Becker - A New Stoicism

A NEW STOICISM

A NEW STOICISM

REVISED EDITION

Lawrence C. Becker

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESSPRINCETON AND OXFORD

Revised edition copyright 2017 by Lawrence C. Becker

Original edition published 1998

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Paperback ISBN 978-0-691-17721-2

Library of Congress Control Number 2017945179

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This book has been composed in Sabon

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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Charlotte

AGAIN AND ALWAYS

THESE FIFTY YEARS

Contents

Preface to the Revised Edition

Comparisons

Readers of the first edition (1998) will find that the overall project of the book remains the same, as do all its central philosophical claims, as well as the structure of the arguments for those claims. But there are five substantial changes.

THE FIRST is the reformulation of the relationships among stoic agency, virtue, and eudaimonia (happiness in the sense of a good life, a flourishing life). That change is stated in the new first section of and further explained in the new opening section of the commentary to that chapter. This has forced subtle and not so subtle changes throughout the book concerning the final end or ultimate goal in stoicism. It may be worthwhile to preview them here.

The reason for the change. The ancient Stoics claimed to be working in the eudaimonistic tradition but also claimed that virtue was the only good. Critics have persistently argued that these two claims are inconsistent. The critics point out that happiness is the final end, or ultimate goal, in the eudaimonistic tradition. How can the final end not itself be a good? And if it is a good, it is inconsistent for Stoics to say that virtue is the only good and at the same time claim to be eudaimonists.

In reply, the ancient Stoics never wavered in their claim that virtue was the only good but went on to emphasize that it was sufficient for happiness and, when pressed, would sometimes say that the two were identical, or perhaps inseparable in some sense. Even critics sympathetic to Stoicism in other respects refused to accept this response. Cicero is an example.

The first edition took the ancient Stoics at their word about virtue being the only good and tried to make the best of it by identifying virtue not with happiness but with ideal agency, which can plausibly be understood as something that is sufficient by itself to generate something resembling happiness. Thus, as the text of the first edition put it, in stoicism the final end or ultimate good is virtue and not happinessalthough virtuous agentic activity yields happiness. But this just resurrects, rather than resolves, the two goods problem and is unsatisfactory for other reasons as well.

The change itself. The account of the matter in this edition is a decided improvement in the sense that it leaves no doubt that stoicism is firmly within the eudaimonistic tradition. The revised account begins by pointing out that the same developmental process simultaneously yields three distinct things: ideal stoic agency, stoic virtue, and happiness in the sense of the stoic form of eudaimonia. Ideal stoic agency is necessary and sufficient for achieving and sustaining stoic virtue (the only good), which is in turn necessary and sufficient for producing stoic happinessthe terminus of questions about what we expect to get from stoic virtue, beyond being and acting virtuously for its own sake, and for the sake of others. Those three things are inseparable because, given their common developmental source, it is not possible to have one of the three things without also having the other two. If you have ideal stoic agency, you are going to get stoic virtue and stoic happiness as well. Stoic happiness, however, like happiness in other forms of eudaimonism, puts an end to questions about why we should develop agency and virtue. In that sense, though virtue remains the only good for Stoics, happiness is the final end.

A bonus from the change. If agency, virtue, and happiness are inseparable, a person who is making progress toward ideal stoic agency is clearly making progress toward virtue and happiness as well. This helps to understand another controversial doctrine in ancient Stoicismnamely, the claim that virtue is an all or nothing thing. The ancient Stoics claimed that virtue itself could not be a matter of degree. Progress toward virtue is a different matter, however, and that is why they presumably emphasized it so much, even coining a technical term for a person making such progress (prokoptn). Such progress can be assessed in terms of degrees of nearness to virtue itself. (An obvious analogy is uniqueness, which is also an all or nothing thing. Things that are not unique can nonetheless be far from it, close to it, or very close to it.) The first edition appreciated this point fully with respect to happiness. The assumption throughout was, and remains, that imperfect stoic moral agents will have more or less unstable forms of stoic virtue and happiness. There is now a more explicit discussion of progress toward virtue, however, to make the point clearer.

THE SECOND substantial change is the acknowledgment that specifically stoic moral training and education must figure prominently, at some stage, in the developmental story told in . Since the book itself is on stoic ethical theory, this change does not have very wide reverberations throughout the text or commentaries, but it is important nonetheless. There is no attempt to give a detailed account of stoic moral education, but there are remarks in the postscript about some possibilities for stoic teaching, training, and therapy.

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THE FOURTH substantial change is the fact that this revised edition has updated the book in response to the remarkable growth of scholarly publication and general intellectual interest in Stoic ethics since 1998. Substantive additions can be found at the following places.

Updated bibliography and commentary. Readers will find mentionsand in some places discussionsof some important new translations of classic texts, new scholarly discussions of Hellenistic and Roman Stoicism, and stoic themes throughout the subsequent history of Western philosophy. Specifically, there are such changes in the commentary to , under the headings Reconstructed texts, Initial influences, The reception of Stoicism, Debates within the Stoic school, Contemporary sources, and Stoic holism and the autonomy of ethics. The current revival of interest in stoic accounts of living well and engagement in stoic practices is treated in the postscript. The works mentioned have complete citations in the new bibliography.

Improved arguments. There are some other changes of note. Not the least of these is the attempt to make more reader friendly by breaking up some extraordinarily long paragraphs, adding new subsection headings, and generally making the text less like something from the age before writers used punctuation.

There are also some restatements of elements in the books arguments themselves. In some cases these are quite brief; in others, not brief at all. They are flagged here for the benefit of readers who want to identify them easily: