The more I read about Stoicism, the more I marvel at how their way of thinking breaks conventional and common sense notions. Clearly, the Stoics invented a lot of concepts to explain their rather complex view of the world. While Plutarch thought that the Stoics were full of “self-contradiction,” these concepts end up being better descriptions of what modern science is telling us about ourselves and our universe.

Let’s take a concepts like “breath” (pneuma) and “tenor” [hexis]. These are complex concepts that are simultaneously expressed as unified “bodies” (a Stoic technical term) but contain opposing forces within their unity. Pneuma is made up of hot and cold simultaneously so that it can expand and contract. Tenor stretches in both directions at once — like a piece of elastic or a rubber band, except that we’d need to think about the elastic as stretching itself. Clearly these terms don’t fit our conventional view of what things are and how they should be described. Unities that are defined by their ability to adjust and change are not very friendly to our Neoplatonic concept of Truth that looks for stabilities and essences. But this doesn’t make them untrue. Rather, a better way to think about these Stoic concepts is that they violate our “dogmatic image of Truth,” to borrow a phrase from Gilles Deleuze. The specific dogmatic image of Truth that they violate was nicely captured by Isaiah Berlin when he wrote that Western Philosophy since Plato has been stuck within a framework of Truth that has three parts:

1. All philosophical questions that we can pose have correct answers

2. If only we can find the right method to answer these questions, we’d arrive at the right answers

3. The answers we find by following the correct method will be incompatible with all other answers and all other methods

I would expand this well beyond Western Philosophy to encompass all of what we think knowledge is.

Stoic virtue does not fit this model. It cannot easily be defined because it is not a kind of Truth that can be captured in easy answers to questions such as “What is virtue?” and “What is good?” Stoic virtue is activated in the events of life as they unfold through one’s demeanor. Virtue is therefore not reducible to an Idea or a Truth that can be readily defined in a sentence or two and applied to a given situation.

Let’s compare a couple of passages from ancient philosophy. The first one is from Plato’s Meno:

“SOCRATES: I do not insist that my argument is right in all other respects, but I would contend at all costs in both word and deed as far as I could that we will be better men, braver and less idle, if we believe that one must search for the things one does not know rather than if we believe that it is not possible to find out what we do not know and that we must not look for it.

Since we are of one mind that one should seek to find out what one does not know, shall we try to find out together what virtue is?” (Meno 86b-c)

The assumption here is that the question of “what virtue is” can be answered once and for all, and that the answer will take the form of a definition abstract enough to include all the possible examples of virtue past, present and future. Dialectical conversation will be the primary method for getting at it. And when we arrive at it, we will have arrived at an answer that automatically disqualifies other answers as incompatible and wrong. I don’t believe that this approach to knowledge is what Plato actually believed. His repeated insistence in the early dialogs on this method that is designed to fail belies other, more important questions about what it means to know something and the ethical benefits of engaging in the search, however futile it may be. It seems perfectly reasonable that what Plato is dramatizing is the willingness to engage in dialectical conversation to collectively arrive at provisional answers to important moral questions, and that the willingness to do so is essential to “caring for our souls.”

That latter reading doesn’t change the fact that this conversation is structured around the search for a definitive verbal answer to the question “what is virtue?” When the question is definitively answered, in other words, it will be a statement that withstands all objections, which themselves will be verbal. At this point, knowledge will be achieved and the work will be done. This is our Neoplatonic inheritance. Specifically and historically, the attempted answers have taken the form of a Categorical Imperative (Kant) or “the greatest good for the greatest number” (Utilitarianism) or the Golden Rule (do unto others et cetera). These kind of answers give rise to scenarios and thought experiments that are designed to raise objections and stress-test these definitions so that the definitions can satisfy Berlin’s three-part structure:

1. “What is virtue” is a question that can be answered definitively

2. Getting the right answer means pursuing the right method (e.g., dialectical conversation, Categorical Imperatives, Utilitarianism)

3. Once the answer is arrived at, all other answers are wrong.

This is quite different from how Stoicism sought to answer the question. I’ll take one of Seneca’s definitions of virtue, which is included in Letter 71:

What is this virtue? True and unshakable judgment, for from this come the impulses of the mind; by this, every impression that stimulates impulse is rendered perfectly clear.( 71.32)

Here Seneca answers the question, but his answer certainly doesn’t take the form of a Categorical Imperative or a Utilitarian rule of any kind. His definition is not even really a definition like we find Socrates driving for in Plato’s early dialogs. Seneca conveys a sense of motion and energy that outstrip the words he uses to define virtue — “true and unshakeable judgement” which is itself the ability to control “every impression that similuates impulse” so that they don’t become out of control emotions. In other words, defining virtue is not a search for propositional truths (in the form of rules) that can withstand all objections regardless of time and place. Virtue is defined as a kind of force of will to make good judgements about what is happening around us so as not to respond in the wrong way.

