Part 2 (1/2)
By things indifferent were meant such as did not necessarily contribute to virtue, for instance health, wealth, strength, and honor. It is possible to have all these and not be virtuous, it is possible also to be virtuous without them. But we have now to learn that though these things are neither good nor evil, and are therefore not matter for choice or avoidance, they are far from being indifferent in the sense of arousing neither impulse nor repulsion.
There are things indeed that are indifferent in the latter sense, such as whether you put out your finger this way or that, whether you stoop to pick up a straw or not, whether the number of hairs on your head be odd or even. But things of this sort are exceptional. The bulk of things other than virtue and vice do arouse in us either impulse or repulsion. Let it be understood then that there are two senses of the word indifferent-- (1) neither good nor bad (2) neither awaking impulse nor repulsion
Among things indifferent in the former sense, some were in accordance with nature, some were contrary to nature and some were neither one nor the other. Health, strengths and soundness of the senses were in accordance with nature; sickness weakness and mutilation were contrary to nature, but such things as the fallibility of the soul and the vulnerability of the body were neither in accordance with nature nor yet contrary to nature, but just nature.
All things that were in accordance with nature had 'value' and all things that were contrary to nature had what we must call 'disvalue'.
In the highest sense indeed of the term 'value'--namely that of absolute value or worth--things indifferent did not possess any value at all. But still there might be a.s.signed to them what Antipater expressed by the term 'a selective value' or what he expressed by its barbarous privative, 'a disselective disvalue'. If a thing possessed a selective value you took that thing rather than its contrary, supposing that circ.u.mstances allowed, for instance, health rather than sickness, wealth rather than poverty, life rather than death.
Hence such things were called takeable and their contraries untakeable. Things that possessed a high degree of value were called preferred, those that possessed a high degree of disvalue were called rejected. Such as possessed no considerable degree of either were neither preferred nor rejected. Zeno, with whom these names originated, justified their use about things really indifferent on the ground that at court ”preferment” could not be bestowed upon the king himself, but only on his ministers.
Things preferred and rejected might belong to mind, body or estate.
Among things preferred in the case of the mind were natural ability, art, moral progress, and the like, while their contraries were rejected. In the case of the body, life, health, strength, good condition, completeness, and beauty were preferred, while death, sickness, weakness, ill condition, mutilation and ugliness were rejected. Among things external to soul and body, wealth, reputation, and n.o.bility were preferred, while poverty, ill repute, and baseness of birth were rejected.
In this way all mundane and marketable goods, after having been solemnly refused admittance by the Stoics at the front door, were smuggled in at a kind of tradesman's entrance under the name of things indifferent. We must now see how they had, as it were, two moral codes, one for the sage and the other for the world in general.
The sage alone could act rightly, but other people might perform ”the proprieties.” Any one might honor his parents, but the sage alone did it as the outcome of wisdom, because he alone possessed the art of life, the peculiar work of which was to do everything that was done as the result of the best disposition. All the acts of the sage were ”perfect proprieties,” which were called ”rightnesses.” All acts of all other men were sins or ”wrongnesses.” At their best they could only be ”intermediate proprieties.” The term ”propriety,” then, is a generic one. But, as often happens, the generic term got determined in use to a specific meaning, so that intermediate acts are commonly spoken of as ”proprieties” in opposition to ”rightnesses.” Instances of ”rightnesses” are displaying wisdom and dealing justly, instances of proprieties or intermediate acts are marrying, going on an emba.s.sy, and dialectic.
The word ”duty” is often employed to translate the Greek term which we are rendering by ”propriety.” Any translation is no more than a choice of evils, since we have no real equivalent for the term. It was applicable not merely to human conduct, but also to the acting of the lower animals, and even to the growth of plants. Now, apart from a craze of generalization we should hardly think of the ”stern daughter of the voice of G.o.d” in connection with an amoeba corresponding successfully to stimulus, yet the creature in its inchoate way is exhibiting a dim a.n.a.logy to duty. The term in question was first used by Zeno, and was explained by him, in accordance with its etymology, to mean what it came to one to do, so that as far as this goes, 'becomingness' would be the most appropriate translation.
The sphere of propriety was confined to things indifferent, so that there were proprieties which were common to the sage and the fool. It had to do with taking the things which were in accordance with nature and rejecting those that were not. Even the propriety of living or dying was determined, not by reference to virtue or vice, but to the preponderance or deficiency of things in accordance with nature. It might thus be a propriety for the sage in spite of his happiness, to depart from life of his own accord, and for the fool notwithstanding his misery, to remain in it. Life, being in itself indifferent, the whole question was one of opportunism. Wisdom might prompt the leaving herself should occasion seem to call for it.
We pa.s.s on now another instance of accommodation. According to the high Stoic doctrine, there was no mean between virtue and vice. All men indeed received from nature the starting-points for virtue, but until perfection had been attained they rested under the condemnation of vice. It was, to employ an ill.u.s.tration of the poet-philosopher Cleanthes, as though Nature had begun an iambic line and left men to finish it. Until that was done they were to wear the fool's cap. The Peripatetics, on the other hand, recognized an intermediate state between virtue and vice, to which they gave the name of progress and proficience. Yet so entirely had the Stoics, for practical purposes, to accept this lower level, that the word ”proficience” has come to be spoken of as though it were of Stoic origin.
