is more satisfying and valuable than wealth, status, or any other goals external to our behavior), to harmonize and systematize them, and in this way to view herself as someone progressing toward greater happiness, goodness, and concord with other people and the world (cf. Robertson 2013: 10). There is no doubt that this approach is well grounded in the ancient texts and accurately captures core intentions of many ancient practitioners. However, we should also remark that modern Stoics emphasize some aspects of the ancient evidence and downplay or repudiate others—avowedly and deliberately so, in fact (Vernon and LeBon 2014; Chakrapani 2018). For this chapter’s purposes, it suffices to mention two of these partialities. The first is that, in proclaiming humankind’s “natural rationality,” they set aside the myriad epistemological, psychological, sociopolitical, and metaphysical questions raised by the endeavor to express truthfully in language the content of thought and the structure of reality.2 The second is that, in declaring that our thoughts are “under our control,” they beg questions about both external and internal determinism and freedom.3
Now contrast the following passage from a section called “In the Garden of Epictetus” in The Education of the Stoic by the Portuguese author Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935):
“The pleasant sight of these fruits and the coolness given off by these leafy trees are yet other solicitations of nature,” said the Master, “encouraging us to abandon ourselves to the higher delights of a serene mind. . . . Sit still with me, and meditate on how useless effort us, how alien the will, and on how our very meditation is no more useful than effort, and no more our own than the will.” (Pessoa 2005: 51)
Since Pessoa (or rather his heteronym, the Baron of Teive) puts these words into Epictetus’s mouth, he implicitly questions to what extent anything is “under our control,” including our thoughts: “Our very meditation,” he muses, “is . . . no more our own than the will.” We could relate this to the ancient Stoics’ own attempts, given their commitment to universal causal determinism, to explain in what sense our decisions belong to us (LS 55, 62; cf. Bobzien 1998: 234–411). Pessoa’s Epictetus also doubts whether we can know or express any truths, which is one reason he considers the very meditation he performs “useless.” Later he explains that we can neither know nature, despite its tantalizing “solicitations,” nor express what we think (2005: 52). Once again, this can be related to ancient Stoic doctrines: their standards of knowledge and correct reasoning are so lofty they have to defend the possibility of their attainment (as we can now read in what may be Chrysippus’s own words [Alessandrelli and Ranocchia 2017]).4 So the Baudelairean attitude of Pessoa’s Epictetus, though antithetical to that of the ancient Stoics, can neverthel ess be read as an intelligible reaction to their teachings, albeit one colored by personal idiosyncrasies and a specific moment in literary history.5
Pessoa was a younger contemporary of Jean-Paul Sartre, the earliest modern philosopher addressed in the present volume, and features prominently in Handbook of Inaesthetics by Alain Badiou, at the opposite chronological end of our coverage. The two broad themes I have just identified in the quotation from his work, which I shall encapsulate under the headings “language” and “freedom,” recur frequently in French and Italian reception of Stoicism. This reception tradition, it should be emphasized, is a complement rather than a competitor to modern Stoicism. One of the French authors concerned, Pierre Hadot, is frequently cited in modern Stoic literature. As Matthew Sharpe elucidates, Hadot’s readings incorporate both prior German and French scholarship and a range of philosophical influences (Sharpe, Ch. 13). Nevertheless, it remains true that continental philosophers tend to develop the meaning of the ancient evidence with greater creative latitude than modern Stoics. On the one hand, they explain aspects of Stoic practice differently than the practitioners themselves, and in this respect expand our understanding of the Stoic life. On the other, they discover significance in theorems that the original theorists would probably disavow, and in that respect envisage ways of living “Stoicism” quite different from those practiced in the ancient world or the mainstream of the modern Stoic movement.
I will not attempt to survey the chapters to come in the remainder of this introduction. Instead, I will selectively use and supplement their research and arguments in order to comment briefly on how modern French and Italian philosophers’ engagement with Stoicism allows them to raise subtle and important questions about language and freedom.