Embodied Reason

A crucial feature of Stoic virtue is that it is embodied. The Meno encourages us to think about virtue as a purely intellectual activity. Categorical Imperatives do the same: they encourage us to imagine vignettes where the moral responsibility resides in the intellectual activity of applying predefined rules to particular situations. Utilitarianism works the same way: reducing moral decisions to calculations. Bodies don’t matter in these traditional formulations of moral responsibility. Only minds matter.

Stoicism never embraced a mind-body dualism. The “commanding faculty” (animus in Latin, nous in Greek) is “corporeal” in the Stoic worldview. Because the commanding faculty has power over our actions, it must be physical. “The soul’s parts flow from their seat in the heart, as if from the source of a spring, and spread through the whole body. They continually fill all the limbs with vital breath, and rule and control them with countless powers — nutrition, growth, locomotion, sensation, impulse to action” (Calcidius, The Hellenistic philosophers Vol. 1, 315). If it weren’t physical, in the Stoic view of things, the animus wouldn’t be capable of effecting anything else — it wouldn’t be capable of turning “impulse to action.” Only bodies can affect other bodies. As such, virtue (as an expression of the soul) is accomplished with one’s entire body.

Time over Space

The Stoic concept of virtue is better understood temporally than spatially, and this is one of its fundamental strengths and differences from our traditional rule-based concepts. Let’s start with understanding the spatial bias in the traditional concept. When virtuous behavior is reducible to the application of rules, a number of implications follow.

First, we tend to tell moral tales in tightly defined vignettes that are more spatially rich than temporally. For example, Kant’s fourth Categorical Imperative takes any form of “lying” off the moral table of options. Typical illustrations of this universal rule go something like this: There is a knock at the door. You know that your brother is in debt to a loan shark and that the guy at the door is here to collect or otherwise harm your brother. Do you lie about him being there or do you tell the truth consequences be damned? Using Berlin’s framework, ideally you’ve already answered the question “what is virtue” such that lying is never acceptable. Therefore you apply the answer dispassionately to this situation. If the method that you’ve used is Kant’s Categorical Imperative, you give up your brother and your conscience is clean. The pacing of the drama is immaterial. The personal histories of the actors are irrelevant.

Second, the moral focus tends to be on one person in the drama whose decision-making is the focus of our judgment. Are they guilty or not? Did they properly apply the rule to the situation? Other ways of responding that seek a larger realm of options — trying to defuse the situation or paying off the loan shark yourself — are out of place in these vignettes because they break the vignette’s purpose of illustrating the universal rule as applied by a lone individual moral actor. Coming up with more creative solutions to diffuse the situation are not imaginable when we structure the vignette as a way of validating and testing Universal Rules.

My point here is not to offer an alternative by elaborating what a Stoic would do in this situation, though that would be easy to do. Rather, the point is to illustrate that these types of universal moral rules lead to moral vignettes that reinforce this vision of virtue as the dispassionate application of cold, hard reason. They are designed to make us argue over ahistorical definitions and demand that Truth take a particular form: definitive answers that are always true and that are discoverable by human reason as long as it pursues the right method of reasoning.

What is the moral problem here? This approach to defining virtuous behavior reduces our ability to imagine different outcomes and circumscribe (if not completely eliminate) how we enact those outcomes. Morality is thus reduced to a question of what one ought to do with the answer being determined by the rule ahead of time. Morally correct behavior starts to feel like an oral exam in high school where you have to stand in front of the class and correctly answer the question posed by the teacher. Essentially this form of morality reduces decision-making to arguments about what is the correct rule to apply to the situation. We end up in rather endless abstract arguments about what one should do when the loan shark knocks on the door.