Seneca is fond of contrasting the sage with the proficient. The sage is like a man in the enjoyment of perfect health. But the proficient is like a man recovering from a severe illness, with whom an abatement of the paroxysm is equivalent to health, and who is always in danger of a relapse. It is the business of philosophy to provide for the needs of these weaker brethren. The proficient is still called a fool, but it is pointed out that he is a very different kind of fool from the rest. Further, proficients are arranged into three cla.s.ses, in a way that reminds one of the technicalities of Calvinistic theology. First of all, there are those who are near wisdom, but, however near they may be to the door of Heaven, they are still on the wrong side of it. According to some doctors, these were already safe from backsliding, differing from the sage only in not having yet realized that they had attained to knowledge; other authorities, however, refused to admit this, and regarded the first cla.s.s as being exempt only from settled diseases of the soul, but not from pa.s.sing attacks of pa.s.sion. Thus did the Stoics differ among themselves as to the doctrine of ”final a.s.surance”. The second cla.s.s consisted of those who had laid aside the worst diseases and pa.s.sions of the soul, but might at any moment relapse into them. The third cla.s.s was of those who had escaped one mental malady but not another; who had conquered l.u.s.t, let us say, but not ambition; who disregarded death, but dreaded pain, This third cla.s.s, adds Seneca, is by no means to be despised.
From these concessions to the weakness of humanity we now pa.s.s to the Stoic paradoxes, where we shall see their doctrine in its full rigor.
It is perhaps these very paradoxes which account for the puzzled fascination with which Stoicism affected the mind of antiquity, just as obscurity in a poet may prove a surer pa.s.sport to fame than more strictly poetical merits.
The root of Stoicism being a paradox, it is not surprising that the offshoots should be so too. To say that ”Virtue is the highest good”
is a proposition to which every one who aspires to the spiritual life must yield a.s.sent with his lips, even if he has not yet learned to believe it in his heart. But alter it into ”Virtue is the only good”
and by that slight change it becomes at once the teeming mother of paradoxes. By a paradox is meant that which runs counter to general opinion. Now it is quite certain that men have regarded, do regard, and, we may safely add will regard things as good which are not virtue. But if we grant this initial paradox, a great many others will follow along with it--as for instance that ”Virtue is sufficient of itself for happiness”. The fifth book of Cicero's _Tusculan Disputations_ is an eloquent defense of this thesis, in which the orator combats the suggestion that a good man is not happy when he is being broken on the wheel.
Another glaring paradox of the Stoics is that ”All faults are equal”.
They took their stand upon a mathematical conception of rect.i.tude. An angle must be either a right angle or not, a line must be either straight or crooked, so an act must be either right or wrong. There is no mean between the two and there are no degrees of either. To sin is to cross the line. When once that has been done it makes no difference to the offense how far you go. Trespa.s.sing at all is forbidden. This doctrine was defended by the Stoics on account of its bracing moral effect as showing the heinousness of sin. Horace gives the judgment of the world in saying that common sense and morality, to say nothing of utility, revolt against it.
Here are some other specimens of the Stoic paradoxes. ”Every fool is mad”. ”Only the sage is free and every fool is a slave”. ”The sage alone is wealthy”. ”Good men are always happy and bad men always miserable”. ”All goods are equal”. ”No one is wiser or happier than another”. But may not one man we ask be more nearly wise or more nearly happy than another? ”That may be”, the Stoics would reply, ”but the man who is only one stade from Canopus is as much not in Canopus as the man who is a hundred stades off; and the eight day old puppy is still as blind as on the day of its birth; nor can a man who is near the surface of the sea breathe any more than if he were full five hundred fathom down”.
It is only fair to the Stoics to add that paradoxes were quite the order of the day in Greece, though they greatly outdid other schools in producing them. Socrates himself was the father of paradox.
Epicurus maintained as staunchly as any Stoic that ”No wise man is unhappy”, and, if he be not belied, went the length of declaring that the wise man, if put into the bull of Phalaris would exclaim: ”How delightful! How little I mind this!”
It is out of keeping with common sense to draw a hard and fast distinction between good and bad. Yet this was what the Stoics did.
They insisted on effecting here and now that separation between the sheep and the goats, which Christ postponed to the Day of Judgment.
Unfortunately, when it came to practice, all were found to be goats, so that the division was a merely formal one.
The good man of the Stoics was variously known as 'the sage', or, 'the serious man', the latter name being inherited from the Peripatetics. We used to hear it said among ourselves that a person had become serious, when he or she had taken to religion. Another appellation which the Stoics had for the sage was 'the urbane man', while the fool in contradistinction was called 'a boor'. Boorishness was defined as an inexperience of the customs and laws of the state.
By the state was meant, not Athens or Sparta, as would have been the case in a former age, but the society of all rational beings into which the Stoics spiritualised the state. The sage alone had the freedom of this city and the fool was therefore not only a boor, but an alien or an exile. In this city, Justice was natural and not conventional, for the law by which it was governed was the law of right reason. The law then was spiritualised by the Stoics, just as the state was. It no longer meant the enactments of this or that community, but the mandates of the eternal reason which ruled the world and which would prevail in the ideal state. Law was defined as right reason commanding what was to be done and forbidding what was not to be done. As such, it in no way differed from the impulse of the sage himself.
As a member of a state and by nature subject to law, man was essentially a social being. Between all the wise there existed ”unanimity,” which was ”a knowledge of the common good,” because their views of life were harmonious. Fools, on the other hand, whose views of life were discordant, were enemies to one another and bent on mutual injury.
As a member of society the sage would play his part in public life.