Class Reflections: Cicero's On The Ends Book 3

introducing my students to a few key ideas of Stoic philosophy

Last week, in my Foundations of Philosophy class sections, we started exploring schools of Hellenistic and Roman Imperial philosophy, using Cicero’s work On The Ends. Book 1 provides an overview of Epicurean philosophy. Book 3, which we discussed yesterday, does the same thing for Stoic philosophy, putting the presentation in the mouth of Cicero’s friend and comrade Cato the Younger, who was firmly committed to that school.

On The Ends is not exactly an easy read for undergraduates or philosophical beginners, but with enough resources provided (like the handouts I give them) and a guide like myself to lead them through it in a class session, my experience is that the average learner is up to reading and understanding it. Book 3 packs in a lot of key Stoic doctrines, without providing a lot of examples or explanation, so I try to provide that to my students in our class session.

After telling them a bit about the originator of the Stoic school, Zeno of Citium, and his “origin story” in the fortunate shipwreck and loss of his goods in Athens’ harbor, and being directed to the Cynic Crates when asking a bookseller where he can find a person like Socrates to study and emulate, and after telling them a bit about Cato’s own history, including his and Cicero’s participation in the civil war against Julius Caesar - a bit of intellectual warmup, perhaps - we jump right into the text itself.

Cicero’s Cato ranges over a number of ideas key to Stoic ethics right away. After mentioning that there is some difficulty and obscurity to the Stoic system due to their use of technical vocabulary which they came up with in Greek, which now needs translation into Cicero’s and Cato’s Latin, Cato introduces us to one centrally important Stoic doctrine.

Every animal experiences and is moved by a set of “primary impulses of nature” according to the Stoics, rather than primarily by desire for pleasure and avoidance of pain, as the Epicureans maintain. Among these, the first that Cato discusses are

an attachment for itself [ipsum sibi conciliari], and an impulse to preserve itself [commendari ad se conservandum] and to feel affection for its own constitution and for those things which tend to preserve that constitution [ad suum statum eaque, quae conservantia sint eius status, diligenda]; while on the other hand it conceives an antipathy to destruction [alienari autem ab interitu] and to those things which appear to threaten destruction [iisque rebus, quae interitum videantur adferre]

Cicero doesn’t use a Greek term here that many contemporary students of Stoicism have learned from mentions about Hierocles’ “circles” (coming from his Elements of Ethics, not all that often read, unfortunately), oikeiōsis, which often gets translated as “appropriation” “affiliation”, or even (a bit of a stretch) “self-ownership”. But that is, as it turns out, what he is referencing. (As a site-note, you’ll also see this discussed, again, not by name, in some of Seneca’s works, and Epictetus use a verbal form of it as well).

I lead my students through thinking about what sorts of things they observe human babies, as well as other young animals, such as puppies and kittens, desiring and doing their best to seek out, motivated by this attachment to their own being, their lives, their thriving. We discuss what we have in common early on, and continuing through our existence with other mammals, and then how we as human beings transcend but never entirely leave behind those needs.

Human beings, according to the Stoics - and in this, they are in agreement with a number of other schools of ancient philosophy - are not only curious (which we can certainly say about other animals), but can come to recognize the value of, and then to desire and orient themselves towards acts of cognition, towards truth, knowledge, and even wisdom. This moves us past the orbit of the primary objects or impulses of nature. But those do remain important as well from the Stoic perspective.

In fact, the classic Stoic ideal of being, living, or acting in accordance with nature comes up shortly after in the text, connected there with “appropriate actions” or “duties” (the Greek kathēkon). Cicero charts out a sort of progression or developmental account.

The initial principle being thus established that things in accordance with nature are 'things to be taken' for their own sake, and their opposites similarly 'things to be rejected,' the first 'appropriate act' . . . is to preserve oneself in one's natural constitution;

the next is to retain those things which are in accordance with nature and to repel those that are the contrary;

then when this principle of choice and also of rejection has been discovered, there follows next in order choice conditioned by 'appropriate action';

then, such choice become a fixed habit;

and finally, choice fully rationalized and in harmony with nature. It is at this final stage that the Good properly so called first emerges and comes to be understood in its true nature

At this point, of course, it might sound as if all this happens automatically for all human beings, which then raises a reasonable question that isn’t addressed by Cicero there. If our very nature leads us to recognizing what we need and what is good and right for us, then how do we end up going astray? How is it that most human beings wind up in some sort of spectrum from slightly messed up to massively messed up in deeply rooted and convoluted manners? That as it turns out, will be a topic for a different class session, but is certainly well worth noting.

Perhaps the most important of the Stoic ethical doctrines that this text discusses, which is also the place where I tell my students “you might have been cool with all of this up to this point, but this is going to be a much harder sell” is one that can be expressed in a formula Epictetus, among others, uses later on (which likely represents a commonplace Stoic statement):

• What is genuinely good are the virtues and what participate in the virtues.

