Virtue: there’s more to it than meets the eye

I enjoyed reading through Massimo’s post, because it is both (as usual) thoughtfully written and thought-provoking. Having gone through it several times, there are a few matters that have been on my mind about Stoicism I’d like to discuss in my contribution. I am admittedly more preoccupied with these matters in terms of exegesis of ancient texts than Massimo is, though it should be noted that he says he’s not just concerned with that, as opposed to not interested at all. Like Massimo, I’m also “interested in what to make of all the above as a modern practitioner of Stoicism,” but in my view exegesis of classic Stoic texts can and should inform contemporary interpretation.

While I don’t think this is at all the case with Massimo (whose thoughts on matters I’ve gotten to know well over a decade or so of interaction), I would say that a good bit of modern reinterpretation of Stoic philosophy goes astray through a combination of two missteps.  One of these is taking single isolated statements from a Stoic author as the definitive take on a matter, and then reasoning out implications from that basis, rather than seeking out, incorporating, and attempting to harmonize the other things Stoics explicitly say about that matter.

The second is not treating Stoicism as what is revealed through the works of the Stoic authors we possess, a complex, systematic network of philosophical ideas, distinctions, arguments, and practices worked out over generations by a number of thinkers, not all of whom were fully in agreement with each other.  When it comes to matters of what virtue means, involves, and encompasses for Stoics, I myself used to think it was a good bit simpler than what continued study of classic Stoic texts gradually reveals.

One prime example of a way I have seen many people interested in Stoicism hamstring themselves, and then land themselves in inevitable confusions, is taking that single statement “virtue is the only good” in far too absolute a manner, ignoring the vast number of passages in literature where virtue is clearly not the only good for Stoics. There are quite a few more passages where we see the “only X is good” clarified as the more inclusive “honorable” or “morally noble” (kalon in Greek, honestum in Latin) or “right”  (rectum in Latin). This broader category would of course include virtue(s) as central to that set of things, but not construe virtue as identical with the good or the honorable.

(As a side-note here, I’ll mention that the very first of Cicero’s Stoic paradoxes uses precisely this language, kalon and honestum in its title, which is then mistranslated in the Wikipedia entry on the Stoic paradoxes as “only virtue is good.”)

A number of passages widen the scope of the good for Stoics beyond just virtue itself, including that very passage from Seneca’s Letter 71, where he tells us at any rate there is no good without virtue (sine virtute).” Interestingly, in the very next chapter, Seneca adds that we should judge that “all things that are touched by (contacta) virtue are good,” and going even further that “they are all equal to each other” (inter se paria), that is, of the same level of goodness, a common Stoic doctrine Seneca approaches in other letters and other works as well, and which Cicero examines in the third of his Stoic Paradoxes.

Epictetus expresses a similar notion, in the course of saying something to his students along the lines of “here’s the standard line about the good, bad, and indifferent that any one of you can parrot.” It runs like this: “The good include the virtues and those things participating in (metekhonta) virtue.” (Discourses, 2.9) The implication that this is by then a standard Stoic take and formula on what the good is gets strengthened by the fact that we find the same language of “participation” (metekhein) getting used at multiple points by Arius Didymus in his Epitome of Stoic Ethics (e.g. 5a9, or 6e28) and by Diogenes Laertes in his summary of Stoic doctrine (7.1.101).

I’m currently writing an article for Stoicism Today about what else besides virtue(s) are called and considered goods by Stoics, so I’ll keep it rather brief here, since I’ll provide a much more detailed discussion there. What do the Stoics apply the term “good” (agathon, bonum) to in their works? Certain positive emotional states are considered good. These are the good emotional states (eupatheiai in Greek or constantiae in Latin), classed under three main headings of “joy” (kharis, gaudium), “caution” (eulabeia, cautio), and “rational desire” or “wishing” (boulēsis, voluntas), and including a number of subordinate good emotional states under these three categories. Friendship and friends are good things as well, and good people and good actions are also classed among good things.

