The Stoic Reality: An Interview With Vanessa de Harven
Examining the Coherence and Unity of Stoicism’s Core Ideas
I recently had the pleasure to speak at length with Vanessa de Harven, Associate Professor at the University of Massachusetts, whose work in Stoic metaphysics is overturning assumptions about how the school conceptualised reality.
Our received understanding of Stoic ontology — theory of reality — is that it was cobbled together through various defences against attacks from opposing philosophies. Vanessa convincingly argues that this perception is incorrect. Her work reveals just how innovative the Stoics were in their approach to conceptualising the Cosmos in purely physicalist terms. She reveals Stoic ontology to be complex, but coherent and unified.
Vanessa has a book forthcoming, titled The Unity of Stoic Metaphysics: Everything is Something. This conversation covers many of the themes explored in the book and her previous work in the area of Stoic ontology.
Steven Gambardella: The most salient innovation with the Stoics’ understanding of reality is placing “something” over “existent” as the highest genus of reality. Can you explain why they did that?
Vanessa de Harven: Yeah. There is an answer to that question. There might be a lot of questions of that sort, questions starting with, “why did they do that?” That we might not be in a position to answer, but I think in this case we can. And I think the answer is Plato’s Sophist [Plato’s dialogue that explores both sophism and the nature of reality].
In the Sophist, there’s this famous battle of gods and giants, where the Gods are the Friends of the Forms, and the Giants are the Sons of the Earth. And even before that, there’s, of course, the battle with Parmenides [a Presocratic philosopher] over non-being. And in that whole segment of the dialogue “something” and “being” are considered inseparable. If something is something, then it’s a being, and if it’s a being, it is something.
And this option to separate “something” from “being” is conspicuously absent in the dialogue. And so I think that the Stoics are, in fact, responding to the Sophist, which is not to say that they’re only responding to the Sophist or only responding to Plato or anything like that. But I think that this move to make Something the highest genus is a reaction to Plato’s Sophist, and that that’s their inspiration for making that move.
SG: I guess that people would make the accusation that it’s a pragmatic move to invent a category of “something” to explain away anything immaterial, and that’s not a theory that you buy into.
VdH: No, I hate that whole way of thinking. I mean, one of the things I take myself to be doing in the [forthcoming] book is trying to overturn this view of the Stoics as making all of their moves defensively in response to problems.
So in the Sophist, for example, the hypothetically civilized giants are, as you say, confronted with incorporeals, things like the virtues. They fold immediately. The Stoics are not doing that. I mean, with respect to the virtues and all the other qualities in general, they’re turning those into bodies. But they’re also introducing other things that are incorporeal, things like place and time and void, and “lekta”. Do you know what the lekta are?
SG: The “sayables”, right? [Lekta or “sayables”, are considered the content or propositional meanings that our words and sentences convey, rather than either the physical sounds or written marks that constitute the words or the thoughts we are having.]
VdH: Yeah, sayables. Exactly. So, in general, I think this idea that the Stoics are backing their way into their theories is maybe just a function of the fact that our sources are so scant and that the sources are hostile. And so I think people assume that they must be doing something wrong. And I think it’s a feature of that whole scholarship also that people think that they must be pursuing a “hylomorphic” schema — according to which everything is a combination of matter and [immaterial] form.
That whole vision of them, I think, is more a function of the biases of the scholars than it is something that you really find the Stoics doing.
SG: So where did we get that from? Did we get that from the hostile texts, like Sextus Empiricus? Because there’s a number of texts that were accusing the Stoics of being just not really making much sense in what they were saying, right?
VdH: Yeah. Sextus, Plotinus, Plutarch are especially hostile, many of the sources. But I also think it’s the scholars. I think the scholars have been somewhat trapped by Aristotle and Plato. Maybe it’s just a lack of imagination or something, but I think that the scholars themselves have been unable to see past what has become the dominant ancient story, which is that body is a combination of matter and form [hylomorphism]. And if you just remove that presupposition, it seems to me that everything really does fall into place.
SG: Okay, yes. We’re going to unpack that over the next few questions or so. The other thing I think that might be forming a bias is that Stoicism is somewhat theological as well. There’s a speculative cosmology at work explaining that the world is destroyed and reborn in cycles and God and the world are one.
I don’t know how much that has to play in the biases that people form against the Stoics. Religious people might say, “This is the way the world is”, and if you challenge that they’re on the backfoot from that point onwards. Maybe that has informed the bias that the Stoic ontology is somehow defensive. I don’t know. But it leads to the question, how theological is their theory of reality?
