Thus, the divine nature of the world is both immanent and transcendent. Again, I have used these philosophical terms because they will be useful to us later. Something that is immanent can be found nowhere else other than in this world. We say it is transcendent when the contrary applies. In this sense, the Christian God is transcendent in relation to the world, whereas the divine according to the Stoics, which is not to be located in some ‘beyond’ – being none other than the harmonious structure, cosmic or cosmetic, of the world as it is – is wholly immanent. Which does not prevent Stoic divinity from being defined equally as ‘transcendent’: not in relation to the world, of course, but in relation to man, given that it is radically superior and exterior to him. Men may discover it – with amazement – but in no sense do they invent it or produce it.
Chrysippus, the student of Zeno who succeeded Cleanthes as the third head of the Stoic school notes: ‘Celestial things and those whose order is unchanging cannot be made by men.’ These words are reported by Cicero, who adds in his commentary on the thought of the early Stoics:
Wherefore the universe must be wise, and nature which holds all things in its embrace must excel in the perfection of reason [Logos]; and therefore the universe must be a God, and all the force of the universe must be held together by nature, which is divine. (On the Nature of the Gods, II, 11, 29–30)
We can therefore say of the divine, according to the Stoics, that it represents ‘transcendence within immanence’; we can grasp the sense in which theoria is the contemplation of ‘divine things’ which, for all that they do not exist elsewhere than in the dimension of the real, are nonetheless entirely foreign to human activity.
I would like you to note again a difficult idea, to which we shall return in more detaiclass="underline" the theoria of the Stoics reveals that which is most perfect and most ‘real’ – most ‘divine’, in the Greek sense – in the universe. In effect, what is most real, most essential, in their account of the cosmos, is its ordonnance, its harmony – and not, for example, the fact that at certain moments it has its defects, such as monsters or natural disasters. In this respect, theoria, which shows us all of this and gives us the means to understand it, is at once an ‘ontology’ (a doctrine which defines the innermost structure or ‘essence’ of being), and also a theory of knowledge (the study of the intellectual means by which we arrive at this understanding of the world).
What is worth trying to understand, here, is that philosophical theoria cannot be reduced to a specific science such as biology, astronomy, physics or chemistry. For, although it has constant recourse to these sciences, it is neither experimental, nor limited to a particular branch or object of study. For example, it is not interested solely in what is alive (like biology), or in the heavenly bodies (like astronomy), nor is it solely interested in inanimate matter (like physics); on the other hand it tries to seize the essence or inner structure of the world as a totality. This is ambitious, no doubt, but philosophy is not a science among other sciences, and even if it does take account of scientific findings, its fundamental intent is not of a scientific order. What it searches for is a meaning in this world and a means of relating our existence to what surrounds us, rather than a solely objective (scientific) understanding.
However, let us leave this aspect of things to one side for the time being. We shall return to it later when we need to define more closely the difference between philoso phy and the exact sciences. I hope that you will sense already that this theoria – so different to our modern sciences and their supposedly ‘neutral’ principles, in that they describe what is and not what ought to be – must have practical implications in terms of morality, legality and politics. How could this description of the cosmos not have had implications for men who were asking themselves questions as to the best way of leading their lives?
Ethics: a System of Justice Based on Cosmic Order
What kind of ethics corresponds to the theoria that we have sketched so far? The answer is clear: one which encourages us to adjust and orientate ourselves to the cosmos, which for the Stoics was the watchword of all just actions, the very basis of all morals and all politics. For justice was, above all, adjustment – as a cabinetmaker shapes a piece of wood within a larger structure, such as a table – so our best efforts should be spent in striving to adjust ourselves to the harmonious and just natural order of things revealed to us by theoria. Knowledge is not entirely disinterested, as you see, because it opens directly onto ethics. Which is why the philosophical schools of antiquity, contrary to what happens today in schools and universities, placed less emphasis on speech than on actions, less on concepts than on the exercise of wisdom.
I will relate a brief anecdote so that you might fully understand the implications. Before Zeno founded the Stoic school, there was another school in Athens, from which the Stoics drew a great deal of their inspiration: that of the Cynics. Today the word ‘cynic’ implies something negative. To say that someone is ‘cynical’ is to say that he believes in nothing, acts without principles, doesn’t care about values, has no respect for others, and so on. In antiquity, in the third century before Christ, it was a very different business, and the Cynics were, in fact, the most exacting of moralists.
The word has an interesting origin, deriving directly from the Greek word for ‘dog’. What connection can there be between dogs and a school of philosophical wisdom? Here is the connection: the Cynics had a fundamental code of behaviour and strived to live according to nature, rather than according to artificial social conventions which they never stopped mocking. One of their favourite activities was needling the good citizens of Athens, in the streets and market squares, deriding their attitudes and beliefs – playing shock-the-bourgeois, as we might say today. Because of this behaviour they were frequently compared to those nasty little dogs who nip your ankles or start barking around your feet as if to deliberately annoy you.
It is also said that the Cynics – one of the most eminent of whom, Crates of Thebes, was Zeno’s teacher – forced their students to perform practical exercises, encouraging them to discount the opinions of others in order to focus on the essential business of living in harmony with the cosmic order. They were told, for example, to drag a dead fish attached to a piece of string across the town square. You can imagine how the unhappy man forced to carry out this prank immediately found himself the target of mockery and abuse. But it taught him a lesson or two! First, not to care for the opinions of others, or be deflected from pursuing what Cynic believers described as ‘conversion’: not conversion to a god, but to the cosmic reality from which human folly should never deflect us.