The world as conceived by Stoicism doesn’t have empty spaces. It is full of “substance,” and everything that exists owes its existence to the continuous transformation and alteration of this substance. “This substance neither grows nor diminishes through addition or subtraction, but simply alters,” as Stobaeus tells us (The Hellenistic philosophers Vol. 1, 167-8). This alteration throws off seemingly stable identities, which include human individuals, animals, rivers, lakes, mountains, et cetera. In the Stoic ontology, these alterations are divided into “commonly qualified things” (e.g., an egg, a person, a sea) and “peculiarly qualified things” (e.g., this particular scrambled egg I am eating, Socrates, the Mediterranean).

Anyone who holds this worldview needs to be comfortable with paradoxical concepts and statements without trying to resolve them. This is especially important if the language we use tilts toward a desire for stable definitions and coherent Truths. You’ll be comfortable finding difference in sameness. You’ll be comfortable with transformations as fundamental to identities. Stobaeus continues:

The peculiarly qualified thing [e.g., Socrates or the Mediterranean] is not the same as its constituent substance. Nor on the other hand is it different from it, but is merely not the same, in that the substance both is a part of it and occupies the same place as it, whereas whatever is called different from something must be separated from it and not be thought as even part of it. (168)

This is an articulation of sameness and difference worthy of the most sophisticated post-structuralist. The flow of this alteration is not one way. Substance does not always create inert things. While things arise from substance, humans have the ability to push back and exert their own force of effort through their souls (animus in Latin, nous in Greek), which has a physicality that accounts in part for its effectivity. We can’t stop a flood or an earthquake that are in progress, but Socrates and Cato can control their emotions, which are physical. We are not simply passive creations of the laws of Physics. We can learn from Socrates’ and Cato’s example to control our emotions.

Stoics were very comfortable asserting that the world is held together by the paradoxical force of “breath” (pneuma) which moves simultaneously inward and outward. As it expands outward it is also contracting inward. How else would one explain the coherence of the world? It doesn’t dissolve outward into the void, nor does it collapse in on itself. Something must be working in both directions simultaneously for it to hold together, at least temporarily (for nothing lasts forever, not even the world). But this breath is not in and of itself a unified thing. It is composed of heat and cold simultaneously. Yet another paradox.

Running counter to the Stoic’s comfort with unresolvable paradoxes are ways of thinking that want to resolve the paradoxes. Let’s take Alexander, who can’t accept a universe where individual entities are not fully self contained by internally coherent essences. In his On mixture, he argues directly against the Stoics on this point:

It is more reasonable, therefore, to say that each of them [entities] is sustained and unified with itself by its own form, by virtue of each thing’s essence, and that their mutual interaction is preserved both by their participation in matter and by the nature of the divine body which surrounds them, rather than by the bond of breath. (On mixture quoted in The Hellenistic philosophers Vol. 1, 283 emphasis added)

Alexander understands the Stoic embrace of paradoxes, but his assumptions about Truth and what is “reasonable” won’t let him accept them. His bias is for stabilities underwritten by essences, which is revealed in this passage. If one believes that essences define what something is, then paradoxes are logical contradictions that must be resolved. If you don’t try to resolve paradoxes, then you are not working hard enough. Your thinking is flawed. Accordingly, essences must precede our attempts to describe real things, and our language should not be satisfied with paradoxes. Thus the Stoic embrace of paradoxes is not “reasonable” because it doesn’t automatically seek these clear stabilities. This is the shape of Truth that we have inherited, and it is what Alexander defended by accusing the Stoic worldview of not being reasonable.

If we look for inherently stable and internally coherent identities in Stoic thought, we will miss the importance of transformations and flows as fundamental to its concept of reality. Stability can only be emergent and doesn’t last forever. Even the sage will pass away. We find plenty of places where things are mixed in such a way that their identities slide into each other yet each remains itself to some degree. This is especially important when understanding the Stoic concept of the individual human being. “Reason and passion are not separate things,” Seneca frequently reminds us. The animus is reducible to neither body nor mind as our conventional dualism would have it. It is definitely a physical body interwoven into the world according to the Stoic ontology because it is “breath”: “That the world is ensouled is evident, they [the Stoics] say, from our own soul’s being an offshoot of it” (Diogenes Laertius in The Hellenistic philosophers Vol. 1, 319). There is clearly no stable boundary between the animus and the world. Galen, reporting on the Stoic view, makes this crystal clear: “Everyone who supposes that the soul is breath says that it is preserved by exhalation both of the blood and of the <air> dawn into the body by inhalation through the windpipe” (315). We are ourselves only because we are ongoing mixtures.

