Epictetus: What Depends on Us

Continuing with Boulnois’s history of free will, the next exploration concerns the way that Epictetus uses the originally Aristotelian phrase “what depends on us”. Here again Boulnois weaves in much discussion of the broader Stoic school.

“The Stoics were forced, we say, to reconcile determinism with the ‘freedom of assent’. But in the Stoic school, these two concepts are not brought together until Epictetus. It is the interpreters who attribute freedom to impulse, to assent, and to ‘what depends on us’. Is this attribution legitimate?” (Généalogie de la liberté, p. 203, my translation throughout, emphasis in original throughout).

“Cicero believes he sees a break in the determinism of Chrysippus, when the latter affirms that certain things depend on us: our actions. But according to Chrysippus, even what depends on us is subject to necessity: ‘even if many things come from us, these too are no less fated, for they are encompassed in the government of the universe’. Many events can occur only through us, but it is included in the order of the world that we necessarily do what depends on us to accomplish them. An action depends on us if we are its cause. Every act derived from us is imputable to us, even if it comes from an anterior cause, and only passes through us. We act in conformity to our nature, but our nature is part of nature” (pp. 203-204).

Stoic determinism is holistic. Humans do not stand outside of nature or fate; we are part of it. Thus Stoic fate is not something external to us. Every agent contributes to the total working out of the order of cause and effect. Our logos is part of the immanent divine logos that governs the world. Our contribution, which depends on us, is real and not an illusion.

“Even if everything is ruled by fate, certain things depend on us: our actions and certain mental acts. To say that the world is not the exhaustive cause of our assent and of our action, is to recall that we have a directing faculty that is their mistress. We cannot represent fate as something that occurs independent of us: if it is in conformity to fate that a boxer will win his match, this does not mean that he can fight ‘with arms dangling at his sides, under the pretext that according to fate he was bound to get out of it unscathed’; this means that he must fight, and that he will triumph through his strength and skill. Among the events of the world, many can only come to pass if we contribute to them. We cannot bend fate, but we can accomplish it” (p. 204).

We are not like leaves that are simply blown about by the wind, even if those who are dominated by their passions come close to this. The more we engage in critical thought and question ourselves, the more we achieve the freedom of Stoic assent.

“If the agent gives her assent, this produces an impulse (horme), which issues in action. The exterior thing is indeed the active cause of action, but it is the faculty of assent that completes it and that determines whether the agent accedes to the representation. By reason of their proper contribution of assent, individuals having different characters will react differently to the same representations. As a consequence, even if initial causality comes from the represented exterior object, still it is the agent who is the origin of her own action: she is the cause, the one responsible. Thus the fact that certain actions depend on us is compatible with the determinism of fate” (pp. 204-205).

Impulse for the Stoics has a rational character that follows from assent, although we who are not the ideal Stoic sage may assent to bad reasons. Through impulse, assent becomes an efficient cause. We are not just effects of nature, but contributing partial causes.

“For the Stoics, the human being, like all living beings, tends toward what is appropriate to her nature, but she heads toward that end by her assent. ‘What depends on us’ is not the order of the world, but our impulse (horme). Nonetheless, it is necessary to articulate this impulse with the order of the world. How is causal determinism compatible with moral responsibility?” (p. 205).

Within the Stoic system, this tendency of beings toward what is appropriate to their natures takes over some of the role of the banished Aristotelian final cause. Officially, Stoicism recognizes only one kind of cause, which is closer than anything in Aristotle to what later came to be called “efficient”. But Stoic nature is not only a seamless network of efficient causes; it also has a normative dimension. We are not only said to be subject to nature; we are also admonished to live in accordance with nature. If nature were purely and simply a matter of fact, of what is the case, this would make no sense. And for the Stoics, there is also providence exercised by the immanent logos.

“P. Hadot holds that for the Stoics, interior discourse ‘remains entirely free’. But what does ‘free’ mean here? Consent is not ‘free’ in the sense that the directing part of the soul can grant or refuse it, accept a thing or its contrary. It is free in the sense that it reacts to the representation in conformity with its nature, and spontaneously (but in the only possible way). If we want at any price to speak of freedom, it is a monovalent freedom. It is a capacity to act, but it is not the capacity to act and not to act (as in Aristotle). It is necessary also to distinguish: 1) the ambivalence of action (Aristotle): if ‘x can do y’, then ‘x can refrain from doing y’; and 2) the monovalence of action (the Stoics): ‘x can do y’, but this does not imply that ‘x can refrain from doing y’ ” (ibid).

Hadot is known for his accounts of ancient philosophy as not just theoretical discourse, but a way of life. What Boulnois is gently pointing out here is another example of the very widespread tendency to read medieval or modern notions of freedom into the ancient philosophers.

“In this theoretical framework, the agent is indeed the cause of action; but she is not the ultimate cause, because causality passes through her and she does not have the capacity to act otherwise. But then, what is willingness [pleine gré]? — Quite simply, spontaneity, the fact of not being constrained [contrainte] to act by an exterior cause. Action depends on me if I consent to it, because then I take responsibility for the causality, and I incur the blame or praise that it merits” (ibid).

