Sophia, Vol. 42, No. 2, October 2003. Copyright © 2003 Ashgate Publishing Limited.
Dirk Baltzly
School of Philosophy and Bioethics Monash University Clayton, Victoria, Australia dirk.baltzly@arts.monash.edu.au
This essay argues the Stoics are rightly regarded as pantheists. Their view differs from many forms of pantheism by accepting the notion of a personal god who exercises divine providence. Moreover, Stoic pantheism is utterly inimical to a deep ecology ethic. I argue that these features are nonetheless consistent with the claim that they are pantheists. The essay also considers the arguments offered by the Stoics. They thought that their pantheistic conclusion was an extension of the best science of their day. Some of their most interesting arguments are thus a posteriori
The purpose of this essay is to examine a species in the zoological garden of theistic views that has not had the study it deserves - Stoic pantheism. Stoic pantheism is interesting in part because it is all of those things that Michael Levine claims no 'prominent' form of pantheism is.1 It at least purports 1) to involve a personal god2 2) who exercises divine providence.3 Nonetheless, 3) this providence is anthropocentric and wholly inimical to a deep ecology ethic.4 Finally, 4) it is a conclusion that I believe the Stoics reached largely a posteriori on the basis of their scientific understanding of the world.5 They thought that it was not merely consistent with some of the best science of their day, but an application of such science to a new domain.
One response to this is to say simply that to the extent that I succeed in showing that these things are true of the Stoic view of god, to that extent I succeed only in showing that the the Stoics were not consistent pantheists at all - they mixed pantheistic views together with ideas such as a personal, providential god, with which pantheism is strictly inconsistent.
I think this objection is a bit too quick. In the next section I offer a very generic definition of pantheism. It has much support in the literature and it seems to me to capture something important at the core of views that have all been labeled 'pantheistic' by historians of philosophy. I think that this is all any definition of pantheism should do, since I suspect that our concept of pantheism is a rather vague one. We could, of course, define pantheism more narrowly to make Levine's claims about what is true of prominent forms of pantheism analytically true of any form of pantheism. But this, I think, would be a mistake. The way the Stoics regard god is inconsistent with, say, Spinoza's treatment of god. But to suppose that this means that the Stoics are not pantheists is to make Spinoza not merely a highly visible representative of pantheism, but rather paradigmatic of pantheism. Everyone is entitled to use terms like 'pantheism' as he sees fit, but I think that being too narrow about what counts as a pantheist view probably invests the concept with more precision that it has historically had. If, however, you consult your intutions about the necessary and sufficient conditions for 'x is a pantheist view' and find that these intuitions rule out candidates that involve providence or a personal god, then read this paper as an essay on something a bit like pantheism in Stoic philosophy. Perhaps you would prefer to label it 'panentheistic'. I won't mind: I'll just envy you your finely articulated intuitions on what counts as pantheism.
I. That the Stoics were Pantheists
In this section, I argue that the Stoic view is correctly described as a kind of pantheism. I adopt a definition of pantheism specifically articulated by Oppy, but common to many writers on the subject.6 According to him, any form of pantheism is committed to an ontological thesis and an ideological thesis:
1. The Ontological Thesis: in some sense to be explained, everything that exists constitutes a Unity and
2. The Ideological Thesis: the Unity is divine in some sense that makes it appropriate to take up a religious attitude toward it.
These two theses are, of course, related. The specific sense in which the totality is a unity typically explains why it would be correct to regard it as divine. Suppose we were friends of unrestricted mereological composition. We would then agree that there is a thing - call it The Big Thing - that is the mereological sum of all things. This would be a sort of unity, I suppose. But it seems implausible to regard this Unity as something divine. I suppose you could argue that The Big Thing is the most powerful thing that there is.7 (After all, it contains as parts all the billions of suns, stacks of nuclear warheads, strong smelling French cheeses of every kind, etc.) You could similarly argue that it is wisest thing that exists. (After all, it contains Stephen Hawking and lots of other very smart people as parts.) But all this seems a far cry from showing that The Big Thing is omnipotent and omniscient or any of the other traditional qualities attached to the concept of god. To sum up, if the kind of
Unity that the pantheist claims exists is merely that of a mereological sum, it seems pretty implausible to claim that this Unity is divine. This example illustrates the give and take between the ontological and ideological theses. We will consider this give and take with specific reference to the Stoic theory in section IV At present I wish to return to the question of whether the Stoic position should count as pantheist given this definition.
The Stoics call the entire cosmos a god, but it has a kind of unity to it that goes beyond the 'unity in thought' had by any mereological sum that we consider. Diogenes Laertius reports the following on the use of the words 'fcwmos' and 'god' by the Stoics.
They use the word 'world' [kosmos] in three ways: of god himself, the peculiarly qualified individual consisting of all substance (ousias), who is indestructible and ingenerable, since he is the manufacturer (demiourgos) of the world-order; they also describe the world-order (diakosmesis) as 'world' and thirdly, what is composed out of both [i.e. god and the world-order]. (DL VII.137 = LS 44F)8
A 'pecularily qualified individual' is a substance in the Aristotelian sense -an individual thing, like you or me. Such qualified individuals are contrasted with mere collections like piles of sand or flocks of sheep.9 The kosmos has the kind of unity to it that an individual biological thing has, as is shown from this report:
They [the Stoics] say that god is an animal which is immortal and rational or intelligent, perfect in happiness, not admitting any evil, provident toward the whole world and its occupants, but not anthropomorphic. He is the creator of the world and, as it were, the father of all, both generally and in particular, that part of him which pervades all things, which is called by many descriptions according to his powers. (DL VII.147 = LS 54A)
Why do they think that the world is a biological individual like each of us? The kosmos is a qualified individual because god - the first thing denoted by 'AüJ/nos' - is the producer of an order within itself. To understand why this is so, we need to consider the Stoic doctrine on the principles of things.
According to the Stoics, there are two archai or ultimate explanatory principles for all things.
They [the Stoics] think that there are two principles of the universe, that which acts and that which is acted upon. That which is acted upon is unqualified substance, i.e. matter; that which acts is the reason [logos] in it, i.e. god. For this, since it is everlasting, constructs (demiourgein) every single thing throughout all matter. (DL VII. 134 = LS 44B)
The question of historical influence between Platonism and Stoicism is a difficult one.10 But it will do no harm to explain what the Stoics are doing by reference to Plato's Timaeus. In the latter, we might locate several ultimate explanatory principles: the Forms, the Demiurge, the World Soul, and the Receptacle in which the copies of the Forms come to be. Of these four, three are 'active' in the sense that they explain what exists and what happens by their activity as agents or as paradigms. The Receptacle is passive and it was common in the period after Plato to assimilate it to Aristotelian matter.11 We can think of the Stoic active and passive principles as collapsing the various roles of the Forms, the Demiurge and the World Soul into a single immanent source of order and change within the cosmos. This active principle they call 'god'.
God, however, is also related to further forces within the Stoic physical theory. They also use the term 'god' to describe the 'designing fire' and 'breath' that permeates everything.
The Stoics made god out to be intelligent, a designing fire (pur technikon) which methodically proceeds towards the creation of the world, and encompasses all the seminal principles according to which everything comes about according to fate, and a breath (pneuma) pervading the whole world, which takes on different names owing to the alterations of the matter through which it passes. (Aetius, Placita 1.7.33 = LS 46A)
'Designing fire' is distinguished from the phenomenon we ordinarily call fire because the latter consumes fuel, transforming it into fire, while the latter causes the growth and preservation of that in which it exists (Stobaeus 1.213, 15-21= LS 46D). Thus designing fire is a theoretical posit that is somewhat like the element fire. The connection between designing fire and breath or pneuma is not easy to ascertain. The latter is constituted by a blend or mixture of heat and cold.12 Given that both are referents of the term 'god', we might suppose that the heat in pneuma is somehow associated with designing fire, though no text says exactly this. Whatever the relation between the heat in pneuma and the designing fire, the constitutents of pneuma are blended through and through. Blending is the kind of mixture that occurs when the ingredient materials are both present everywhere within the blend:
... when certain substances and their qualities are mutually co-extended through and through, with the original substances and their qualities being preserved in such a mixture; this kind of mixture he [sc. the Stoic Chrysippus] calls specifically 'blending';... for the capacity to be separated again from one another is a peculiarity of blended substances, and this only occurs if they preserve their own natures in the mixture. (Alexander Aphrodisias, On Mixture 216, 25-217,2 = LS 48C4)
The Stoics illustrate the blending relation by talking about mixtures of wine and water, the fire in a red-hot poker and the mixture of soul and body. This makes it clear that blending involves the presence of bodies in the same place.
