The Stoics and the practical: a Roman reply to Aristotle

277 Pages·2014·2.51 MB·English

by  Robin Weiss

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College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences
College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences
Theses and Dissertations
8-2013
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Robin Weiss
DePaul University, [email protected]
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THE STOICS AND THE PRACTICAL:
A ROMAN REPLY TO ARISTOTLE

A Thesis

Presented in

Partial Fulfillment of the

Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

August, 2013

BY

Robin Weiss

Department of Philosophy

College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences

DePaul University

Chicago, IL
- TABLE OF CONTENTS -

Introduction……………………..............................................................................................................p.i

Chapter One: Practical Knowledge and its Others
Technê and Natural Philosophy…………………………….....……..……………………………….....p. 1

Virtue and technical expertise conflated – subsequently distinguished in Plato – ethical knowledge
contrasted with that of nature in the Phaedo – the divesting of ethical knowledge of its relation to nature in
Aristotle – connection to nature as established via contemplation – subsequent attempts by Aristotle to
reunite ethics and nature.

Chapter Two: The Divided Self
The Aristotelian and Stoic Search for Inner Harmony………………………………………………p. 21

Usual methodological approach rejected – nature as guide to the good in Aristotle – potential disharmony
between logos and orexis found in orexis itself – references to pre-rational impulses in Seneca, not as a sign of
dualism but unity between the two – reason explained as the assent to pre-rational impulses – Stoic assent
and Aristotelian deliberation compared – common supposition that reason independently establishes what
impulse enacts rejected – the possibility of akrasia in Stoicism considered – akrasia in Tusculan Disputations
and De Ira as the result of overreaching logos – causes of disharmony between reason and desire found in
reason – original harmony between the two posited – the role of anticipation in passions – the role of
externals in driving us from our path – the threefold effect of passions in Stoicism and Aristotle – the
choice between ethical and practical as sign of an oncoming passion.

Chapter Three: The Search for an Ars Vitae
Neither Too Technical nor Too Theoretical………………………………….…………………...…p. 73

Stoic practical knowledge as resembling theôria – Stoic practical knowledge contrasted with Epicurean
practical knowledge as technê in De Finibus – Stoic theory of knowledge in De Academica – divination as
model for technical knowledge in De Divinatione – Stoic technê defined as the travelling of a path – the lack
of a transition from technical to non-technical knowledge in Seneca and De Finibus – assent to virtue
explained – Stoic practical knowledge nevertheless demonstrated to remain technical in kind – practical
knowledge as knowledge neither of archai nor telos but what lies between them – comparison of ethical life
to the performing arts – the aesthetic harmony of self with itself in De Finibus – evidence of Foucauldian
aesthetic self-formation found in De Officiis.

Chapter Four: The Meaning of Ascetic Practice
and Spiritual Exercise in Stoicism……………………………………………….............................. p. 129

The current neglect of the role of praxis in attaining truth – the supposed refutation of Platonic dualism in
Stoicism – Platonic assumptions underlying current interpretations – the question of whether asceticism
necessarily entails Platonic dualism, as considered by Cicero in Tusculan Disputations – the cura animi and
the removal of false beliefs – shared assumptions in Cicero and Seneca about the treatment truth provides
– preliminary analysis of praecepta and decreta in Seneca – the negative role of truth in removing passions
which disrupt the harmony of the soul examined – Hadot and Foucault on self-renunciation and self-
formation – the hermeneutic relationship between the subject and truth – praecepta as sufficient without
theoretical support – philosophical and rhetorical discourse compared.
Chapter Five: Technê and Phronêsis at Rome……………………………………………………....... p. 169

Nature in Aristotle – that the technician does not impose ends on things they do not already have – that
in Stoicism, things ask to be used in particular ways – the diminished role of the forms in Stoicism – the
subsequent need to distinguish phronêsis from technê examined – the five-fold manner in which the
distinction is dissolved – its preservation in the form of a distinction between artistic and non-artistic
activity – the gap in Aristotle’s account of moral development and the absence thereof in Stoicism – the
Platonic role of the forms in Aristotelian practical intelligence retains – subsequent conclusion that
practical knowledge is more technical in Aristotle than in Stoicism – the Stoic art of life as requiring
freedom from a regula.

