Stoics Essays - Hellenistic Philosophy, Philosophical Movements

Stoics The point of being independent and not needing things is so that your happiness will not be destroyed by some accident outside of your control or by the malice of other human beings. The more your happiness depends on anything someone else can destroy, the less freedom you have - you are vulnerable to threats. In late antiquity many people felt insecure; governments were tyrannical, there was a lot of illegal violence, people died suddenly of disease or poison or through witchcraft or the malice of the gods. According to Aristotle, happiness consists primarily in worthwhile activity, but it does have some need of the goods of fortune. 'The good is something of one's own, that cannot easily be taken from one' (E.N., I.5 , 1095 b25). The Stoics, wanted to find something that could not possibly be taken away. Yet they did not want to live 'like dogs'. The solution is this: The good is to live in accordance with reason, and the power to do this cannot be taken away. Our external circumst ances may be the result of accident or the malice of others, but whether we act rationally given the circumstances is up to us. As for physical things, it is in accordance with reason to use them when they are available and useful, but not to become attached to them so that their loss causes distress. Possessions do not make you vulnerable unless you become attached to them. To live in accordance with reason is the Stoic conception of the good for man. The Stoics seem to be aware of Aristotle, borrowing and changing his ideas. Tyranny, slavery, freedom were important concepts in Stoic thought (see Epictetus). Freedom is not poverty, it is being able to give up external possessions and external freedom without distress. According to the Stoics the essential human freedom is inward: the ability to give or withhold assent to representations (thoughts) that come before my mind - to assent or not to the representation that something is so, or that the act it represents is to be done, or that the state of affairs represented is a good or an evil. I can always withhold my assent to such a representation - that is a power that cannot be taken away. I cannot prevent the removal of my property, the loss of a limb, the sensation of pain; but I can withhold by assent from the mental representation of these things as evils. Someone living perfectly in accordance with reason would feel the pain and perhaps some psychological disturbance, but would remain tranquil at the centre. Equanimity is the ideal. Emotion, or at le ast undue emotion, is to be repressed. No one lives perfectly in accordance with reason: the 'wise man' is an ideal. The wise man is happy, i.e. is in possession of the good, no matter what happens to his possessions or body, because he would refuse to regard as really an evil anything but failure to act in accordance with reason. (The Stoic paradoxes - 'the wise man is happy on the rack', or in the bull of Phalaris: he feels the pain, and cries out, but knows all the time that this is not an evil.) When Demetrius the city-sacker came upon the philosopher Stibo emerging from the flames of his city in which his wife and children had just died, he asked 'Did you lose anything?' Answer: 'No, all I possessed I have with me': 'meaning by this', Seneca says (Letter 9), 'the qualities of a just, a good and an enlightened character, and indeed the very fact of not regarding as valuable anything that is capable of being taken away.' What does the wise man do when he is acting in accordance with reason? His actions aim at the same sorts of things as other people aim at, but he does ordinary things differently. According to the Stoics human beings all begin by seeking food, drink, and other things relating to self-preservation, but may come to make it a goal to seek these things 'in accordance with nature' or 'in accordance with reason'. This may become the over-riding goal (see Cicero, De Finibus, III.vi.21), so that we will endure the loss