Stoicism

one of the principal schools of Hellenistic and Roman philosophy, along with the Epicurean school and Skepticism. The name derives from the Painted Stoa, a portico in Athens where the Stoics met.

The first period of Stoicism, third to second centuries B.C., is called the Early Stoa. Its founders were Zeno of Citium, Cleanthes of Assus, Chrisyppus of Soli, and their disciples. This first, classic form of Stoicism was notable for the extreme harshness and rigidity of its ethical doctrine, which was mitigated during the Middle Stoa, the second period of Stoicism, second to first centuries B.C. Because the Middle Stoa’s chief representatives, Panaetius and Posidonius, used the methods of Plato and Aristotle, the term “Stoic Platonism” has been applied to this period, which also includes Roman Stoicism. The third period of Stoicism, or Late Stoa, first to second centuries A.D., tended toward sacramentalism and was marked by the Stoic Platonism of such thinkers as Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. Subsequently, Stoicism evolved toward Neoplatonism and eventually merged with it.

The Stoics were the first to divide philosophy sharply into logic, physics, and ethics. In physics the Stoics revived the cosmogony of Heraclitus, who regarded fire as the primary element and, through its metamorphosis into the other elements, as the source of all that exists. The primary fire, in the Stoics’ terminology, is the pneuma—the spirit, or breath—which flows through the world and creates all things, including man and animals, while cooling down in inorganic nature. This creative fire, like the Logos inherent to it, exhausts itself in the infinitely varied tension of being; matter, which is identical with Logos, is also marked by an infinite variety of degrees of coarseness or fineness. Matter is different in inanimate and animate substances, in the human soul, in nature, in the cosmos, and in the gods themselves.

Since the primary fire, or Logos, is a creative fire that rationally constructs the world and governs it, the Stoics called it “providence.” Each human being is one of the countless reincarnations of the cosmic primary fire, or pneuma; this was the basis for the idea of inner human impassivity.

All that exists is corporeal, including men, the gods, and all the qualities of the soul. Some Stoics argued that void, space, time, and objects of assertions are incorporeal. As a whole, the materialism of the Stoics differed sharply from classical Greek materialism in its teleology, providentialism, and fatalism.

The creative primary fire is an outflowing of logoi spermatikoi, or fertilizing ideas, that permeate the cosmos in a total intermingling and that create a cosmic “sympathy”—a universal mutual permeability and mutual transmutability. The Stoics combined the Heraclitean doctrine of a periodic conflagration and purification of the cosmos with the doctrine of the unquestionable recurrence of things, of persons, of events, and of the entire cosmos after each world conflagration.

In the rigor of their ethics the Stoics were close to the Cynics but did not share the latter’s contempt for science and culture. The Stoics preached the ideal of the wise man who loves his fate; creative fire, providence, and fate are one and the same. He who does not understand this worries and suffers in vain, loving himself and not his fate, besides which nothing exists. Stupidity is madness, a state typical of the overwhelming majority of people. Man is the highest and most rational being in nature; he is virtuous because he has practical wisdom, or strength of character, which was seen by the Stoics in the form of four basic virtues, according to Plato’s model. But also inherent to man are affects that confuse the mind and that are to be eradicated from the soul. From this follow the basic categories of Stoic ethics: impassivity, or absence of affects; unflagging moral rectitude; and responsibility, in the sense of honest fulfillment of duty to one’s best ability. All needs deserve contempt, and this is the meaning of the Stoics’ call to follow nature—that absolutely passionless, ideal designer of life.

Early Stoicism was marked by absolute moral rigor. The wise man, in spite of himself, may get entangled in the chaos of human relations. If he cannot bring rational order into this chaos, he must take his own life, thus drawing closer to the ideal wisdom of the cosmic whole. According to legend, Zeno of Citium and Cleanthes committed suicide; the same has been said of many other early Stoics.

Finally, the cosmos, governed by fate, is seen by the Stoics as a world state, and all people as its citizens, or cosmopolites. An inexorable law governs nature, man, society, and the state. Stoic cosmopolitanism, with this universal law in whose eyes all are equal—freemen and slaves, Greeks and barbarians, men and women—marked a great advance in the evolution of the idea of human equality.

The Stoics were the first to introduce the term “logic,” which they understood as the science of verbal expression. The Stoics divided logic into rhetoric and dialectics, and dialectics into the science of the signifier (poetics, theory of music, and grammar) and the science of the signified, or the object of assertion. This recalls formal logic, insofar as the Stoics interpreted an incomplete assertion as a word and a complete assertion as a sentence. Likewise, they conceived of four logical categories pertaining to a word: something (being or nonbeing); essential quality (universal or particular); accidental quality; and relatively accidental quality, namely, one that is related to other accidental qualities. Sentences were divided into simple, or categorical sentences, and complex sentences, especially hypothetical ones. The logic of the Stoics, as a semantic analysis of words and sentences, was contrasted to the study of being, and so was reduced to an analysis of the relationships reigning in consciousness and thought.

The Stoic science of words and sentences greatly influenced some of the early grammarians—for instance, Dionysius Thrax (first century B.C.).