In Our Time - Stoicism

Episode Date: March 4, 2005

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Stoicism, the third great philosophy of the Ancient World. It was founded by Zeno in the fourth century BC and flourished in Greece and then in Rome. Its ideals of inner solitude, forbearance in adversity and the acceptance of fate won many brilliant adherents and made it the dominant philosophy across the whole of the Ancient World. The ex-slave Epictetus said "Man is troubled not by events, but by the meaning he gives them". Seneca, the politician, declared that "Life without the courage for death is slavery". The stoic thoughts of Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher emperor, provided a rallying point for empire builders into the modern age.Stoicism influenced the Christian church, had a big effect on Shakespeare and Renaissance drama and may even have given the British their 'stiff upper lip', but it's a philosophy that was almost forgotten in the 20th century. Does it still have a legacy for us today?With Angie Hobbs, Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Warwick; Jonathan Rée, philosopher and historian; David Sedley, Laurence Professor of Ancient Philosophy, University of Cambridge.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, the philosophy of stoicism was founded by Zeno in the 4th century BC and flourished in Greece and then in Rome. Its ideals of inner solitude, forbearance and adversity,

and the acceptance of fate won many brilliant adherents and made it the dominant philosophy across the whole of the ancient world. The ex-slave Epictetus said, Man is troubled not by events, but by the meaning he gives them. Seneca, the politician philosopher, declared that life without the courage for death is slavery. The stoic thoughts of Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher-emperor, provided a rallying point for empire builders into the modern age. But what was stoicism?

How did its ideas of inner retreat come to influence the most powerful and public men of the classical era, and does it still have a legacy for us today? We meet to discuss the philosophy of stoicism is David Sedley, Lawrence Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, the philosopher and historian Jonathan Ray, and Angie Hobbes, lecturer in philosophy, at the University of Warwick. Angie Hobbes, Stoicism took its name from the colonnade or Stoa in Athens, where Zeno and his followers discussed their ideas.

Can you give us a brief outline of what those ideas were? Yes, well, above all, Stoicism, presents us with a coherent system based on the integrated three pillars of logic, physics and ethics. They argue for a materialistic and deterministic cosmos, which at the conceptual level is composed of passive matter interpenetrated by active divine reason. At the observable level, this passive matter takes the form of earth and water, and the divine reason takes the form of a mixture of fire and air known as Pneuma, And the key point is that this divine reason

organises everything for the best. This is the best of all possible worlds. Now as an organic entity, the cosmos has a set lifespan and at the end of each cosmic cycle, all the matter is transmuted into pure, creative, rational fire out of which the next perfect and absolutely identical cosmos is formed. It has to be identical because it was perfect to begin with. Now, human reason is a spark of the divine fiery reason, and so we are part of a greater whole.

And our happiness and our virtue lie in acknowledging that fact and accepting that whatever happens to us, even if at the time it seems to be terrible, is actually part of a greater providential plan. And if we can live in accordance with this plan and accept it, that is living in accordance with nature according to Zeno. How does this transfer over to what is best known about Stoicism, the way that individuals should behave with their idea of inner probity and inner certainty in face of external slings and arrows and so on? Yes, well, we have to remember that at the time Zeno is setting up the Stoer in about 300 BC, the Greek world in Athens in particular is looking very, very different

from how it had when Plato set up his academy nearly 100 years before. In the interim, we've had Alexander the Great and Philip of Macedon, setting up the Macedonian Empire, which has effectively destroyed the Greek city state. The polis is an independent political unit. So it's a time when people are feeling confused, they don't know what's happening next, they're feeling far more powerless than their grandfathers and great-grandfathers.

Now, I think this has two particular effects. On the one hand, people are starting to look inward and thinking, well, I can't control my immediate political environment. I can search for my inner salvation, for my inner peace of mind. I can practice philosophy as a therapy of the soul to give me stability and tranquility and time of often great external disturbance. On the other hand, perhaps partly as a result of the barriers of the Greek world breaking down under the Macedonian Empire,

we have people thinking of themselves as part of a good thing, greater unit than the old individual polis, the city-state, and starting to think of the way that human beings connect up. So we're also getting this move outward to how humans connect with their fellow men. Thank you. Jonathan, Roy, Stoicism isn't the only philosophy in the 4th century. There are other schools of thought most eminently perhaps the cynics and the Epicureans. And they with the Stoics, the Synex, Epicureans and Stoics, are they quarreling over the same, Are they quarrelling over the same legacy, the Socratic legacy? And if they are, where are the Stoics in that argument?

