Zeno of Citium

Introduction

Zeno of Citium is the Greek philosopher who founded Stoicism at Athens around 300 BCE and produced the framework that would shape Greek and Roman moral thought for the next five centuries. The school takes its name from the Stoa Poikile — the Painted Colonnade on the north side of the Athenian Agora — where Zeno taught. The Stoic system Zeno developed integrates logic (the formal structure of valid reasoning), physics (the substantive doctrine of nature and divine immanence), and ethics (the doctrine of virtue, the indifference of external goods, and the alignment of the rational soul with the rational order of the cosmos) into a comprehensive philosophical framework.

The Stoic tradition that Zeno founded is one of the most institutionally successful in the history of philosophy. The Athenian Stoa continued for five centuries through Cleanthes, Chrysippus (the major systematic developer of the school), Panaetius, and Posidonius; the Roman Stoic tradition through Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius gave the philosophy its most-read formulations and has produced the contemporary Stoic revival.

Life

Zeno was born around 334 BCE in Citium on the island of Cyprus to a family engaged in the maritime trade between Phoenicia and the Greek world. The biographical record, preserved in Diogenes Laertius's Lives of the Eminent Philosophers Book VII, reports that Zeno came to Athens around 312 BCE in connection with the family's commercial activity; the famous account has him being shipwrecked off Piraeus, encountering a copy of Xenophon's Memorabilia (the account of Socrates's conversations) in an Athenian bookseller's, and being so moved by the work that he asked the bookseller where one might find someone like Socrates. The bookseller pointed to the passing Cynic philosopher Crates of Thebes; Zeno followed Crates and became his student.

Zeno's philosophical education took him through several of the dominant Athenian schools. After Crates (Cynicism), he studied with Stilpo of Megara (the Megarian school of dialectic), Diodorus Cronus (the major Megarian logician), Polemo (the head of the Academy), and Xenocrates. The eclectic training shaped the synthesis Zeno would eventually develop: the Cynic emphasis on virtue as sufficient for happiness and on the indifference of external goods, the Megarian rigor in logic and dialectical reasoning, the Academic engagement with the Platonic tradition.

Zeno began teaching at the Stoa Poikile around 300 BCE. The school he founded was distinctive in its institutional structure: unlike the Academy (founded by Plato as an institution with property) or the Lyceum (founded by Aristotle on similar lines), the Stoa was held in a public colonnade and had no formal property; the school was constituted by the teacher and his students rather than by an institutional location. The structure has been continuous with the more open and less institutionally bounded character that Stoicism would maintain throughout its history.

Zeno's reputation in Athens was substantial. The public honors he received included a gold crown and a tomb in the Kerameikos cemetery (the standard burial place for distinguished Athenians); the Athenian decree honoring him praised his teaching as exhortation to virtue and self-control. He died around 262 BCE; the ancient accounts give various stories of his death (a fall, a self-imposed fast). He was succeeded as head of the school by Cleanthes of Assos.

The problem he worked on

Zeno's project was the development of a comprehensive philosophical system that could orient individual life under the conditions of the post-Alexander Hellenistic world. The traditional Greek civic frameworks that had organized classical philosophy had been weakened by the rise of the Hellenistic monarchies and the cultural pluralism of the Hellenistic Mediterranean. Like Epicurus (his contemporary and the founder of the rival Hellenistic school), Zeno developed a philosophy oriented to individual flourishing under conditions that the traditional civic frameworks could not adequately address.

The Stoic response was substantively different from the Epicurean. Where Epicurus had identified the human good with pleasure (in its higher form of ataraxia), Zeno identified the human good with virtue — the rational alignment of the human soul with the rational order of the cosmos. Where Epicurus had developed an atomist physics that excluded purposive divine action, Zeno developed a substantively monistic physics in which the divine principle (the logos) is immanent in the material cosmos and organizes its rational order. Where Epicurus had counseled withdrawal from political life, Zeno's framework was more compatible with continued public engagement (and the Roman Stoic tradition would develop this dimension).