The animus is thus woven into the fullness and is susceptible to the same forces of nature as described in Stoic Physics. Nonetheless it retains a semi-autonomous entity not wholly determined by those forces. It can, in other words, exert its own effort within the world of substance, which is why it is often translated into English as “the commanding-faculty.” This effort of the animus accounts for Stoic moral development and is made possible by its being interwoven with the fundamental forces of the world, not in spite of it.

Given the importance of fullness, unstable identities, and transformations of substance, Stoicism will be one of the first philosophies to theorize and make extensive use of frontiers — a way to think about boundaries and connections between things that exist when there is no empty space conceivable between them. The frontiers are where the action is for Stoicism. It is disingenuous to impose Alexander’s bias for essences and to therefore ignore or downplay what is happening in the frontiers. To impose Alexander’s essential viewpoint is to miss a lot of what Stoicism has to tell us about moral responsibility in a hard determinist’s world.

Essential worldviews like Alexander’s tend to see compartments with hard boundaries where Stoics find flows, mixtures, continuums, and transformations that come before identities and their boundaries. Mixture, in other words, precedes identity, which is the result of mixing. To be sure, Stoicism does envision a “void,” but it is a pure nothingness outside of the world into which the world’s transformations (as substance) can expand and from which it can contract. Galen reports this fundamental Stoic belief: “They think there is no such thing [as empty space] in the world, but that the whole substance is unified with itself” (The Hellenistic philosophers Vol. 1, 295, emphasis added). To be clear, there is a “surrounding void” that is pure nothingness; inside the void there is “the world” that is fire, air, water and earth mixing together without any empty spaces; and inside the world there is the earth that sits in the middle as the center of gravity.

These substances that make up the elements of the world can expand into the void (and contract from it), but this expansion makes no room for empty spaces to open up inside substance. Instead, Stoicism had the concept of “tenor” that accounted for a force that simultaneously stretches out as it pulls back so that the substances of the world are held together and “sustained”:

They [the Peripatetics] also say that if void existed outside the world, substance would have flowed through it and been infinitely scattered and dissipated. But we [endorsing the Stoic doctrine] shall say that substance cannot experience this. For it has tenor which sustains and protects it. On the one hand, the surrounding void causes nothing; and on the other hand, substance, making use of its superior power, protects itself altogether, contracting and again flowing out in the void by its natural changes, sometimes flowing out into fire, and at other times setting forth on cosmogony. (Cleomedes quoted in The Hellenistic philosophers Vol. 1, 295)

To be something that exists — generically for Stoics this is a “body” — you can’t have any empty spaces. You have tenor that holds together the temporary amalgamation of substances that make up bodies as “peculiarly qualified things” (e.g., Socrates, the Mediterranean, the Forum).

——--

In this meditation, I want to dwell on a single passage from the second book of Seneca’s On Anger. I’ve thought a lot about this passage because it is a nice encapsulation of Stoic moral psychology, but it also yields an opportunity to meditate on how frontiers work in Stoic thought, especially that of Seneca. Placed in the context of the Stoic worldview — there are no empty spaces inside the world — I can read this passage as a corrective to modern theories of moral responsibility that seek to ground it in some sort of “compatibilist” emptiness between human consciousness and the laws of Physics and neuroscience. We will also see that there once existed a way of thinking that saw no need to reconcile the paradoxical implications of a fully determined universe with the ability for humans to morally improve through personal and collective effort. In fact, for Stoicism, the one (hard determinism) made it possible to conceive of the other (moral responsibility and freedom). In other words, Stoicism saw a paradox, but not a contradiction to be logically reconciled. When we look closely at how these early philosophers thought through these issues, we find some very helpful and relevant concepts for thinking about our own place in a world where Physics and neuroscience increasingly squeeze our ability to envision freedom of will and the ability to make choices. There was a time where the very same issues were in play, and the depth of thinking then is relevant today.