At least one source reports that god - in his guise as active principle - is blended with the passive principle or matter:
They [the Stoics] say that god is mixed (memichthai) with matter, pervading all of it and so shaping it, structuring it, and making it into the world. (Alexander Aphrodisias, On Mixture 225,1-2 = LS 46H)
It is important to appreciate that though the active principle plays the role of the soul of the cosmos, it is not itself like our post-Cartesian conception of soul. The active principle, like matter, is corporeal.1* Thus the relation between the active and passive principles within the cosmos is supposedly like that between the blended wine and water in LS 48C.
The texts considered so far show the Stoics using the term 'god' to refer to several things: a) the whole cosmos (44F); b) the active principle (44B); c) intelligent designing fire (46A1) and d) breath or pneuma (46A2). The last three are probably somehow related since the designing fire and pneuma seem to denote various modes of the active principle's activity. However, our surviving texts and testimonia do not paint a very clear picture of the exact relations between god qua active priniciple, the designing fire, the element fire, and whatever the heat in pneuma might be.14 There should be a genetic account that teases them apart, since the early Stoics held a theory of eternal recurrence according to which the same story of the world plays itself out between punctuations of total cosmic conflagration.15 But our texts are not particularly helpful on this subject.
God, intelligence (nous), fate and Zeus are all one, and many other names are applied to him. In the beginning all by himself he turned the entire substance through air into water. Just as the sperm is enveloped in the seminal fluid, so god, who is the seminal principle of the world, stays behind as such in the moisture, making matter serviceable to himself for the successive stages of creation. (DL VII. 135-6 = LS 46B)
Though this text does not clarify the relations between the various senses of 'god' delineated so far, it does introduce a further equation of god with Fate. As noted, the Stoics are causal deterrninists who embrace a doctrine of eternal recurrence. They call the chain of causes and effects 'Fate'
By 'fate' I mean ... an ordering and sequences of causes and effects . . . . Nothing has happened which was not going to be, and likewise nothing is going to be of which nature does not now contain causes working to bring that very thing about. This makes it intelligible that fate should be, not the 'fate' of superstition, but that of physics, an everlasting cause of things - why past things happened, why present things are now happening, and why future things will be. (Cicero, On Divination 1.125-6 = LS 55L)
Stobaeus tells us that the third head of the Stoa, Chrysippus, identified the breath or pneuma with the substance (pusia) of fate (Anthology 1.79.1 = LS 55M). Cicero tells us that Chrysippus also spoke of god as 'the force of fate (fatelem vim) and the necessity of future events' (On the nature of the gods 1.39 = LS 54B). The order of the cosmos is this chain of causes and effects that is worked out through the proximate agency of intelligent designing fire and breath.
Summing up then, the Stoics use the term 'god' to refer to the cosmos as a whole and regard it as a single, biological individual. But they also use the term to refer to the means by which god enacts the life of the cosmos. These manifestations of god's creative activity within the cosmos are described as the active principle, designing fire, and pneuma. These completely interpenetrate the cosmos, so that god in these guises is present everywhere. The identification of god with fate - the sequence of causes and effects that constitute the history of the world from conflagration to conflagration -highlights the fact that the world-order produced by god's action upon himself is perfectly rational.
I think anyone who holds such a theory about god is rightly described as a pantheist. The Unity Thesis is not implausibly thought to be satisfied in virtue of the fact that the whole cosmos is alleged to be a single biological individual which is alive, self-creative and immortal. The Ideological Thesis might be thought to be satisfied because of the qualities of this individual. To see that this is so, contrast the Stoic picuture with the argument for the divinity of the mereological sum of all things. The latter is unconvincing because there is, as it were, no internal connection between Hawking's intelligence and the power of nuclear weapons - these powers are had by the aggregate simply in virtue of its parts. But on the Stoic view, the world is no mere aggregate and the powers exhibited by various parts of it are to be explained ultimately by reference to god's activity: the world - and so god -is the order of causes and effects which make it up.
But is god all there is for a Stoic? Or would it be more accurate to describe their view as panentheisticl - that is, the thesis that the universe is part, but not the whole of God.16
In a sense, there "are" other things in the Stoic ontology apart from the cosmos. There "is" the infinite extra-cosmic void in which it is situated. But because empty space can neither act nor undergo anything, the Stoics say that it does not exist, but rather merely subsists (huphistasthai). According to the Stoics, only bodies exist or are - hence the scare-quotes around the copula in the previous sentences. Similar remarks apply to lekta. Roughly, these are entities like propositions. Time is another subsistent according to the Stoics. All these items, whether existent or subsistent, are nonetheless particulars. As the Stoics say, each is a something (ti). What we may not say, however, is that there is something other than god, for according to them the 'somethings' other than god fail to be.
It will be objected that this is special pleading. Philosophers who attempt to draw a distinction between existence and subsistence are generally misguided. We should regard the Stoics as meaning by their use of 'something' what we mean by 'existent'. So though the Stoics might avoid the sentence 'There are beings other than god', they can't avoid the fact that things other than god exist on their theory. They just say this in a misleading way.
In reply to this, let me try a bold move. I suggest that panentheism in the sense defined by Forrest should not be regarded as inconsistent with pantheism. Consider a possible world in which just the Stoic cosmos exists, and none of the lekta or other subsistents of their theory. This is a world in which we would all say pantheism is true. Now, imagine a world just like this one, except that in it numbers exist. Is this world, unlike the first, not a world in which pantheism is true? Before you answer, consider this. Given the kinds of things numbers are widely believed to be - necessary existents - the first world you supposed you imagined really was the second world all the time. I think that the universal quanitifier in the Unity requirement is really implicitly restricted in scope. When we say that pantheism requires that all things form a unity, we do not have in mind abstract objects. Rather, we have in mind the kinds of things that we suppose constitute our physical universe. This is why I think that 'pantheism' correctly describes the view that Plato has in the ftmaeus when he says that the sensible world is itself a god. Pantheism is consistent with the odd Platonic Form or number that is not strictly a part of god.
But there is another ground on which it might be claimed that the Stoics were merely panentheists, not pantheists. We might mean by the former term the view that the universe is god, but that there are things other than god within the universe. The second of the two principles - matter - looks as if it is something other than god. Since matter is that which passively undergoes effects through the agency of god, matter is a body. (Body for the Stoics is defined as that which acts or undergoes.) If it is a body numerically distinct from god, then there is something within the cosmos that is not god.
That matter is such a body is strongly suggested by the quote from Alexander Aphrodisias above (On Mature 225, 1-2 = LS 46H) in which it is said that god is everywhere mixed with matter. The Stoic theory of blending describes blends as cases where two bodies are everywhere extended through and through (Alexander Aphrodisias, On Mixture 216,25-217,2 = LS 48C4). Therefore, matter is a body different from god and the Stoics are panentheists rather than pantheists.
I reply that we should reject the view that matter and god are two numerically distinct bodies. Rather, matter and god are two ways of minking about one and the same body.17 That this is so can be argued in a number of ways. First, matter is not a body numerically distinct from god because matter qua matter has no qualities (DL VII. 134 = LS 44B). But for the Stoics, non-identity is grounded in qualitative difference.18 Therefore qualityless matter cannot be distinct from god. Second, matter is not subject to generation or destruction (Calcidius 292 = LS 44D). But at the conflagration, the reason or commanding faculty (hegemonikori) of god is described as existing alone.19 Matter must nonetheless be present even when only the commanding faculty of god exists alone, else it would have to be generated in the next world-cycle. The conclusion must therefore be that god and matter are merely different aspects of one and the same body. Finally, the passage that implies that god and matter form a mixture in which two (different) bodies are blended through and through (Alexander, On Mixture 216,25 ff) should be discounted. Alexander is an Aristotelian critic of Stoicism who argues that even the mixture of wine and water - interpreted as the Stoics interpret it - is incoherent. If it can be shown that the absurdity involved in the co-location of two bodies is global, and not merely local, for the Stoics, then this serves Alexander's polemic purposes well.
I conclude that the Stoic view should be classified as a form of pantheism. The cosmos forms a single individual. This is god. The term 'god' is also used to refer to the means by which this global individual acts upon itself in bringing about its own periodic history-cycles. God in this sense is to be identified with the active principle, pneuma and the chain of causes and effects that is termed 'fate'.
II. Stoic Pantheism Involves a Personal God
A. The Historical Evidence
The Stoics treat god as a person. This is just what we should expect given what was said about god in DL VII. 147. God is a rational animal - just like me - but in addition he is immortal and blessed. If I am a person, how could god be any less a person? Like the other persons with whom we are acquainted, the Stoic god is a soul-body composite. The entire world is god's body.
The Stoics hold the view that the universe is a body and think that this sensible cosmos is a god .... And they define god to be mind (nous) in as much as he is the soul of the whole existing vault of heaven and earth. (John Damascene, On heresies 1 = SVF II.1026)20
[The Stoics say] that god is the mind of the world, and that the world is the body of god. (Lactantius, Divine Institutes VII.3 = SVF II. 1041)
I suspect that some pantheists resist the idea that god is a person because they think that a divine being that constituted the entire cosmos could not possibly be a subject of experience or have a unified centre of consciousness. The Stoics disagree that the cosmos is not a thinker. At least during the conflagration when all things become the divine designing fire, god has thoughts.
What kind of life will a wise man have if he is abandoned by his friends and hurled into a prison or isolated in some foreign country or detained on a long voyage or cast out onto a desert shore? It will be like the life of Zeus, at the time at which the world is dissolved and the gods have been blended together into one, when nature comes to a stop for a while; he reposes in himself given over to his thoughts. The wise man's behaviour is just like this. (Seneca, Letters IX. 16 = LS 460)
But though god is the soul and mind of the world, he is not manifested throughout his body in exactly the same way.
This view [that the soul is mixed with everything] perhaps agrees with that of Zeno when he lays it down that god is manifest through all substance, at one place as intellect, at another as soul, at another as nature, and elsewhere as what holds things together (hexis). (Themistius, Epitome of Aristotle's DeAnima 35, 33 = SVF I. 158)
These four categories - intellect, soul, nature and hexis - are the four gradations of breath or pneuma distinguished by the Stoics. The first is the grade of pneuma that is found in rational things. Soul is the pneuma in sentient creatures, nature that in living but non-sentient creatures. Hexis is what makes an inanimate thing an object of the kind that it is. The various kinds of pneuma differ from one another qualitatively in virtue of the degree of inner tension (tonos) present in the hot and cold elements from which pneuma is blended. These gradations of pneuma also explain the plural reference to 'gods' in the previous passage. The Stoics claim that the heavenly bodies are gods on the ground that they must be composed of the divine designing fire.
So far I have argued that god for the Stoics must be a person since he is a body with a mind just like me. Is it absurd to think of the relationship between the world and god as like the relationship between my self and my body? Remember that the Stoics have a materialist conception of all kinds of soul - both ours and that of god. Thus it makes more sense, perhaps, to compare what they say about the mind or soul of the world and its body to what we modern materialists might say about ourselves and our bodies. It is not obviously absurd to think that my agency is manifested in different ways in different parts of my body. I perform some actions by moving different parts of my body in different ways. These different ways correspond to the different gradations of pneuma found in different parts of the cosmos.
Not only is the Stoic god an individual whose body is that of the cosmos, their god is a virtuous agent. According to the Stoics, god is entirely lacking in anger. He harms no one and is a mild, calm, beneficent savior (Lactan-tius, On Divine Anger ch. 5 = SVF 11.1120). Indeed, such is the moral perfection of god that every wrong action is an instance of impiety:
It is their view that every wrong act is an impious act. For to do something against the wish of the god is proof of impiety. For the gods have a natural affinity with virtue and virtuous actions; and they have a natural relation of alienation from vice and what results from it. Now since a wrong action is doing something in accordance with vice, every wrong action is revealed as displeasing to the gods - that is, something impious. With every wrong action, the worthless person does something that is displeasing to the gods. (Arius Didymus, Epitome of Stoic Ethics llk=SVF III.661)
This impression of god as personal being is further reinforced by Cleanthes' longest surviving fragment, his Hymn to Zeus. In the Hymn Cleanthes a) addresses Zeus as an agent who is responsible for the functioning of nature; b) reinforces the identification of Zeus with Fate - the series of causes and effects running through each qualitatively identical cycle of eternal recurrence; c) exempts Zeus from responsibility for what wicked people do through their ignorance; d) begs Zeus to reduce human ignorance and e) notes that humans alone among all the cosmos bear a resemblance to god (Stobaeus, Anthology 1.1.12 = LS 541). The claims in (c) and (d) will be examined more closely in the next section on god's providence. The point that needs to be made here, however, is that Cleanthes seems to sincerely believe that his hymn is addressed to a being that is an agent, and a morally virtuous one at that.
Β. Can Pantheists Have a Personal God?
Cleanthes identifies Zeus with fate, and fate in turn with the causal order of the cosmos, and given that he addresses Zeus as a person, it seems to me clear that the Stoics held a form of pantheism in which god is personal. This is just what we would expect given their claim that the entire cosmos constitutes a single rational living being who is immortal, morally perfect and happy.
Now, someone might concede the historical point that the Stoics had a concept of a personal god, but nonetheless insist that they were simply confused in this respect. Pantheism is just incompatible with a personal conception of god. I think that the Stoics are not confused - or at least not substantially more confused than other theists. Their identification of Zeus with fate - or the world-order, or the pneuma by means of which the world-order is brought about - involves the reification of something that has a narrative structure. Persons and their thoughts have a similar narrative structure: we say and do now one thing, now another. It makes sense to talk about what god, in their sense, is going to do and what he has done.
Is this enough for a personal pantheistic god? It might be objected that any series of events within the history of the world has a narrative structure within which can say, 'This happens next' Yet no such series of events is rightly described as a person. Therefore the sum total of all the events and the world that they constitute cannot be a person. It is requisite for a personal god, that god have a mental life with intentional states and the capacity to make decisions.21
It is true that the Stoics use the word 'god' in relation to fate and the world-order and these may plausibly be identified with a series of causes and effects or the events that manifest these causal relations. So it might be thought that they are vulnerable to the objection just considered. But they also describe the world as god's body and god as the mind of the world. Given their views about the mind-body relation, this is something that they can say in full seriousness. Recall that on the Stoic view is that the pneuma that interpenetrates my body and makes me a rational creature is one gradation of the pneuma that is identified with god's proximate activity in constituting the world.22 This material stuff is everywhere co-located with passive, quality-less matter. Certainly when it is condensed and pure at the conflagration, god will then have a unitary mental life, just as Seneca suggests in the passage quoted above.
Does it make sense to talk about a personal relationship with this pantheistic god? It might be the case that even if the Stoic god is like a person in some ways, it is not personal in the sense that we cannot have a personal relationship with it. Part of the worry is that Zeus or Fate might still be thought to be more like a book than an author, in spite of my attempts to ease these worries in the preceding paragraph: Fate contains or determines a narrative of events, but it isn't itself a narrator. Thus, someone might say, we cannot have a personal relationship with it.
I think this line of thought may be mistaken. Consider your favourite novel. There is a sense in which you have a personal relationship with it: you read it first at a formative time in your life; it made you reflect on your failed marriage; it is something that you read again when you need to feel better about love, and so on. It might be objected that what I am calling a personal relationship with the book is actually a mediated relationship with the author. But this can't be right, for your relationship with the book would still survive even if you discovered that there was no author. Suppose that Catcher in the Rye was really the result of a rather extraordinarily improbable explosion in the type-setting room. I think that you could not refrain from taking the intentional stance toward the novel in spite of this knowledge -your relationship is with the book, not its author. Again, it might be objected that your personal relationship is with characters in the book, not the book itself. This may be true too - sometimes we do have such personal relationships with fictional characters. But this does not show that we don't also have similar relations with narratives rather than characters. But even if we were to concede this point, a good Stoic would say that the various natural forces deified in their pantheon are like characters in a novel. Hera, the personification of the air, plays a certain role in the world's narrative, just like Holden Caulfield does in Salinger's narrative.