That’s not what Stoicism does, despite the tendency to think of it in exactly the terms above — as an emotionless pursuit of moral duties without regard for the particulars of the situation. To illustrate, let’s take another passage where Seneca defines virtue, this one from On the Constancy of the Wise Person:

Virtue is free, inviolable, unmoved, unshaken, so hardened against chance events that it cannot be made to bend, let alone be defeated. It stares down the devices of terror: whether it is presented with hardships or with blessings, its expression remains unchanged. (5.4)

Seneca’s definition of virtue doesn’t fit the mold of a conventional definition. Here again virtue is described as a force. As such, it can only be defined in relation to the other forces it encounters — “chance events” — and is called into action by those forces. (A force acting in an empty space makes no sense.) Necessarily, it acts and responds, and it must be stronger than the forces that call it into being in the moment of need. It must be “inviolable, unmoved, unshaken”; it must “stare down” its opposing force. This does not mean inert, nor does it mean self-contained or self-sufficient. As a force, it must be active in the face of the other forces. It gets its quality as a force from the other forces acting on it. Pushing an object across a room requires an object that is resisting your effort. Thus the pushing force needs the inertial force of the object in order for it to become “pushing.” The same can be said of Stoic “constancy” (constantia) and “tranquility” (tranquilitas) and “self-sufficiency.” They are not inert and isolated states of the human mind unmoved by, and independent of, chance events. They are active states of mind that come into being when they are forced to do so. As I said above, they also encompass the whole body.

As such, virtue is not reducible to a thing; nor is it reducible to a clear and definable set of rules. It exists only as an expression of force in response to other forces. It is not, therefore, reducible to applications of universal rules to situations. Virtue is created in the moment by the way we conduct ourselves with others, not the application of universal Truths to particular situations. Because it exists as a force, virtue must be constantly tested and practiced. It simply doesn’t exist other than in its expression as a counter-acting force.

As a force, we need to hold ourselves back from seeing Stoic virtue as a definable thing. Rather, it is better understood as something that happens temporally and is a process, not an entity. Seneca makes this perfectly clear in Letter 113:

One could say, “The virtues are not a plurality of living beings, and yet they are living beings. For just as someone is both a poet and an orator but still one person, so the virtues are living beings but not a plurality of these. The same mind is both moderate and just and prudent and brave, being disposed in a certain way with respect to the individual virtues.” (113. 24)

The virtues are not standalone entities but they do arise from an entity (“the same mind” as the commanding faculty) as expressions of its virtue, which is itself a “disposition” to respond to whatever happens with the right virtue. Quoting Cleanthes (an early Stoic), Plutarch puts a point on it: “This strength and might, when it arises in what seem to be matters requiring persistence, is self-control; when in matters requiring endurance, courage; concerning deserts, justice; concerning choices and avoidances, moderation” (The Hellenistic philosophers Vol. 1, 378). Virtue is a unified substance, but it only exists in its reactive expression to other forces. It is thus better understood as a temporal process than an entity easily captured in an abstract definition. Rather, its fundamental ability is to be open to what is called for in the situation and transform itself into the virtuous disposition that will yield the best outcome.

So, despite Seneca’s metaphors of stability and constancy, virtue is never the same thing twice; it is always in a state of becoming that never begins and ends as the same thing. It is a force that expresses itself with greater or lesser intensity, and its expression is necessarily a self-transformation based on the particular virtue (or virtues) called for in the moment of need. It is endurance when the opposing forces of fortune require virtue to transform into courage. It is justice when the opposing forces require one to enact the distribution of goods. It is moderation when the opposing forces are temptations of luxury. But we cannot, as a matter of logic, think that each virtue (courage, prudence, moderation, justice) will be the same thing at each moment just as the opposing forces are never the same things when they are encountered. Key to Stoic virtue is its ability to become what it needs to become in the face of unpredictable circumstances. Those circumstances are never the same, thus prudence will never be the same each time it is called upon.