Here’s the passage from Seneca’s On Anger:

Now, to make plain how passions begin or grow or get carried away: there’s the initial involuntary movement — a preparation for the passion, as it were, and a kind of threatening signal; there’s a second movement accompanied by an expression of will not stubbornly resolved, to the effect that “I should be avenged, since I have been harmed” or “this man should be punished, since he’s committed a crime.” The third movement’s already out of control, it desires vengeance not if it’s appropriate but come what may, having overthrown reason. (2.4.1-2)

A simple question: in which direction is time flowing? The numbering of the movements asks us to imagine each movement as occurring in a sequence. Time is Newtonian in this model — it simply is an absent presence that allows Seneca to present a psychological process unfolding in linear steps. The first movement leads to the second which leads to the third. Human consciousness moves along in an eternal present that slides from one compartment to the next. Simple and obvious.

In this numericalized sequence, we are tempted to see hard divisions between the movements. At some point the first movement ends and the second one begins and just so from second to third. Each movement would better be understood as a “moment” and would have a distinct compartmentalization. We’d be tempted to ask what the essence of each moment is. But that’s not what Seneca is describing, and the translation seems to be pushing against these simple and obvious common sense interpretations. First of all, there is a difference between describing something as a “movement” versus a “moment.” Second, Seneca’s passage starts by stringing together words that push against compartmentalization: “Now, to make plain how passions begin or grow or get carried away.” The language here encourages us to flow with it, not to compartmentalize moments.

This compartmentalization begins to dissolve when we take a closer look at key words used to describe each movement. Within the first movement we find that it is a “preparation for the passion” — a preparation for the third movement — and it is a “threatening signal” that it sends to the other movements. The first movement, in other words, is full of metaphors of sending things forward to be received by the others. The boundaries are already porous and we haven’t even left the definition of the first movement.

The third movement is “already out of control.” What is the word “already” doing here? Was the third movement already the passion itself before it started? But the first movement was merely a “preparation” for it and not the passion itself. And what about the second movement? Did we just skip over that? Holding our attention on the first movement as a “preparation for the passion,” we see that indeed something was “already” happening that prefigured the third movement, though the third was clearly not necessitated by the first. We don’t have a causal chain where the final movement is completely determined by the “initial involuntary movement.” There is both mixture and autonomy in each movement. The “preparation” does not have to become the “passion,” but the third movement is prefigured and signaled in the first.

The crux of the sequence is the second movement. This is where the traditional reading of Stoicism has found its moment of moral responsibility. The preparation is blocked so that it doesn’t become the passion. At the heart of this second movement is the ability to verbalize the knee-jerk feelings represented by “preparations” and “threatening signals.” By verbalizing feelings, we expose them as propositions that we need to endorse or not. Once we validate or invalidate them, then the action follows.

In traditional Stoicism, this verbalizing movement is referred to as lekta, and it is the primary ethical technique of the Stoic. It formulates the proposition that will be endorsed or not. If one endorses, then the action follows. This latter movement is encompassed by the term horme and is generally translated as “impulse” in English. For Stoicism, it is important to remember that the second movement always happens. The initial involuntary movements can only become passions by being endorsed, but this endorsement can be either implicit or explicit. Moral development happens for a Stoic when you improve your ability to make that moment explicit. If you rarely or never activate that moment, you will develop a character that is corrupt and incapable of the kind of self-reflection that leads to self-control.

The difference between explicit and implicit is critical here. Slowing down the movement from knee-jerk reaction (movement one) to out of control passion (movement three) is what happens in movement two as lekta/verbalization. It is to make the implicit judgement about the validity of movement one into explicit words that one can evaluate and decide whether or not to endorse. This step can be skipped, but that doesn’t make it nonexistent or empty. It still happens, it’s just implicit. It remains the unspoken, unverbalized sense of movement one, but it is still an implicit endorsement:

Anger is a kind of pursuit, and no pursuit ever occurs without the mind’s assent, nor can one act to gain vengeance with the mind all unaware… Accordingly, that first mental jolt produced by the impression of an injury is no more “anger” than the impression itself. The intentional movement that follows, which has not only taken in the impression but affirmed it — that’s anger, the arousal of a mind that moves willingly and deliberately toward the goal of vengeance. (On Anger 2.3.4-5)

The second movement is always there, it’s just more or less effective based on how much effort one exerts to control the threatening signal. When we combine this passage with Seneca’s insistence that reason and passion “don’t have separate and distinct dwelling places but are the mind’s transformations to a better or worse condition” (1.8.3), we have completely lost the boundaries between the compartments and are pushed to rethink how this process is experienced.

This process is therefore best understood as an issue of speed rather than an issue of whether or not the second movement exists or is compartmentalized. The faster it moves, the more implicit — and less self-aware — the second movement is and vice versa. The ethical trick is to slow down the process by making explicit the implied beliefs of the first movement. Movement two, in other words, is always there, it just goes very fast and never rises to the level of awareness unless we do something to slow it down.

For slowing down to occur, some level of effort is required. You’re battling against your own implicit stubbornness and pushing back against the preparation before it becomes an automatic resolution. We do ourselves a disservice if we see the will here as an entity operating in the vacuum of the second movement. This movement is not empty; it is not an Existential filling in of an original “nothingness.” Quite the opposite of empty, the second movement is always full of feelings, signals and judgments about what is going on around you. This fullness can be more or less explicit and you can be more or less aware of what is going on. Your work is to make the implicit increasingly explicit so that it can be evaluated. For Seneca, this is moral development.

——

I can now return to my initial question about these movements: in which direction is time flowing? If we delve into how time happens in movement two, we find time is not linear, nor does it move at the steady pace of a clock. It is moving simultaneously backward and forward, and faster and slower. It is yet another Stoic paradox that need not be resolved. The grammatical structure of the propositions indicates a simultaneous looking backward while looking forward. “I have been harmed” looks backward within the same movement in which “I should be avenged” looks forward. In order for this to happen, the second movement reaches back to the first to interpret what remains only a feeling or a sense — the “preparation for the passion” and the “threatening signal.”

This reaching back is important and is the crux of moral responsibility in movement two. It is the ethical technique of making the implicit increasingly explicit. Let’s unpack this. If the first movement merely passes along the sensation (preparation, signal) to movement two, and movement two doesn’t do any work, then movement two quickly and automatically becomes the third movement — “already out of control.” Movement two must do something with the signals and preparations of movement one. It must have some form of agency that allows it to slow down, verbalize and evaluate the inchoate information that movement one sends to it. This “work” that I’m arguing for is translated as “expression of will” in this passage, but it is likely better discussed as “effort,” which I’d like to use in order to jettison the modern baggage that comes with the term “will.” The latter term tends to bring with it a notion of subjectivity that is originally and inherently free. Its will arises from an existential emptiness that the subject must fill up with Being. My use of “effort,” to the contrary, emphasizes a fullness of experience for effort to even have a chance of being effective. Effort summons language out of feelings (“the involuntary initial movements” Seneca describes), not out of an emptiness or a fundamental lack at the heart of existence. There is no emptiness within the Stoic world. As such, effort does work and exercises agency that is made possible by the fullness of the signals, sensations and feelings of the first movement as they are made to slow down and linger in the second movement.

Here it may be helpful to marshal a line of thinking from Henri Bergson. If the second movement actively works on the involuntary feelings of the first movement then the feelings of the first cannot just disappear into an inert past as the first movement becomes the second. When I say, “I have been harmed,” I am doing something to the feeling while it lingers in the second movement. It has to be there for it to be interpreted and verbalized. That feeling just doesn’t disappear to be fully replaced by the verbalization. It remains present enough so that it can be verbalized. That verbalization is thus already at its inception an act of the present moment that is simultaneously and inseparably a recollection of the past. The present of human consciousness cannot but be the activation of the the past to understand the present and make a decision about the future. The present is informed by the past and reaches back to the signal to bring out its meaning — “I have been harmed.” But it is simultaneously projecting forward a possible future out of that assessment of the past — “therefore I should be avenged.” Is time moving forward or backward?