What about other aspects of the notion of a personal relationship? Can we make sense of the idea that a Stoic pantheistic god cares for each of us? Can we make sense of the idea that one might pray to it, as Cleanthes does, and ask it to save us from our own ignorance? With respect to the last question, it seems to me that the pantheist faces no greater difficulty than any traditional theist who believes in God's immutability. The second question is one that will be addressed in the next section on pantheistic providence. I will argue that the Stoics can say, consistently with their theory of value, that the world does all that it can in order to enable a happy life for each of us.
ΙΠ. Stoic Pantheism and Providence
The Stoics are adamant that god exercises divine providence. In fact, they think that it is a conceptual truth about god that he is provident.
Moreover, they themselves [the Stoics] are unceasingly busy crying woe against Epicurus for ruining the preconception (prolepsis) of the gods by abolishing providence. For, they say, god is preconceived and thought of not only as immortal and blessed but also as benevolent, caring and beneficent. (Plutarch, On common conceptions 1075E = LS 54K)
Moreover, god exercises providence in relation to rational creatures: everything in the world is for them:
Suppose someone asks for whose sake this vast edifice has been constructed. For the trees and plants, which although not sentient are sustained by nature? No, that is absurd. For the animals? Not, it is no more plausible that the gods should have done all this work for the sake of dumb, ignorant animals. Then for whose sake will anyone say that the world was created? Presumably for those animate creatures that use reason: that is, for gods and men. Nothing is better than them, for reason is the supreme gift. Thus it becomes credible that it was for the sake of gods and men that the world and everything in it was made. (Cicero, ND 11.133 = LS 54N)
So, far from being congenial to a deep ecology ethic that locates divinity and thus value in nature, Stoic pantheism is breath-takingly anthropocentric. This has not prevented some modern interpreters from trying to recruit them to the green camp, but it won't work.23
A modern reader might be willing to concede the historical point that some pantheists did suppose that god exercises a providence tailored to humans. As John Bigelow says, 'There is almost no view so crazy that you can't find some Greek philosopher who held it.' And we might think that providential pantheism is thoroughly crazy. While I don't believe in this view, I think that the Stoics are actually in a better position to defend the idea of a providential pantheistic god than most other theists are. The key lies in their theory of value.
According to the Stoics, there is only one thing that is genuinely good: moral virtue. There is only one thin&lhat is genuinely bad: moral vice. Other things such as health or wealth are, strictly speaking, indifferent. We distinguish among the indifferent things and call some of the indifferents 'preferred' because they keep us alive and in a natural state of functioning. Unlike the Cynics who thought that there was no way of rationally deciding among indifferent things, the Stoics will say that it is rational for me to prefer wealth to poverty under most circumstances. It would, of course, be a mistake to regard my achieving wealth as a good thing.
The argument the Stoics present for this view is familiar from a rather different context. Compare:
They [the Stoics] say that some existing things are good, others are bad, and others are neither of these. The virtues - prudence, justice, courage, moderation and the rest - are good. The opposites of these - foolishness, injustice and the rest - are bad. Everything else which neither harms nor benefits is neither of these: for instance, life, health, pleasure, beauty, strength, wealth, reputation, noble birth, and their opposites .... For just as heating, not chilling, is the peculiar characteristic of what is hot, so too benefiting, not harming, is the peculiar characteristic of what is good. But wealth and health no more do benefit than they harm. Therefore wealth and health are not something good. Furthermore they say: that which can be used well or badly is not something good. But wealth or health can be used well or badly. (Diogenes Laer-tiusVII.101-3 = LS58A)
with
There is no possibility of thinking of anything at all in the world, or even out of it, which can be regarded as good without qualification, except a good will. Intelligence, wit, judgement, and whatever talents of the mind one might want to name are doubtless in many respects good and desirable, as are such qualities of temperament as courage, resolution, perseverance. But they can also become extremely bad and harmful if the will, which is to make use of these gifts of nature and which in its special constitution is called character, is not good. The same holds with the gifts of fortune; power, riches, honour, even health ... (Kant, Groundwork 393)
There are of course some important differences. Kant seems to imagine that what the Stoics would regard as a virtue - courage - could be used badly. The Stoics, however, are like Socrates and hold a strong unity of the virtues thesis: an agent who is bold in the pursuit of evil ends is not really courageous-just bold and ignorant of the good.
The more important difference is that the Stoics, unlike Kant, are eudai-monists (though perhaps Kant himself regarded them more as perfectionists). They think that the doing or having of that which is genuinely good is sufficient for happiness or well-being. Kant supposes that happiness is something additional and only contingently connected with the good will. The passage from Kant quoted above continues by enumerating happiness as among the goods of fortune
... and that complete well-being and contentment with one's condition which is called happiness make for pride and often hereby even arrogance, unless there is a good will to correct their influence .... The sight of a being who is not graced by any touch of a pure and good will but who yet enjoys an uninterrupted prosperity can never delight a rational and impartial spectator. Thus a good will seems to constitute the indispensable condition of being even worthy of happiness. (Kant, Groundwork 393)
In order for Kant's God to exercise divine providence toward human-kind, He would have to bring it about that those who manifest the good will and thus are worthy of happiness actually find it - if not in this lifetime, perhaps in the next.24 For the Stoic, however, much less is required. All that god need do is provide the conditions under which people can become virtuous. He thereby makes it possible that all can be happy.
What is required for happiness and virtue according to the Stoics? The Stoics say that happiness or eudaimonia 'consists in living in accordance with (kata) virtue, in living in agreement (homologia), or, what is the same, living in accordance with nature' (Stobaeus, Anthology 11.77, 16-27 = LS 63A). How do we live in accord with nature and virtue? We pay attention to what nature has to teach us about what is good (Seneca, Letters 120.3-5; 8-11 = LS 60E). This means becoming acquainted with and admiring virtuous actions and thus being led to love and pursue as our final goal the kind of character from which such actions consistently flow. In order to live in accordance with nature, we must also get clear about what is up to us and what is not. It is not up to us what will happen in many circumstances. It is only up to us how we will react. It is up to us how we will act, but not what will eventuate from our actions. All my actions have as their primary aim that I should act virtuously. I may prefer that I should succeed in accumulating enough money to buy a house through my virtuous actions. But if I do not, then I can revise my preferences in accordance with my growing knowledge of what the course of nature holds for me.
The Stoics say that the happy person (ho spoudaios) experiences nothing contrary to his desire or impulse or purpose on account of the fact that in all such cases he acts wTth reserve (met' hupexairesees) and encounters no obstacles which are unanticipated. (Stobaeus, Anthology 11.155, 5-8 = LS 65W)
The good person not only revises his conditional preference for getting those strictly indifferent things that the foolish call genuine goods - things like nice houses or life itself - when it becomes apparent that his virtuous efforts to attain them will not succeed. He also comes to prefer those things that one might normally disprefer when it becomes clear to him that they will come about. As Chrysippus says:
As long as the future is uncertain to me I always hold to those things which are better adapted to obtaining the things in accordance with nature [i.e. the indifferents it is rational to prefer]; for God himself has made me disposed to select these. But if I actually knew that I was fated now to be ill, I would even have an impulse to be ill. For my foot too, if it had intelligence, would have an impulse to get muddy. (Epictetus, Discourses II.6.9 = LS 58J)
We are to god as Chrysippus' foot is to his body. So long as god gives us sufficient forewarning that we are about to 'get muddy', things like cancer or earthquakes need have no impact on our happiness. This forewarning god does by being a sequence of causes and effects that conforms to the principle of sufficient reason. In short, at its most minimal, god's providence for humans consists in being and bringing about a rationally intelligible world order.25
The Stoics, however, are not content to rest on this minimal sense in which god exercises providence. In addition to providing us with all that is necessary for happiness, god provides a surfeit of indifferent things of the sort that it is rational to prefer. In Cicero's On the nature of the gods, his spokesman for the Stoic view catalogues the advantages that derive from plants and animals, rivers and seas, and from divination. He includes the care that the gods exercise with respect to individuals - Odysseus, for example (ND II. 154-67). The anthropocentric nature of some Stoic examples of providence is quite amazing. According to Porphyry, Chrysippus claimed that the animate nature or soul of the pig functions like salt, preserving the tasty meat until it is ready to be eaten by humans! (On abstinence III.20.1 = LS 54P). I suspect that the Stoics here defend a position that is stronger than the one that they need to defend. Cicero's Stoic spokesman says that god's providence means that the world is governed and arranged in the finest or most beautiful way (omniapulcherrume geri, ND 11.75). Given the analytical connection between the fine and the good, I think this requirement entails minimally that our world is susceptible of the rational understanding which allows virtuous living.
