The next stage of development in Boulnois’s historical argument about free will focuses on the late Stoic Epictetus (d. 135 CE). An accurate account of Epictetus requires that we understand the views of the Stoic school as Epictetus received them. This affords an excellent occasion to give these views a more than passing mention. (In Généalogie de la liberté, there is an intervening chapter on future contingents in Aristotle’s On Interpretation, but according to Boulnois, it is only the way in which this latter topic was transformed by Boethius (ca. 480-524 CE) that makes it relevant to the genealogical investigation of free will. I may return to his argument about Boethius at some future date.)
Shortly after the time of Aristotle, the Stoic school emerged and became famous. The works of its founder Zeno of Citium (b. 334 BCE) and its main systematizer Chrysippus (ca. 336-206 BCE) are known only from quotations in later writers. But Stoicism came to occupy a significant place in the broader culture of the Hellenistic and Roman periods. In this way, a kind of philosophy achieved wide social influence and diffusion in the broader culture that has rarely if ever been equaled.
In contrast to Plato and Aristotle, early Stoic thought is distinguished by its strongly systematic ambitions and more “dogmatic” style of teaching. Like most Greek philosophers, the Stoics emphasize reason. They rationalize the Greek religious idea of fate in a famously strong form, propounding an unprecedented determinism of cause and effect. They make embodiment a criterion of reality. But while rejecting Platonic forms, they give an important place to incorporeal lekta (“sayables”, meanings, or propositional contents). The Stoics followed the Megarian tradition of formal logic, which differs from that of Aristotle in important ways, and begins with propositions rather than terms.
Stoicism seems to have originated the idea of a deterministic physics. At the same time, the Stoics introduce and universalize a strong notion of providence that would later be adopted by the monotheistic religions. But unlike those later traditions, the Stoics see divinity as entirely immanent in the world.
The Stoics advocate a stern morality, based not on an Aristotelian harmonious coexistence of reason and desire but on a quasi-ascetic ideal of eliminating the passions, while remaining engaged in worldly action. Nonetheless they recognize that elimination of the passions is vanishingly rare in humans.
Passion for the Stoics is a disorder of reason. In those who are ruled by passion, the whole soul is still said to have a rational character. The passions themselves are explained as resulting from rational assent to false propositions. Chrysippus is also said to compare reasoned action to walking, and passion to running, in which it is harder to stop. Meanwhile Stoicism explicitly promotes an egalitarian attitude toward humanity.
Later Stoicism, known mainly from surviving works of Cicero, Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, focuses primarily on ethics, and has been widely admired. Epictetus — a slave who was later emancipated — is regarded as later Stoicism’s most substantially philosophical representative.
“What is freedom? As a first approximation, the Stoics do not hesitate to repeat the response of the Sophists, for whom it consists in being able to do what we want. Thus Epictetus’s Discourse IV begins with this provisional definition: ‘One who lives as he wants (hos bouletai), […] one whose impulses are not obstructed, in whom desires are realized, in whom aversions do not fail’. To be free is to lead a life in conformity to one’s desires and impulses, without being prevented from accomplishing them. Freedom consists in doing what we want and enjoying it without obstacles.”
“But this definition is ironic and empty, for it remains a promise rarely kept. A bit later, Epictetus continues, ‘Who wants to live in error?’, ‘Who wants to be a dupe in life?’ — And he concludes: ‘No bad person lives as he wants; and as a consequence he is not free’. Ultimately, freedom does not consist only in the satisfaction of our desires and impulses. It only consists in doing what we want on the condition that we will what is good. Freedom of the will is empty if it is not ordered to the good” (Boulnois, Généalogie de la liberté, p. 197, my translation throughout, emphasis in original throughout).
A kind of freedom and a kind of will are important in Epictetus, but close examination will show that he does not have a concept of free will, in the way that that comes to be understood in the later tradition. Boulnois notes that the Sophist concept of doing what we want is political rather than psychological.
“Thus Epictetus transposes the Sophistic definition (associated with a form of political power) to the individual faculties. True freedom is profoundly linked to the will (‘to live as he wants’). It is interior, and consists in holding to the things that depend on us (ta eph’ hemin). But problem is to know what sort of things depend ‘uniquely on us’, and on nothing else. In effect, to live without obstacles and attain serenity, it is necessary to discipline our desires, which trouble us when what we do not desire happens. It is necessary to be able to desire nothing that is in the power of others. ‘Of the various things we love and hate, let us beware. Necessarily, those who have power over them are our masters’. We can only enjoy without hindrance if we limit our desires to the citadel of the soul, that is to say the domain that depends on us” (pp. 197-198).