Contributions

The threefold division of philosophy

The Stoic framework distinguishes three parts of philosophy: logic (the formal study of valid reasoning, including dialectic and rhetoric), physics (the substantive study of nature, the cosmos, and the divine), and ethics (the study of the human good and the proper conduct of life). The three parts are presented as interdependent: logic provides the formal apparatus for the physics and ethics; physics provides the cosmological framework within which the human good can be understood; ethics is the practical application that integrates the first two.

The metaphor Zeno offered: philosophy is like a fertile field, with logic the wall protecting it, physics the soil, and ethics the fruit. The framework gave Stoicism its distinctive integration of the formal, the substantive, and the practical and distinguished it from the more narrowly ethical orientation of Cynicism or the more narrowly cosmological orientation of pre-Socratic natural philosophy.

The doctrine of indifferents

The central ethical innovation: the distinction between what is genuinely good or bad and what is indifferent (adiaphoron). Genuine good is virtue alone; genuine evil is vice alone; everything else — health, wealth, reputation, even life itself — is indifferent in the technical sense that it does not constitute the human good or evil.

The doctrine is famously paradoxical and was contested even in antiquity. The Stoics did not mean that health, wealth, and life are not preferable to their opposites; they distinguished preferred indifferents (health, wealth, life) from dispreferred indifferents (sickness, poverty, death) and granted that rational agents would naturally select the preferred ones when possible. What the doctrine rules out is the identification of these indifferents with the genuine good: a person who has virtue but lacks health, wealth, and life is in the genuine human condition (the condition of human flourishing), whereas a person who has health, wealth, and long life but lacks virtue is not.

The doctrine of oikeiōsis

Zeno's moral-psychological doctrine of oikeiōsis (appropriation; coming-to-be-at-home) describes the developmental process by which the rational agent comes to recognize the proper objects of moral concern. The young child naturally orients itself toward its own preservation (self-oikeiōsis); as the child develops, it comes to recognize its family, its community, the broader human community, and ultimately the rational cosmos as the proper objects of its concern (social oikeiōsis).

The doctrine grounds the Stoic cosmopolitanism: the proper object of human concern is not the restricted local community but the polis of the rational cosmos, which includes all rational beings as fellow citizens. The framework has been continuously influential, especially through its development by the Roman Stoics into the cosmopolitan-humanist tradition that shaped the Roman engagement with provincial peoples and the early modern engagement with international law (Grotius, Pufendorf).

Logic and the criterion of truth

Zeno's contribution to logic was the development of the criterion of truth in the form of the kataleptic impression (phantasia katalēptikē) — the cognitive impression that arises from a real object, that exactly represents the object as it is, and that could not have arisen from a non-existent object or from a different existent object. The kataleptic impression is the foundation of the Stoic epistemology and the Stoic claim to a positive criterion of truth that distinguishes them from the Skeptical tradition.

The doctrine has been continuously contested. The major Hellenistic Skeptical engagement (Arcesilaus, Carneades) attacked the kataleptic impression as ungrounded; the contemporary engagement with the doctrine continues through Michael Frede, Tony Long, and the broader Hellenistic philosophy scholarship.

Physics: the divine logos

Zeno's physics is substantively monistic and pantheistic. The cosmos consists of a single material substance organized by a rational principle (the logos) that is itself material but distinct in its nature from the passive matter it organizes. The divine logos is immanent in the cosmos, organizing its rational order; the cosmos is a single living organism whose parts (including human beings) participate in the divine rationality.

The framework gives the cosmological foundation for the ethics: the human good consists in the rational alignment of the individual soul with the divine logos immanent in the cosmos. Virtue is rational consistency; vice is the disordered movement that resists the cosmic order. The framework has been continuously generative and shaped the Christian engagement with Stoicism through the Patristic period.