It will be objected that the actions of the vicious present a problem for the Stoic doctrine of providence. Proponents of a more traditional, transcendent deity can invoke the (purportedly) great good of free will in their theodicy - God permits moral evil because this is the price of creating a world with free agents. It might be doubted that the Stoics can do likewise and this doubt can have two grounds. First, the Stoics are strict causal deter-minists. Thus the vicious actions that take place could not fail to happen given the history of the world prior to the action. Second, the vicious agent is a part of god for a Stoic pantheist. To maintain the image of god and his world-body, it is as if one of my fingers were to wrongly harm one of my toes. How can it be said that I am looking after all the parts of my body?
The first problem is no worse for the Stoics than for any other theist who is a compatibilist about free will. Any such theist must confront Mackie's hard question: was it not up to God to create a world in which every agent freely chooses the good? The question of whether god is separate from the deterministic world that he creates seems to make no difference at all to how hard this question is to answer. It may be impossible to provide a free will theodicy if one is a compatibilist, but this impossibility owes nothing to the peculiarities of pantheism.
With respect to the second problem, no one other than the enlightened Stoic sage is capable of really harming the Stoic sage. Since only vice is bad, and only I determine whether I am vicious or not, only I can harm me. So the Stoics will say that the example of my finger unjustly harming my toes is not apposite: none of god's members harms another - they only harm themselves. But this seems to re-locate the problem. For it is now the vicious person - the offending finger in my analogy - who is harmed. In addition, a critic might point out that not every person is a sage. Indeed, the Stoics claim that almost no one ever achieves wisdom and virtue. So though a few rare individuals may be invulnerable to the actions of the vicious, most people are not.
The second part of this rejoinder is not a problem for the Stoics. Something like a rape or a beating is an indifferent thing that it is typically rational to prefer not to happen to you. Only the Stoic wise person is aware of its status as such. Those who are not wise are unaware that a beating or a rape does not really harm them. But the absence of this awareness of the true nature of these things in no way changes their status as indifferents.
The first part of the rejoinder presents a much more serious difficulty. Cleanthes, the second head of the Stoa, thought that it was sufficiently problematic that he claimed that, though vicious actions are caused and thus part of fate, they are no part of god's providence.26 Chrysippus, however, seems to have grasped the nettle.27 PerhapsJie thought this problem could be overcome by arguing that the existence of goods (e.g. virtuous people and their actions) required the existence of evils. Justice, for example, is simply the removal of injustice.28 This seems implausible. But notice how little Chrysippus' commitment to pantheism adds to its implausibility. Any traditional theodicy must answer the question of why God has devised a world in which so few are willing to accept the gift of God's grace. Was it not open to God to make more people who would accept the salvation that He freely gives? The presence of god in or outside of his creation makes little difference to the difficulty of this problem.
I conclude that, as a matter of historical fact, the Stoics were pantheists who also believed in divine providence. When we consider the coherence of this claim against the backdrop of their views in ethics, it emerges that they are not significantly more badly placed to defend their position than those who advocate more traditional, non-pantheist conceptions of god.
IV. The Stoic Arguments for Pantheism
In the previous sections of the paper I have argued that the Stoics accepted a form of pantheism with features that are at odds with Levine's characterization of this view. I have argued that they are not in a substantially worse position to defend their form of pantheism than are other more traditional theists. But to show that the arguments against a position are no worse than the arguments against its competitors is pretty small beer. How interesting are the positive arguments for Stoic pantheism?
A. Argument Strategies
How, in the most general of terms, does one go about arguing for pantheism? I'll consider two very general argument strategies. The Stoics employ the second of these.
One kind of argument strategy might be called 'top down'. You could start from an independent argument that god exists and then show that there is nothing other than god. I think Spinoza's argument for pantheism is of this form. It is interesting to contrast it with the Stoic arguments since I think Spinoza's argument for pantheism involves premises that could not be shared by any ancient Greek philosopher prior to Plotinus. Spinoza's Definition 6 claims that God possesses infinite attributes (i.e. essential properties). But prior to Plotinus, no Greek philosopher questions the correlation of being with that which is limited and thus capable of definition. The infinite number of God's attributes are essential to Spinoza's argument for pantheism. No two substances can share the same attributes (I, prop 5). Since God necessarily exists (I, prop 11), there can be no other substance. The existence of one substance with infinite attributes precludes the possibility of any other substance since there are no attributes it could possibly have. So Spinoza argues that God exists and then argues that there is nothing separate from God.
It must be observed that, like the top down strategist, the Stoics present arguments for the existence of god that are not specifically pantheistic. If these arguments show anything, they show that a 'generic god' exists. Unlike
Spinoza, they do not extend this conclusion into a specifically pantheistic version of theism by arguing that there is nothing additional to the god that has been shown to exist.
An alternative argument strategy for pantheists might be called 'bottom up'. Suppose that in some sense the universe is a unity. Now argue that some feature or features of this unity makes it count as divine. But if the unified universe is divine, then pantheism is true. The argument goes from unity, to divinity, to pantheism. Pretty obviously, however, the move from unity to divinity is going to depend on what kind of unity we are talking about.
I argued above that the sort of unity had by the mereological sum of all things is not a promising start for establishing the divinity of The Big Thing. In what other ways could the Ontological Thesis be satisfied? You might suppose that every existing thing is composed out of the same kind of thing. I'll call this view Compositional Monism. Stoic materialism would be a form of Compositional Monism. If Compositional Monism were true, then there would be a sense in which everything that exists forms a unity. The sense in which there is a Unity would be analogous to the sense in which we say there is one element whose atomic number is one. All the hydrogen there is forms a kind of unity. At the very least, we discuss it in ways that make it sound as if it is a unified subject of predication.
But as in the case of The Big Thing, the path from the kind of unity implied by Compositional Monism to its status as divine is not at all obvious. A would-be pantheist could point to the fact that every existing thing depends on matter, as traditional theists say everything depends on god. He might even claim that it is not just that the existence of every object depends on the existence of matter, but that the nature of matter determines the properties and characteristics of each individual object composed out of it. The limits of matter effectively determine what properties things can and cannot have. This is perhaps slightly more compelling than the argument for the divinity of The Big Thing, but not much. Fortunately, Compositional Monism is not the Stoic argument strategy for pantheism.
I think that the Stoic arguments for a specifically pantheistic god proceed from a position I'll call 'Pan-substantialism'. The Stoics supposed that there is an important difference between a thing and a heap of sand. A person, an animal or even an individual plant are examples of things that have a special kind of unity about them that mere collections lack. I'll use Aristotle's term for an individual unitary thing, 'substance' or ousia, though this terminology presents some potential for confusion since later philosophers used 'substance' or 'the substance of a thing' to indicate the stuff from which it is composed. (Indeed, some of our reports about the Stoics sometimes use 'substance' in this way, though others use the term 'substrate' (hupokeimenon) to indicate the matter that composes a thing.) I'll call the view that claims that everything that exists forms a unitary thing 'Pan-sub-stantialism'. This must not be confused with another closely related position that I'll call Substance Monism. Substance Monism is the thesis that there is only one substance - that is, only one unitary thing - and it is the universe.