2 Language
The foundational figure for continental responses to Stoic philosophy of language is Émile Bréhier (1876–1952), chair of the History of Ancient and Modern Philosophy at the Sorbonne and successor to Henri Bergson at the Académie des sciences morales et politiques. Bréhier’s research interests were extremely far ranging, but Stoicism particularly fascinated him both intellectually and practically, as Henri-Charles Puech eulogized:
This intransigent rationality, which was nevertheless life-affirming and profoundly human, this austere discipline of self-mastery, this ideal of wisdom founded on the accord of philosophical autonomy with the rhythm of the universe, inspired in him both sympathy and admiration. (1952: xxvi)6
Bréhier’s doctoral thèse complementaire, the first edition of which reached publication in 1907 (third edition 1962), was on La théorie des incorporels dans l’ancien stoïcisme (“The Theory of Incorporeals in Ancient Stoicism”)—a topic which had begun attracting attention in the 1880s, and which von Arnim’s collection of fragments in 1903–5 made substantially more accessible.7 The metaphysics of “sayables” (lekta) feature prominently here, as indeed in Wolfhart Totschnig’s recent defence of Bréhier’s core position (Totschnig 2013). But Bréhier’s formulations have generated echoes far beyond specialist scholarship. Consider the terminology he uses to highlight the Stoic distinction between bodies, which are beings and have causal power, and the effects of bodies, which are nonbeing, incorporeal sayables:
These results of the action of beings, which the Stoics were perhaps the first to perceive in this form, are what we today would call “facts” or “events” (des faits ou des événements): a bastard concept that is neither that of a being nor of one of its properties, but what is said and asserted about being. (1962: 13)
Note two aspects of Bréhier’s interpretation of Stoic sayables. First, he problematizes their relationship with the bodies that cause them (when they are conceived as effects, LS 55A-D) or to which they refer (when they are conceived as the content of thoughts, LS 33). We will see below that this problem expands to encompass their relation to the signifiers that express them, the speech acts that enunciate them, and the speakers who think and say them. Second, he elevates this problem to the status of a metaphysical principle. It is in this connection that he speaks of “‘facts’ or ‘events,’” which are caused by beings, yet whose connection to those beings is unstable: they “play” on the “surface” of being (1962: 12–13, 60–3). This way of presenting the Stoic theory of sayables has ethical and political consequences, as the evental metaphysics of Deleuze, Badiou, and other contemporary continental philosophers demonstrates. Although these aspects are tightly intertwined, for the sake of exposition I will present them separately.
Let me begin with language and the event. It is well known that Gilles Deleuze took inspiration from Bréhier’s interpretation of the Stoic theory of sayables when elaborating his metaphysics of the chaosmic Event in The Logic of Sense, which coordinates ideal significations, bodily intensities, and enunciative attitudes.8 (Deleuze was also influenced by Bréhier’s successor, Victor Goldschmidt, on whom see further below.) It has not been recognized until now that Sartre had preceded Deleuze in this respect, as Laurent and Suzanne Husson demonstrate in this volume. Sartre enthusiastically followed Bréhier’s lectures at the Sorbonne, and his loan record at the École Normale Supérieure from 1926 to 1928 includes both ancient Stoic texts and French and German scholarship on the school . While it cannot be argued that Stoicism plays a major role in Being and Nothingness, it is noteworthy that Sartre alludes to Stoic doctrine precisely when, in the “metaphysical outlooks” of that book’s conclusion, he postulates a type of being that would unify the for-itself and the in-itself. Such a being, the Hussons argue, would be analogous to the Stoic category of “somethings” (LS 27A-D), and its foundation in the absolute in-itself’s “ontological act” would correspond to the thinking of Stoic God (L. and S. Husson, Ch. 3). At the opposite end of the century, Thomas Bénatouïl shows how part of Alain Badiou’s polemic in Deleuze: The Clamor of Being revolves around a closely related issue. Badiou’s strategy is to tendentiously pigeonhole Deleuze as a Stoic. Among Badiou’s moves is to claim that the ostensibly Stoic theory of evental sense (i.e., the sayable) makes it impossible to defend the univocity of being, which is supposed to underpin Deleuze’s radical ethics and politics. A true radical, Badiou argues, must return to Plato (Bénatouïl, Ch. 5).
