Ancient Stoics weren’t right about everything

No reasonable person can claim that the ancient Stoics were right about everything. The mind is not in the chest and there is no reason to accept that oracles can prophesize; the planets are not gods, and there is no hard boundary between the cognitive and linguistic life of human beings and (at least some) other animals.

Moreover, we moderns face challenges that the ancient Stoics did not foresee and, despite their thoughts on some of these aspects, could not possibly have imagined. For example, the cosmos, despite their allegiance to it, is more enormous than they ever dreamed.

Equally, they may have lived through the extinction of several animal species due to the activities in the Coliseum, but they could not have envisioned a mass extinction. Even their conception of the cosmopolis takes on a different meaning when one considers the dangers of misinformation in a globalized world.

Updating vs.‘fixing’ Stoicism

It is only reasonable that contemporary adherents of Stoicism, classicists, and philosophers update and incorporate the knowledge gained in the 2300 years since Zeno paced up and down the Stoa Poikile. However, this leads us to another problem: that of attempting to “fix” Stoicism by imposing our worldview onto those of the ancients. Sometimes, we risk misreading the Stoics in their own context and may try too hard to make their ideas more palatable. We might, for example, retroactively soften their positions on warfare or slavery. Sometimes, we might err too far the other way, as some have upon shamefully attaching misogyny to the philosophy, when it was not even there in antiquity.

Justus Lipsius and Neostoicism

We will call the injection of our values into Stoic philosophy the ‘Lipsius trap’. Justus Lipsius (1547–1606) was a classical scholar and humanist who became the founding father of Neostoicism. The latter was a movement that incorporated aspects of Christian metaphysics and ethics into a Stoic framework. Lipsius’ incoherent hybrid was something he ultimately rejected on his deathbed in favour of traditional Christianity, presumably with all the baggage that entailed: the immaterial soul, original sin, heaven, and the peculiar view of free will.

Is our world view dubious or hopelessly mistaken?

Perhaps, like Lipsius, it is our own ethical or even metaphysical worldview that is dubious or hopelessly mistaken. The ideas put forward by some contemporary Stoics that warfare is evil goes against the key Stoic tenet that only the vices (ignorance, injustice, greed, and ignorance) are evil. Other new ideas include the assertion that some errors are morally worse than others and the categorical abandonment of pantheism.

Both of them interfere with the entire Stoic ethical framework, not just its metaphysics. In this regard, we run the risk of creating an incoherent philosophical creature that, like Lipsius, we will end up abandoning. Lipsius was every bit a follower of Stoicism as we moderns are, and his predicament serves to warn us of the danger of assuming that the ancients’ views are less coherent than ours, merely because we see them as incompatible with the way we want the world to be. Indeed, we should consider carefully how and why we fix things, especially if it might lead us to lose the very thing we came to love and were looking for in the first place.

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