To see the difference, reflect on the question of whether one substance can be a part of another. In the Categories Aristotle claims that a part like a hand or a head is a substance. Thus he thinks that substances can have other substances as parts. But you can imagine someone who might disagree with Aristotle on this point and claim that no unitary thing has other unitary things or substances as its parts. If you thought this, then you would think that Pan-substantialism implies Substance Monism. If the universe is itself a substance and if no substance has another substance as a part, then there exists only one substance. I think Spinoza was a Substance Monist. But one could also reject this principle about substances and their parts, as Aristotle did, and then Pan-substantialism would not imply Substance Monism. I think this is the Stoic position.
The path from Pan-substantialism to pantheism looks less problematic than inferences from unity to divinity that we have considered. Part of what makes it seem implausible to claim that The Big Thing or the totality of matter is god is the fact that these entities don't seem to be a single thing in quite the way that we suppose god ought to be. Moreover, if the universe is a unified thing analogous to a living thing like a plant or animal, then it is pretty marvellous. One might even say divine. The Stoics argue for Pan-substantialism by trying to show that the universe is a living, intelligent and rational being. In addition to showing that the universe is therefore a substance in much the same way a person is, it also provides evidence of the divinity of the universe - it is alive, rational and intelligent.
B. Stoic Arguments for 'Generic God'
The Stoic arguments for the existence of a god that is not specifically pantheistic are interesting in their own right. Our fullest source for the arguments of Zeno, Cleanthes and Chrysippus is book II of Cicero's On the nature of the gods. We find there arguments from 1) the universal consensus that god exists (II.5); 2) from divination (II.7-12); 3) from the naturalness of the concept of god (11.12-15); 3) a version of the argument from design (11.16-18), together with an attack on Epicurean views that the nature of the world can be explained without reference to a divine craftsman (11.93—5); and 4) an axiological argument attributed to Chrysippus that there must be a god since, if there were not, humans would be the greatest thing in the universe. But since the latter is arrogant madness, there must be gods (II. 16 = LS 54E). Sextus Empiricus reports a syllogism of Zeno's that might be most charitably described as a crude form of the ontological argument (adv Math IX. 133-6 = LS 54D).
These arguments have been examined in detail by others and for the purposes of this paper I will pass over them without comment.29 If any of them were convincing, they would establish only the conclusion that god exists. They would not show that the entire cosmos is a single living creature that is rational, intelligent and eternal.
C. Cleanthes 'Arguments from Physics
The arguments that Cicero attributed to Cleanthes30 in On the nature of the gods seek to establish that the cosmos is a single, animate organism. The argument is largely a posteriori and I believe it relies on an extension of what is the best science of the day.
Let us begin with a short summary of the four arguments discussed in ND 11.23-32
A. Everything that grows contains within itself a supply of heat which is the causal source of its growth and development. This is shown by, inter alia, the fact that perishing coincides with cooling. Therefore heat possesses a vital force. But heat permeates the world. It is found in earth, since (e.g.) rocks struck together produce sparks, soil steams when one digs in the winter, etc. There are similar proofs that heat is present in the other four elements. Since the world is made up of these four elements, the world's continued existence itself depends on the presence of the same or similar substance throughout it. Thus, Cleanthes concludes that there exists a hot, vital force that permeates the whole (23-28).
B. The vital element that holds the world together and preserves it is possessed of sensation and intelligence. Every natural object that is complex and not homogeneous contains within itself a ruling principle.31 In plants, for example, the thing that plays the role of the hsgemonikon or ruling principle is in the roots. Since the world as a whole is superior to everything in it, that in which its ruling principle is located must be the best thing and what is most deserving of authority and rule over all. Since some parts of the world contain sensation and reason, that part which contains the ruling principle of the world must contain sensation and reason to an even greater degree. The ruling principle of the world is the vital heat and it possesses sensation and intelligence (29-30).
C. Further proof that the heat which constitutes the ruling part of the world is superior to us in sensation and intelligence. There is nothing outside the world which can move the entirety of its ruling faculty, so it must be self-moving. This is now identified as the soul of the world on the basis of Plato's claim that what is self-moving is soul. Hence the world is animate. (32-32)
D. If the world heat were not also superior to us in intelligence, it would not be as good as the parts which make it up. But every part of our bodies is inferior to us taken as a whole. So it is with the soul of the world. It is supremely rational and intelligent. (32)
The vital heat in question is pretty clearly the pneuma - one of the things that the Stoics use the word 'god' to denote. Recall that pneuma in its various gradations is tenor (hexis), the sustaining and unifying cause of inanimate objects;32 nature (physis) the internal source of growth and change in animate objects; soul (psyche) in virtue of which living things are sentient;33 and the ruling principle (hegemonkon) of rational creatures.34
The resemblance of pneuma in these various guises to what Aristotle calls substantial form (Metaphys VII. 17) is not coincidental. Just as form makes each object both 'some this' and 'what it is', so in all these cases the pneuma makes each kind of thing what it is. When Cleanthes says that each thing has a ruling principle or hegemonikon, his remarks parallel Aristotle's illustration in De Anima II. 1: if an axe were a living thing, its soul would be the power to cut. Adapted to the Stoic theory, the idea is that the role that rational soul plays in us is parallel to the role played by the other forms of pneuma in non-rational things. Again, like Aristotle and in opposition to the Epicureans, the Stoics think that you cannot explain the powers of natural objects - like the powers of ensouled things that are analogous to the power of the axe to cut - simply by reference to the matter from which objects are composed.
Clearly, then, pneuma is pretty special stuff. Why did the Stoics think that there was such a thing? I think that they have taken a concept from the best medical science of their day and adapted it to a cosmic purpose. To see that this is so, we need to say something about the history of the idea of pneuma.
D. The Pneuma and Cutting Edge Science in the Hellenistic Period
Pneuma as it appears in Stoicism is a notion drawn from the medical tradition of the early Hellenistic period.35 The term occurs in Aristotle, but our surviving texts do not make it easy to determine exactly what Aristotle's theory of it was. In particular, it is unclear whether pneuma is a substance with distinctive, intrinsic causal powers or whether it is some mixture of air and heat the plays a causal role within the context of living beings.36
Praxagoras of Cos, a physician of the latter half of the fourth century BC, propounded a theory that gave pneuma a very special role in the human body. He suggested that pneuma is sent from the heart to the rest of the bodies through the arteries. He distinguished the arterial system from the veins. He thought that the latter, but not the former, carried blood around the body. He supposed blood to be derived from digested food and associated it with growth. He called the substance transmitted by the arteries pneuma. This substance was derived from the air that we breathe in. It was responsible for both the power of movement and generation. It is not entirely clear whether Praxagoras thought that pneuma was a substance that possessed these powers intrinsically or whether it acquired them in the context of the human body.
Pneuma certainly acquires quite special properties in the work of Erasi-stratus of Ceos (c. 315-240). Unlike Praxagoras, Erasistratus clearly distinguished the system of arteries and veins from the nervous system. When we breathe in air, this breath passes into the left cardiac ventricle. There it is turned into 'vital pneuma' through the body's heat and is then pumped through the arteries. This sort of pneuma keeps the body alive and is responsible for motion and generation, as in Praxagoras' theory. However, some of the pneuma that is pumped from the left ventricle goes to the brain. There it becomes 'psychic pneuma' and moves through the nerves. This kind of pneuma is responsible for the power of sensation. The result of all this is that we find in the medical tradition of the Hellenistic period the idea of substance that is connected with both heat and air, and which confers the power of life, sensation and movement.
The role of these medical theories in the formulation of the role ofpneuma in Stoic physics and cosmology is a matter of dispute. David Hahm argues that Zeno and Cleanthes took their inspiration from the traditional belief that the cosmos has a birth from water and fire.37 The first two heads of the Stoa updated this theory, not by reference to the medical tradition of the Hellenistic period, but by reference to the reproductive theories of Diogenes of Apollonia. According to Hahm, it was Chrysippus, the third head of the Stoa, who adapted the Stoic theory of the human soul to the model of contemporary medical thought.