Now let us consider how the Stoic sayable has been appropriated for theorizing the relations among bodies, signifiers, thought, and speech. Of course, Deleuze’s Logic of Sense is once again central to this story. But he is far from the only continental thinker involved. For example, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, whose theories are an important point of reference for The Logic of Sense, appears in turn to take inspiration from it. In the wake of the publication of Logic of Sense in 1968, Lacan experiments with connecting the Stoic lekton to his own ideas about the signifier, objet a, lalangue [sic], and the transference (Lacan 1970a: 9–11, b: 19; c: 55–6, 61, 68, 1985 [delivered 1975]: 11–12, cf. 2007 [delivered January 21, 1970]: 60–1).9 It may not be coincidental that the classicist and philosopher Barbara Cassin has also been deeply influenced by Lacan. In her discussion of the Stoics’ analysis of ambiguity, she argues that their distinction between the dynamics of vocal sound (which is bodily) and the dynamics of significations (which are incorporeal) blocks the demand that speakers aim to signify one and the same thing, for themselves and others, with univocal correspondence to material referents. Since this demand implies a regulatory norm, blocking it creates an opportunity—whether or not most Stoic practitioners take advantage of it—for ethical and political reorientation (Cassin, Ch. 10).
Julia Kristeva approaches Stoic philosophy of language from a similar theoretical orientation, but arrives at less sympathetic conclusions. This is in large measure because her numerous remarks on Stoicism, while indebted to Bréhier, are more influenced by Goldschmidt. In his magisterial Le système stoïcien et l’idée de temps (The stoic system and the idea of time 1953), Goldschmit develops a vision of the Stoic aspiration to incorporate divine totality and eternity in the “events” of human thought, volition, and action. This leads Kristeva to infer that Stoicism freezes the relations among signifier, signified, and referent, and then again between antecedent and consequent propositions. This has the effect of repressing what she calls the “semiotic” and “imaginary” dimensions of language, which strangles creativity and singularity. In my chapter I return to lesser-known ancient Stoic texts in order to evaluate Kristeva’s claims. While she illuminates one temptation for Stoics, I argue that imaginary and semiotic creativity play a larger role in ancient Stoic thinking than she acknowledges—and that this deserves further consideration in modern Stoicism (Lampe, Ch. 6).
If the interpretations of the sayable by Deleuze, Lacan, Cassin, and Kristeva overlap in many particulars, Giorgio Agamben’s reception—though undertaken in full knowledge of the work of Bréhier, Goldschmidt, and Deleuze—marks a substantially new departure. Nicoletta di Vita explores in her chapter how Agamben’s scattered discussions culminate in the long chapter “On the Sayable and the Idea” in Che cos’è la filosofia? (What Is Philosophy 2016: 57–122), where he argues that the sayable just is “the fact of language” (di Vita, Ch. 11)—in other words, speech as a potentiality that human beings must actualize, withdraw from, or be deprived of in various ways. Agamben incorporates a philologically detailed meditation on Stoic and Platonic texts into his ongoing investigation of what is presupposed and singularized by every act of speaking.
3 Freedom
The theme of freedom is connected to those of language and knowledge. In the 1920s and 1930s “Alain” (Émile Chartier, 1868–1951) popularized an association between Stoicism and his own ideas about the will, truth, and responsibility, which go back to his own and Victor Brochard’s scholarship on Stoic epistemology in the 1880s and 1890s (Bénatouïl 2017: 361–2). Alain’s “Stoic attitude” exerted considerable influence over Jean-Paul Sartre, as Olivier D’Jeranian shows. More specifically, D’Jeranian traces how Sartre comes to terms with the Epictetan dyad of “what is up to us” and “what is not up to us” during the 1940s. In a nutshell, Sartre eventually incorporates “what is not up to us” in his own philosophy as “the situation,” which is factitious rather than natural, fated, or providential. He then transforms “what is up to us” so that it no longer connotes our capacity to affirm a situation as an opportunity for behaving virtuously, but rather our ability to “assume” and “surpass” that situation toward a “free project,” rather than affirming that situation as an opportunity for behaving virtuously (D’Jeranian, Ch. 2).
