Beautifully written and a succinct compilation of the history of Stoicism. Well done. Your conclusion at the end is spot on. Hadot refers to this as Cosmopolitanism - all humans are members of a single community.
1. He wrongly associates phusis with science, the later would be episteme.
2. He asserts that soul is not part of the world.
3. He introduces the alien concept of enlightenment.
4. He introduces the alien concept of non self.
5. He introduces non naturalist human exceptionalism
6. He takes a proof text from Hammond’s translation of Marcus 4.3 out of context to explicitly express mind body duality contra the physicalist monism of the Stoics.
<Consider that the mind, once it has abstracted itself and come to know its own defining power, has no contact with the movement of the bodily spirit, be that smooth or troubled>
This is Gill. It relates to the autonomy of reason and the faculty of assent and that desires and aversions are judgment. .
<Or will bodily things affect you? Reconsider that when the mind takes hold of itself and recognizes its own power, it no longer associates itself with the movements, rough or smooth of the breath; and finally think of what you have heard and assented to as regards pain and pleasure. >
And Gill's Notes.
<The third set of themes (4.3.6) seeks to counteract the power of ‘bodily things’, that is, ‘pain and pleasure’, and their corrupting influence on our ethical judgements. Marcus reminds himself of the capacity of the mind (dianoia) to recognize ‘its own power’, that is, to exercise ethical judgement independently of current sensations of pleasure and pain (‘movements, rough and smooth, of the breath’ (pneuma). For the psychological language used, see 2.2 and 5.26, also Introd., text to nn. 191–211; on the importance of exercising autonomy in the way we pass judgement on our sensations, especially before adding the judgement that something is good or bad, >
It is simply not about mind body duality, which is not a thing in Stoicism.
7. He then explicitly identifies the logos as immaterial, therefore non-existent for the Stoics.
8. He states the “The integrated self is a fiction in Stoicism. It doesn’t exist” which is in direct contradiction with the monistic psycho-physical holism of the Stoics.
9. He identifies the human soul as transcendent and unknowable, which is in direct conflict with the Stoic pneumatic model. The soul is an exhalation of the blood associated with breath. .
Thanks for your comments. There's some mixing up here of my suggested updates, that attempt to resolve problems in the Stoic ontology, and my interpretation of ancient Stoic thinking about various facets of our reality. On the latter I do believe that there is a duality underlying Stoic metaphysics which the ancient Stoics fail to account for. I have three questions: What makes the active principle active and the inactive principle inactive? And, if the logos rules and defines the interactions of everything, how is it of the cosmos? What's its ontologial status?
For something to exist it must have extension and resistance, to have body. In the absence of that any interaction with anything is impossible.
It is the same problem with Platonic and Cartesian dualism, how can something non-physical effect something physical?
"What makes the active principle active and the inactive principle inactive?"
They come as a set, completely co-dependent and co-existent
The active is that which forms,
The passive is that which is formed.
This is not quite right but is is informative.
A shape has to be a shape in something and any something has to have some of kind of shape
That which is bound and that which binds, you can't have one without the other.
"And, if the logos rules and defines the interactions of everything, how is it of the cosmos?"
The cosmos is made of it.
The logos is the divine creative fire, identified with Zeus, which interacts with itself and condenses to form the various elements which are phase states.
The logos remains in all things as heat, notably as mixture of air and fire, as pneuma, the vehicle of logos, pneuma, breath, physical, is the "soul of Zeus" the "world soul" which shapes and forms everything there is.
It is a substance and a force: a body, corporeal, as the the soul of humans, pneuma, again breath, a vaporous exhalation of the blood generated in the heart that pervades the body as tensional force through the arterial blood network, providing feedback from the periphery to the center, .. analogous to the nervous system., It all works through vibration in a physical medium.
*******
Diogenes Laertius.
136. God is one and the same with Reason (Logos), Fate, and Zeus; he is also called by many other names.
In the beginning he was by himself (as divine fire) ; he transformed the whole of substance through air into water, and just as in animal generation the seed has a moist vehicle, so in cosmic moisture God, who is the seminal reason (logos) of the universe, remains behind in the moisture as such an agent, adapting matter to himself with a view to the next stage of creation.
137. The four elements together constitute unqualified substance or matter. Fire is the hot element, water the moist, air the cold, earth the dry. Not but what the quality of dryness is also found in the air. Fire has the uppermost place; it is also called aether, and in it the sphere of the fixed stars is first created; then comes the sphere of the planets, next to that the air, then the water, and lowest of all the earth, which is at the centre of all things.