The actual course of development for Stoic cosmology need not concern us here. What is important for our purposes is that a well-educated Stoic of the late third century could say that his pantheistic theory, which identifies god with the pneumatic soul and mind of the cosmos, is supported by the best contemporary medical science. The physicians think that there is something in us that plays the role of a vital force that makes us capable of sensation and thought. Our third-century Stoic's physical theory, and the attendant pantheism, simply takes this 'cutting edge science' and re-writes it on a cosmic scale. Stoic pantheism was a theory which was not merely consistent with the best science of the day - it was a view that science might well be thought to suggest. After all, it presents a dramatic economy of explanatory principles. It takes an allegedly successful posit in the field of medical science and hypothesizes that it is found elsewhere as well. This posit answers (or purports to, anyway) questions that were deemed important at the time. Specifically, the pneuma present in inanimate things explains why they are unitary objects with the properties that they have. It thus presents an alternative to the Aristotelian posit of substantial form or nature. In animate things, it explains all this and more - the vital, motive and sensitive powers that pneuma exhibits in human bodies are intrinsic to it and pneuma's presence explains why plants and animals behave as they do. The passage relating Cleanthes' application of the theory of pneuma to the cosmic level in Cicero thus presents us with an a posteriori argument for pansubstantialism.
E. Zeno's Syllogisms
It is one thing to show that the entire cosmos is a single living being. It takes more to show that it is a god. Zeno's arguments stress the sentient and rational nature of the cosmos. They are typically delivered as nice tidy syllogisms.38 They encapsulate much of the force of Cleanthes' more extended physical theorizing - at least as the latter is presented by Cicero. They also try to provide some additional reasons for thinking that a cosmos pervaded by pneuma is not only living, sentient and rational, but also a god.
The first pair of Zeno's syllogisms concern the conclusion that the cosmos is sentient and rational.
Zeno also argued as follows: 'Nothing lacking in sensation can have a sentient part. But the world has sentient parts. Therefore the world does not lack sensation.' He then proceeds to a tighter (angustius) argument: 'Nothing without a share in mind and reason can give birth to one who is animate and rational. But the world gives birth to those who are animate and rational. Therefore the world is animate and rational. (Cicero, On the nature of the gods 11.22 = LS 54G)
The line of argument here is a common one in ancient Greek philosophy: if χ causes y and y is F, then there must be some sense in which χ is F.39 This gives in a particularly pithy form the anti-emergentist view about life, sentience and intelligence that is implicit in the argument of ND 11.23-32 considered above. This view is common to other, earlier sources. We find a similar line of argument about the presence of intelligence and soul in the world, as well as in us, in Plato's Philebus 29a-30e. Soul and intelligence are in us, in a weakened form, by virtue of being present in the whole sensible cosmos in a much greater form. A similar line of argument is considered in Xenophon's Memorabilia. There Socrates says:
And do you think that wisdom is not found anywhere else, although you know that you have in your body only a small portion of all the earth that there is and a mere drop of all the water, and mat of all the other mighty elements you received, I suppose, just a scrap towards the fashioning of your body? But that in the case of mind it is nowhere else, and do you suppose that you grabbed it all up by a lucky accident and that these huge and infinite bodies came about by a kind of absurd coincidence? (Mem. 1.4.8)
In all these cases, there is a general a priori argument to the conclusion that soul and intelligence cannot emerge from the basic elements40 but must rather be found in nature since they are found in us. When this a priori argument is married to a specific a posteriori theory about the physical source of life, sentience and intelligence in the substance pneuma, the result is the Stoic pantheistic view.
A critic might reject such an anti-emergentist assumption, but Zeno has another syllogism waiting for him.
And Zeno says again: 'The rational is better than the non-rational; but nothing is better than the universe; therefore the universe is rational. And so likewise with the intelligent and that which participates in soul; for the intelligent is better than what is not intelligent and the living better than the non-living; but nothing is better than the universe; therefore the universe is intelligent and ensouled, (adv Math IX, 104)
Sextus Empiricus also give an account of an objection and a rejoinder to the objection.
But Alexinus parodied Zeno as follows. The poetical is superior to the non-poetical, the grammatical to the non-grammatical, and the skilled to the non-skilled in the other crafts. But nothing is superior to the world. Therefore the world is poetical and grammatical. The Stoics counter this argument by saying that Zeno's premise refers to the absolutely superior, i.e. the rational to the non-rational, the intelligent to the non-intelligent, and the animate to the non-animate, whereas Alexinus' does not: for the superiority of the poetical to the non-poetical and the grammatical to the non-grammatical is not absolute. Hence a great difference can be seen in the arguments, (adv Math IX. 108-10 = LS 54F)
The objection to the argument from Alexinus (late 4th - early 3rd century dialectician) is a parabols or parody argument that brings out the need to specify a respect in which one thing is superior to another. We say that the person who is able to use correct grammar is a better writer than one who is not. If we say that whatever is able to use correct grammar is superior to what cannot full stop, then a grammatically correct Stalin is superior to a Gandhi who makes some mistakes with 'lead' and 'led'. But surely this is absurd. So, there is something wrong with the argument.
The Stoic rejoinder to this argument draws a distinction between predicates for which the Absolutely Better principle holds true and those for which it doesn't:
AB: if χ is better than y in respect of F, then χ is absolutely better than y or better in every respect.
Terms like 'intelligent' or 'rational' are alleged by the Stoics to be terms for which AB holds, while 'grammatical' or 'poetic' are not. The move seems to me to be importantly similar to the kind of response offered on behalf of Anselm to Guanilo's critique of the former's ontological argument: one cannot substitute 'greatest possible island' in the argument for 'greatest possible being' because the term 'being' has logical properties that 'island' lacks.
We may or may not be persuaded by either claim about the special logical properties of 'rational' or 'being'. The point that I want to make is that it is not at all clear that the a priori arguments for the existence of a traditional transcendent God - like Anselm's argument - are substantially better than those of the Stoics for their pantheistic god. The Stoics seem to me to be able to argue for their form of theism at least as well as other theists.
V. Conclusion
I have argued that the Stoics are correctly regarded as pantheists. They differ from the form of pantheism that Levine defends in virtue of having a personal conception of god. Moreover, they couple an identification of god with the cosmos together with a typical ancient polytheism about various parts of the cosmos, regarding the sun and stars as themselves gods within the all-embracing god. The gods are providential - the world contains everything that a rational creature needs in order to live a flourishing life. But this providential care for human-kind is compatible with complete disregard for the well-being of the non-rational aspects of nature. Stoic pantheism is providential and also utterly anthropocentric. Though we would not regard it as plausible now, the Stoic position was at the time an extension of the very best science of the day. It was buttressed by several a priori arguments. Though these arguments may be open to serious criticisms, they are no worse for being arguments for a specifically pantheistic conception of god.41
Endnotes
1. Levine (1994).
2. Levine says 'Most versions of pantheism reject the idea that God is a person (Lao, Tzu, the Presocratics, Spinoza, Plotinus and Bruno). Indeed, I know of no prominent versions of pantheism that conceive of God as a person. Pantheists may, at times, conceive of God as a person. But if pantheism is to be a practicable alternative to theism, it must reject such a conception' (op cit, p. 11)
3. 'For the type of non-theistic pantheism (i.e. non-personal theism) that I am discussing, plan or purpose cannot be interpreted as the intentional result of an agent. On that interpretation, pantheism reduces to a type of theism, since the-ists believe in an agent responsible for a divine plan (i.e. "providence"). Pantheistic Unity based on plan or purpose must be distinguished from the plan or purpose theists posit in terms of divine providence' (op cit, p. 44).
4. It is often thought that pantheism (if it were true) would provide a strong metaphysical foundation for a deep ecology ethic. A typical pantheistic ethics would extend moral concern beyond human beings to non-human and non-sentient creatures. Ά pantheistic ecological ethic will not be anthropocentric' (op cit, p. 232). 'For pantheists,... [the] anthropocentric view is an anathema and a basic ingredient of environmental disaster' (op cit, p. 232). See also Levine (1994).
5. On pantheism and scientific explanations of the origin of the universe, see Levine (1994), pp. 192-3.
6. Oppy (1997), but see also Levine (1994), p. 25 and references ad loc.
7. The illustration assumes that the mereological sum of all things is identical to the phyiscal universe. If your ontology included more than physicalists allow -say you were a modal realist - you could perhaps build a stronger case for your preferred All to satisfy the Ideological requirement. But naturally there would be concerns about the sense in which the mereological sum of causally isolated possible worlds would be a unity. For similar worries about the Unity requirement with respect to the expanding physical universe or the multiverse, see Forrest (1997).