Sartre’s ethics also bear a surprising resemblance to Goldschmidt’s influential vision of Stoicism. Consider Goldschmidt’s description of the relation between Stoic wisdom and the singular acts through which it is expressed:
However, if he receives the theme for his action from external circumstances, the sage by no means depends on them. . . . Which amounts to saying . . . that potentiality i s higher than actuality, because it is an infinite potentiality for all possible acts. . . . The singular act reveals the entirety of a potentiality that infinitely surpasses it. (1953: 152–3)
For Goldschmidt, “surpassing” the present toward eternity and totality, which involves a kind of “freedom,” is central to Stoic practice. He explicitly compares this with Sartrean ethics: “One could compare the ‘spontaneity’ of the ‘for-itself’ in Sartre to the [Stoic] present of freedom, where ethical initiative (hormē . . .), which ceaselessly renews itself, is located” (1953: 191 n.2; cf. 124 n. 3, 213 n. 5). Of course, it remains the case that this free “surpassing . . . of all concrete determinations” (1953: 191 n.2; cf. 124 n. 3, 213 n. 5) is nevertheless governed by cosmic law, which prescribes every event in the universe (1953: 89, 156). However, responding elsewhere to Heidegger, Goldschmidt asserts “there would be some naivety . . . and plenty of imperialism” in asserting, from the supposedly universal vantage point of existential phenomenology, that the Stoic way of relating to nature and god is “inauthentic” (1953: 54). Later he goes so far as to suggest that we can view Epictetus’s reconciliation of “care” (epimeleia) with “steadiness” (eustatheia) as a way of unifying what Heidegger calls “the double sense of care” (1953: 177–8, citing Ep. Diss. 2.5.9 and Heidegger 1962: §42 H199). In other words, by combining free responsibility for finite events with appropriation of an infinite divine law, Stoicism configures in its own way the same issues as the two Heideggerian faces of care, namely “thrownness” and “projection.” One might even argue, developing statements by Deleuze and Paul Veyne (Deleuze 2004: 148–9; Veyne 2003: 181 n. 80), that Senecan tragedy dramatizes the tension this creates (cf. Lampe 2018).
Deleuze scarcely mentions “freedom” in his reading of Stoicism, but what he does say is very indebted to Goldschmidt. Goldschmidt writes the following in his discussion of “the use of impressions”:
Since we cannot, like god, go from intention to act in the same instant, since the act [i.e., the event] is given to us first, it will suffice in this same instant to follow the inverse pathway and make the act (what does not depend on us) coincide with the intention (which depends on us fully). We must “accept” the event and want it. (Goldschmidt 1953: 100)
For Deleuze, the Stoic sage aims to articulate and assent to “cataleptic impressions”10 that “envelope” the differential sense of an event (2004: 163–7). This is what Deleuze calls “counter-actualization.” For a Stoic it is the sense of divine thought that must be counteractualized. Deleuze instead relates counteractualization to the psychoanalytic “phantasm.” This is where he speaks of freedom: “It is here that our greatest freedom lies—the freedom by which we develop and lead the event to its completion and transmutation, and finally become masters of actualizations and causes” (2004: 243). In good Stoic fashion, he construes “freedom” in what we can loosely call a “psychological” sense; in other words, he makes it primarily a matter of the agent’s relation to her own passions and actions (Bobzien 1998: 338–45). That said, it must be added that Deleuze envisages a very different way of relating to passions and actions than the ancient Stoics did. As Janae Sholtz shows, a Deleuzean neo-Stoicism (especially if it were nourished by Deleuze’s later collaborations with Félix Guattari) would continue to revolve around techniques of self-cultivation, which we could call the pursuit of freedom; but “habituation” would be replaced with “experimentation,” and the moderation of emotions (impassivity and eupathy) with their “intensification” and “amplification.” Underlying these changes is the shift from an implicit theory of self as an “inner citadel” to Deleuze’s valorization of “nomadic subjectivity” and the impersonal (Sholtz, Ch. 4).