This account of “willingness” as the criterion of moral responsibility is close to that of Aristotle. The very existence of these accounts ought to be recognized as thoroughly refuting arguments that moral responsibility can only be grounded by the postulation of an unobservable metaphysical free will. But they are also better accounts. Willingness and unwillingness are ethical criteria that serve to differentiate our judgment of situations. Metaphysical free will can play no such differentiating role, because it is supposed to be uniformly applicable. That in turn is to say that it can make no practical difference.

“The Stoics are characterized by their unitary conception of the psyche. They do not make a partial instance in us responsible for action (as in Aristotle, the logos, lust, or aggression), but identify its principle with the whole nature of the agent, with her ‘soul’, which includes her character, impulses, and beliefs. An action is accompanied by willingness [pleine gré] if it results from an assent given by the soul to a desirable representation. Acquiescence guarantees that the agent is the triggering cause of the action; it makes her responsible. But this assent is determined; it is in conformity with her individual nature and tendencies” (p. 206).

The Stoic insistence on a strongly unitary and holistic view of the soul stands in contrast to Plato and Aristotle. Plato’s Republic classically compares the unity of the soul to that of a city.

“For the Stoics, as for Aristotle, we can only attribute moral value to an action if it ‘depends on us’. Chrysippus seems to have used the same expression as Aristotle: our action is ‘dependent on us’ (eph’ hemin). But much later a substantialized form appears: ‘the “what depends on us” ‘ (to eph’ hemin); it has become a subsistent faculty: assent. From action that depends on us, we have passed to a principle in us by which action occurs: assent, the principle of action and the key to ethics. For the agent applies her own impulse to her action; the antecedent causes are only conditions sin qua non. But she exercises a causality, and she must assume responsibility for it, the blame or the praise. It is on this that our access to happiness and the freedom of the sage depends” (ibid).

There is value in the Stoic analysis of assent and non-assent to motivating appearances. “What depends on us” has great value as a distinguishing ethical criterion. But not only is the substantialization of what depends on us a reification, it completely changes its character. The late Stoics seem to hold that only something purely inner can depend only on us. The concern to identify something that depends exclusively on us is new; we saw clearly that in general, actions that depend on us do not depend exclusively on us. The claim here seems to be that our assent is the only thing that depends exclusively on us. This kind of assent does seem to be something purely “inner”. But assent is still something that happens. It is not itself a doer. But the later substantialized form is clearly also supposed to be a doer, and indeed the primary doer in us. Coupled with a strongly unitary view of the soul, that makes it into the primary us, or sense of “us”. This is a huge shift.

“As Alexander of Aphrodisias remarks, the Stoics safeguard ‘the “what depends on us” (to eph’ hemin)’ (a substantialized expression, which P. Tillet translates as ‘freedom’), while at the same time suppressing ‘the power of choice’ (exousia tes haireseos), which is to say the ‘capacity to perform contrary actions’. Thus for them, there is no choice between contraries, and responsibility is monovalent. In effect, ‘they affirm that what happens through us (di hemon) depends on us’. Thus everything that happens is in conformity with fate, but we are the causes (responsible) for what results from our impulse and our assent, and is produced in conformity with our nature, that is to say for what occurs through us. Although necessary, the effect produced by us is indeed ours. This action remains imputable to us, because it does not come from an extreme constraint, but is indeed produced by us, even if it results from an internal necessity. Human action is integrated into physical causality: just as the stone falls according to its nature and in conformity with fate, in the same way the human is moved according to her impulse and under the action of fate; her action is at the same time necessary and dependent on her” (pp. 206-207).

Alexander’s claim that the Stoics “suppress” the power of choice is a bit disingenuous. In a later chapter, Boulnois will point out Alexander’s major role in reshaping Aristotelian proairesis (resolution of a deliberation) into a strong notion of binary choice. The occasion for Alexander’s somewhat heavy-handed reinterpretation is indeed the Stoic rejection of Aristotle’s bivalent concept of action. The classic Stoic attempt to view the entire universe as an air-tight system of univocal efficient causality is indeed highly problematic, to say the least. What ought to be defended in this context is Aristotle’s very different, more “humane”, interpretively rich, relaxed pluralistic and non-exclusive notion of causes as reasons why things are this way rather than that. Not having an overly strong, univocal notion of causality in the first place removes the motivation for an overly strong notion of choice. Alexander re-reads Aristotelian causality in a much more systematic and univocal way that brings it closer to the Stoic view, and then finds it necessary to compensate for this with a stronger notion of choice.

All that notwithstanding, not only is there is nothing intrinsically bad about the Stoic motivation to think human action as embedded in the world; it has positive value in its own right. But Aristotle’s “compatibilist” view of human action is quite different from the Stoic one, for all the reasons mentioned above. A more hermeneutic view of causality and an emphasis on temporally extended resolution or commitment rather than punctual bare choice combine to make Aristotle’s approach more attractive.