8. Most of the translations in this paper are taken from Long and Sedley (1987). I give the source text first and then the reference to Long and Sedley by chapter number and the letter assigned to the text. Throughout I abbreviate Diogenes Laertius' Lives of Eminent Philosophers, by 'DL' and Cicero's On the Nature of the Gods with 'ND'.
9. Simplicius, in Cat. 214, 24-37 = LS 28M.
10. See Reydams-Schils (1999) for a treatment of this topic. If she is right, then the explanation of Stoic physics that I give in terms of the Timaeus is not merely a convenience for modern readers better acquainted with Platonism than
Stoicism. Rather, the Stoics themselves thought of what they were doing as a modification of Plato's cosmogony in the Timaeus.
11. Theophrastus, fr. 230 = Simplicius, in Phys. 26, 5-15.
12. 'This breath possesses two parts, elements, or conditions which are blended with one another through and through, or if one wished to describe them by different names taken from their substances, air and fire.' (Galen, Placita 5.3.8 = LS 47H)
13. Diogenes Laertius VII.134. There is a parallel to Diogenes' text in the Suda which says 'incorporeal' (asematous). The first reading must be correct. Only a body can act on anything - that which is incorporeal cannot (Cicero, Acade-mica 1.39 (=LS 45A); Sextus, adv Math VIII.363 (= LS 45B)).
14. It may be that the 'designing fire' or 'vital heat' was a theoretical posit of Zeno's. Chrysippus then elaborated the theory into one in which pneuma played the role of designing fire. This would, perhaps, account for some of the lack of clarity in our sources. Cf. David Furley in Algra (1999), p. 440.
15. There are some concerns about the relationship between the events and, importantly, the times involved in each world cycle. Is it correct to say that the very same course of events plays itself out again! See Long (1985) as well as some close analysis of the relevant texts in Sorabji's forthcoming book on theories of the self in antiquity.
16. For this formulation of panentheism, see Forrest (1997), p. 308.1 take it that the pantheism/panentheism distinction is the ground on which Maclntyre (1967) denies that the Stoic Marcus Aurelius is correctly thought to be pantheist. According to Maclntyre, when Aurelius addresses the universe as divine, it is not the universe itself to which he speaks, but rather the order within it. It must be admitted that Marcus speaks of god in a variety of different ways. Bon-höfTer (cited in Dragona Monachou (1976), p. 244. n. 1) catalogues four different ways in which he does this. Two seem to treat god as transcendent and this might suggest panentheism, since the other two ways in which Marcus refers to god strongly suggest that god is immanent. The lesson to be drawn from this, however, is not the Marcus was not a pantheist - much less that the Stoics in general were not. We need to take account of the context of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. Though we may glean some Stoic philosophy from them, they were not written as philosophical discourses. Rather, they are intensely personal 'spiritual exercises' in which Marcus aims to make himself a better Stoic. See Hadot (1998).
17. I am not alone in taking this view of the relation between the two Stoic principles. See Sorabji (1988), pp. 93-98.
18. Cf. Dexippus, in Cat. 30,20-6 = LS 28J and Sedley (1982).
19. Cf. Seneca, Epistles 9.16 = LS 460 quoted below, as well as Eusebius, ΡΕ 15.14.2 = LS 46G; Origin, Contra Celsum 4.14 = LS 46H.
20. Η. von Arnim, Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta, 3 vols (1903-5) was the first systematic collection of the fragments of the Old Stoa. Not everything that appeared in SVF is reproduced in LS.
21. Cf. Levine (1994), p. 2.
22. In this respect the Stoics are not all that far removed from Peter Forrest, who likewise supposes that the relation between world and god is like the relationship between mind and body. Forrest, however, treats consciousness as a non-reducible property of brain events. It is a double aspect theory, but one
compatible with physicalism, Forrest (1996), p. 191. The Stoics, by contrast, are more like old-fashioned vitalists: pneuma is the stuff that, when present in the right gradation, causes life and thought by its presence. They differ from vitalists, however, in supposing that lower gradations of pneuma are present everywhere. The difference between vital and non-vital pneuma is one of degree, not kind.
23. The uncritical interpretation of Stoicism in Cheney (1989) is corrected by Stevens (1994). As Stevens shows, Cheney fails to notice that the Stoics think that the moral sphere extends only as far as other rational creatures. The suggestions of Castelo (1996) on how one might mitigate the force of Stoic logocentrism seem to me to run aground on dreadful texts like Epictetus' Discourses 1.6 where it is claimed that all of nature is for us humans since we and we alone are the rational observers of god's teleological handiwork. A balanced picture of the hopeful signs and disappointing features of Stoic thought vis a vis the environment is presented in Holland (1997).
24. Kant may have flirted with a form of theological eudaimonism, cf. Critique of Practical Reason A813 /B841.
25. "Thus some believe it to be an assumption that there is a difference between providence and fate, the reality is that they are one. For providence will be god's will, and furthermore his will is the series of causes. In virtue of being his will it is providence. In virtue of also being the series of causes it gets the additional name 'fate'." (Calcidius 144 = LS 54U)
26. Calcidius 144 = LS 54U
27. Plutarch, On Stoic self-contradictions 1050C-D = LS 54T.
28. Gellius, Attic Nights 7.1.1-13 = LS 54Q.
29. By far the most detailed examination of the Stoic arguments in Cicero and elsewhere is Dragona Monachou (1972).
30. Actually, it is a bit unclear from what Cicero says that the responsibility for all the content in this section of ND rests with Cleanthes. Since our purpose is not to assign responsibility for particular arguments to individual members of the school, and since Cicero does mention Cleanthes at the beginning of this section of the text, it will do no harm to hang these arguments on Cleanthes' name.
31. Cf. the parallel discussion at Sextus adv Math IX. 119—21.
32. 'In his book On Tenors Chrysippus again says that tenors are nothing but currents of air. "It is by these that bodies are sustained. The sustaining air is responsible for the quality of each of the bodies which are sustained by tenor.'" (Plutarch, On Stoic self-contradictions 1053F = LS 54M)
33. 'There are two kinds of innate brea% the physical kind and the psychic kind. Some people [i.e. the Stoics] also posit a third kind, the tenor kind. The breath that sustains stones is of the tenor kind, the one which nurtures animals and plants is physical, and the psychic breath is that which, in animate beings, makes animals capable of sensation and of moving in every way.' (Galen, Medical Introduction 14.726, 7-11 = LS 47M)
34. 'Some of the Stoics ... say that 'soul' has two meanings, that which sustains the whole compound, and in particular, the commanding-faculty. For when we say that man is a compound of body and soul... we are referring particularly to the commanding-faculty.' (Sextus, adv Math VII.234 = LS 53F)
35. For the background to the Stoic theory of soul in the medical tradition, see Annas (1992) chapter 1 and Von Staden (2000).
36. See Nussbaum (1978), Freudenthal (1995).
37. Hahm(1977).
38. See Schofield (1983).
39. Cf. Lloyd (1976).
40. Sextus Empiricus considers this argument in Book IX of adversus Mathemati-cos. He notes that some critics reply that a similar line of argument should show that the universe as a whole has gall and blood since these things too are found in you. But, in defence of Xenophon, Sextus observes that 'he [Xenophon] bases his inquiry on the simple and primary bodies... [but] those who employ the parallel argument (pambole) jump aside to compounds; for neither gall nor blood nor any bodily fluid is primary and simple, but a compound of the primary and elemental bodies.' (Μ. IX. 97, trans. Bury) The implication is that mind or soul would have to be like earth, air, fire and water - primary, non-compound ingredients in ourselves and the cosmos.
41. I am grateful to Dr Jacquiline Broad and Fiona Leigh for their expert research assistance in the preparation of this paper and to the Monash Faculty of Arts for the small grant that made their employment possible. I am also grateful for the comments of the two anonymous referees for Sophia. I have benefited from thinking through their criticisms and suggestions, even in those cases where I have not been completely persuaded.
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