The awareness activated in the second movement thus gathers the past and future into the explicit work of verbalization: “I have been harmed” activates the past in the present; “therefore I should be avenged” looks forward as the proposed action to be endorsed. If this movement remains implicit, time rushes forward quickly and inexorably:

Certain things are within our control at first, whereas the subsequent stages carry us along with a force all their own and leave us no way back. People who have jumped off a cliff retain no independent judgment and cannot offer resistance or slow the descent of their bodies in free fall: that irrevocable leap strips away all deliberation and regret, and they cannot help arrive at an outcome they would have been free to reject at the outset. (On Anger 1.7.4)

But if we can exert “control at first,” then time takes on a different characteristic. It slows down, deliberates, evaluates, and judges before it takes a definitive action.

——

To be clear, this is not merely a psychological experience of time. Seneca and the Stoics are not phenomenologists or humanists such that the world is wholly separate from human consciousness that tries to make sense of it. There is no compartmentalized dualism of mind vs body or human vs the world. This formulation would require us to assert another emptiness in addition to the one represented by will activating itself in an empty movement number two. It is an emptiness between the outside (the world) and the inside (the self). That emptiness simply does not exist in Stoicism, and in Seneca in particular. (One could argue that it doesn’t exist in any phenomenological worldview, but the Stoics were the first to rigorously embrace it and try to incorporate it into their philosophy.) The animus, which is typically translated as “mind” or “commanding faculty” in English, is a material substance that aligns the Stoic body/mind with the realm of Physics. But this body/mind that is the animus is not reducible to the laws of Physics.

To better understand this, we need to dwell a bit on how early Stoicism theorized two different types of cause and effect. Cicero tells us that Chrysippus distinguished between “primary and complete causes” and “auxiliary and proximate causes” (On Fate 39-43). While the first enforces a hard determinism, the second provides some room for effort (and therefore moral improvement and responsibility). We can’t help receiving “impressions” as human beings in the world. We are affected by the events of the world as we live through them. This is the first realm of cause and effect — complete and primary. To be struck by another person cannot be unfelt. To have your family enslaved by a conquering army will create a great deal of pain. For Stoicism, these feelings are part of the realm of Physics. You can’t help feeling them because you are a human being.

But the attitude we have toward them, and the actions we take in response, are not of the same hard determinist logic of complete and primary causes. Rather, they are proximate and auxiliary causes. Deleuze, in The Logic of Sense, called them “quasi-causes.” So while we can’t avoid the initial involuntary feelings, we can adjust our disposition and responses to them. There is something like moral effort in Stoicism that is made possible when “complete and primary causes” create impressions that must be responded to. But the response is not a purely and completely determined effect as if the movement from “complete and primary causes” to “auxiliary and proximate causes” is a one-way street. The ability to respond has the power of pushing back on Physics.

Seneca makes this clear in the text that immediately follows the passage we started with:

We cannot avoid that first mental jolt with reason’s help, just as we cannot avoid the other movements that (as I’ve mentioned) befall our bodies, just as we cannot avoid having another’s yawn provoke our own, or avoid closing our eyes at the sudden poke of another’s fingers. Reason cannot overcome those movements, though perhaps their force can be lessened if we become used to them and constantly keep watch for them. That second movement, which is born from deliberation, is eradicated by deliberation. (2.4.2)

To make this clear, “that first mental jolt” can be moral — the impression or sense of being harmed — or it can be a purely physical reflex action — closing your eyes as someone attempts to poke them. Both of these fall into the realm of Chrysippus’s complete causes. But it is up to our “reason” to absorb the physical cause and slow down our further reactions so that we don’t do something we’ll regret. We don’t have to go from having someone try to poke at our eyes to automatically throwing a punch. Closing your eyes is involuntary and completely caused; the second part operates in Chrysippus’s realm of proximate causes where you are in more or less control of your response. Far from being an empty chasm between the laws of physics and the human animus, there is a very full “frontier” (to use Deleuze’s term) where forces are flowing in both directions.

To summarize, “Reason cannot overcome these movements,” but through time, effort and practice, reason can learn to stop the automatic flow across the frontier — reason can “become used to them” and more easily activate the therapeutic techniques that Seneca details in Book 3. Clearly this is not reason as truth-telling. This is reason as a disposition and an attitude that operates in this back and forth flow in the frontier. Calming oneself, reflecting on one’s history and marshaling other ways to push back on the automatic response happen before deliberation because they prepare the frontier for deliberation.