Stoic Virtue as Will to Power

As such, virtue is a kind of “will to power” as Deleuze interpreted it through Nietzsche: “it is an essentially plastic principle that is no wider than what it conditions, that changes itself with the conditioned and determines itself in each case along with what it determines… It is never superior to the ways that it determines a relation between forces, it is always plastic and changing” (Nietzsche and Philosophy, 50). If we try to encase the will to power within a clearly articulated definition, we eviscerate it into metaphysical abractions: “The will to power cannot be separated from force without falling into metaphysical abstraction” (50). The same can be said of Stoic virtue as a kind of will to power. If we reduce it to Universal Rules (Categorical Imperatives, Utilitarian calculations, Golden Rules), then we lose our intellectual and practical grip on its pragmatic and creative power to become what it needs to be in the face of unpredictable opposing forces.

Constancy and self-sufficiency, for Stoics, are not virtues that privilege Being over Becoming. They reject that binary because they are active forces that extend beyond the individual who enacts them and transform situations as they are expressed:

“The wise person is self-sufficient.” My dear Lucilius, many people misinterpret this. They pull the sage in on every side, driving him inside his own skin. The fact is, one has to make some distinctions as to what that assertion means and how far it extends. The wise person is self-sufficient as concerns living a good life, but not as concerns living in general. For the latter, there are many things he requires [e.g., food, shelter]; for the former, only a sound and upright mind that rises superior to fortune. (Letter 9.13)

Here we have a clear statement that self-sufficiency is not a withdrawal into oneself and is not a principle of isolation. It is a disposition expressed as a force “that rises superior to fortune.” To say that self-sufficiency is to “pull the sage in on every side, driving him inside his own skin” is to stunt the power of self-sufficiency as a force that transcends the physical boundaries of the individual who expresses this force.

Thus the sage does not live “inside his own skin” but moves into the world actively as a counterbalancing force whose constancy, tranquility and self-sufficiency cannot be reduced to his Being that isolates him from the events of the world. Self-sufficiency, though at times it requires withdrawal to gain strength (see Letter 9.16), must be expressed in the world to be realized. It exists only in its expression that does not have its essence in a “plurality of living beings” inside the human soul. Virtue — as constancy and self-sufficiency that become prudence, courage, moderation and justice — exists only as transformations and expressions in the face of other forces that enable and activate virtue’s power. These values can thus only be understood as an ability to reactivate themselves when the moments come, but this reactivation is necessarily different each time though it may resemble the past and certainly is an effect of practice and training.

Though he may use the label “courage” to describe someone’s virtuous disposition to dangerous situations, Seneca is not signaling a stable entity that can be easily defined. He is signaling a disposition of the animus which is simultaneously and inseparably physical and mental. Courage does not eternally return as the same thing each time. Rather, to channel Deleuze again, the eternal return “must not be interpreted as the return of something that is, that is ‘one’ or the ‘same’. We misinterpret the expression ‘eternal return’ if we understand it as ‘return of the same.’

In other words, identity in the eternal return does not describe the nature of that which returns but, on the contrary, the fact of returning for that which differs. This is why the eternal return must be thought of as a synthesis; a synthesis of time and its dimensions [past, present and future all blended at the same “moment”], a synthesis of diversity and its reproduction, a synthesis of becoming and the being that is affirmed in becoming, a synthesis of double affirmation. (48)

Courage and prudence are not “living beings” that are always the same in the human soul. They do not have stable identities that return as the exact same thing each time. They are concepts that Seneca uses to capture this return as “becoming [i.e., virtuous disposition] and the being [i.e., constancy, self-sufficiency, courage, prudence] that is affirmed in becoming.” Everything is always in motion; our labels are merely ways to exert some interpretive and explanatory framework to synthesize different situations and the virtues that are called for to deal with them. We “misinterpret” Stoic self-sufficiency and Nietzsche’s eternal return if we think that these concepts are faithful reflections of reality. We misinterpret them if we think that they “live inside their own skins” and are based on stable and eternal entities that can return unchanged as if they are Neoplatonic Forms or Ideas. To be sure, “metaphysical abstractions” are necessary practical tools in our ability to respond. It is incredibly useful to use the term “anger” to describe certain ways of feeling, if only to be able to marshal counteracting forces when the time comes. These labels are crucial in our ability to rehearse our responses to anticipated events of fortune, such as exile and death, but they are not the things themselves. These “misinterpretations” — the misinterpretation of Stoic self-sufficiency (called out by Seneca) and the misinterpretation of the eternal return (called out by Deleuze) — discount the powerful concepts of flow, synthesis, force, intensity and expression as fundamental to living a good life and imagining how we might live a virtuous life with ourselves and others.