And, another more outrageous example: Crates occasionally made love in public with his wife Hipparchia. At the time, such behaviour was profoundly shocking, as it would be today. But he was acting in accordance with what might be termed ‘cosmic ethics’: the idea that morality and the art of living should borrow their principles from the harmonic law which regulates the entire cosmos. This rather extreme example suggests how theoria was for the Stoics a discipline to acquire, given that its practical consequences could be quite risky!
Cicero explains this cast of mind lucidly when summarising Stoic thought in another of his works, On Moral Ends:
The starting-point for anyone who is to live in accordance with nature is the universe as a whole and its governance. Moreover, one cannot make correct judgements about good and evil unless one understands the whole system of nature, and even of the life of the gods, not know whether or not human nature is in harmony with that of the universe. Similarly, those ancient precepts of the wise that bid us to ‘respect the right moment’, to ‘follow God’, to ‘know thyself ’, and ‘do nothing to excess’ cannot be grasped in their full force (which is immense) without a knowledge of physics. This science alone can reveal to us the power of nature to foster justice, and preserve friendship and other bonds of affection. (
III
, 73)
In which respect, according to Cicero, nature is ‘the best of all governments’. You may consider how very different this antique vision of morality and politics is to what we believe today in our democracies, in which it is the will of men and not the natural order that must prevail. Thus we have adopted the principle of the majority to elect our representatives or make our laws. Conversely, we often doubt whether nature is even intrinsically ‘good’: when she is not confirming our worst suspicions with a hurricane or a tsunami, nature has become for us a neutral substance, morally indifferent, neither good nor bad.
For the Ancients, not only was nature before all else good, but in no sense was a majority of humans called upon to decide between good and evil, between just and unjust, because the criteria which enabled those distinctions all stemmed from the natural order, which was both external to and superior to men. Broadly speaking, the good was what was in accord with the cosmic order, whether one willed it or not, and what was bad was what ran contrary to this order, whether one liked it or not. The essential thing was to act, situation-by-situation, moment-by-moment, in accordance with the harmonious order of things, so as to find our proper place, which each of us was assigned within the Universal.
If you want to compare this conception of morality to something familiar and current in our society, think of ecology. For ecologists – and in this sense their ideas are akin to aspects of ancient Greek thought, without their necessarily realising it – nature forms a harmonious totality which it is in our interest to respect and even to imitate. In this sense the ecologists’ conception of the ‘biosphere’, or of ‘ecosystems’, is close in spirit to that of the cosmos. In the words of the German philosopher Hans Jonas, a great theorist of contemporary ecology, ‘the ends of man are at home in nature’. In other words, the objectives to which we ought to subscribe on the ethical plane are already inscribed, as the Stoics believed, in the natural order itself, so that our duty – the moral imperative – is not cut off from being, from nature as such.
As Chrysippus said, more than two thousand years before Hans Jonas, ‘there is no other or more appropriate means of arriving at a definition of good or evil things, virtue or happiness, than to take our bearings from common nature and the governance of the universe’, a proposition which Cicero in turn related in these terms: ‘As for man, he was born to contemplate [theorein] and imitate the divine world … The world has virtue, and is also wise, and is consequently a Deity.’ (On the Nature of the Gods II, 14).
Is this, then, the last word of philosophy? Does it reach its limits, in the realm of theory, by offering ‘a vision of the world’, from which moral principles are then deduced and in agreement with which humans should act? Not in the slightest! For we are still only on the threshold of the quest for salvation, of that attempt to raise ourselves to the level of true wisdom by abolishing all fears originating in human mortality, in time’s passage, in death itself. It is only now, therefore, on the basis of a theory and a praxis (the translation of an idea into action; the practical side of an art or science, as distinct from its theoretical side) that we have just outlined, that Stoic philosophy approaches its true destination.
From Love of Wisdom to the Practice of Wisdom
Why bother with a theoria, or even an ethics? What is the point, after all, in taking all this trouble to contemplate the order of the universe, to grasp the innermost essence of being? Why try so doggedly to adjust ourselves to the world? No one is obliged to be a philosopher … And yet it is here that we touch on the deepest question of all, the ultimate end of all philosophy: the question of salvation.
As with all philosophies, there is for the Stoics a realm ‘beyond’ morality. To use philosophers’ jargon, this is what is termed ‘soteriology’, from the Greek soterios which means, quite simply, ‘salvation’. As I have already suggested, this presents itself in relation to the fact of death, which leads us, sooner or later, to wonder about the irreversible nature of time and, consequently, about the best use we can make of it. Even if all humans do not become philosophers, all of us are one day or another affected by philosophical questions. As I have suggested, philosophy, unlike the great religions, promises to help us to ‘save’ ourselves, to conquer our fears, not through an Other, a God, but through our own strength and the use of our reason.
As the philosopher Hannah Arendt noted in Between Past and Future (1961), the Ancients, even before the birth of philosophy, traditionally found two ways of taking up the challenge of the inescapable fact of human mortality; two strategies, if you like, of attempting to outflank death, or at least, of outflanking the fear of death.
The first, quite naturally, resides in the simple fact of procreation: by having children, humans assure their ‘continuity’: becoming in a sense a part of the eternal cycle of nature, of a universe of things that can never die. The proof lies in the fact that our children resemble us physic ally as well as mentally. They carry forwards, through time, something of us. The drawback, of course, is that this way of accessing eternity really only benefits the species: if the latter appears to be potentially immortal as a result, the individual on the other hand is born, matures and dies. So, by aiming at self-perpetuation through the means of reproduction, not only does the individual human fall short, he fails to rise above the condition of the rest of brute creation. To put it plainly: however many children I have, it will not prevent me from dying, nor, worse still, from seeing them die before me. Admittedly, I will do my bit to ensure the survival of the species, but in no sense will I save the individual, the person. There is therefore no true salvation by means of procreation.
The second strategy was rather more elaborate: it consisted of performing heroic and glorious deeds to become the subject of an epic narrative, the written trace having as its principal virtue the conquest of transitory time. One might say that works of history – and in ancient Greece there already flourished some of the greatest historians, such as Thucydides and Herodotus – by recording the exceptional deeds accomplished by certain men, saved them from the oblivion which threatens everything that does not belong to the realm of nature.