Perhaps the most sustained discussion of freedom in the continental reception of Stoicism is that by Michel Foucault (esp. 1990, 2005). This bears emphasizing, since anglophone classicists and historians of ancient philosophy often overlook Foucault’s philosophical agenda, which tends to disappear behind his philological and historical commentary (cf. Ure, Ch. 9). In the final years of his life, Foucault had come to see the continuity of his oeuvre in investigating how, given that “governmentality” (the operations of power) pervades “subjectivation” (the formation of subjectivity) and “veridiction” (the constitution of truths), we can nevertheless resist domination and incapacitation (Foucault 1990: 3–7, 1996: esp. 432–49, 2010: 2–6, 2011: 8–9, 65–8). If he emphasizes the priority of self-care over knowing and governing oneself and others in Stoicism (esp. 2005: 250–69, 455–62), it is not primarily in order to make claims about the conceptualization of “the self,”11 but rather because he suspects this model of subjectivation can facilitate a kind of freedom under the circumstances in which he is living. Thus, his hyperbolic assertion that “there is no first or final point of resistance to political power other than the relationship one has to oneself” (which he softens in a subsequent interview) must be taken with its immediate prequel: “I think we may have to suspect that we find it impossible today to constitute an ethic of the self, even though it may be an urgent, fundamental, and politically indispensable task” (2005: 252, cf. 1996: 448).
Several chapters in this volume explore Foucault’s search for freedom in Stoic practices. Michael Ure confronts Foucault’s praise of Stoicism with Hannah Arendt’s critique. Arendt and Foucault loosely agree about the harmful effects of managerial governmentality in modern liberal states. But Arendt, drawing on a Hegelian tradition to which Sartre was also heir, argues that Stoicism positively saps resistance to political domination. Foucault rightly objects that Stoics by no means encourage withdrawal from political activity, contrary to Arendt’s assertions. But Ure finds little evidence that ancient Stoicism equipped its practitioners to resist political domination (Ure, Ch. 9).
By way of confirmation, one might adduce David Sedley’s reconstruction of how philosophical commitments influenced the plot against the “tyranny” of Julius Caesar in 44 BCE. Contrary to the impression given by Shakespeare, Brutus was motivated by Antiochean rather than Stoic principles. A fascinating report in Plutarch’s Life of Brutus (12.3-4) underpins Sedley’s contention that “it is far from being the case that Brutus was even a Stoic-sympathizer. . . . It will turn out to be no accident at all that the conspirators did not even include any known Stoics” (1997: 44). “For a Stoic,” Sedley explains, “freedom is first and foremost a personal matter, exclusive to the wise, who can count on preserving it under any political conditions” (50). Whether for this or other reasons, the ancient Stoic political imagination was often dull and sometimes downright establishmentarian (cf. Lampe, Ch. 6).
On the other hand, the activity of Roman Stoics, like Thrasea Paetus, Musonius Rufus, and Helvidius Priscus, arguably amounts to political resistance in a sense both Foucault and Arendt would recognize, even though it eschews violent regime change. Consider the following dialogue between Helvidius Priscus and the emperor Vespasian imagined by Epictetus:
When Vespasian sent to him and forbade him from entering the Senate, he answered, “It’s in your power not to allow me to be a Senator. But as long as I am, I must go in.” “Fine, then go in, but stay silent.” “Don’t call upon me, and I’ll stay silent.” “But I have to call upon you.” “And I have to say what seems right.” “But if you say it, I’ll kill you.” “So when did I tell you I was immortal? You’ll do your part, and I’ll do mine. Your part is to kill, mine to die without trembling; yours to exile, mine to depart without distress.” So what good did Priscus do, being just one person? Well, what good does the purple do to the garment? What else than stand out as purple and display itself as a fine model for other people? (Diss. 1.2.19-22)
In his chapter, John Sellars confirms Foucault’s assertion that Roman Stoics often view life as a heroic “test” (Sellars, Ch. 7). If Priscus was enacting such a test with Vespasian, one could argue that it was futile: he was in fact killed by the emperor, whose behavior remained unchanged. We could even follow Lacan’s claims about Stoic “masochism,” and suggest that Priscus’s unconscious goal was to encourage Vespasian to “lay down the law” (Lampe 2013: 192–7). But it is worth considering more carefully Epictetus’s claim that Priscus’s solitary resistance nevertheless “did good” (ὠφέλησε) and “was displayed as a fine model for other people” (τοῖς ἄλλοις δὲ καλὸν παράδειγμα ἔκκειται).
