CLAS 196/PHIL 196
Stoicism
Prof. Bailly

Taken largely from Sellars Stoicism.

• Stoic 'Physics':
• The word physis is a Greek word, generally translated as "nature."
  
• Like Latin-derived 'nature,' Greek 'physics' is from a word that refers to living being: nat- refers to birth and phys- refers to growth
• They used it for theories about the physical world, how it came to be and how it works
  
• Thus "physics" is "natural science" and more.
  
• In Stoic texts, it means all of the following:
• necessity/fate
• the principle which creates/maintains/forms each thing
• 'our individual natures are all parts of universal nature' (D.L. LIII our numbering)
  
• the principle which creates/maintains/forms the entire world
• 'the heaven is the most remote circumference of the world, in which all the Divine Nature is situated.' (DL LXX our numbering)
• D. L. LXXIII. 'And his nature they define to be, that which keeps the world together, and sometimes that which produces the things upon the earth. And nature is a habit which derives its movements from itself, perfecting and holding together all that arises out of it, according to the principles of production, in certain definite periods, and doing the same as the things from which it is separated. And it has for its object, suitableness and pleasure, as is plain from its having created man.'
  
• fiery pneuma, creative fire, which moves and generates itself
• D.L. LXXXIV. 'Another of their doctrines is that nature is an artificial fire tending by a regular road to production, which is a fiery kind of breath proceeding according to art.'
• By "artificial fire" is meant "a fire that is an artificer, a creator." It does NOT mean "a fake fire."
  
• god
• providence
• reason
• God, according to Stoics, is the paradigm of rationality.
• And God is the structure of the world, its nature: so the whole world is itself rational.
  
• If there is something in the world which human reason, strength, and power are incapable of producing, that which produces it must be better than man. But the heavens and everything which display unceasing regularity cannot be produced by man. Therefore that by which those things are produced is better than man. And what name rather than God would you give to this? (Cicero de Natura Deorum ii.16)
• intelligent designer
  
• The supreme category of Stoic Ontology is 'something'
• 'Something' divides into;
• Existents
• corporeal
• they act and are acted upon
• Plato's Sophist also offers a definition of existence as the capacity to act or be acted upon
• Perhaps this should replace 'body' as the mark of existence: whatever can act or be acted upon is a body
  
• they have spatial and temporal locations and extensions
• All bodies exist
• soul, you, me, anything you say, etc.
• they have qualities
• a further question is what status those qualities have. They are not subsistents, for they are spatial.
  
• Subsistents
• incorporeal
• Void: has 3 dimensions
• Lekta
• Space/place: the 3 dimensional volume occupied by a body is its place: can void and place coexist in the same place? seems not.
• Time
• Lekta ('sayables')
• to be, they must be 'something'
• sometimes, they are said to merely 'subsist,' while at other times, in contrast to simply subsisting, they 'belong'
• the past and future subsist
• the present also 'belongs'
• why doesn't the past belong to the bodies in the past? not sure. Perhaps only the present exists and everything in the past subsists without belonging? Not sure here. Have to read thru L&S again.
  
• What of other things?
• Platonic Ideas, for example, do not exist or subsist
• These are entities for Plato, but the Stoics reject them: so what are they to Stoics?
  
• What is their status?
• They seem to be 'somethings'
• Hallucinations?
• Stoics labelled these things 'not-somethings' (Simplicius' commentary on Aristotle's Categories 105, 9-11)
• They simply have no place in Stoic ontology
• we can think about them, talk about them, argue about them, but that doesn't make them exist
• perhaps stoics think the following:
  
• these not-somethings don't ever "belong" to anything that exists
• they can of course be expressed by the bodily thing that is speech or thought (we're doing that now), but they cannot belong to it
  
• Particulars vs. Universals
• Particulars are specific things
• Universals are things that apply to more than one thing
• For instance, "human" applies to every human, and 'red' applies to every red.
• This here color of my shirt or this here human is a particular, but 'human' and 'red' more generally are universals
• Stoics denied that there are universal entities
  
• Chrysippus said that our ordinary language fools us into thinking that there are universals
• When we say "Humans are rational," we should, in more fully accurate well-regimented logical speech, say "This human is rational" or "Every single particular human is (potentially? normally?) rational" or "If a thing is human, it is rational"
• In other words, there is no 'humanity' aside from individual humans
• this applies to all things that might have universals
  
• Chrysippus tried to show that universals, such as"the human," have no referent: they fail to refer to something
• They can't refer to a particular, because it is not universal
• So maybe they refer to 'someone' a non-specific individual human
• Then Chrysippus constructed the 'no-one' argument:
• Assume that the human refers to a non-specific individual human, 'someone'
• If any given thing is in Athens, it is not in Megara
• things can't be in two places, can they?
• The universal 'human' refers to someone.
• Someone is in Athens.
• Therefore the universal 'human' is in Athens
• Therefore, "the human" is not in Megara
• Which is preposterous, because someone actually is in Megara.
  
• The way to get out of Chrysippus' argument is to deny that "the human" refers to "someone," but that may seem wrong to people who believe in universals: why can't it refer to whatever it is that qualifies humans to belong to the set of all humans?
  