That the human has a capacity to perform contrary actions seems uncontroversial. But “contrary actions” can be understood in as many ways as actions can be contrary to one another. Aristotle more specifically attributes to rational beings the ability “to act, or not to act” in specific ways. To my ear, acting and not acting in some particular way are not contrary actions properly speaking. I have long puzzled over the motivation for Aristotle’s emphasis on the narrower “to act, or not to act” case as a distinguishing characteristic of rational beings. But as Boulnois points out, Stoicism with its univocal view of causality effectively denies the validity of the “to act, or not to act” case altogether, while upholding the “up to us” criterion for ethical responsibility. But the plot is about to thicken even further. We are about to see why Boulnois still treats it as an open a question whether Stoicism really is determinist in the modern sense.

“The cosmos represents a network of preliminary or auxiliary causes of action, but not as a constraint, since the ‘complete’ cause includes the agent’s own character, beliefs, and dispositions. It only is what it is in its character of being done in this conjunction, but it is indeed she who does it: the determined action is exempt from constraint, indeed compatible with the responsibility of the agent. The Stoic position is compatibilist” (p. 207).

That Stoicism combines a kind of determinism with a defense of the reality of moral responsibility is an apparently obvious ground for calling it compatibilist. But here, suddenly, we have the novel introduction of a notion of “preliminary or auxiliary” causes. These do not behave in the strongly univocal way that we have been considering as characteristic of Stoic causes. Here we begin to see an ambivalence in the notion of “constraint”. At first it seemed to be a synonym for the kind of coercion or extraordinary circumstance that makes an action seem willing and unwilling at the same time. But in the context of a comparison with these new preliminary or auxiliary causes, the classic Stoic univocal efficient causes are in a different sense tightly “constraining” in a way that Aristotelian causes, and now also Stoic preliminary or auxiliary causes, are not.

Here also the Stoic concept of representation intervenes. First, it should be acknowledged that although it is defensible, the translation of Stoic phantasma or phantasm as “representation” is a bit of a stretch. This is definitely a case where a significant work of interpretation is presupposed by the translation. What can be shown is that Stoic phantasms have a strongly representational character. But phantasms have other characteristics as well. In the first instance, they are perceptual images. In Aristotle, the same Greek word is closely linked to the broad but underdeveloped notions of imagination and interior sense. These involve images that are in a way the same as those associated with sensible objects, but different in that they can arise — or be recalled — independent of present sense perception.

Stoic phantasms are also ancestral to medieval sensible species. The classic early Stoic theory of the phantasm forms a three-way bridge connecting optics, the physiology of sense perception, and inner experience. Since the early Stoics hold that everything real is in one way or another connected with embodiment, perceptual images begin as subtle bodies literally transmitted by light. The perceptual images thus transmitted re-present the visible forms of ordinary sensible bodies, and are again re-presented in something that begins to resemble the modern concept of “mind”. At each step, there is a kind of structural translation that preserves the “same” form in a different medium. For the early Stoics, this material translation of forms grounds a strong epistemological realism in an unequivocally physical and physiological theory that tightly knits together a kind of realism with a kind of representationalism.

If we speak of any kind of representationalism in Aristotle, it must be said to have a more poetic and less absolute character. Unlike the Stoics, Aristotle does not rely on a kind of strong identity of the image across a continuous chain of physical transmission to underwrite strong claims of epistemological realism. He does not even separately claim that there is such a tight chain of transmission. Aristotle’s theory is more “relaxed” and aesthetic. It avoids strong claims of identity in representation. While holding that there is such a thing as real knowledge, Aristotle’s moderate realism also avoids the strong realism that unites the “dogmatism” attributed to the Stoics in the ancient world, with the dogmatism that will later criticized by Kant.

Boulnois continues, “The gods have given us the power of using our representations. It is true of itself that an inadequate representation does not take away our assent, and that we can refuse to consent to it. But certain commentators have demanded to know whether a comprehensive representation necessarily entails our assent, or whether it is only an occasion in the face of which we can again refuse consent. Epictetus is nonetheless clear on this point: before the demonstration of a moral contradiction, indeed before an adequate (comprehensive) representation, ‘like a balance, the reasonable soul is inclined, whether it wants to be or not’. It is impossible for the human not to approve that which appears to her as preferable in an adequate representation. There is indeed no place here for free will [libre arbitre] as the capacity of acting otherwise. The evidence of a representation does not do violence to reason, because it is itself recognized as a part of universal reason, and only submits to itself. But this in no way excludes necessity” (pp. 207-208).

“Aulu-Gelle gives another version of the argument: ‘if you throw a long stone cylinder in a steeply inclined terrain, you are the cause and principle of its fall, but soon the cylinder is carried away in rolling, no longer because you made it roll, but because it has the capacity to roll according to its measure and its form. In the same way order, reason, and the necessity of fate move kinds and the principles of causes, but it is our own will (voluntas) and the character of each one that control the impulses that issue from our deliberations and the acts of our spirit’ ” (p. 208).