Time plays a crucial role in this frontier. Reason is not a fully formed entity but must be trained through practice and training, which takes time. It must learn to recognize the first stirrings of anger and head them off. If you don’t, you end up habituated to anger, which disables this ability to exercise effort in the frontier. In the passage that immediately follows the one I’ve been interpreting, we get the negative examples of Apollodorus and Phalaris, who have been “brought by full and frequent exercise to lose all thought of clemency and every human bond, until at last it’s transformed into cruelty” (2.5.3).

The point is that your responses build up over time and create your character. This character takes on the quality of a complete and primary cause, which thus increasingly limits your ability to apply conscious effort in the realm of auxiliary and proximate causes — full and frequent activation of anger becomes cruelty. Moral development is therefore about preserving that autonomy of Chrysippus’s proximate causal logic, which is also Seneca’s second movement in the process of becoming angry.

A critical point to make here about the flow of time is that even though your impressions are part of the realm of complete and primary causes, they become the bearers of your own history (which is also and necessarily a collective history) and therefore change over time. In other words, an initial involuntary impression is not created anew every time it happens via the laws of Physics. You do not have to relearn what “harm” or “injury” is every time they happen, just as you don’t have to relearn what white or blue are every time you see them, or relearn a dog’s bark each time you hear one. Quite the opposite, their recurrence is both the same and different every time because you bring the entire history of your experience to bear on the new-but-similar feeling each time it happens.

In fact, to verbalize any given feeling as “harm” must follow the rules and structure of language. Words carry the weight of history with them. “Harm” only gets its meaning from being reused in different situations to gather the differences into similarities. Each reuse is by definition different, but by trying to describe feelings as similar, the word “harm” gains meaning. So, while the feeling of being harmed is mine, my ability to call it “harm” is social and historical. But that social meaning is in turn made personal and developmental by my past responses to similar circumstances. The more I refect on my behavior, the more I am able to control it in the future.

Thus the quality of our initial involuntary movements change over time because we recognize them and ideally verbalize and reflect on them. In reflection, we decide whether or not we want to correct ourselves if and when we feel them again. This is the substance of Seneca’s famous “stock taking” that he claimed to do every evening, which he learned from his mentor Sextius (On Anger 3.36). This retrospective effort is key to Seneca’s ethics. By making this self-reflection a regular habit, our characters are formed such that they turn quasi-effects into virtuous behavior as an embedded property of one’s character:

A man’s moral character is the primary cause of his performing good and bad acts. Each act additionally requires a triggering cause, normally in the form of a sense impression, since all acts are somehow responses to external circumstances. But because the major share of responsibility belongs to the primary cause, the triggering cause cannot be said to necessitate the assent which initiates the action. (Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic philosophers Vol. 1, 393)

Reason is the activated ability to push back from the second series to the first. But you can only push back so far. The animus cannot change the flow of a river or calm down an earthquake. But it can prevent anger and other passions from welling up inside oneself. Thus effort is something that one exerts on oneself to cut off knee-jerk feelings from becoming regrettable actions. There is a frontier within oneself where this effort of the animus can be successful working on itself and control the “transformations” of itself into “better or worse conditions.”

——-

Frontiers unfold between and among people, and not just between my animus and the world. While this effort cannot stop an earthquake, it can affect others positively and negatively. It is contagious. My internal transformations can be passed on to others. Reason and passion as internal transformations can become social. The frontier, in other words, can unfold between people. Stoic ethics would only be a personal ethics without the possibility of this frontier between people.

Suppose someone becomes angry with you. You, by contrast, should challenge him to match you in kindness. Conflict subsides immediately when one party leaves it behind: there can be no fight without a pair of fighters.

The time and space between ourselves and others is full. We don’t necessarily fill it up with words but with demeanor. We fill it up by being “calm and even tempered in the face of error” (2.10.7). When “conflict subsides,” it doesn’t do so by emptying out the space and time between us. We change the intensity flowing between us. We match them in kindness and, hopefully, transform their demeanor to match ours.