• note that a "universal" is not just a group of individuals: it is the type of thing that an individual is: Stoics deny that such types exist as entities
  
• So how does Chrysippus account for qualities of any kind shared by more than one 'something'?
• It seems natural to say that "redness" exists, independent of any particular red thing.
• Rather than saying that, Chrysippus calls shared qualities "common qualities"
• These shared qualities do not exist apart from the individuals of which they are qualities, but nonetheless more than one individual has them
  
• Chrysippus also talks of "peculiar qualities"
• These are the qualities that make an individual different from other individuals
• "When we talk about the concept of 'human being' or 'man' all we are really talking about is a mental construction that we have created in order to describe a certain physical quality of being 'commonly qualified' that exists in a number of different particular individuals (see e.g. DL 7.61)." (Sellars, P. 86)
• what about qualities that existed for a time, but then never ever anywhere again? assuming that there are such things (e.g. dinosaurs?), how can we correctly talk about them now even though they no longer belong to any existents? Maybe this is not a problem?
  
• but it seems that Stoics along with everyone else used universals: Stoic lekta (assertibles and propositions) contain universals.
  
• Not sure what more to say
• Puzzles and problems like this arise, but mostly we wind up speculating, because of the tattered state of stoic texts
• We can spin theories and try to come up with coherent systems, but it's hard to be sure whether they were held by any particular stoic.
  
• Bodies and existence:
• A body is something that can act or be acted upon: those are the two principles of bodies.
  
• That seems like two things: a capacity to act and a capacity to be acted upon
• We might call it "the active" and "the passive"
• Stoics also called them "God" and "Matter"
  
• Plato's Sophist, the Early Academy, or Heraclitus seem like good places to look for the origins of these ideas
• Zeno, the first stoic, apparently identified the active with fire
• Chrysippus replaced fire with "breath" (pneuma)
• So, how do the stoics cash out these two things, the active and the passive?
• Texts don't make it absolutely clear, but we can explore what might work for them.
  
• Since there are two things here, the active and the passive, we might ask if both are bodies: are the stoics dualists about bodies?
  
• Cicero, at Academica 1.39 says that a body is anything that can act OR anything that can be acted upon.
• But other sources think that the Stoics were monists (i.e. they had a conception of a single unified material reality)
• If they are strict monists, then the distinction between active and passive may be a purely conceptual distinction
  
• A distinction that can only be made by thinking, never actually.
• much like the distinction between a convex curve and a concave one: a real curve is always both convex and concave, but we can, in our minds, think about only the concavity aspect.
  
• The monistic explanation is advantageous in its fit with other Stoic ideas:
• There is no need for anything outside of nature to explain the world and individual things in it
• The same things can act and be passive, at different times or relative to different actors and materials
• or maybe "acting" and "being acted upon" are just a matter of perspective, like the concave/convex distinction.
  
• If we want them to be monists, we still need to ask about the active and the passive: what are they? what's their relation?
• Also, what is their status? If we say that they exist 'only conceptually,' then they don't really exist: do they subsist? as lekta (sayables).
• could they always exist in body as one single thing (monism?) but are conceptually divisible into two things (bodies can be conceptually divided as much as you like)?
  
• Maybe they can be monists another way:
• Stoics spoke of three kinds of mixture:
• Juxtaposition: like salt and sugar mixture or a beans and wheat grains mixture: thoroughly mixed, but separable: you could take every bit of salt and every bit of sugar (beans/wheat) and separate them again after mixing is the idea.
• Fusion: like cooking: mix flour, eggs, milk, and salt to make popovers: you could never separate popovers back into flour, eggs, milk, and salt
• Blending: every part of the mixture contains all of the original ingredients, and yet they keep their peculiar qualities and could, in theory, be separated: like the mixture of wine and water, or of heat and water.
• If the world is a total blending, then we are back at a now monistic universe, but we also preserve the distinctness of the two principles.
• It helps explain the strange position that we find in some Stoics that two bodies can be in the same place.
• Thus the active is not just present like little tiny active grains amongst other passive grains
• It is everywhere.
• It is called pneuma, and the whole world has pneumatic properties.
• Stoics also had a four-element theory of the world: that it is made up of earth, air, fire, and water. It is unclear whether pneuma is a fifth element or fire.
• Pneuma
• There are three main conditions of pneuma
• mere cohesion: the force that makes any object one object distinct from others.
• nature: the force that makes something alive
• soul: the force that makes animals alive
• The difference is one of "tension": a better way to put it is that it is a difference of organizational complexity.
• It is a difference of degree, not one of kind.
• And so, it is possible to see Stoic physics as being able to countenance an evolutionary account of life's development in terms of increasing organizational complexity along a continuum.
• And yet, the Stoics also look quite religious
• They are pantheists: god is everywhere
• God is the providential ruling force in nature
• But this god is a philosophical one, based on argument, a thing (full) of thought, not simply myth or faith
• So, if God is the active principle, the pneuma, is God in a rock?
• Apparently
• but god can be more present here than there: god is less present in a rock than in you, because god tracks organizational complexity, and you are much more complex than a rock
  
• God simply is nature, or the active force within nature