“For a modern who accepts the principle of inertia, this seems to exclude every human impulse: once the initial impulse is given, it seems that the cylinder continues to roll on its path. But there is no inertia in ancient physics: the effect is always contemporary with its cause; and each nature follows its own tendency. As a consequence, to explain the continued movement of the cylinder, there must be a new impulse, ‘its proper force’, and the internal spontaneity of ‘its nature’. Necessity is compatible with spontaneity. For the movement of an object is produced not only by its antecedent causes (exterior impulse), but again by its own form (cylindrical or conical). There is an impulse proper to the agent; it does not passively submit to the causality of representations; it joins to them its spontaneity. Nonetheless, the nature of our spirit is itself subject to fate. Even what depends on us is explained by the state of our beliefs and our emotions. Our actions reveal what we are. They come from the acquiescence that we give or not, by function of our character, to representations that come from outside. Thus we are responsible” (ibid).

Conversely to the first point about inertia, it might be argued that if we think of form as having a kind of causality of its own, a separate concept of inertia might not be needed. It is not entirely clear which approach is more parsimonious. While it might with justice be said that one universal concept of inertia is simpler than a causal role exercised by innumerable forms, it could also be argued that inertia does not entirely eliminate the relevance of form. An appropriate articulation of form and matter might make a separate concept of inertia superfluous, but inertia does not seem to make all uses of formal and material cause superfluous.

” ‘What depends on us’ has constraint for its contrary, and not necessity. Our assent is indeed ours within the chain of causes, but it comes from the form of our individual soul, which itself obeys a necessary order. From here on, the key to assent lies in a word: voluntas [will]. This becomes the point of contact between a necessary nature and a unified psyche, the nodal point of ethics. Since the will is ours, it depends on us to act. By this articulation between impulse and assent, between the initial movement and the capacity to roll, Stoicism admits the existence of ‘what depends on us’ (in nostra potestate). Representation impresses a movement that is received in the soul, but assent depends on us — it is spontaneous. Once the exterior impulse is received, assent moves itself. We can indeed maintain that everything happens by necessity (modal determinism), without this preventing consent from depending on the soul, because it comes from it. This is why we are responsible for our action” (pp. 208-209).

The references to Latin terms here might seem out of place in the context of Epictetus, who wrote in Greek, but Cicero and Seneca had already written about voluntas before Epictetus flourished. The explicit introduction of a faculty of will is closely tied to the substantialization of occurrences of Stoic assent into a principle that gives assent or refuses it, which Boulnois has already pointed out in Epictetus. Only, according to Boulnois, this is still not yet the free will that is so much insisted upon by later writers.

“Action depends on us if it is committed by (hupo) us, and if it occurs through (dia) us: [quote from Alexander of Aphrodisias:] ‘Nothing of what is produced by anyone (hup’ hekastou) in conformity with their own nature can, they say, be otherwise, but each of the things done by them (hup’ auton) is produced in a necessary way […]: the circumstances being such, it is impossible to submit to them in another way, and not to be moved in this way’. Certainly, the key to decision is assent, and it is possible to refuse an imperfect representation. But this refusal is itself determined by causes: that the agent does or does not give her acquiescence to the representation, itself results from her beliefs and her desires. Thus action is determined, through the agent, by her impulses and her stronger representations. With the Stoics, will is not a free will, because it is a power of consenting to fate” (p. 209).

“Does the necessity of assent render all ethical exercise vain? — In no way. The work on ourselves, the discipline of assent, consists precisely in criticizing the representations that are presented to us, in order to separate our subjective emotions and uncertain beliefs, and to open up a truth adequate to the world. Thus we give our assent to a true judgment, and choose not only what appears to us to be better, but that which is really better” (pp. 209-210).

This is similar to the earlier example of the boxer. If he is fated to win, this does not mean that he does not need to make any effort. It presupposes that (among other things), his character is such that he will in fact make the effort. If he did not have such a character (among other conditions), it could not be truly said that he was fated to win.

“Nonetheless, even if we do not consent, fate is accomplished. If I must go into exile, be imprisoned, or have my head cut off, I can refuse my assent; but necessity is accomplished no less. There are two ways in which fate is accomplished necessarily: assent (if this is the interior principle of my action); and constraint (if I am driven by an exterior principle). It does no good to oppose the order of the world: either the agent consents, and her interior spontaneity coincides with necessity, or she refuses her assent, and what is necessary is accomplished in spite of her, coming from an exterior principle, under the form of a constraint. According to Zeno and Chrysippus, the human is subject to nature in the manner of a dog attached to a chariot: [quote from Hippolytus:] ‘A dog attached to a chariot, if it wants to follow, at the same time follows it and is pulled by it, because it is at the same time the dog’s self-determination (autexousion) and necessity that act; while if it does not want to follow, it is constrained in every way. It is the same with humans: even if they don’t want it (me boulomenoi), they are in every way constrained to follow their fate’ ” (p. 210).