As this figure of the inviolable citadel of the soul illustrates, later Stoicism develops a much sharper distinction of inner from outer in the human than we find in Plato or Aristotle. Converging with early Christian views, this comes to dominate the subsequent Western tradition. Much of the same Greek vocabulary of Aristotle’s ethics is adopted by the Stoics, but given different meaning. Not until Hegel does this “alienated” separation of inner and outer come to be substantially challenged. For this later Stoic-Christian view, only in the inner are we truly at home, and only in the inner do we find our freedom. A similar privileging of the inner is also characteristic of Avicenna.
“Thus the access to freedom rests in the first instance on exercises that put into practice the delimitation of ‘what depends on us’. The free human is such that ‘everything happens in conformity with her decision (proairesis), and whom nothing can hinder’. In effect, to be free it is necessary to know what depends exclusively on us, and to desire only what is inside these bounds. ‘Who is the unhindered human? The one who desires nothing alien to herself’. The one who is attached to her body, to possessions or to her reputation is chastised, for she obtains neither durable goods nor serenity. The sage knows her place in the universe: ‘What she can choose is without obstacles. What she cannot choose can be obstructed. When she places her good and her advantage in the only objects that cannot be obstructed and that depend on her, she is free.’ Inversely, ‘if she places her good and her advantage in exterior goods, which cannot be objects of her choice, she will be the slave of those who have in their power the things she admires or believes’. As Marcus Aurelius says, ‘If the act depends on you, why do you accomplish it? If it depends on another, from whom do you take it?’ ” (p. 198).
The reference to exercises here is significant. Whatever requires exercises to develop cannot be metaphysically intrinsic or innate.
“The problem of individual freedom is born with this reversal of freedom’s first, political, sense. Freedom becomes a positive attribute, a concept that we can attribute to ‘what depends on us’ (eph’ hemin). The mutation is capital. As Hannah Arendt says, freedom is no longer ‘experienced in the fact of acting and of associating with others, but in the will and in commerce with oneself’. The scission between metaphysical freedom and political freedom is already consummated” (ibid).
The hugeness of this cannot be overstated. What Boulnois here calls “individual” freedom seems to be a freedom that is supposed to be intrinsic or innate to the individual (“metaphysical”), and therefore unrelated to social conditions. But insofar as political freedom consists in civil liberties and civil rights, it is highly applicable to individuals, who have or do not have — or have only some of — such liberties and acknowledged rights. The real contrast is the one he mentions at the end, between political freedom, which depends on and directly refers to our real-world social conditions, and a “metaphysical” freedom that is claimed to be independent of whatever is or is not the case in our social conditions.
“What is the significance of this mutation? In contrast to the Aristotelian universe, which leaves room for contingency in the world of humans, for the Stoics nature is subordinate to fate. But in the grip of fate, is there a place for choice? For responsibility? For freedom?” (p. 199).
“The Stoic doctrine of freedom is generally interpreted in the following manner: by reason of their deterministic physics, the Stoics could not admit that freedom consists in the capacity to choose, therefore they fall back on a doctrine of the freedom of the sage, which consists in consenting to the necessary order of the world.”
[quote from Pierre Hadot:] “There is a difference between the freedom of choice, thanks to which the directing principle has the possibility of rendering itself good or bad, and real freedom, thanks to which, choosing the moral Good and universal Reason, the directing principle succeeds in that its judgments are true, its desires realized, its willings efficacious. It is only this real freedom that is properly freedom.”
“In place of an apparent free will [libre arbitre], a real moral freedom, reduced to the citadel of the soul. This interpretation is characterized by two points: 1) it leaves in the shadow the reality of this freedom of choice: does the human or does she not have the ability to choose between contraries? 2) in opposing apparent freedom to true freedom, it makes it seem as if the question of choice and that of freedom pertain to the same concept. But that is not the case. The double concept of freedom (apparent and true) does not appear until Augustine (see chapter 8), to cover by a single term what among the Stoics are two distinct concepts, and two different questions” (p. 199).
The two concepts are eleutheria (freedom) and proairesis (resolution or “choice”).
“To elucidate these two concepts, it is necessary to examine four questions: 1) Is Stoic thought about causality determinist? 2) In what sense, according to the Stoics, do actions depend on us? 3) Is there a place, for them, for a doctrine of choice? 4) What does being free signify for them?” (pp. 199-200).
