On Nature, further reflections

Dear Tony,

Nature does seem to be an absolutely central concept in Stoicism. It is of course foundational for Stoic physics but also for Stoic ethics, given that the goal is to live in agreement with Nature. It is striking that the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius – a work often assumed to be about practical ethics with little interest in theoretical questions – devotes more space to reflecting about Nature and our place in it than to anything else.

So, what is Nature for the Stoics? As you rightly note, they present it as something living and animate. Life, they insist, is not an emergent property that somehow develops out of the movements of dead matter, but instead is an intrinsic property of the universe. Nature is in itself animate and self-moving – energetic we might say. The Stoics likened Nature (more precisely, the active principle within it) to fire, following Heraclitus. It seems worth pausing to reflect on this choice. Compared to the other traditional physical elements (earth, water, air), fire is the only one that is self-moving, seemingly alive, and energetic. Were the Stoics groping towards the idea that we ought to think of matter as energy? I am sympathetic to your view that if we think of matter as simply dead and inert it becomes difficult to explain how it is that life suddenly appeared. If instead we see matter as inherently energetic and moving – animate, an ever-kindling fire – then it becomes possible to think of life as simply a more complex instance of this activity. Here we might think of the Stoic ‘scale of nature’ which does not see a difference in kind between the inanimate, the living, and the rational, but instead a continuum differentiated by increasing degrees of tension or organizational complexity.

I’m conscious of a danger here. It is easy to slip into over-interpreting the ancient material to make it sound more modern and more plausible than it actually is. Should we try to interpret the ancient material as generously as possible or should we acknowledge its limits and accept that some elements are now outdated?

Thinking of the seminal principles as something loosely analogous to DNA strikes me as a generous but not implausible way of thinking about the Stoic view. I think it is certainly more plausible than the parallel Massimo draws with modern panspermia theories. We are not talking about literal seeds floating through space here but instead something within all matter that passes on rational information and is identified with life. I guess stones don’t have DNA in them, so there are of course limits to how far we can push this, but it can still be illuminating.

We would all agree that there are some elements of Stoic thinking about Nature and the cosmos that are clearly false today, such as their cosmology. The universe is far larger than they or Aristotle ever imagined (although the Epicureans were closer to the mark on that). So it seems inevitable that some ancient Stoic ideas ought to be left to one side; the question is simply how many.

People often get hung up on language. Modern secular readers might strongly dislike words like ‘god’ or ‘providence’, which we find throughout Stoic sources. As Greg Lopez suggests perhaps we could jettison the word ‘god’ and just talk in terms of ‘Nature’, given that the Stoics identify the two. The same goes for ‘providence’ which the Stoics identify with ‘fate’, which in turn they identify with the causal chain. As Cicero once commented, Stoic fate is not the fate of superstition but the fate of physics. There’s a famous anecdote in which Chrysippus is said to have interpreted allegorically a statue of Zeus and Hera intertwined as a representation of the intermingling of the active and passive principles in Nature. When Stoics such as Cleanthes insist that we embrace the divine will, does that amount to anything more than welcoming whatever happens as inevitable? I don’t think we should get hung up on what any particular ancient Stoic actually believed; whether Cleanthes seriously thought we ought to worship Zeus seems beside the point. What’s more important are the implications of the philosophical positions they put forward.

I think you are right to insist that a core Stoic view – even if we put aside the theological language – is that matter is essentially energetic and active, not lifeless and inert. Perhaps a better way of putting it would be to say not that this particular rock or lump of dirt is active and energetic but rather that Nature considered as a whole is. Change is everywhere!

Vale,
John