Key works

Most of Zeno's corpus is lost. The reports preserved by Diogenes Laertius and other ancient sources document the major works, including:

• Republic (a work on the ideal city; Zeno's contribution is contested but fragments survive)
• On Human Nature
• On Impulse
• On the Universe
• Universal Inquiries
• On the Passions
• On Life According to Nature

The collected fragments are gathered in Hans von Arnim's Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta (4 volumes, 1903–24), the standard collection of Old Stoic fragments. The English translations include Brad Inwood and L. P. Gerson's Hellenistic Philosophy (Hackett, 1988; second edition 1997), A. A. Long and David Sedley's The Hellenistic Philosophers (Cambridge, 2 volumes, 1987), and the Loeb Classical Library volumes on Diogenes Laertius.

Influences and influenced

Influenced by: Crates of Thebes (the Cynic teacher who introduced Zeno to philosophy); Stilpo of Megara (the Megarian dialectical school); Diodorus Cronus (the major Megarian logician); Polemo and Xenocrates (the Academic tradition); Heraclitus (the Pre-Socratic influence on the doctrine of logos); Socrates (the ethical predecessor whose conception of virtue Zeno developed).

Influenced: The Stoic tradition through five centuries. Cleanthes of Assos (Zeno's immediate successor as head of the school); Chrysippus (the major systematic developer of the school, who elaborated the framework Zeno had founded); Diogenes of Babylon, Antipater of Tarsus, Panaetius of Rhodes, Posidonius of Apamea (the middle Stoa); Cicero (whose De Finibus and De Officiis gave the major Latin presentation of Stoic ethics); the Roman Stoic tradition through Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius; the Christian engagement through the Patristic period (especially Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Augustine); the Renaissance revival through Justus Lipsius; the contemporary Stoic revival through the work of A. A. Long, Lawrence Becker (A New Stoicism, 1998), William Irvine (A Guide to the Good Life, 2009), Massimo Pigliucci, Ryan Holiday, and the Modern Stoicism movement.

Reception

Zeno's reception in antiquity was substantial. The Stoa Poikile became one of the principal philosophical institutions of Athens; the school's expansion through Chrysippus made Stoicism the dominant philosophical movement of the Hellenistic period. The Roman reception transmitted the philosophy into Latin and produced the most-read formulations of the tradition.

The decline of organized Stoicism in late antiquity was followed by the transmission of Stoic themes through Christianity (especially the Stoic influence on Patristic ethics) and through the Renaissance recovery. The contemporary revival through both academic scholarship (the twentieth-century work on Hellenistic philosophy) and popular philosophy (the Modern Stoicism movement of the twenty-first century) has restored Stoicism to one of the most-engaged ancient philosophical traditions.

Continuing engagement

Major recent scholarly work includes A. A. Long and David Sedley's The Hellenistic Philosophers (1987), John Sellars's Stoicism (2006), Tad Brennan's The Stoic Life (2005), the Cambridge Companion to the Stoics (Inwood, ed., 2003), and the work of Anthony Long, Brad Inwood, Margaret Graver, Michael Frede, and Pierre Hadot (especially The Inner Citadel, 1992, on Marcus Aurelius). The Modern Stoicism organization, the Stoa Conversation podcast, and the popular work of Massimo Pigliucci, Donald Robertson, and Ryan Holiday have produced the twenty-first-century Stoic revival. Active scholarly debates concern the precise content of Zeno's Republic, the relation between Zeno's framework and the elaborations of Chrysippus, the contemporary applicability of the doctrine of indifferents, and the relation between ancient Stoicism and the contemporary practical Stoic revival.

Further reading

• Stoicism — the tradition Zeno founded
• Seneca — the major Roman expositor of Stoic ethics
• Epictetus — the major Roman Stoic of the Discourses and Enchiridion
• Marcus Aurelius — the philosopher-emperor whose Meditations are the most-read Stoic text
• Epicurus — the contemporary founder of the rival Hellenistic school
• Heraclitus — the Pre-Socratic predecessor whose doctrine of logos the Stoics developed
• Apatheia — the Stoic ideal of freedom from disturbing passions
• Logos — the divine rational principle central to Stoic physics and ethics

The Greek philosopher who founded Stoicism at Athens around 300 BCE and originated the tradition that would shape Greek and Roman moral thought for five centuries.