“The dog can refuse to consent to the movement that drags it along, but this will be painful and useless — it will be irresistibly dragged. Or it can trot in the rhythm of the chariot: it will arrive at the same result, but it will be in tune by its assent and will not suffer. If the human refuses her assent to the order of the world, she will be unhappy, since she will arrive necessarily at the contrary of what she wished. When she gives her assent, she will attain a form of happiness, since she will consent to what happens, in accord with nature: ‘if she accomplishes this, she will get what is due to her’. Happy and free, she will blend in with the determinism that she cannot change” (ibid).

“According to Cicero, the Stoics join with the representations received by the senses ‘the assent of the mind’, situated in us (in nobis) and voluntary (voluntarium)’: is this a doctrine of free will [libre arbitre]? No: the expression is clearly a hendiadys [one thing expressed by a conjunction], ‘in us and voluntary’ together translate eph’ hemin (‘what depends on us’). Cicero affirms that we give our assent willingly [de plein gré] (‘voluntarily’), but not that we have an undetermined will. It is not a question of posing a freedom of choice in the face of fate, as a number of commentators affirm, aided by problematic choices of translation. It is a matter of more fundamentally establishing our responsibility, of knowing whether action is voluntary, that is to say ours” (pp. 210-211).

“The Discourses of Epictetus begin with a question: ‘what is it that is in my power, and what is it that is not in my power?’ We will notice the singularization of the question. Aristotle speaks of ‘what depends on us’ (collectively). Epictetus no longer asks about a generic we, or about the kinds of action, but about what depends on me, here and now. Ethics is no longer thought starting from a particular political community (as in Aristotle); it starts from the singular dispositions of each. It is necessary to discover what each can legitimately desire, to separate out a domain that nothing can ever enter, a power that is mine, whatever the external circumstances may be. Does this consist only in assent? The only thing that depends on us is the correct usage of our representations; ‘this alone is emancipated from all obstacles, from all constraint’. By reason of this exclusive concentration on our assent, everything outside it is alien and ‘indifferent’, unworthy of being chosen (aproaireton). If our action deserves praise or blame, this does not concern external circumstances, but the beliefs in the name of which we give our assent and act: what comes from right convictions is beautiful; what comes from erroneous convictions is bad’. It is the assent that we give to our representations that explains the justice of our action. Only by this are we deserving of praise or blame. We have only to render an account of our ‘use of representations’, that is to say the way in which we put our sensible impressions to the test to see if they deserve our assent or not; the rest is not imputable to us” (pp. 211-212).

“It is by this that Epictetus introduces a relation between ‘what depends on us’ and freedom. The Manual begins with this fundamental thesis: ‘Among the things that are, some depend on us (eph’ hemin), and others do not depend on us. […] What depends on us is by nature free (eleutheros), without impediment and without shackles. What does not depend on us is weak, enslaved, in chains, and foreign’. The key to ethical liberation lies in the distinction between our works and the rest; this is what is new. Ethical life is a continual effort to distinguish what depends on us from what does not. This permanent attention frees the agent from the desire to obtain what we cannot have, and that make us depend on someone else. Who submits to this discipline is never frustrated in her desires; this allows her to avoid trouble and the passions” (p. 212).

“Is this a doctrine of freedom of the will? Certainly, in affirming that ‘what depends on us is by nature free’, Epictetus makes freedom a property of our assent. But the judgment is conditional; it is in aligning impulse and desire with what depends on us that we are free, and in desiring what does not depend on us that we are enslaved. As a consequence, the key to freedom lies in the restriction of our desire to ‘what depends on us’. What kind of freedom is involved here? An ethical freedom. Not that of doing everything we want, but that of not desiring what we cannot do. It is only in this extreme restriction that we can let our propensity bloom” (ibid).

Neo-Stoicism to Descartes

We have reached part 2 of Schneewind’s The Invention of Autonomy, which will develop a portrait of the major alternative to the natural law tradition in 17th-century ethics. Within this scope, the major figures will be the neo-Stoics; the Cambridge Platonists; and the four canonical “rationalists”, Descartes, Spinoza, Malebranche, and Leibniz. What makes Schneewind’s book especially interesting is his strong focus on the history of ethical thought. I am giving it unusually thorough treatment because I agree with his assessment that the history of ethics tends to be badly under-represented in general histories of philosophy, and in briefer accounts of individual major philosophers.

The first chapter of part 2, which I will discuss here, treats the neo-Stoics and Descartes. We have seen before that a concept of “right reason” derived from the Roman writers Cicero and Seneca already began to play a role in medieval ethics. This is now joined by notions of constancy and self-governance that also come from Cicero and Seneca. Not only the neo-Stoics but also Descartes embrace all three. The view of Descartes that emerges here is new and interesting, and quite unexpected.

To set up a contrast with the account he will be developing here, Schneewind quickly recalls the ground already covered.

“The modern natural lawyers held that by reasoning from observable facts we can find out how to cope with the moral and political problems that beset our lives. Experience gives us the evidence we need in order to infer that God exists and cares for us. Part of what we learn from it is that God has made the proper structure of our common life independent of any larger cosmic scheme” (p. 169).