• What is genuinely bad are the vices and what participate in the vices

• Everything else is indifferent, neither genuinely good nor genuinely bad.

It is important, I stress, not to fall into the mistake of thinking that Stoics teach that only virtue is good and only vice is bad. That is unfortunately a common misrepresentation that you see out there in contemporary literature about Stoicism. It’s clear that the range of the good and bad for classic Stoics was wider, though certainly centered on virtue and vice.

Cicero has Cato speak in terms of the honestum as along being what is good, and the turpe as alone being what is bad. These are somewhat tricky terms to translate, corresponding to the Greek kalon and aiskhron, but you can use “fair” and “foul”, “honorable” and “dishonorable”, “morally or intrinsically good” and “bad”, and you get some sense of what’s being referred to. The Stoics were pretty clear, and this is actually discussed briefly in On The Ends book 3, that certain relationships can be good or bad in this full sense.

Along with this goes the viewpoint that what makes us human beings actually happy is the genuine good that is not reducible to but does certainly encompass the virtues, that is wisdom, justice, temperance, and courage. Possessing, developing, living out, and choosing and arranging in accordance with these virtues is necessary for human happiness. And similarly on the other end, the person who lacks these virtues, and has the vices instead, foolishness, injustice, self-indulgence, and cowardice instead, is going to experience the opposite of happiness, misery.

The Stoics go beyond most of the other virtue ethicists of antiquity in maintaining that not only are the virtues necessary for human happiness, because they are productive of it, and a good bit of what happiness even consists of. Virtue as a whole, according to them is sufficient for human happiness. They famously said that the wise person, who has all the virtues, can be happy, even when being tortured on the rack, that is, experiencing things that we generally see as bad things, like pain, ignominy, even death.

That leads to thinking about the indifferents. Earlier in the class sessions, I had written on one side of the board a number of things that we generally consider to be goods, namely:

• wealth

• health

• social status

• fame

• pleasure

• security or freedom

• relationships

• virtue or moral goodness

I remind them that these were things in earlier class sessions they had said mattered to them, as being important to, or even part of their own conception of happiness. I also remind them that Plato, Aristotle, and the Epicureans also said that these could be good things, though perhaps not all of them are always good, or outweigh all the other goods.

On one side of the board, I place happiness, the virtues, and good relationships, and I add that the Stoics think these are genuinely good. On the other side of the board, I place the opposites of those, misery, the vices, and bad relationships. And in the big space between them, I write “Indifferents - what doesn’t make a genuine difference to our happiness or misery”.

And then in two columns, I set down pairs of opposites

• wealth and poverty

• health and disease

• high status and low status

• fame and “being nobody”

• pleasure and pain

We consider whether wealth really leads to happiness or poverty to misery. I have them think about rich people they have met, for example some of the high school classmates, who had plenty of money but seemed to be miserable people despite that. We consider whether any amount of wealth can purchase or produce the moral virtues if a person lacks them. Then we do the same for poverty, misery, and vices, stressing the lack of connection between these matters.

We do the same for each of these positively and negatively valued opposites in turn. As it turns out none of them, none of them have the necessary connection with the real good or evil for human beings, happiness or misery, that the genuinely good and bad states of character, virtue and vice, exhibit.

Now does that mean that these “indifferents” make no difference whatsoever? Should we place precisely zero value on wealth or health? Should we not care about them at all, be sloppy with them, perhaps even shun or avoid them? That is definitely not what the Stoics thought. Some of the indifferents are “preferred”, and that means they have some positive value, just not of the order of the genuinely good. Likewise some of them are “dispreferred” or “rejected”, having some negative value, but not enough to ensure genuine misery. (In fact, it would be the foolishness of considering them as misery-making that would make a person miserable, or the cowardice involved in not facing them well that would do do).

I note that the Stoics did consider some matters to be genuinely indifferent, totally neutral, having no positive or negative value. One of these is unsurprising. I pick a student at random, and ask them to guess whether the number of hairs on their head is even or odd. They don’t know, of course, since none of us do, and frankly none of us care at all, because there’s no situation in which that has any importance, let alone relevance to happiness or misery, virtue or vice. The second one is to them surprising. The Stoics used the color of a person’s skin as another example of something completely indifferent.

We come back to the columns of paired off indifferents, and I tell them that if they buy into this way of looking at moral matters so far, there’s one other pair that we have to add to the indifferents, one that the Stoics themselves (particularly Seneca) admitted was a harder sell. That pair is life and death. For the Stoics, strictly speaking these are indifferents, but it is pretty tough when you’re faced with your own death or the death of those you love, to treat them as the indifferents the Stoics claim them to be. But it certainly is possible to do so.

That’s essentially where we leave off in our class session. We’re going to get more Stoic philosophy, this time drawn from several of Seneca’s letters, in the next class session, including some good further discussion about the virtues and vices. This is already a lot for incoming freshmen, recently crossing the threshold into adulthood, to understand and to mull over. A stark philosophy that they might find difficult to accept, but which offers them a robust challenge to think about.