The remainder of this post covers Boulnois’s discussion of the first of these. The other three will be treated later. But haven’t we already said Stoicism was determinist?
“The Stoics maintain that everything happens in conformity with fate, fate being the unified network of all the series of causes. But what is it that is a cause? The Stoics no longer call causes the ensemble of explicative factors of a being (as in Aristotle, for whom they come in pairs: agent and patient, matter and form, producer and final cause), but only those that actively produce an effect: efficient causes. According to the Stoics, causality is exercised when a body enters into contact with another body, and they make an incorporeal effect arise: ‘the scalpel is a body, which becomes for the flesh, another body, the cause of the incorporeal predicate “being cut” ‘. The body of the patient remains, but it receives a new predicate. Thus causality implies a contact, and produces a transformation” (p. 200).
Although with a bit of squinting the Stoic lekta can be understood in modern terms as propositional contents, speaking about the cause of a predicate sounds odd to us, because it mixes physics (governed by causes) with logic (which can be thought of as governed by the applicability of predicates). This serves as a reminder that we should not go too far in claims about the “modern” character of Stoic causality.
To my ear, “for whom they come in pairs” in reference to Aristotle sounds too categorical or too simple, but that is a side issue. Much more important is the good contrast he makes between Aristotelian “explicative factors” and a monomorphic notion of efficient cause. When I previously studied Stoicism, I was not yet sensitized to this Aristotelian concern, so in thinking about causality more recently, I have not had the fact that Stoic causality is “efficient” in mind. But from a historical or “genealogical” point of view, this has great significance.
A distinctive feature of the ethically bad or reductionist modern notion of cause that can be very useful in certain kinds of practice — but has an alienating effect on both the practice and the theory of general interpretation in human life — is its amenability to calculation. Even Aristotle — despite his strictures against an excessive desire for precision in ethical matters — notes that the substitutability of means to a given end in principle allows for the same kind of exactness in reasoning about the logistics of means that is characteristic of reasoning about geometrical figures (or, for modern readers, mathematical reasoning in general). This quasi-mathematical precision about the means to ends is just where the “modern” intuition of causality excels, and this is exactly what is needed for a “determinist” account of things.
“After this the Stoics affirm that every effect necessarily has a cause — a version of the principle of causality reduced to efficiency: ‘the world would be dislocated and unhinged, and would not remain eternally one, conforming to a unique order and a unique economy, if we introduced an event without a cause (anaitios)’. Consequently the cause is no longer explicative but efficient. The principle ‘nothing is without a cause’ takes on a new dimension. But above all, the Stoics also maintain the converse: every cause necessarily produces its effect, which is the principle of determinism. According to the testimony of Alexander of Aphrodisias, they declare: ‘From every event follows another that is related to it necessarily (ex anagkes) as to its cause’. Not only is there no effect without a cause, but again every cause necessarily produces its effect: ‘When all the circumstances environing the cause and that of which it is the cause are the same, it is impossible that sometimes they have no effect, sometimes the effect is different, and sometimes the same’. All things being equal otherwise, a cause always and necessarily produces the same effect” (pp. 200-201).
To say with the Stoics that every effect necessarily has a cause is both narrower and more “precise” than to say with Aristotle that every quality of things has a dialectical reason why it is the way it is. Conversely, general interpretation as I understand it is ethically better but logistically weaker than the narrow means-end reasoning at which modernity excels. Determinism depends on this narrowness to exclude ambiguous cases from consideration. The Stoic aitiaton (“effect”, literally “that which is caused”) is literally or identically the passive construction corresponding to a Stoic cause (aitia). For better or worse, the exactness of the Stoic aitia stands in contrast to the relative openness of the Aristotelian aitia.
“On the ground of this new conjunction between causality and necessity, the Stoics admit a universal determinism; each event follows necessarily from causes that precede it, and that necessarily produce the consequences that follow from it. The ensemble of causes and effects thus forms a necessary series, and the ensemble of causal series constitutes a necessary and ordered totality: nature, God, or fate” (p. 201).
The Stoic aitia is subject to a strict “logic of identity” that is foreign to Aristotle. For Aristotle there is such a thing as strict identity, but it only applies to special cases. The Stoics in effect claim that all causes and effects have strict identity.
“The necessary sequence of causes entails the necessity of all events. Everything that will happen in the future is already contained in the present state of the causes, and is determined by the ensemble of the past: ‘it is indeed necessary that what is true comes from causes; thus when it follows, it comes to be necessarily’. The number of causes being finite, their combination must be reproduced periodically, from which arises the thesis of the eternal return (which will be reprised by Nietzsche). As result, the state of the world at a given instant precontains as a necessary cause the ensemble of its future states. As Cicero says, ‘If there could exist a mortal capable of perceiving by the mind [esprit] the relation of all the causes, he would not be mistaken in any way: in effect, one who knows the causes of future events knows necessarily all that will happen’. Only one world is possible. It is indeed necessary. Every omniscient observer knows it” (pp. 201-202).
Perceiving the relation of all the causes would be a kind of omniscience. That which can only be known by an omniscient observer (not us) cannot play a role in real-world ethical practice. Aristotle’s definition of the necessary is the logically weaker and more humane criterion “that which follows always or most of the time“. Stoic necessity is the overly strong “that which follows always”, full stop.
“In this necessary totality, how can human action find a place? The Stoics distinguish between a condition sin qua non and the production of the act. Thus they oppose two sorts of causes: preliminary (procatartic) causes, and the all-encompassing or containing (synectic) cause, the action of the breath [pneuma] that orders and conserves the universe. These distinctions have the purpose of preserving the efficacy of assent: the latter has preliminary causes, but they depend on each agent. Even if necessity governs nature and our representations, it is in our power to give to them or to refuse to them our aquiescence. Fate is not an absolute cause but a preliminary cause, without which it would suppress ‘what depends on us’ (eph’ hemin) and that which is ‘willing’ (hekousion). Chrysippus thus identifies the workings of fate with proximate and preliminary causes: ‘If everything comes to be by fate, it follows that everything comes to be by anterior causes, but not that these causes are principal and perfect; it suffices if they are auxiliary and proximate. If these are not in our power, it does not follow that the impulsion is not in our power’. The auxiliary and proximate cause represents the exterior conditions of fate, the order of the world, but the perfect and principal cause is the assent of the human. It is indeed the human who acts, and who acts according to her consent. Certainly the state of our desires and of our beliefs is determined by the system of the world, but it depends on us to consent and to act. The representations caused by the world do not depend on us, but it is we who consent, and not the impulsion that triggers our action” (p. 202).
The introduction of “preliminary” or procatartic causes here is unexpected. This is a major qualification on what up to now was being said unconditionally. Just now, we were saying that for the Stoics all causes produce their effect necessarily; now it seems that only the synectic or “all-encompassing” causes do so. Is it still appropriate to call this determinism? Perhaps this is why he raised the first question above, about determinism.
Fate was the very thing that led to the discussion of determinism in the first place. Strict determinism and the attempt to represent causality in the world by an air-tight, systematic logic of identity in which all terms are univocal (if indeed that is what we still have here) create artificial problems that later authors will try to solve by positing a radical metaphysical free will. What we might call Aristotle’s “logic of difference” does not encounter these problems, because it does not try to apply overly strong criteria in the first place.
“For it is the very nature of the mind [esprit] that is the principal and perfect cause of assent, and the exterior world only constitutes an antecedent and auxiliary cause: ‘Every rational animal does nothing without the representation of a thing that has been incited from the outset, then only if an impulsion begins (impetum cepit), then only if assent confirms this impulsion’. At the outset the exterior cause is a condition sin qua non, but the moving impulsion and the principle of impulse come from the soul of the agent, who then produces aquiescence by way of confirmation (or infirmation), when the desire has already begun, and thus triggers movement (or not)” (p. 203).
What is this “mind” that is exclusively inner? Does assent even have a principal and perfect cause? A condition sin qua non is a necessary condition, but determinism requires conditions that are both necessary and sufficient.
“Since the doctrine of causality is identically a doctrine of responsibility, every human must be answerable for her action; this is not reduced to the conjuncture of the world and her representations, but comes from herself, by her assent. Nonetheless responsibility does not signify that the agent is the sole origin of movement. It no longer signifies that the action has no exterior causes. For agents are responsible for the actions that depend on them, which is to say that the actions that pass through them and that we can attribute to them, whatever the causal explication of their arising may be” (ibid).
We are responsible for the actions that pass through us. It is unclear to me at this point why responsibility would “no longer” signify that the action has no exterior causes. This seems to imply that it did signify that at some earlier point. I don’t think that is what Boulnois really means.
The Postmodern Peripatetic 