“The major seventeenth-century alternative to modern natural law theory rejected both its empiricism and its refusal to tie morality to a divinely supervised universe. Many of those who rejected natural law theory held that God’s mind and ours are fundamentally akin…. As we improve our understanding — as we perfect ourselves — we will see ever more clearly that we are part of a harmonious whole and can live on harmonious terms with ourselves and others. On this view our participation in the divine mind is the most important fact about us” (pp. 169-170).

These writers have what I would call the Greek philosophical idea that reason and nature are themselves divine, or at least can legitimately be said to participate in a divine character. They do not rely on specific revelation for their respective views of God, but that does not make them irreligious. They reject a reductive, empiricist view of reason. They think that through participating in reason, we ourselves can be said to participate in divine activity, and this is our highest calling. So I don’t think it is quite right to say that these writers want to defend a divinely supervised universe. They variously defend a divine universe or a divinely created universe. Supervision sounds like direct intervention from outside. But Herbert of Cherbury has been called the father of English deism. The original Stoics saw divinity as immanent. Spinoza would have vigorously rejected the applicability of a notion like supervision to God. For Leibniz, God exercises providence at the level of possible worlds. There are a great many alternatives to the traditionalist or literalist theism that is implied by the term “supervised”.

From the phrase “as we perfect ourselves”, we begin to get a sense of what Schneewind will mean by perfectionism. (Part 2 is called “Perfectionism and rationality”. This chapter is called “Origins of modern perfectionism”.) It is uncontroversial that the figures he surveys in part 2 used the term “perfection” in various ways. But it is quite a leap to conclude from that fact, that this whole scope is appropriately summed up by an ism term of very recent coinage, “perfectionism”. At the outset, it has yet to be established that this grouping of figures has enough in common even to be appropriately called a stream. Leibniz is very different from Spinoza, and they are both very different from Descartes. One might also be concerned that an exclusive focus on perfecting ourselves is too narrow or individualistic to adequately characterize some of these figures. But Schneewind will bring to light a great deal that is of interest. In any case, he does an excellent job at the detailed level.

“The thought that our morality arises from our awareness of the divine mind was worked out in detail by the Stoics; and restatements of Stoicism were formative for seventeenth-century moral philosophy…. In the late fifteenth century the first printings of the works of Cicero and Seneca and of Latin translations of Epictetus made some of the major accounts of Stoicism readily accessible. Two sixteenth-century books helped spread Stoic teaching even more widely…. The Latin text [of Lipsius] went through more than eighty editions and was translated into several vernaculars” (p. 170).

Stoicism commonly contrasts our current state with the figure of the ideal Stoic sage, who by following the immanent divine logos or reason is able to rise above all disturbance by the passions.

“If Stoicism was to help modern Europeans cope with their lives, or if it was, as du Vair hoped, to shame them into improvement by showing how virtuously even a pagan could live, its doctrines had to be made acceptable to Christian readers. Neo-Stoicism was the result of the effort to blend two rather disparate views” (p. 171).

Much the same could be said of scholastic Aristotelianism. Whether we approve or disapprove of their innovations, both neo-Stoicism and scholastic Aristotelianism have an innovative character, and do not simply repeat Greek philosophy.

“Du Vair has no qualms about adding a notion of will to Stoic moral philosophy” (p. 171n). “The will’s main task is to enable us to pursue only what is truly in our power…. Du Vair ends by saying that God is delighted above all else by seeing us attain the perfection he created us for; but because ‘our natural forces can never bee sufficient of themselves to keepe us in this perfection’ we must invoke God’s favor” (p. 172).

It is important to note that a notion of will has to be added here. The way it is defined by du Vair above is unique and interesting. It recalls the later Greek Stoic Epictetus’s recommendation that only that which is in our power should be called good or evil.

“Lipsius gives us rather more theory than du Vair, but with no less of a Christian turn. In urging the great virtue of constancy upon us, Lipsius is urging us to live by right reason, ‘a true sense and judgement of things human and divine’. Reason, he says, is the remainder in man of the image of God…. Reason is divinity within us…. Through right reason all of us belong to a common kingdom” (p. 173).

The reference to constancy and right reason is significant. Both of these terms are important in both Cicero and Seneca. They do not exactly come from Greek Stoicism, but rather represent new contributions to Stoic thought (or Stoic-influenced thought, in Cicero’s case). In a bit, we will see that Descartes also adopts them.

“[Lipsius] develops Cicero’s deep belief that the honorable course of life is also the useful course” (p. 174).

“[Neo-Stoicism] tells us that if we look at our own reason we can both see what the highest good is and move toward attaining it. We can do so essentially because reason in us is the divine in us” (p. 175).

“For Herbert [of Cherbury], and for the moral innatists generally, our guide to God’s mind is our own mind, and therefore moral ignorance, leading to wrongdoing, is first of all defective self-knowledge” (p. 183).

The neo-Stoic notion of innate ideas will be adopted by Descartes, and criticized from an empiricist point of view by Locke.