Let me briefly sketch a reading of how Priscus exercises a kind of freedom. For a Foucauldian, the principal question is not how Priscus responds to the emperor’s explicit commands, but rather how he relates to the considerations that implicitly give those commands meaning and force. In this instance, those considerations include the value of execution, exile, fear, and distress, and the privileges and obligations of an emperor, senator, or citizen. If we bear in mind the historical contexts, we will appreciate that these are subtler than they might appear to most modern readers. At this time the Roman Empire was once again recovering from several years of civil war and the swift, violent deaths of four emperors (ca. 67–69 CE). As it had under Augustus, this recovery involved an array of practical and symbolic measures. In both respects Helvidius Priscus, as both senator and praetor, clashed with the new emperor. For example, he argued that it was the senate, not the emperor, which should control the treasury and address the deficit created by the wars, and he both initiated and performed the most conspicuous ceremonial role in the postwar restoration of the central shrine of the Roman state, namely the temple of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva on the Capitoline hill (Tac. Hist. 4.5-9, 4.53; Malitz 1985; Wardle 1996). It would thus be entirely incorrect to claim that Helvidius only concerned himself with “inner freedom,” and did nothing to oppose the actual and external operations of imperial power. What a Foucauldian reading adds here is the suggestion that it is by caring for himself, constantly trying to discern how to be a more virtuous senator, praetor, and human being under complex and demanding political circumstances, that Priscus finds the leverage to reconfigure governmentality’s “mobile field of force relations” (Foucault 1998: 95–6). This concern allows him to disregard the considerations that Vespasian hopes will govern his decisions, such as that death is bad and opposing the emperor is pointless. For Priscus, the question is instead whether a certain attitude toward execution or the emperor allows him to perfect “the person he is” (Frede 2007). By focusing on this question, Priscus not only deflects Vespasian’s attempt at control but also exerts influence over others—as attested not only by Epictetus’s commemoration but also by the lost biography of Herennius Senecio (another Stoic, himself executed by Domitian; on the “Stoic resistance,” see Syme 1991).
Perhaps it is therefore best to maintain a middle position: Arendt is right that Stoicism sometimes motivates aquiescence and complicity, but Foucault is also right that prioritizing the self’s relation to itself sometimes nourishes political resistance. In fact, I suggest that recognizing this ambivalent potential in Stoic politics is very important for modern practitioners, since it can help them avoid pitfalls and cultivate the tradition’s best potentials.
The example of Priscus raises another issue for Stoicism and freedom. If he evades imperial influence by prioritizing the effort to become a more just and courageous version of himself, does he not thereby risk “subjection” to precisely those normalizing ideals of “justice” and “courage?” To put it another way, cannot the pressure to “be brave” and “pursue justice,” both as internalized ideals and as exhortations from like-minded friends, in itself become controlling and oppressive? One way to approach this problem is via Foucault’s final seminar on parrhēsia (2011), which may be translated “saying everything” or “free speech.” While some commentators have been apologetic about this seminar, which Foucault completed while dying of AIDS, Valéry Laurand finds it surprisingly useful for interpreting parrhēsia in the works of Seneca, Musonius Rufus, and Marcus Aurelius. Parrhēsia is both a mechanism of self-care and a testament to a certain mode of relating to oneself and others. It is this “testimonial” dimension which leads Foucault to view it as a kind of “truth-telling.” This truth-telling is not a matter of embodying preexistent “true” propositions; it aims to “be truthful” without being grounded in certain knowledge. For this reason, at least in part, it avoids subjecting its speaker to the kind of norms that would constrain her freedom. In fact, Laurand argues that Stoic parrhēsia, because it takes careful account of circumstances and addressees, is a better candidate for “the reality of philosophy” than the Cynicism championed by Foucault. In other words, Laurand speculates that Stoicism could offer a model of philosophical “free speech” as “truth-telling” that constitutes political action (Laurand, Ch. 8).