Conclusion ………………………………………………………………………..………………....p. 209

APPENDICES
Appendix One:
Historical Evidence for the Relationship Between Aristotle, Cicero, and the
Stoics..………………………………………………..………………………………………..p.213

Appendix Two:
Antiochus……………………………………………………………………………………....p.218

Appendix Three:
The Process of Moral Development………………………………………………………...…p.222

Appendix Four:
The Specter of Dualism……………………………………………………………………..…p.22
WORKS FREQUENTLY CITED

ARISTOTLE
De An. De Anima
Met. Metaphysics
Nic. Eth. Nicomachean Ethics
Pol. Politics
Rhet. Rhetoric

CICERO
Ac. Academica
De Am. De Amicitia
De Fat. De Fato
De Inv. De Inventione
De Off. De Officiis
De Orat. De Oratore
Div. De Divinatione
Fin. Finibus Bonorum et Malorum
Leg. De Legibus
Nat. De Natura Deorum
Parad. Paradoxa Stoicorum
Rep. De Re Publica
Tusc. Tusculanae Disputationes

DIOGENES LAERTIUS
DL Lives of Eminent Philosophers

EPICTETUS
Dis. Discourses
Ench. Enchiridion

FRAGMENTS
LS The Hellenistic Philosophers
SVF Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta
DK Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker

GALEN
PHP De Placitis Hippocratis et Platonis

PLUTARCH
Comm. Not. De Communibus Notitiis
Stoic. Rep. De Stoicorum Repugnantiis
Virt. Mor. De Virtute Morali

SENECA
Ben. De Beneficiis
Brev. Vit. De Brevitate Vitae
Const. De Constantia
De Ir. De Ira
Ep. Epistulae
Prov. De Providentia
Tranq. De Tranquilitate Animi
Vit. Beat. De Vita Beata

SEXTUS EMPIRICUS
Adv. Math. Adversus Mathematicos

STOBAEUS
Ecl. Ecloges

Except where noted otherwise, translations are drawn with only slight emendation from the Loeb editions, with the exception
of Aristotle. These translations are drawn, except where otherwise noted, from the Princeton version of the collected works.
Where translations have been rendered by Long and Sedley, I have tried to use them, but in almost every case, with slight
modification.

Neither the separation between politics and contemplation, between
living together and living in solitude as two distinct modes of life, nor
their hierarchical structure, was ever doubted after Plato had
established both. Here again the only exception is Cicero, who, out of
his tremendous Roman political experience, doubted the validity of the
superiority of the bios theôrêtikos over the bios politikos, the validity of
solitude over the communitas.

- Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics
(New York: Schoken, 2002), 86
– INTRODUCTION –

“In the pursuit of truth, which is both natural and
virtuous, two vices are to be avoided; first, we must
not treat the unknown as known and too readily
accept it…The other vice is that some people
devote too much effort and work to matters that
are obscure and difficult, and not needful.”