“Herbert held that, in becoming aware of the Common Notions, we are sharing thoughts with God” (p. 184).

Herbert’s Common Notions with respect to religion consist of five affirmations: existence of God; a duty of worship; centrality of virtue; need for repentance; and reward or punishment in an afterlife.

“Descartes rejects this view because of a position he holds firmly but never fully expounds, a position that greatly distressed a good many of his early readers. He thinks that truths of the kind Herbert’s Common Notions contain would constrain God, the way pagan deities are tied by fate; and he is emphatic in asserting that we must not admit that anything could subject God to such necessities. Even eternal verities must depend on God’s will, as a king’s laws do in his country. There are eternal truths, such as that the whole is greater than the part; but they would not be true unless God had willed them to be so. God’s will is as much the cause of essences and of what is possible as it is of what is actual” (ibid, extensive embedded citations omitted here and below).

Here we get a taste of Descartes’s famous voluntarism, which, it seems to me, leads in a very different direction from those of Herbert and the neo-Stoics. But even here, there is a new twist.

“God’s creative willing is completely free because he is initially indifferent to every possible state of affairs. He does not create something because it is better that it should exist than that it should not; rather, his willing something to exist makes its existence better. Before he wills, he could have no reason to will as he does. Descartes goes to the extreme of allowing that God could perfectly well have commanded his creatures to hate him. But unlike Luther, Calvin, and Suarez, he says not a word about God’s having commanded that we are to obey certain laws of nature” (ibid).

This last distinction has huge importance. In common with the fundamentalists, Descartes defends an outrageous voluntarism, but in so doing he does not appeal to special revelation or fundamentalist literalism.

“It will become clear that Descartes is proposing a thoroughgoing ethic of self-governance.”

This I find utterly fascinating. Self-governance is another important theme from Cicero and Seneca. I think of it as a kind of opposite pole to voluntarism and the command/obedience paradigm. But as we were just reminded, Descartes is one of history’s more notorious voluntarists. We have recently seen that there were defenders of natural law who were not at all voluntarist. With Descartes, it is the converse — we get a very strong but abstract voluntarism that is not tied to any claims about specific natural law.

“His refusal to make any claims about divine imposition of laws of nature goes beyond his determination not to discuss anything that is properly a matter for theologians” (pp. 184-185). “It is part of the same outlook that leads him to exclude all talk of final causes from physics” (p. 185).

This is another large subject. Galileo and Descartes are among the early advocates of a physics that looks to mathematics rather than teleology to ground its explanations of the workings of nature. What is less frequently recognized in standard accounts of this is that Avicenna, Aquinas, Suarez, and their co-thinkers already turn what they call efficient causality into a “cause of existence”, which then makes it appear that efficient causality is fundamental and grounds all other causality, rather than being limited to an account of the relations of means to ends. Or again in another way more relevant to modern physical explanation, the means are given an expanded explanatory role that eclipses the original Aristotelian priority of ends.

“Descartes is no atheist, but he does not think that we can use rational knowledge of God to solve problems either in theory or in practice. His God is at least as inscrutable as the God of Luther and his predecessors, perhaps more so” (ibid).

Descartes uses the unknowability of God in a way that is in a sense opposite to the role it plays in Luther’s proto-fundamentalism. For Descartes it opens up a large space for secular modes of explanation; for Luther on the other hand, it requires an increased reliance on revelation over natural knowledge.

“Our most basic ways of thinking do not allow us to infer anything at all about how God thinks. The fact that we cannot conceive alternatives to the laws of geometry and logic shows the limits only of our minds, not of God’s power. Confined thus to our own way of thinking, we cannot ‘share in God’s plans’. Hence in physics, Descartes holds, ‘we must never argue from ends’ ” (ibid).

Though they do have points in common, mathematical physics and what I would call Aristotle’s hermeneutics of nature are fundamentally different disciplines. Received views of the history of science notwithstanding, the one does not really compete with the other. If we are doing mathematical physics, Aristotelian ends will not be relevant.

In common with the neo-Stoics, Descartes defends an important role for innate ideas. But Descartes does not understand his innate ideas in the Stoic way, as immanent fragments of a divine mind within us.

“The same is true in practice. Knowing nothing of God’s purpose in making the world, we cannot suppose that he made everything in it for our benefit” (ibid).

“We can know God’s purposes only if he reveals them” (ibid). Here Descartes is closer to Luther.

“If we are speaking ‘from the human point of view adopted in ethics’, we rightly say that God made all things for his glory; but all that this means is that we must praise God as the efficient cause of all that exists. A further conclusion also follows. Whoever loves God fully will be completely resigned to whatever happens, even if it involves evil or death to himself. For Descartes as for the Christian neo-Stoics, God’s providence is a kind of fate, showing us that mere fortune has no role in the world” (ibid).

Descartes takes for granted the notion of efficient cause as “cause of existence” that was developed by Avicenna, Aquinas, and Suarez to replace Aristotle’s “source of motion”.

“But from the attitude we are to take toward life as a whole, we cannot infer any specific guidance” (ibid).