The term universe or cosmos is used by them in three senses: (1) of God himself, the individual being whose quality is derived from the whole of substance; he is indestructible and ingenerable, being the artificer of this orderly arrangement, who at stated periods of time absorbs into himself the whole of substance and again creates it from himself.
138. Again, they give the name of cosmos to the orderly arrangement of the heavenly bodies in itself as such; and (3) in the third place to that whole of which these two are parts. Again, the cosmos is defined as the individual being qualifying the whole of substance,
The world, in their view, is ordered by reason and providence: so says Chrysippus in the fifth book of his treatise On Providence and Posidonius in his work On the Gods, book iii. – inasmuch as reason pervades every part of it, just as does the soul in us. Only there is a difference of degree; in some parts there is more of it, in others less.
142. The world, they hold, comes into being when its substance has first been converted from fire through air into moisture and then the coarser part of the moisture has condensed as earth, while that whose particles are fine has been turned into air, and this process of rarefaction goes on increasing till it generates fire. Thereupon out of these elements animals and plants and all other natural kinds are formed by their mixture.
147. They give the name Dia (Δία) because all things are due to (διά) him; Zeus (Ζῆνα) in so far as he is the cause of life (ζῆν) or pervades all life; the name Athena is given, because the ruling part of the divinity extends to the aether; the name Hera marks its extension to the air; he is called Hephaestus since it spreads to the creative fire; Poseidon, since it stretches to the sea; Demeter, since it reaches to the earth. Similarly men have given the deity his other titles, fastening, as best they can, on some one or other of his peculiar attributes.
148. The substance of God is declared by Zeno to be the whole world and the heaven, as well as by Chrysippus in his first book Of the Gods, and by Posidonius in his first book with the same title.....
Now the term Nature is used by them to mean sometimes that which holds the world together, sometimes that which causes terrestrial things to spring up. Nature is defined as a force moving of itself, producing and preserving in being its offspring in accordance with seminal principles within definite periods, and effecting results homogeneous with their sources.
Laertius, Diogenes. Delphi Complete Works of Diogenes Laertius (Illustrated) (Delphi Ancient Classics Book 47) (p. 1988). Delphi Classics. Kindle Edition.
Marcus:
Logos is a hot substance that forms the world out of itself like wax. .
One fundamental substance.
One fundamental cause.
One fundamental object.
One World.
One Whole,
An Undivided Continuum.
No, edges, no gaps, no boundaries.
Panta Rhei, everything flows.
Universe: All things poured into one
Cosmos: the single order of all things
Phusis, nature, physical.
Meditate often on the concatenation of all things in the universe and their relationship to one another. You could almost say, since all things are intertwined with one another, that they’re in a loving relationship. They cohere one with another thanks to tensional movement, the breath that permeates them all, and the unity of all substance
6.38
"Universal Nature out of its whole material, as from wax, models now the figure of a horse, then melting this down uses the material for a tree, next for a man, next for something else. And these, every one, subsist for a very brief while. Yet it is no hardship for a box to be broken up, as it was none for it to be nailed together.
7.23
Everything is interwoven, and the web is holy; none of its parts are unconnected. They are composed harmoniously, and together they compose the world. One world, made up of all things. One divinity, present in them all. One substance and one law—the logos that all rational beings share. And one truth … If this is indeed the culmination of one process, beings who share the same birth, the same logos
OK I know all that. I didn't ask those questions to get a lesson in Stoic monism. I'm pointing out the problems with these ideas. Ancient Stoicism is rife with problems relating to identity, coherence, and subsistence. We see this in Plutarch, Plotinus, and Spinoza's own attempt to reconcile thought and extension into a monistic system (which is more successful in my opinion). If you believe that you can reconcile the idea that the cosmos is "made of" divine logos while at the same time as consisting of codependent active and passive principles then I'm sold.
But, as I've made clear in this series of essays, I'm modifying Stoicism to separate it from universal cosmological concerns (which are always either theological or speculative) and build its ethics from the conditional neccesities of the human condition (the constitutive characteristics of being human) so that we can get on with doing ethics. Thanks for the reading - I'm genuinely intending to read the Phd thesis you shared with me, but I will need a while to get through it, maybe six months.
