A Guide to StoicismStock, St. George William Joseph
Philosophy
A Guide to Stoicism
Stock, St. George William Joseph
Stoics
There was therefore something rational corresponding to three out of
four primary passions--against delight was to be set joy; against
grief there was nothing to be set, for that arose from the presence
of ill which would rather never attach to the sage. Grief was the
irrational conviction that one ought to afflict oneself where there
was no occasion for it. The ideal of the Stoics was the unclouded
serenity of Socrates of whom Xanthippe declared that he had always
the same face whether on leaving the house In the morning or on
returning to it at night.
As the motley crowd of passions followed the banners of their four
leaders so specific forms of feeling sanctioned by reason were
severally assigned to the three eupathies.
Things were divided by Zeno into good, bad, and indifferent. To good
belonged virtue and what partook of virtue; to bad, vice and what
partook of vice. All other things were indifferent.
To the third class then belonged such things as life and death,
health and sickness, pleasure and pain, beauty and ugliness, strength
and weakness, honour and dishonour, wealth and poverty, victory and
defeat, nobility and baseness of birth.
Good was defined as that which benefits. To confer benefit was no
less essential to good than to impart warmth was to heat. If one
asked in what 'to benefit' lay one received the reply that it lay in
producing an act or state in accordance with virtue, and similarly it
was laid down that 'to hurt' lay in producing an act or state in
accordance with vice.
The indifference of things other than virtue and vice was apparent
from the definition of good which made it essentially beneficial.
Such things as health and wealth might be beneficial or not according
to circumstances; they were therefore no more good than bad. Again,
nothing could be really good of which the good or ill depended on the
use made of it, but this was the case with things like health and
wealth.
The true and only good then was identical with what the Greeks called
'the beautiful' and what we call 'the right'. To say that a thing was
right was to say that it was good, and conversely to say that it was
good was to say that it was right; this absolute identity between the
good and the right and, on the other hand, between the bad and wrong,
was the head and front of the Stoic ethics. The right contained in
itself all that was necessary for the happy life, the wrong was the
only evil, and made men miserable whether they knew it or not.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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