Near the end of a long discussion via Substack notes, about the nature of Stoicism, after I mentioned "ontological dualism," then re a response from him, made sure I was being understood correctly, he said:
I simply don't see that as true.
My response, which I didn't originally send? This:
We’ll agree to disagree on that, too, but I think the Logos is just as much a non-materialist entity, if you will, as karma is in Buddhism and Hinduism. I know they were determinists, just like Enlightenment Deists (even if they didn’t recognize it).
I see it as similar to Aristotle’s “prime mover”; the Logos has to sit outside the material world, just like the Deist “wind up the clock” divinity.
It's how I've always understood Stoicism.
And that's true even if the Stoics didn't understand themselves that way.
The conversation did fully open my mind, though.
I realize that part of why I have seen it this way is that, I see it as "not working" due to self-referentiality problems, the exact ones that Hofstadter, Gödel and Tarski have like liked to write about, only universe-wide.
The way I see it is, we have a dilemma, and a real one, not a false one.
Accepting at face value Zeno's claim that Stoicism was monistic?
We either say he got that claim wrong, which allows the general Stoic edifice to remain, albeit with making Zeno look like a clueless metaphysician, or ...
We say that he was right on that Stoicism was monistic, and he had created a self-rotting edifice.
I don't know which is more "charitable."
I do know that either angle makes me realize far more than before how overrated Stoicism is in some ways.
Of course, the central platform of Stoicism, the reason so many people are ga-ga over it via neo-Stoicism, is ethics. So, Stoicism's ethics are either part of that rotten edifice, and ditto for neo-Stoics, or they're dualistically based even as neo-Stoics don't realize this. If, per Hume's dictum (with preceding sentence) that:
We speak not strictly and philosophically when we talk of the combat of passion and of reason. Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.
Is at least more true than false, then a principle of living ethically according to reason and nature is more false than true. That's what got me started with Massimo; it's been a long, long time — before I became a secularist, to put it bluntly — that I've read seriously in Stoicism. I didn't realize that its use of "passion" has nothing to do with Hume's passions.
And, while I think Hume is not totally true here, just as he is not on "is ≠ ought," I do think on that, and this, both issues, he's more right than wrong. In the run-up to that dictum, he noted that most people of his day felt that passions needed to be the slave to reason, and so explained his inverse. See here. And, of that, he said:
I think, again, that this may not be 100 percent true, but it's more right than wrong.
In order to shew the fallacy of all this philosophy, I shall endeavour to prove first, that reason alone can never be a motive to any action of the will; and secondly, that it can never oppose passion in the direction of the will.
The crux of what Hume is getting at comes a few paragraphs later, with this definition:
A passion is an original existence, or, if you will, modification of existence, and contains not any representative quality, which renders it a copy of any other existence or modification. When I am angry, I am actually possest with the passion, and in that emotion have no more a reference to any other object, than when I am thirsty, or sick, or more than five foot high. 'Tis impossible, therefore, that this passion can be oppos'd by, or be contradictory to truth and reason; since this contradiction consists in the disagreement of ideas, consider'd as copies, with those objects, which they represent.
Followed by this observation:
According to this principle, which is so obvious and natural, 'tis only in two senses, that any affection can be call'd unreasonable. First, When a passion, such as hope or fear, grief or joy, despair or security, is founded on the supposition of the existence of objects, which really do not exist. Secondly, When in exerting any passion in action, we chuse means insufficient for the design'd end, and deceive ourselves in our judgment of causes and effects. Where a passion is neither founded on false suppositions, nor chuses means insufficient for the end, the understanding can neither justify nor condemn it.
In other words, if a passion is justly formed, it's impossible to reason it away.
I would go further, and state that claims that one can do so are itself a passion, though an ill-formed one. Of course, I like petard-hoisting.
I think devotees of all Hellenistic philosophies could learn from Hume. Even Cynicism made strong claims for human reasoning. At least it, unlike Stoicism and Epicureanism, rejects determinism.
Now, per Hume's other dictum, yes, his dictum on the passions and reason may not be totally true. After all, if "is ≠ ought," theoretically, we can reason our way beyond passions. But, can we? Beyond me going with petard-hoisting snark, per Hume's third bon mot about how we can never truly apprehend ourselves, we may never be able to so totally detach from ourselves as to truly abstractly reason with a bracketing — a phenomenological bracketing or epoche — of passions.
I see this to be more true the older I get, even as I wish it were not the case.
That then said, related to that? Hume has a big problem here, and it's a personal one as a professional one, because he was a big practitioner of it.
It's called "motivated reasoning."
That then said, this doesn't let Stoicism off the hook, or the petard. It's easy to engage in — and to fling accusations of others engaging in — motivated reasoning. That in turn suggests again that actual reasoning is harder than St. David presents and much more so than Zeno claims.
We very much aren't letting Stoicism off the hook. Per a later comment to Massimo:
So, whether Zeno was wrong in assuming that you can have a monist Logos, and ignoring all the self-referential issues that causes, which being literally universal in size, certainly satisfies Gödel et al on being a sufficiently large issue, or whether, if I’m charitable on accepting Zeno’s monistic stance, we then say per what I just said, and that theoretically means the edifice is rotten (yes, that’s a bit harsh, but I’m OK with it), there we are.
I don’t see that as a false dilemma but a real one, and I know that, per the Cretan liars paradox and other things, self-referentiality problems were known to Zeno.
As for the eternal recurrence? That of course means the Logos gets nuked along with everything else.
Behind this, Zeno makes assumptions about the rationality of the universe, as well as of H. sapiens, that probably aren’t warranted. Can I hop in a Tardis and introduce him to non-local subatomic particles?
Per Hume on Kant, I’ve been awakened from some sort of slumber.
And, that last sentence is as true as anything.
This sets aside the issue of Stoicism being a hard determinist philosophy, and who exactly is trying to achieve ataxaria admidst such determinism. And yes, that last part was snark.