If you knew that the Cosmos is made out of Logos, which is the Creative Fire, it kind of makes your question as to its ontology moot.
Heraclitus: Fire is the foundation of Being.
Stoicism is a monistic, non-dualistic process philosophy and as such the Stoics were conceptualists.. (Their theory of language and meaning is astonishingly modern)
The active and passive principles are complementary descriptions, qualitative values of a single body. As an analogy, think of mass-energy equivalence: Energy is that which moves, mass is that which is moved, but mass is energy, and energy is mass. We can talk of them as different qualities, but they are dual descriptive aspects of one and the same thing.
Energy is that which moves, mass is that which is moved, but mass is energy and energy is mass: We can talk of them as different qualities, but they are a dual descriptive aspects of one and the same thing.
Process philosophy; Think Taoism, Yin Yang.
Thought is a process of a bodily pneumatic organisation of particular complexity and tension: it is linguistic, it is energetic activity within in a physical substrate. .
Stoicism does need "fixing".
And if we switch out Stoic metaphysics for Plutarchs, Plotinus, we end up with Platonism, Neo-Platonism, Spinozism or a New Dualism. If you get rid of the Cosmology you get rid of the ethics,and we don’t have Stoicism at all, and the texts of the Stoics are no longer coherent with your New Philosophy.
The philosophy of Zeno, Chrysippus, Marcus, Epictetus and Seneca is not informative of the New Philosophy.
The New Philosophy is not informative of the philosophy of Zeno, Chrysippus, Marcus, Epictetus and Seneca.
We've come full cicle. I suggest that instead of commenting at length under my posts, you write an in-depth article explaining your orthodox position and how the ancient Stoics get around the problem of incorporeals. Then share that with me. I think my solution stands up, and I'm not concerned if it's not orthodox. However, I'm happy to revise everything if I'm shown to be incoherent.
Beautifully written and a succinct compilation of the history of Stoicism. Well done. Your conclusion at the end is spot on. Hadot refers to this as Cosmopolitanism - all humans are members of a single community.
Thank you - yes, I'll be writing more on that soon.
I took some notes.
1. He wrongly associates phusis with science, the later would be episteme.
2. He asserts that soul is not part of the world.
3. He introduces the alien concept of enlightenment.
4. He introduces the alien concept of non self.
5. He introduces non naturalist human exceptionalism
6. He takes a proof text from Hammond’s translation of Marcus 4.3 out of context to explicitly express mind body duality contra the physicalist monism of the Stoics.
<Consider that the mind, once it has abstracted itself and come to know its own defining power, has no contact with the movement of the bodily spirit, be that smooth or troubled>
This is Gill. It relates to the autonomy of reason and the faculty of assent and that desires and aversions are judgment. .
<Or will bodily things affect you? Reconsider that when the mind takes hold of itself and recognizes its own power, it no longer associates itself with the movements, rough or smooth of the breath; and finally think of what you have heard and assented to as regards pain and pleasure. >
And Gill's Notes.
<The third set of themes (4.3.6) seeks to counteract the power of ‘bodily things’, that is, ‘pain and pleasure’, and their corrupting influence on our ethical judgements. Marcus reminds himself of the capacity of the mind (dianoia) to recognize ‘its own power’, that is, to exercise ethical judgement independently of current sensations of pleasure and pain (‘movements, rough and smooth, of the breath’ (pneuma). For the psychological language used, see 2.2 and 5.26, also Introd., text to nn. 191–211; on the importance of exercising autonomy in the way we pass judgement on our sensations, especially before adding the judgement that something is good or bad, >
It is simply not about mind body duality, which is not a thing in Stoicism.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Marcus-Aurelius-Meditations-Clarendon-Philosophers-ebook/dp/B00HFQJQXY
7. He then explicitly identifies the logos as immaterial, therefore non-existent for the Stoics.
8. He states the “The integrated self is a fiction in Stoicism. It doesn’t exist” which is in direct contradiction with the monistic psycho-physical holism of the Stoics.
9. He identifies the human soul as transcendent and unknowable, which is in direct conflict with the Stoic pneumatic model. The soul is an exhalation of the blood associated with breath. .
TLDR: The Stoics were monistic physicalists.
This is recommended reading.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Structured-Self-Hellenistic-Roman-Thought/dp/019956437X
Thanks for your comments. There's some mixing up here of my suggested updates, that attempt to resolve problems in the Stoic ontology, and my interpretation of ancient Stoic thinking about various facets of our reality. On the latter I do believe that there is a duality underlying Stoic metaphysics which the ancient Stoics fail to account for. I have three questions: What makes the active principle active and the inactive principle inactive? And, if the logos rules and defines the interactions of everything, how is it of the cosmos? What's its ontologial status?
" On the latter I do believe that there is a duality underlying Stoic metaphysics which the ancient Stoics fail to account for."
How closely have you looked at that?
https://www.academia.edu/78714638/The_Coherence_of_Stoic_Ontology
For something to exist it must have extension and resistance, to have body. In the absence of that any interaction with anything is impossible.
It is the same problem with Platonic and Cartesian dualism, how can something non-physical effect something physical?
"What makes the active principle active and the inactive principle inactive?"
They come as a set, completely co-dependent and co-existent
The active is that which forms,
The passive is that which is formed.
This is not quite right but is is informative.
A shape has to be a shape in something and any something has to have some of kind of shape
That which is bound and that which binds, you can't have one without the other.
"And, if the logos rules and defines the interactions of everything, how is it of the cosmos?"
The cosmos is made of it.
The logos is the divine creative fire, identified with Zeus, which interacts with itself and condenses to form the various elements which are phase states.
The logos remains in all things as heat, notably as mixture of air and fire, as pneuma, the vehicle of logos, pneuma, breath, physical, is the "soul of Zeus" the "world soul" which shapes and forms everything there is.
It is a substance and a force: a body, corporeal, as the the soul of humans, pneuma, again breath, a vaporous exhalation of the blood generated in the heart that pervades the body as tensional force through the arterial blood network, providing feedback from the periphery to the center, .. analogous to the nervous system., It all works through vibration in a physical medium.
*******
Diogenes Laertius.
136. God is one and the same with Reason (Logos), Fate, and Zeus; he is also called by many other names.
In the beginning he was by himself (as divine fire) ; he transformed the whole of substance through air into water, and just as in animal generation the seed has a moist vehicle, so in cosmic moisture God, who is the seminal reason (logos) of the universe, remains behind in the moisture as such an agent, adapting matter to himself with a view to the next stage of creation.
137. The four elements together constitute unqualified substance or matter. Fire is the hot element, water the moist, air the cold, earth the dry. Not but what the quality of dryness is also found in the air. Fire has the uppermost place; it is also called aether, and in it the sphere of the fixed stars is first created; then comes the sphere of the planets, next to that the air, then the water, and lowest of all the earth, which is at the centre of all things.
The term universe or cosmos is used by them in three senses: (1) of God himself, the individual being whose quality is derived from the whole of substance; he is indestructible and ingenerable, being the artificer of this orderly arrangement, who at stated periods of time absorbs into himself the whole of substance and again creates it from himself.
138. Again, they give the name of cosmos to the orderly arrangement of the heavenly bodies in itself as such; and (3) in the third place to that whole of which these two are parts. Again, the cosmos is defined as the individual being qualifying the whole of substance,
The world, in their view, is ordered by reason and providence: so says Chrysippus in the fifth book of his treatise On Providence and Posidonius in his work On the Gods, book iii. – inasmuch as reason pervades every part of it, just as does the soul in us. Only there is a difference of degree; in some parts there is more of it, in others less.
142. The world, they hold, comes into being when its substance has first been converted from fire through air into moisture and then the coarser part of the moisture has condensed as earth, while that whose particles are fine has been turned into air, and this process of rarefaction goes on increasing till it generates fire. Thereupon out of these elements animals and plants and all other natural kinds are formed by their mixture.
147. They give the name Dia (Δία) because all things are due to (διά) him; Zeus (Ζῆνα) in so far as he is the cause of life (ζῆν) or pervades all life; the name Athena is given, because the ruling part of the divinity extends to the aether; the name Hera marks its extension to the air; he is called Hephaestus since it spreads to the creative fire; Poseidon, since it stretches to the sea; Demeter, since it reaches to the earth. Similarly men have given the deity his other titles, fastening, as best they can, on some one or other of his peculiar attributes.
148. The substance of God is declared by Zeno to be the whole world and the heaven, as well as by Chrysippus in his first book Of the Gods, and by Posidonius in his first book with the same title.....
Now the term Nature is used by them to mean sometimes that which holds the world together, sometimes that which causes terrestrial things to spring up. Nature is defined as a force moving of itself, producing and preserving in being its offspring in accordance with seminal principles within definite periods, and effecting results homogeneous with their sources.