I'm not really sure that quarrel is quite the right word. That's why I switch to argument, yeah. We tend to think nowadays of different philosophical schools as taking diametrically opposite positions on fundamental questions of theory. And I don't think it's like that when we're talking about Greek philosophy. And they're more like friendship networks, these different schools. It all goes back, and Socrates is the father of it all. of whom I think no one speaks evil.

And after his death in, I think it's 399 BC, Plato sets up his school in his academy to, I think, to the west of Athens, and then a generation later, Aristotle sets up the Lyceum to the east, and then Diogenes, the cynic, sets up his school to the south. And then there's a new generation sets up their schools in the centre of the town, notably. Zeno the Cynic.

Zeno the Stoic. Zeno the Stoic, sorry. And choosing between these different schools at around about 300 BC. It was more like choosing between Café Nero and Starbucks than choosing between rationalism and empiricism because all of them promised to teach you how to lead a better life, how to lead the life of a philosopher,

how to imitate Socrates in a sense, how to lead a life of virtue, where virtue would lead you to happiness, where you'd understand that being good and being happy were one and the same thing. Although there are friendship networks, and I accept that, and it's a very illuminating point about what's happening in this very small city. Nevertheless, one has to seek to define what's...

Well, it's helpful, I think, to define stochism in relation to the synod, yes, and the epicurean. So if you could tell us... I mean, at its bolder, what the Stoics are holding on to and which direction they're going into, which is not being, the direction is not being gone to, being followed by the cynics, particularly,

and the Epicureans. Okay, perhaps I'm going to do it by way of a story. Here's how it all began, at least according to accounts written sometime later. Diogenes the cynic. His cynicism, it has nothing to do with the modern sense of the word cynicism. His cynicism consisted of taking Platonism very seriously, so seriously that he absolutely despise.

the social world. He despised human convention. He lived in a tub. He walked around naked. He masturbated in public to prove that he didn't care what anybody thought. His pupil, Cretes, rich man who carried on the tradition and gave away all his money and said that it was a wonderful exchange because he'd got in exchange a quarter of lupins

and the ability to say, I care for nobody. That was the great problem. Zeno, age about 30, I think, raised around 300 BC. He's had a shipwreck. He comes to Athens, and he's sitting in a bookshop, reading Xenophon, reading about Socrates, reading about this wonderful man whose intellect enabled him to rise above his circumstances. And he asked the bookseller, is there anybody in Athens now who carries on the tradition of Socrates? And the guy says, there's that man.

There's your man. There's Cretti's walking past. and so Zeno follows Cretes. He becomes Cretes' pupil. Here's how Cretes teaches him. He tells him he's got to carry a pot of lentil soup around, something servile. Zeno is not happy about this,

so he tries to hide it under his cloak. Cratis smashes the pot so that he has this brown stuff dribbling like diarrhea down his legs. And Cretes insists, you must not feel ashamed of this. This is philosophy teaching through humiliation. Zeno then becomes, he never becomes as extravagantly exhibitionist about his contempt for the world.

Stoicism, I would say, is cynicism for the shy. Right. So we know where we are with spilt soup and couldn't as knows what going in Athens, but can we try to, David Sedley, can we just take it on and give us the defining idea of Zeno in terms of behaviour, because that I think is what a lot of our listeners know about Stoicism.

It is a way to behave. Yes, I think that's absolutely right. The whole issue for Zeno started from Socrates. Socrates had made it at the top of his agenda to ask the question how we should live. But he'd also raised some very difficult issues about what are the goods we should actually be pursuing in our lives. Because what Socrates pointed out is that although

knowledge, wisdom is an unconditional good. You can't go wrong so long as you know what you're doing. All the other things that people value in their lives and that actually structure the way they form their ambitions and pursue them are things which in their own nature no more good than bad. So everybody wants to be rich, everybody wants influence and reputation. But actually, wealth is no more good than bad because if you use it for good purposes, it's good. But if you use it to commit genocide, for example, it's just it's a greater bad. for all of these other supposed goods. And the legacy of Socrates to Zeno, among others, is the question, well, in that case, should we be pursuing these things at all? Should we make any effort at all to follow the norms of society, to be ambitious in conventional ways to take part in politics?

Now, Zeno tried, first of all, the cynic route. As Jonathan has said, his first training was with a cynic philosopher, Cretes, the story of the lentil soup says it all. Zeno was really too conventional character to want to go for the opt-out solution that the cynics went for. And Zeno's great breakthrough was to see that there was a way in which you could adopt the same Socratic Value System, but nevertheless lead a very conventional life, a life in which you take part in the politics of your city and want your children to be properly educated and to pursue the same goals.

And the reason he gave was this, that although it's true that things like wealth and even health and even life itself are not intrinsically good, because it all depends on how you use them, nevertheless, nature has created us to pursue these things. It is our instinct from birth to pursue certain things and to avoid other things. As we grow up and become rational,

we find that increasingly we're simply by nature, seeing rational goals. And so the goal of life, according to Zeno, is actually to make your life totally in conformity with nature. And that doesn't mean back to nature. It means a rational cosmic nature, which has an overall plan of which you are just a tiny part. And as you learn to conform your activities increasingly to nature's rational plan, you discover that the things which, as a matter of course, is natural to pursue, such as good health, may actually have to be varied. So the later stoic Chrysipp has said, normally speaking,

I try to stay healthy because that's the natural thing to do. But if I knew that I was fated to be ill now, I'd actually want to be ill because I would know that my illness had some purpose. Now, of course, it's left to us to speculate what that purpose might be. It could be that it's to test you for your own moral improvement. It could be that your sickness is needed for somebody else to become virtuous, a Florence Nightingale, as it were. There were no sick people.

How could virtue? others acquire virtue. So that is the project. In the end, if you succeed, your life will be in complete harmony with nature. You will understand what nature wants for you and you will actually go along with it willingly. Zeno, well, sorry, Chrysippus, actually,

went on to say. An interpreter, a later interpreter. Yes, Chrysippus, who was the most important Zeno's followers, put the point by, he continued the same, remark about how he would want to be, if he knew he was fated to be ill, he would want to be ill. By saying likewise a foot, if it could think, it would want to get muddy. And what he meant is that you should think of your relation to the world as like a relation of your foot to you.

It would be absurd for feet to go on strike and say, we refuse to get muddy, we refuse to get blisters, because that would be for them to misunderstand what it is to be a foot. A foot is not there for its own pleasure, it's there as a part of an organic whole. and that's just what your own relation to the world is. But usually, as I know, as I've been told in the notes, in the history of philosophy, philosophers went from Athens to Rome to make a case, to do with some treaty or other. They sent philosophers, anyway.

And these philosophers give us lectures about their philosophy, Stoics. Yes, well, it's absolutely right, that the year 155 BC was the year in which philosophy arrived in Rome. And as you say, the Athenians had been fined, huge fine of 500 talents for pillaging the city of Eropos. And they, because Greece was under Roman control at this time, if they wanted to appeal against the fine, they had to appeal to the Roman Senate. And they took the most extraordinary decision.

They decided they would send the three heads of the three major philosophical schools as their ambassadors to Rome. And that included Diogenes of Babylon, who was then the head of the Stoic school, along with the head of the academy and the head of the peripatetic school. And these, when they arrived around, these philosophers turned out to have the status of superstars. Incidentally, I should say that it did work. They did get the fine reduced to 100 talents. But what was really important...

Tried over here, really. Happy days. It's like sending the Beatles as ambassadors. Straight out of in our time to negotiating table. But the really important event occurred in the few days they were waiting to appear before the Senate because there were hundreds and hundreds of Romans who wanted to hear them, even though these people couldn't speak Latin. They spoke Greek and it relied on the educated Roman audiences

who could understand Greek. They gathered crowds around them and they gave demonstrations of their philosophical virtuosity. And all of them made an impression. In fact, it was the head of the academy, Carniades, who really shot the Romans with his attack on justice. But the Romans were particularly impressed by Diogenes, the Stoic, who was said to speak with great common sense and sobriety.

And I think the Roman love affair with stoicism really did begin at that point. And then Jonathan Ray, we have Cicero, who we think was influenced by the Stoics. And the great first real Roman Stoic philosopher was Cato the Younger. We're talking about the first century BC, if I'm right. So why do you think it dovetailed with Roman society? So immediately, as David just pointed out, and then contentious. and grew, in fact. And can we tell us how Cato the Younger took it up?

It wasn't received without opposition. I mean, the older Cato, at the time of this delegation from Athens, was absolutely revolted by these Greek philosophers who were coming, and as he thought, corrupting the youth of Rome. He was putting them off there. There's nothing like opposition to create a strong government, isn't it? And one of his problems was that he thought was precisely this linguistic problem, that the Greeks were telling, well, philosophy was a Greek thing,

and it was taking place in the Greek language, and he thought this was distracting. people from their national duty to the... Yeah, but let's go to Cato the Younger, who did take it up, who was a Stoic, and Stoicism did take a hold on the Roman imagination and the Roman morality. So what did Cato the Younger do to push forward that process? Well, at the time of the Civil War, 49 to 46 BC, we do tend to think, it's maybe more because of Renaissance Reconstructions than because of what actually happened at the time,

that the great heroes, Scipio Pompey, Brutus, and Cato, who you mentioned, were Stoic philosophers. They certainly had a certain respect for the idea of philosophy, but Cato became a hero after his death. He became a kind of mother-teresa figure,

he was supposed to, and he became that. He took his own life. And the story is, the story that was told again and again, and people started saying, oh, God, not that story about Cato again. The story that was told again and again was that after he'd been defeated, he'd retreated to Tunisia, to North Africa with his troops

and he'd been defeated, and he'd been defeated. And he spent a night reading Plato's Fido over and over again. He had Plato's Fido in one hand, and he had his sword in the other hand, and the next morning he disemboweled himself, apparently quite unsuccessfully. And after his death, he came to be... What's successful enough to kill him?

Well, I think he needed a bit of help. He needed another push. The devil's in the detail. So after his death, he was canonised as this great combination of philosopher and politician and warrior. Can we talk about the way that, about the Stoic's idea to life? We mentioned Cato of the Younger and he took his own life, and that seemed to be part of what was going on. Not contempt for life, but life was no more important, as David said earlier than wealth and so on. And then bring it to Seneca, who was who was.

at a political advisor, what a job to Nero and was also a Stoic philosopher, according to what I've read, the greatest philosophers. Now, can you just bring those together quite neatly, I hope? Okay, yes, well this goes back to what David was saying earlier about the difference between the Stoic's concept of the good and the indifferent. The only thing good in itself is virtue,

which is living in accordance with rational nature and accepting whatever happens to you as part of the divine plan. Other things such as life and death in themselves are indifferent, though usually under normal circumstances to be preferred. They make this rather strange distinction between the good and the naturally preferred. However, there can be exceptional circumstances when life is not actually to be naturally preferred. If you're being forced to do something that's against your will, which would sully your inner purity and moral integrity and freedom,

then in those cases it is acceptable. to commit suicide and of course Cato felt it was going to sully his integrity to accept Caesar's pardon, Caesar his arch enemy. Seneca was actually forced to commit suicide by Nero but he decided to to accept this decision and accept this death and make a kind of Socratic theatre out of it. Now I've got two people coming up who exemplify both sides of this. One is Nero and the other is Marcus Aurelius. We talk about the influence of stoicism, and yet Seneca, the greater philosopher, is advising Nero, and where did that get Stoicism? I'd like to ask David Dut. And then we have the great emperor Marcus Aurelius, who expresses views which are very, very close to socialism, and so it gets as it were through to him.

So what was Seneca's relationship with Nero? What was he trying to do there that he seems, from his dream, singly a failed to do? Well, yes, Seneca's relationship to Nero was started off in a rather accidental way. he was employed by Nero's mother when Nero was 12, but not as a philosophical tutor to Nero, but actually as his tutor in rhetoric. Actually, if she'd wanted him to be trained in philosophy,

which she didn't, she'd have brought a Greek in to do it. That was a Greek job, but Romans were the relevant rhetoricians to call it, and Seneca was brought in to do this job because he was the greatest Roman literary author of the time. It was his reputation and literature. Nevertheless, he... He did exercise a very strong influence on Nero.

And when Nero became emperor at the age of 17, Seneca did what was kept on as his advisor. And that's the point at which one might ask, was that the proper thing for Stoic to do? And the answer is yes, Stoics had always thought that being an advisor to a monarch was one of the ideal positions for a philosopher to hold. There was no Stoic commitment

to the restoration of the Roman Republic rather than keeping the system of the principal. Seneca is quite clear that he thinks the Republic could not be resuscitated and that monarchy, enlightened monarchy, was the right way forward. So from his point of his own theoretical point, he was doing exactly the right thing. And indeed, the first five years of Nero's reign were regarded by historians as one of the best periods of Roman rule.

It was only after that five years into Nero's reign when he murdered his mother and then went on a whole string of other atrocities that he really went off the rails. And that was the point at which one might have wondered why Seneca didn't get out. And in fact, he did make a number of attempts to get out to the Imperial Service.