VdH: I wouldn’t want to deny that it’s theological. But I, for example, don’t spend a lot of time thinking about their theology.
So it’s absolutely true that God, for the Stoics, is one of the two principles. There are two fundamental bodies — the divine active logos, that’s one of them, and the passive matter, hylē, that’s the other one.
They blend together and completely co-extend. And then my vision of it is that God just starts doing, maybe moving itself, bringing the matter along with it. And so there’s no need [for an external force]. For example, in Plato you’ve got the demiurge — the [divine] craftsman — who is external to the world.
Maybe this is the pragmatic element of the Stoics, now that you mention it, right? It’s that they’re just putting the agent and the reason directly in the world and making one of the two fundamental bodies itself be both rational and divine.
SG: You describe the Stoics as non-reductive physicalists. Can you explain what you mean by that?
VdH: They’re committed to bodies as the only things that exist, but in so far as they count the incorporeals — place, void, time, and the sayables — as Something they’re not eliminating or even reducing those things to body. So I think that’s physicalism.
Insofar as they’re committed to bodies as what exists, that’s their corporealism. And then physicalism, I think, comes from making everything else that is not a body depend on body for its subsistence. And that’s going to include certainly the corporealism.
SG: Okay. So is that to say that there’s an “emergent complexity” to existence, or existences?
VdH: I think it’s fine to say that. I think that there’s a lot of language from the philosophy of mind that is useful here. Sometimes we speak of mental states and the mind as emerging from the brain and things like that. So yes, I think that is this idea that from there being bodies as they are in motion and all that, come the incorporeals.
For example, time is defined as the extension of the world’s motion. So if there were no world and the world were not in motion, there would not be time. But time is not nothing but the world in motion.
Sometimes I use this image of the flow of traffic as a way of capturing this. If you think about the flow of traffic, sometimes it’s smooth, sometimes it’s stop and go, sometimes it’s fast, sometimes it’s slow. That flow of traffic depends on the cars, but it’s not nothing but the cars. That’s what I have in mind for “non-reductive physicalism.”
Vanessa de Harven gives a talk at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, UNAM) on the Stoic Categories.
SG: Should we talk in terms of bodies or body? Is it not singular? There is body, right?
VdH: Well, I think you can do both. I think both are apt. I think there are two fundamental bodies, in which case you want to use a count noun and call them “bodies.”
But the nature of body is such that it is continuous. And so in that respect, you very much do want to use a mass term like “body.” So also there is only the one Cosmos. And so in that respect, we could say there’s only one body.
But of course, there’s you and me and the pen and all that. And those are bodies. So one of the things I do have to say in the book is that both of these locutions are apt. You can speak of body in “mass” terms, and you can also speak of bodies. And every body that there is, just in so far as it is solid three-dimensional extension, is going to be “massy”, so to speak.
SG: You mentioned “subsistence” earlier. Do you mind explaining subsistence, your take on it?
VdH: There’s controversy about “subsistence” as a translation of “hypostasis.” There’s this other verb hyparchein. But basically, I think that “subsistence” is the way incorporeals are being Something. The Stoics also have a tripartite ontology where they count what is neither corporeal nor incorporeal
Subsistence just is the dependent way of being Something, namely dependent on some underlying body, like in the flow of traffic way, if we’re talking about incorporeals, and in a different way, if we’re talking about what is neither corporeal nor incorporeal.
SG: So just to carry on this track, what’s the distinction between subsistence according to body and subsistence according to thought?
VdH: Subsistence according to body is the way that incorporeals are Something, and that is a lack, or a privation, of the underlying body in the flow-of-traffic way. And then subsistence according to thought is the mode of being for what is neither corporeal nor incorporeal. And those things don’t correspond to the underlying cars. Those are just pure products of thought, things that we invent. But this isn’t, I think, about making sure that everything you think has an intentional object. I think it’s about the construction of social reality, as one might put it. I think that there are things that are products of thought, things like limits of the continuum, like minutes and seconds, right?
So body as well as place space and time, those are continua for the Stoics. And that means that they’re completely homogeneous. They have no internal parts or divisions. And so if we want to carve up time, for example, with minutes and seconds and hours and whatever else, those are things that we’re inventing and conventions that we’re agreeing to use. And so likewise, things like geometrical entities — there’s no perfect triangle in the world. A perfect triangle is something that we make up or construct. And similarly, creatures of fiction, like centaurs and giants.
SG: What’s an example of subsistence according to body?
VdH: All of the incorporeals, place, time, the lekta, flow of traffic, will subsist on that model. And that’s where you have a body. And when you subtract the body, what’s left over is the incorporeal. So the place of my bottle [holds up bottle] is this size because the bottle is this size. And so the place that subsists according to this bottle, is body-less. It’s lacking the body. It’s the place that this thing occupies minus the thing.
SG: Right. I see. But with lekta, isn’t the perfect triangle or the centaur lekta?
VdH: No, they’re going to be something else. We might bring those into being by using lekta, by saying things. We might define the triangle a certain way, or we might describe a centaur. We might draw it as well. It need not be in words, but presumably we do write stories about them, and in that way, give “life” to them.
So we do use the lekta to create those things, but they are not themselves lekta. So I think that the lekta depend for their subsistence on the impression, and that’s the underlying body, because, of course, the soul for the Stoics is also a body, and so are your mental states.
SG: Okay. So just drawing this out a little bit, and this is where I’m going to be a devil’s advocate — how does the idea of subsistence explain phenomenological experience? How does it explain qualia? How does it explain the very structure of thinking?
VdH: I don’t think it does. Things like qualia will be like Stoic concepts, ennoēmata. Those are not Somethings. Those are not publicly available entities.
I think whatever explanation there is for things like qualia and phenomenology, all of that’s going to be happening at the corporeal level. And I don’t think they’ll have any explanation for why it’s like this to see red [picks up a red object].
I don’t think they’re in the business of explaining that thing. But if you want to talk about what it is to have a mental state of seeing red, that’s something that they’ll explain in terms of what we call the Categories [see the video above where Vanessa gives a fuller explanation of Stoic Categories].
SG: Right. I’m going to double down on this a little bit. There’s a world with no perfect triangle, right? We understand triangles as being related by resemblance, right?
VdH: According to the Stoics?
SG: Yes. There’s no triangle “Form” [in the Platonic sense]. So instead, when I see a triangle, I recognize it as a triangle because someone pointed at a triangle and told me what a triangle is, what a triangle looks like. But the similarity per se at work in my recognition of the triangle has no explanation through this framework, right? Because similarity is a phenomenal engagement.
VdH: I think there is real similarity in the world. I wouldn’t want to say that similarity is merely a phenomenal engagement. If we’re drawing, say, two triangles here and they’re similar, those are corporeal triangles. They’re not perfect triangles. And so, similarity relations, I think, hold between things that are bodies, or maybe even you could have similar places. They might be similarly shaped or something like that.
In the Categories, for example, they have the substrate, which is the stuff, your corpulence, if you will, the stuff that you’re made of. But then they have the “uniquely qualified individual” [a term Stoics use for individual entities].
SG: Right…
VdH: This is your “Steve-ness”, I guess. And then they also have the “commonly qualified individual”. So the Stoics do identify all humans as being commonly qualified as human without taking them to have anything in common in any Platonic or Aristotelian way. And so there is a similarity there without it being a phenomenological matter.
SG: But is there a danger of this all collapsing into just nominalism?
VdH: Yes. I think that that’s a benefit. A feature, not a bug.
SG: Can you explain why you think it’s a feature?
VdH: Well, because they’re quite actively resisting Plato’s Forms. There’s this sophism called the “Not Someone Sophism”, whereby they reject the existence of things like Plato’s Forms because they’re rejecting the existence or the subsistence of anything that can be in two places at once. So they are committed to an ontology of objective particulars, and that will be true for bodies as much as for things that subsist.
SG: Does that make the Stoics nominalists?
VdH: I wouldn’t want to call them nominalists in so far as I don’t necessarily think of them as doing something inherently linguistic in the way that you get in Medieval [philosophy]. But they’re certainly more nominalists than they are realists about things like universals.
SG: You’re explaining to me that the triangles are objectively similar, right? Yeah. But I guess I’m really trying to get my head around what explains the commonality of things that are similar. Universals make life possible. You and I can hold a conversation just through the commonality that universals grant us. But what explains the commonality of universals? I know they would never use that language, but what explains the commonality of universals? What explains the commonality of those things in Stoic ontology?
VdH: The resemblance nominalist is not going to accept your challenge. If we just do basic nominalism, the resemblance nominalist is going to resist the idea, because in putting it that way, especially, what you are looking for is some entity that they have in common or by reference to which they are judged to be similar. But of course, that’s the very thing that they’re rejecting.
SG: Yeah, it’s a “one plus one equals three” thing, isn’t it? I’m seeing a triangle-ness of flat objects with three sides.
VdH: Yeah, but that’s precisely the thing that they reject, right? This thing has a shape, and this thing has a shape, they’re pretty similar. They’re definitely not exactly alike. There is, of course, qualitative similarity, although never for the Stoics is anything qualitatively identical to another.
SG: Right. Of course.
VdH: So they’re just going to send you away with your demand for a thing [an essence] triangles have in common.
SG: Okay, I’ll accept they’re sending me away. I guess there’s also somewhat of a relationship to Wittgenstein’s family resemblance theory. I think maybe that plays a role here. But also that itself could be very problematic. I mean, what’s the fundamental commonality that allows you to put things together? I don’t know. I don’t think we’re going to solve this.
VdH: I think the family resemblance notion is apt. I think [the Stoics] would welcome that. There is in their discussion of qualities and intrinsic suchness, some overlap with their discussion of concepts.
If somebody, maybe like you are, is seeking a level of precision that a notion like family resemblance is not going to deliver, I think at that juncture, they’re going to say, “Okay, you can delineate by your concepts and give it those boundaries if you want to. But that’s still going to be a function of us imposing those rigid boundaries.”
I think this is all part and parcel of the rejection of not just Plato’s forms, but also Aristotle’s — although it’s an open question to what extent they were responding to Aristotle. But I think the tidiness that motivates the realist about universals is something that they’re not moved by, I think.
SG: Yes, that’s a really interesting way of looking at it. Let’s go back to the fundamental stuff we spoke about before. How does the divine Logos relate to Stoic ontology? What’s its ontological character?
VdH: Well, they are 100% realists about their two principles. I work both in terms of the two ontological criteria and this grounding story, the metaphysical story about what is fundamental. So if we’re asking a question in terms of ontological criteria, the answer is going to be, well, the two archai [principles], they exist.
They’re making the two principles, Logos and Hylē, be fundamental bodies. And so all they are is masses. One of them is divine and rational in its nature, and the other is passive, and slack, and dumb in its nature. Those are the two eternal and ungenerated bodies that there are.
SG: How do they skirt around dualism there? Mass is mass, right? But the logos is imbued in it, correct?
VdH: No. I think that’s part of the hylomorphic way of thinking. I think that if by dualism, you mean something like two things of different ontological order, like one thing being material and the other thing being immaterial, that is not what the Stoics mean. But to the extent that they recognize two fundamental bodies, and those are two and not one, that is a form of dualism. There are two of them.
SG: The Logos does not comprise of body or matter, right?
VdH: It is a body. It just is a body. One of the two bodies that they posit is a rational body.
SG: Okay. So they’re so fundamentally mixed as to be inseparable, right?
VdH: Also, no. They are always mixed together, but I want to deny that what makes Logos a body is that it is mixed with matter. I want to deny that what makes matter a body is that it is enformed by Logos. They’re both bodies in their own right. And even though they are always, as a matter of fact, blended, the nature of blending is such that two blended bodies are always in principle independent and separable. Even if as a matter of fact, they never will be separate.
SG: Aren’t the later Stoics, like Epictetus, giving God agency that’s distinct from the playing being out of bodies.
VdH: Okay. Yeah. I guess this is where I’ll show myself not to know anything about Stoic ethics or really Epictetus for that matter. So we would have to look at an example to say, but there doesn’t seem to me to be any problem with thinking of God as providential and all those things while being immanent and this fundamental body. Those all seem to me to be compatible.
SG: So because we live in a providential Cosmos, there’s still agency there, right?
VdH: Yeah, absolutely. It’s just that it’s all from the inside out. It’s all so immanent. So I think the agency, the rationality, it’s all there. It’s just happening from the inside.
Thank you for reading. If you’re interested to learn more, you can see Vanessa’s Philpaper page here.
Somehow, this dialogue feels as if we might need Steven Nadler to jump in and bring his understanding of Spinoza to the picture and clarify the parsing of the concepts that bodies, shapes, forms add to the confusion of how it all work’s metaphysically speaking — to breathe life into The Stoics eudaemonic comprehension of living a good life that uses Gods as an archetype to propel us onwards like Marcus Aurelius says — “Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars and see yourself running with them.”……ie; The Stoic’s are casting the net that includes nuances in meaning such as Reason is the divine spark in order for humans to enter the domain of Godliness to find out at the core of our being that we are ‘Infinite Potential’ therefore we can try to reach the unreachable by our attitudinal stance in relation with this “Divine Spark” that allows for the use of Gods to unravel this infinite potential that dwells inside of us — waiting to be invoked by — Calling out to the Gods.