A great deal could be said about freedom and Stoicism following Foucault, but I shall restrict myself to two brief notes. The first concerns Bernard Stiegler, a philosopher best known for his work on “technics”: in other words, the acquisition and practice of skills (or “techniques”), their material and digital supports (“technology”), and their psychical, social, and institutional frameworks. Terms borrowed from Senecan Stoicism feature prominently in Stiegler’s transformation of Foucault’s “care of the self” into “therapeutics” of the capacity to “take care” (see especially Stiegler 2010).12 Second, Clifford Robinson explores Agamben’s remarks about a Stoic “providence-fate apparatus” in The Kingdom and the Glory (Agamben 2011). Agamben’s concept of an “apparatus” emerges from his critical reading of Foucault (Agamben 2009). Responding critically to Agamben, Robinson argues that “zones of indifference” in Stoic cosmology permit Seneca to elude (at least in part) the incapacitating effects of the emperor Claudius’s sovereign power (Robinson, Ch. 12).
4 Conclusion
In this short introduction, I have attempted just one way of synthesizing the meanings of French and Italian reception of Stoicism over the last century. I have chosen it because it creates the possibility of dialogue about big ideas between continental philosophy and not only modern Stoicism but also mainstream anglophone scholarship. The question of how these readings challenge and enrich interpretations of both ancient Stoic and modern continental philosophies is addressed by the contributors to this volume in a variety of provocative and creative ways. Their array of backgrounds and breadth of expertise enable them to illuminate a wide array of interchanges with Stoicism (see also the companion volume in this series, German Stoicisms: from Nietzsche to Sloterdijk [Lampe and Benjamin]). Still, much remains to be explored, and our hope is that this volume stands as a launch point for these future inquiries.
Notes
1 The digital epicenter of this movement is the Modern Stoicism website (https://modernstoicism.com) and the associated Facebook open group, which as of July 18, 2019, had 50,616 members.
2 As Janae Sholtz rightly suggests to me, this also disregards the complexity and diversity of human “nature.”
3 Robertson addresses this briefly (2013: 82–4); Long proposes modern Stoicism should creatively embrace ancient physics as “cosmic connectedness” (2018).
4 Alessandrelli and Ranocchia, in their edition, commentary, and Italian translation of columns 104–10 of Papyrus Herculanensis 1020, argue that Chrysippus is its most likely author (2017: 8–10).
5 Note that I am not claiming Pessoa knew Stoic theory in any detail. The reading I sketch here is deliberately charitable.
6 All translations in this chapter from French, Latin, and ancient Greek texts are my own, unless a published translation is cited.
7 Bréhier acknowledges several predecessors (1962: 2 n.3); cf. Bénatouïl 2017: 364).
8 See the scholarship cited by Bénatouïl and Sholtz in this volume. In an as-yet unpublished paper, which he informs me is destined to become the introduction to a new edition of Bréhier, Jean-Baptiste Gourinat critiques Bréhier’s influence on Deleuze’s understanding of Stoicism (2016).
9 To the best of my knowledge, no one has yet explored whether Lacan’s shifting claims about Stoic philosophy of language are philosophically interesting or can be related convincingly to the evidence.
10 Deleuze calls them “comprehensive representations,” which is simply a matter of translation conventions. What anglophone scholars typically call an “impression,” French scholars usually call a représentation (Greek phantasia); and while anglophone scholars often transliterate ancient Greek katalēptikē, French scholars translate it compréhensive.
11 Even Inwood 2005: 322–52, despite his subtle attention to controversies in Foucauldian interpretation (esp. 329–32), focuses on claims that are tangential to Foucault’s real concerns.
12 I am preparing a publication on Stiegler, Foucault, and Seneca.
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