There is some exaggeration in referring to the death of Stoicism, of course its ethics (which is what concerns us here) is still of interest and has even had a revival, popular and academic in recent years. Nevertheless there really was a death of Stoicism in that the influence it had from its Hellenistic and Roman beginnings to the eighteenth century in defining ethics has gone. The influence was not quite dominance, since Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics was a major text in the field for much of that period, and many people’s idea of ethics was shaped by Cicero’s On Ends.
However, the Stoic ethical texts of Seneca and Epictetus set the tone for the understanding of other ethical texts, in the emphasis on reason over desire, and independence from external circumstances. Seneca as a character was a philosophical martyr to tyranny on a level close to that of Socrates in a manner that is no longer with us. His forced suicide resulting from the persecutions of Nero served as a widely understood contrast of ethical mastery of desire with the triumph of desire over reason in the tyrannical personality.
This is how political liberty and the virtuous character were understood together. Epictetus’ journey from Rome to Nicopolis, probably because of a ban the Emperor Domitian placed on philosophers, itself serves as a story of moving from politics to philosophy, from state power to inner power, an idea confirmed by the emphasis in Epictetus on indifference to relations with the Emperor. The Stoic emphasis on reason did not exclude literary style and aesthetic compositions as we see in the plays of Seneca, and the prose style of Epictetus as well as Seneca.
Stoicism did not exclude the exercise of power power, as we see in the contribution of Marcus Aurelius, and in Seneca’s time as an adviser to Nero. However, the role of poetic capacity in Plato and Aristotle has no obvious equivalent in Stoicism, and similar remarks apply to the role of political life. A Stoic could practice poetry and politics, but from a position in which they are dominated by reason, rather than a position in which we might learn something from poetic practice or the political life.
The non-exclusive, but particularly significant role of Stoicism can be considered in the sixteenth century with reference to Michel de Montaigne. In the Essays, Stoicism is a constant reference, particularly with regard to Seneca. The major theme that emerges, through Montaigne’s mode of equivocation and qualification, is that Stoic interest in rational self command is admirable, but not sufficient in providing principles of virtue and living. In a Stoic manner, Montaigne suggests that external glory is inferior to inner virtue, but then argues for some measure of state provided honour for the purposes of inspiring bravery. Montaigne frequently indicates that his writing is related to the fear of death and the inadequacies of his mind. The Essays are not a journey from intellectual inadequacy and anxiety in the face of mortality to self-command and tranquillity. Montaigne mentions tranquility as a goal, but indicates in multiple ways that it is not a realistic goal given the contradictory and restless nature of the human mind.
The central preoccupation of the Essays is how to form the anxieties and tensions of the human mind in writing. If this is done in a way that is at all comprehensive, and such is Montaigne’s ambition, then the writing must bee overwhelmed by the impossibility of unifying all directions to thought in the author’s mind, or the human mind in general. Stoicism is now left as one point of reference in the Essays, maybe it is the most important pole in terms of Montaigne’s ambiguous delineations of objects of antagonism, but even so it has to compete with all the sources of cruelty, intolerance, and delusion. The dominance of reason is replaced by writing and imagination, which are driven by fear, failures of communication, and the inexhaustibility of forms. All of this, and more, contributes to Montaigne’s status within French literature, and the later development of imaginative prose style.
Montaigne did not kill of Stoicism as he was part of a long process of the undermining of the ideal of the complete subordination of of desire or passion to reason, and evidently there are ways in which that project has persisted. What has not persisted is the dominance of a tendency to believe that power, desire, imagination, external relation, are all less than reason detached from everything, but reason.
The growth of the novel in the eighteenth century, a literary genre particularly association with subjective desire, irony, imagination, passion, and sympathy, in relation to a world integrated by culture rather than natural law, matches the decline of Stoicism as a dominant pattern of thought. We can understand the emergence of aesthetic philosophy, and various forms of criticism in Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Burke, Winckelmann, Lessing, Baumgarten, and Kant in this context, a context that also includes the novelistic and operatic achievements of Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Constant.
This not to say that everyone used to be a Stoic and stopped over the course of the early modern period, just that it colours everything and is the most convenient way of indicating what dominates the assumptions of thoughts about ethics and living from Roman-Hellenistic antiquity to the Enlightenment, given that sometimes we do need to make such generalisations.
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