But that was not easy because to resign would be taken as a sign of disloyalty. And so it was some years before he could, but eventually he was able to withdraw. But by the time we go to Marcus Aurelius in the 2nd century AD and he was emperor for about 20 years, Jonathan, we have an emperor who seems to have taken on stoicism. He writes things, in his...

meditations which were taken up very much in the 19th century in this country, it's possible to live out your whole life in perfect contentment, even though the whole world defends you with its roar and wild beasts tear apart your body like a lump of clay for nothing can shake a steady mind if it's peaceful repose. So we're there with the inner certainties of stoicism and the philosophy behind it, as expressed by Angie at the very top of the programme, getting to the head, the sole, the greatest authority in the world at that time. a known Roman world.

And I think it's interesting to make the contrast between Seneca and Marcus Aurelius. People, as David was saying, there are questions about whether Seneca was really a consistent Stoic. And I think the answers to those questions are that he was. But people have even thought that Seneca might be the name of two different authors, one who was given to violence and the other who wrote these wonderfully peaceful stoic meditation. And I don't see any contradiction at all. It seems to me that Seneca is the greatest of the Stoics because he recognises it. He says, you know, if you are in a state of sorrow, then there is nothing you can do to control it.

When he tries to console people, he says the point is not to trick yourself out of your misery, but to conquer it. It seems to me he's the kind of Stoic who, if you like, he had a lot to be Stoical about. I mean, he did recognize that the passions are a very powerful force. Moving on to Marcus Aurelius, a century, a century and a half later, I feel that it's a tremendous step down intellectually. I find Marcus Aurelius rather prim, simple-minded and polyanarish. I didn't much enjoy working my way through the 12 books of his meditations yesterday. Well, there's one very good sentence in this day,

which is where he says, if anybody says to you, I will speak to you quite frankly, then you know that they're a hypocrite. Because if they have to say that they're being frank, then their frankness can't come to them naturally. So don't believe. I think that's a very, very good remark and one worth bearing in mind. Not you by all broadcasters from now.

Absolutely. I mean, to tell you that it does the same purpose. And he only has one argument, I don't think he invented it, but the argument he keeps making is that we live our life in the present moment. The past is lost to us. because it's over and the future hasn't happened. Therefore, when we die, we don't, it's not the whole of our life that comes to an end

because our previous life has already come to an end the moment before we died. So all that we lose when we die is a moment and therefore living a life of 3,000 years or 30,000 years is no greater than living a life of 10 years. And that seems to me so completely sophisticated. And actually completely the opposite of Seneca, who does talk about how you have to understand a life as a whole. It seems to me that Marcus Aurelius is

prim, superficial and dull compared with Seneca. I'm going to, and we're coming to the end. We're about just for the listeners, we're about two-thirds where we should be, but that's the way it goes. It's been engrossing. I find it engrossing. But I do want to do a massive fast forward

to a point that Jonathan made, Jonathan made in his notes, that Stoicism came back a bit of the Renaissance, and Spinoza, doom-d-d-d-d-dom. But Marcus Realis and the ideas of Stoicism began to inform other empires, particularly, as you said,

the British Empire, the idea of the Stoic re-emerged strongly then. Would you say? That's true, and I think it's connected with Christianity. I mean, I think there was a serious tension between Stoicism and Christianity, particularly after the 16th century when Stoicism gets relaunched in Europe.

Some people say, Oh, well, Stoicism is exactly the same as Christianity, but I think serious Christians don't. I mean, Milton, for example, is absolutely appalled by the fashion for Stoicism. Because he talks about Stoic pride. The ideal of Stoicism is self-sufficiency. And Christianity, certainly the kind of Christianity

that flourishes after the Reformation, says there's no such thing as self-sufficiency. There's no such thing as salvation except, you know, through Christ and through the Gospels. And so there was something kind of deeply pagan and deeply pagan, not just superficially pagan, about Stoicism. And it seems to me that that connects with the crisis of faith in Victorian England, that when people started having doubts about Protestant Christianity,

characters like Matthew Arnold, they speak of, Matthew Arnold does actually talk of Marcus Aurelius as a great friend to him in times of adversity. When you think that God has, the tide of divine providence has gone out, then Stoicism leaves you with some kind of comfort. And I think all those ideas about empire and self-sacrifice in the name of some greater good come in to occupy the space vacated by Christianity. Yes, apparently Marcus Aurelius' Meditations was Rhodes' favourite work. I don't know how much went in that imperialist adventurer's sensibility.

Also on Bill Clinton's top 20 reading list. Oh, really? Yes. So, I mean, the Sturis system has been called the religion of the 19th century British public school. And characters like Matthew Arnold, of course, the son of Thomas Arnold, but we're carrying that forward. We'll have to stop now, unfortunately. I find that engrossing. I'm kind of glad we didn't finish. We spent more time on the early bits. Next week, we'll be talking about modernist utopias. Thank you for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy,

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