1. The Physical Basis of Stoic Ethics. In Stoic the-
ory the world is an organic whole, a rational being,
conceptually divisible into two principles, active and
passive: the active principle is pneuma (“fiery breath”),
a vital, all-pervasive power which gives quality and
coherence to the passive principle, “matter” (earth and
water). Pneuma and matter together constitute “body,”
and body is all that exists. Particular material objects,
whether animate or inanimate, are differentiations of
pneuma in matter, marked off from one another by
their internal structure, but interconnected externally,
since matter is continuous, in contradistinction to the
Democritean, Epicurean Atomism, and its empty
spaces. The external contact between all bodies gives
rise to an eternal sequence of cause and effect, since
movement is a defining characteristic of the pneuma
which organizes all things. This organizing principle
is also called reason (logos), providence (pronoia), and
destiny (moira); all of these are predicates of Nature
or God, who is conceived as the world-soul, a perfect
being, which is immanent in everything and which
directs events to achieve worthy ends.
Man, like all things, is pervaded by God, but he
possesses a special status. The pneuma which gives
coherence to a stone and life to a plant manifests itself
as reason (logos) in mature men. The natural life for
man is “rational” life and this makes him a partner
of God, or universal Nature. As Epictetus, the Stoic
slave, puts it (Discourses I. i, 12): “We [i.e., the gods]
have given you a certain portion of ourselves, the
faculty of choice and refusal, of desire and aversion;
that is, the faculty to make use of the impressions
presented to your mind.” Natural events are outside
human control, but man has the power to evaluate
them and adapt his life accordingly. The world as a
whole develops in an ordered pattern, determined by
immanent providence. But this does not, in the Stoic
view, remove human responsibility for good and evil.
It is the proper function of man's nature to grasp the
cosmic order by his own logos. He achieves happiness
and goodness when he does nothing which is incon-
sistent with or alien to the will of God or Nature.
How does the Stoic set about this task? He has no
innate ideas, no Platonic Forms, the recollection of
which can provide criteria for moral action. His
knowledge is entirely empirical, and the truth of what
he apprehends depends upon external impressions of
a sufficiently clear and accurate kind. But there are
certain guidelines laid down for human nature which
can serve, at least initially, as standards for action, and
which enable the developing logos to grasp the princi-
ples on which morality itself is based. The human
being, like all creatures, has an instinctive attraction
towards those things which promote its own well-being
and a complementary aversion towards their opposites.
Self-love, family feeling, desire for health—these are
basic drives, and their specific objects are “primarily
in accordance with nature.” The human infant will
naturally take something appropriate to its constitution
rather than the reverse, and the same applies to the
mature man. But man differs from the child in his
possession of logos. Moral choice, unlike infantile and
animal behavior, is not a simple response of the orga-
nism to the environment. It is explained by Cicero as
follows (De finibus III, 20-21): from the system of
values acquired by his instinctive responses a mature
man of sound reason intuits a higher-order system, a
principle of moral action, which grasps the relationship
between all events and provides the ultimate category
of value.