Perfectly good actions (katorthomata), like those the legendary (and perhaps entirely imaginary) sage would do, are of course good. There’s a bit of room for interpretation when it comes to doing one’s duties, meeting one’s (moral) obligations, or engaging in appropriate action, all of which are decent translations of the Greek kathēkon or the Latin officium, but at least a case can be made looking to Cicero’s On Duties or Epictetus’ works that these can be considered good. Seneca will even mention in Letter 66 the safety or welfare of one’s country, victory, good children and their devotion as being examples of one kind of goods. So there are quite a few things besides virtue that Stoics acknowledge as goods. A quip like “virtue is the only good” probably should be regarded as a bit of hyperbole or rhetorical oversimplification, not as a definitive statement of what Stoic philosophy professes.

All that said, virtue is definitely central, primary, and in some sense unifying for the Stoics. A variety of goods that are not the virtues themselves “participate in” or are “touched by” virtue, and there is a wide range of terminology used by Stoics to convey this connection between the good that is virtue and the other goods. Seneca in that same Letter 66 will tell us that “whatever [virtue] touches (attigit), it attracts and dyes (adducit et tinguit) with its own likeness.” He mentions two things we have already noted, actions and friendships, as things virtue “adorns” (condecorat), but also writes of entire households (domos totas) as similarly affected.

A lot of this adorning, attraction, dyeing, or touching by the virtues of matters that aren’t virtue corresponds not only to the participation in the virtues, but something else that Massimo highlights in his piece, which is how the virtues and indifferents intersect in Stoic ethics. This is a complex topic, discussions of which we can find distributed across the body of classic literature on Stoicism. In understanding and applying it, one can rely upon rough and ready overviews, arguments, bits of advice, even striking images used by way of analogy. And that’s good—I don’t in any way want to suggest that learning what the Stoics have to say, even if just piecemeal, isn’t helpful for us.

I would like to make a rather speculative claim here I admittedly won’t try to provide any full justification for at this point. Stoicism works best for a person when the understanding one builds up of it in one’s mind is systematic, as comprehensive as possible, connecting together as many of the proverbial dots as one can find. An analogy I like to use for this is that it resembles a constellation, a composite of many stars assembled together into a structure where the individual parts (doctrines, principles, practices, etc.) attain a greater meaning and effectiveness when they aren’t just left on their own (let alone left out), but grasped in relation to each other. As I mentioned at the start, I think a lot of people steer themselves wrong with Stoicism by trying to oversimplify it, or by making one or a few ideas the most important ones, and overlooking the vast network of connections between them.

Obviously, because much of Stoic literature is lost, even if we assiduously study the portions we do possess, we don’t gain access to the totality of that network as it was. But what we do have, when we explore and reflect upon it, still turns out to be, particularly with respect to ethics, a system of great scope and power. Virtue and the virtues are a central and key part of that, and when they are developed in their fullness through ongoing engagement with the texts and thinkers we have, and experienced as we slowly build them in ourselves through practices and discipline, we discover them intertwined with a great number of other matters important within the framework of Stoic philosophy.

Some of these we might frame using modern language foreign to the Stoics of antiquity, such as the “perfection of agency” Massimo brings to us from Becker’s much more recent work (an interpretation I agree with). Others might already be there within the classic Stoic texts, and just require us to put in the work to progressively bring them to light, recognize connections, and reincorporate into a more systematic approach, for example the interplay between the virtues and what Epictetus identifies as a preconception of what is up to us and what is not (and explains in multiple, complementary ways throughout the works of his we have). In yet other cases, it might be finding or forging the parallels between different discussions of the same basic matter, like noting that the playing ball analogy Epictetus powerfully develops, using Socrates as an example, is also explored in detail by Seneca in On Benefits (who attributes it to Chrysippus, 2.17).

At any rate, I’ll wrap up these rambles by simply issuing a challenge to readers, a healthy practice which I’ll admit I need to engage in just as much as anyone else, one that could apply to any robust philosophy as a way of life. Without calling into question our confidence that we are on a good path, whenever we think we have some intentional way of living articulated through a complex body of challenging literature entirely figured out, we might want to say “perhaps not” to ourselves. And if we do, then there is another “perhaps” we can remind ourselves of as well. Perhaps it’s time to read more, to reread attentively, to see whether repeated forays into the texts don’t yield additional illumination about key ideas and practices, and even more about their systematic interconnections.

Vale,
Greg S