2. The Logical Basis of Stoic Ethics. Logos, hitherto
translated “reason,” also means “speech,” and the
Stoics devoted much attention to the analysis of lan-
guage and logic in its formal sense. They recognized
as a fundamental distinction between men and animals
the fact that man alone possesses the power of “internal
speech” and an idea of consequence or succession
(ennoia akolouthias). In the content of his significant
discourse man grasps connections in nature, and true
statements are the expression in language of such con-
nections. The sequence of events is ordered and a
necessary consequence of the universal causal nexus.
Only God, who oversees and determines all things,
possesses complete foreknowledge of events. But to the
human reason the world presents itself as a set of events
about which some valid inferences are possible and
indeed necessary if life in accordance with nature is
to be realized by an act of will, rather than external
necessity. In its cruder form this concern for the future
stimulated beliefs in the efficacy of divination, but the
basis of these was the thoroughly scientific principle
that no event occurs without a cause and that signs
of what will happen are available in nature. It is likely
enough that the Stoics' concern for valid inference and
the logical rules which they formulated concerning
hypotheticals were partly prompted by the practical
desire to make prediction as reliable as possible. The
sage is a logician not from academic inclination but
because life in accordance with nature and reason
requires understanding events and the consequences
which follow from them.
Logos is the characteristic of mature human nature;
only its “seeds” are available to the child. Provided
that it is not corrupted by external influences, the
developed logos will enable man to grasp the true
nature of reality, and it will stand as the moral princi-
ple which directs him to a correspondence between
himself and the world. But this natural condition of
the logos is generally not realized owing to “perver-
sions” brought about in childhood by the environment
and bad upbringing. Events themselves and human
influence give rise to beliefs that pain is an evil, pleas-
ure a good, and success or failure in the world the states
to be sought or avoided. This system of values produces
as its consequence actions which are alogos, not irra-
tional as such, but contrary to reason in its natural or
healthy condition. Actions which are properly rational
or “logical” are actions prompted by a logos whose
soundness is guaranteed by the fact that it accords with
Nature or God.
The Stoics' stress on logic led them to see the moral
agent as one who possesses “a body of true proposi-
tions” (Sextus Empiricus, Adversus mathematicos VII,
39-41) which he incorporates in his actions. The bad
man is false to facts. Stoic physics, which denied exist-
ence to the incorporeal, also influenced the treatment
of moral character. The logos itself is “pneuma in a
certain state,” and any state other than that enjoyed
by the good man is eo ipso a bad or unhealthy physical
condition. The fact that the good are differentiated
from the bad by criteria such as true/false, or
healthy/sick, helps to explain the hardness and rigidity
of Stoic ethical theory.
