On Nature

Dear Fellow Proficientes,

I would like to start this series of Stoic Letters, and perhaps a conversation within the Stoic community more broadly, with a discussion of the ancient Stoic notion of a determinate causal system which takes life (as instantiated by Zeus) to be foundational to nature, not something derivative and evolutionary.

As the world’s active principle, Zeus is not value-free but the basic power that endows matter with “seminal principles” (spermatikoi logoi). In fact, the Stoics derived the name Zeus from the root of the Greek words for life, animal, etc.

These seminal principles are structures perhaps loosely analogous to DNA. When the ancient Stoics characterize human beings as “parts” of nature, they seem to offer us an organic and holistic notion of how we can orient ourselves into both the human world of sociability and the ecological system that sustains life.

Marcus Aurelius touches on this all the time with his Heraclitean notion of how we can adapt to systematic change, and other ancient texts that I find cardinal are Epictetus 1.6 and Seneca’s Letter 124.

While I share Larry Becker’s distaste for Stoic providence, I believe that Nature, as I try to adumbrate it, is not theologically charged in objectionable ways but fully capable of being brought up to date. “The way things are” (Becker’s updated Stoic Nature) needs to incorporate life and value, or so I think.

Moreover, the Stoic ideals of autonomy, control, dignity, and sociability gain great depth when they are situated in this holistic notion of “belonging” (oikeiosis). It would be very interesting if we could prod people to reflect on their ideas of Nature from this viewpoint.

I would encourage us to think about Stoic Nature on the basis of some modern background readings, such as Whitehead’s Process and Reality, or Nagel’s anti-Darwinian Mind and Cosmos.

Vale,
Tony Long