- Cicero, De Off. I.vi.19

N ot so long ago, nobody assumed that the truths at which different philosophers arrived,
or claimed to arrive, by differing means could be directly applied in everyday life. At
Rome, there was special cause for doubt that philosophy had any place in the public
sphere. If philosophical theories could not be directly applied in practice, if Plato’s republic
could not simply be recreated on earth, then what part could philosophy play in political life?
Hence the significance of Cicero’s attempt to promote the search for truth. According to
Cicero, it would bring the seeker a particular kind of knowledge, one with palpable and
immediate repercussions for everyday life. We shall then claim to find in his works a kind of
knowledge having, to the present day, implications for ethical and political life.
After a period of waning interest in post-Aristotelian philosophy, which has deprived us,
in the meantime, of our fluency in the terms of a debate held after Aristotle’s death, we have
steadily begun to preoccupy ourselves again with what the Ancients had to say about an
important question. The debated question was, ‘How does the fact of our already being immersed in
practical life place constraints on what we may know?’ The limits of human knowledge ascertained, the
question for all philosophical schools then became, ‘What of that which it possible to know has import
for practical life?’
If we want to familiarize ourselves with the terms of this ancient debate, then who better
to serve as our guide than a writer, himself as much a seeker-of-truth as a practical-minded
man, whose every ethical or political tract takes the relationship between knowledge and
practical action as its subject matter? Who better than Marcus Tullius Cicero? Unhappily for
us, the interest that Cicero took in this debate because he was a man of action does not
recommend him to most of us as a philosopher qualified to speak on the subject, even though
he talked of philosophy as the one subject which he “never interrupted and which since youth
never ceased to cultivate and develop” (Brut. 89.306). Perhaps the fault is Cicero’s for having
sometimes refused the title of philosopher, with what most would consider uncharacteristic
modesty. His philosophic treatises, he tells us, were written only because he was forced out of
the practical sphere in which he felt more at home. “My leisure proceeds from lack of
employment, not from desire for repose,” he writes (De Off. III.i.1). Then there are the self-
effacing disclaimers that commence some of Cicero’s works, an example of which can be found
in De Re Publica:

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Although I am not satisfied with what the greatest and wisest men of Greece have
written about the subject, I am also not bold enough to prefer my own opinions to
theirs. Therefore, I ask you to listen to me in this way: as someone neither ignorant of
Greek learning, nor deferring to the Greeks—particularly on this subject—but as one
Roman citizen, reasonable well educated by his father, and inflamed from childhood
with the desire for learning, but educated much more by experience and home learning
than by books. (Rep. I.35)1

Though it is ostensibly Scipio who says that he would not count himself a real philosopher
because he was educated more by experience than by books, we hear the author’s voice. We
also perceive false modesty. As someone “neither ignorant of Greek learning, nor deferring to
the Greeks,” Cicero thinks of himself as equally capable of ascending to the sky of ideas and
descending back to earth, though he never soars too high, preferring to keep his feet upon the
ground. Again and again, we find him styling himself as an intermediary moving between the
theoretical and practical spheres of existence—a kind of demigod situated between earth and
sky, between the material and the ideal, the practical and the theoretical planes of existence.
Cicero had a conception of practical knowledge to match. He discovered, or
rediscovered in the philosophy of his predecessors, a kind of knowledge of what neither lacks
immediate import for practical life, nor exceeds our practical ability to know. But in one of
those great ironies of history, Cicero’s reputation as a philosopher suffers because of an
incompatibility we presume to exist between worldliness and philosophical profundity.2

THE STOIC PROVENANCE

One wishes to say that the conception of practical intelligence Cicero develops is Stoic, and
indeed we shall treat it as deeply Stoic in inspiration because there are certain aspects of his
thought that can only be understood in relation to that tradition out of which it emerges. The
same themes are taken up by Seneca, Cicero’s heir and successor in disseminating Stoic
thought to the Roman masses, and we shall in time, call on him to shed further light on ideas
which he can be shown to share with Cicero.
But Cicero and Seneca are not the heirs of an unbroken philosophical tradition. Theirs
is best understood as a return to or appropriation of Stoicism. Indeed, their appropriation of
Greek philosophy for their own time is about as paradigmatic an example as one could hope
for of the attempt to find and retrieve something from the ancient past by making it new.
Theirs is like every appropriation of this past a reappropriation; willingly or no, their attempt to
understand an older philosophy is, as Gadamer would say, an attempt to understand it
differently.
In asides and footnotes the reader will find the evidence that what Cicero and Seneca
say has its precedent in a much older Stoic tradition, but we leave to the reader to determine

1 Similar prefatory remarks are made by Crassus in On the Orator (I.111), and by Cicero himself in De Fato (iv).
2 Clarke’s view of Cicero is this: “For most of his life philosophy was not in the forefront of Cicero’s interests. He
believed in a union of rhetoric with philosophy and of statesmanship with philosophy, and liked to think of himself as a
philosophic orator and philosophic statesman, but oratory and statesmanship came first.” Martin Clark. The Roman
Mind: Studies in the History of Thought from Cicero to Marcus Aurelius. (New York: Norton, 1968), 54.

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