Laertius, Diogenes. Delphi Complete Works of Diogenes Laertius (Illustrated) (Delphi Ancient Classics Book 47) (p. 1988). Delphi Classics. Kindle Edition.
Marcus:
Logos is a hot substance that forms the world out of itself like wax. .
One fundamental substance.
One fundamental cause.
One fundamental object.
One World.
One Whole,
An Undivided Continuum.
No, edges, no gaps, no boundaries.
Panta Rhei, everything flows.
Universe: All things poured into one
Cosmos: the single order of all things
Phusis, nature, physical.
Meditate often on the concatenation of all things in the universe and their relationship to one another. You could almost say, since all things are intertwined with one another, that they’re in a loving relationship. They cohere one with another thanks to tensional movement, the breath that permeates them all, and the unity of all substance
6.38
"Universal Nature out of its whole material, as from wax, models now the figure of a horse, then melting this down uses the material for a tree, next for a man, next for something else. And these, every one, subsist for a very brief while. Yet it is no hardship for a box to be broken up, as it was none for it to be nailed together.
7.23
Everything is interwoven, and the web is holy; none of its parts are unconnected. They are composed harmoniously, and together they compose the world. One world, made up of all things. One divinity, present in them all. One substance and one law—the logos that all rational beings share. And one truth … If this is indeed the culmination of one process, beings who share the same birth, the same logos
Meditations 7.9
OK I know all that. I didn't ask those questions to get a lesson in Stoic monism. I'm pointing out the problems with these ideas. Ancient Stoicism is rife with problems relating to identity, coherence, and subsistence. We see this in Plutarch, Plotinus, and Spinoza's own attempt to reconcile thought and extension into a monistic system (which is more successful in my opinion). If you believe that you can reconcile the idea that the cosmos is "made of" divine logos while at the same time as consisting of codependent active and passive principles then I'm sold.
But, as I've made clear in this series of essays, I'm modifying Stoicism to separate it from universal cosmological concerns (which are always either theological or speculative) and build its ethics from the conditional neccesities of the human condition (the constitutive characteristics of being human) so that we can get on with doing ethics. Thanks for the reading - I'm genuinely intending to read the Phd thesis you shared with me, but I will need a while to get through it, maybe six months.
If you knew that the Cosmos is made out of Logos, which is the Creative Fire, it kind of makes your question as to its ontology moot.
Heraclitus: Fire is the foundation of Being.
Stoicism is a monistic, non-dualistic process philosophy and as such the Stoics were conceptualists.. (Their theory of language and meaning is astonishingly modern)
The active and passive principles are complementary descriptions, qualitative values of a single body. As an analogy, think of mass-energy equivalence: Energy is that which moves, mass is that which is moved, but mass is energy, and energy is mass. We can talk of them as different qualities, but they are dual descriptive aspects of one and the same thing.
Energy is that which moves, mass is that which is moved, but mass is energy and energy is mass: We can talk of them as different qualities, but they are a dual descriptive aspects of one and the same thing.
Process philosophy; Think Taoism, Yin Yang.
Thought is a process of a bodily pneumatic organisation of particular complexity and tension: it is linguistic, it is energetic activity within in a physical substrate. .
Stoicism does need "fixing".
And if we switch out Stoic metaphysics for Plutarchs, Plotinus, we end up with Platonism, Neo-Platonism, Spinozism or a New Dualism. If you get rid of the Cosmology you get rid of the ethics,and we don’t have Stoicism at all, and the texts of the Stoics are no longer coherent with your New Philosophy.
The philosophy of Zeno, Chrysippus, Marcus, Epictetus and Seneca is not informative of the New Philosophy.
The New Philosophy is not informative of the philosophy of Zeno, Chrysippus, Marcus, Epictetus and Seneca.
Problemo...
We've come full cicle. I suggest that instead of commenting at length under my posts, you write an in-depth article explaining your orthodox position and how the ancient Stoics get around the problem of incorporeals. Then share that with me. I think my solution stands up, and I'm not concerned if it's not orthodox. However, I'm happy to revise everything if I'm shown to be incoherent.
What "problem" of incorporeals?
They have a very coherent explanation of the supervenience of the incorporeal on the corporeal:
You would need to elaborate upon why you think there is a problem at all.
I do actually have a Substack, we could have a to and fro, a dialectic, using this platform if you like.