For Descartes at least, it is a straightforward consequence of his voluntarism that God has nothing like an ethical stance, from which practical conclusions can be drawn. From God’s completely arbitrary freedom, logic dictates that no definite ethical conclusion can possibly follow. The more theologically minded voluntarists, on the other hand, follow tradition rather than strict logic on this point, and assume that morality should be derived from God’s commands, which are assumed to be known by revelation.

“Descartes offers an a priori proof of God’s existence, and an a priori proof to show that he is not a deceiver; he thinks of God as the creator and the indispensable continuing ground of the existence of the world; but his voluntarist insistence on keeping God untrammeled entails that although God’s existence and power explain everything in general, they can never be used to explain anything in particular” (ibid).

The thought behind this seems to be that to directly explain particulars by appeals to God is to treat God as unconditionally committed to those particulars, whereas Descartes wants to say that God is not unconditionally committed to any particulars. But this also means that we should not claim the authority of God’s will to justify any worldly particulars. No human view of worldly particulars has an exclusive or unquestionable claim to divine sanction. Love of God, properly understood, can never legitimately excuse dogmatism, sectarianism, or claims that some particular human authority is unconditional.

“What is true of physics and biology is equally true of morality. We can come to trust our faculties by considering God’s perfection, but then we must do our science for ourselves. We can come to love God by considering his perfection, but then we must determine for ourselves how we are to act” (ibid, emphasis added).

“He included what he called a ‘provisional morality’ … but he told Burman that he did so only ‘because of people like the Schoolmen [who] would have said that he was a man without any religion or faith, and that he intended his method to subvert them’…. The provisional morality is to be used while Descartes, or his reader, is withholding assent from all his beliefs…. obey the laws and customs of your country … be constant once you have chosen a course of action … master yourself rather than the world, by making yourself desire only what is fully within your power…. God gave us the power to separate truth from falsity ourselves, and he intends to spend his lifetime using it…. Metaphysics may constitute the root of the tree of knowledge, but the useful sciences are its fruits” (p. 186).

Constancy, mastering oneself, and desiring only what is in our power are all precepts highlighted by the neo-Stoics. At each point in time we work from the best resources available to us, but no general inquiry into morality is ever really over. Something new can always arise.

“[N]one of us will ever have all the knowledge we need to live an ideal life. Whatever morality we come to, it will always be ‘provisional’ ” (p. 187).

“For Descartes the thinking substance that is our mind is simple. All the different mental functions must therefore be construed as ways of thinking. To a critic’s suggestion that this must entail that there is no such thing as will, Descartes replies that the conclusion does not follow: ‘willing, understanding, imagining, and sensing and so on are just different ways of thinking, and all belong to the soul. The thoughts we experience as depending on us alone are volitions, the sole actions of the mind; the perceptions that constitute knowledge are passions. Some volitions, such as those directing us to think about an abstract entity, aim inward; others aim outward, as when we decide to walk. However directed, volitions, as thoughts, are about some object; and their function is to unite us to or separate us from that object” (pp. 187-188).

Gone is the insistence of the theological voluntarists on a separate faculty of arbitrary choice. For Descartes it is the whole person who is unconditionally free.

“The will is as important in purely theoretical thinking as it is in practice. When a theoretical thought occurs to us, we can either accept it — make it ours — or reject it; and if we accept it, we come to believe or know it. When a thought about something good occurs to us, our acceptance of it is what we call desire, and the desire may effectively move our body by redirecting spirits to the pineal gland. Willing in relation to action is thus active thought about good and ill, or about perfection and its opposite. We necessarily pursue what we take to be good and avoid what we take to be ill. If we see clearly and distinctly ‘that a thing is good for us’, then, Descartes says, as long as we keep that thought before us it is impossible to ‘stop the course of our desire’. We can abstain from pursuing a clearly perceived good only by thinking that it is good to demonstrate, by so doing, that we possess free will” (p. 188).

Will is here identified with Stoic interior freedom to assent or not assent to anything that is suggested to us. This is not the same thing as arbitrary choice of a course of action.

“Our liberty is thus not basically a liberty of indifference. We are indifferent to alternatives before us only when we lack sufficient clear knowledge of the goods and ills involved in them. Indifference in us is an imperfection — a lack of knowledge — though on God it is a result of omnipotence. But our ability to give or withhold assent, or our freedom, is a positive power, and no imperfection. That we have this power is so self-evident, Descartes claims, that our knowledge that we possess it ranks with our knowledge of the other innate ideas. We cannot doubt our freedom, even when we see that God has predetermined all events and cannot understand how this predestination is compatible with our freedom. When we act freely we do what we most want to do. We want to assent to clear and distinct propositions, since clarity and distinctness give us the best reasons for assent. And we want to unite ourselves with what we clearly see to be good, since, again, there could be no better reason for desiring something. We can be indifferent when we lack reasons either to accept or to reject; and acting without reason is not what we think of as acting freely. ‘And so’, Descartes says to a critical questioner, ‘I call free in the general sense whatever is voluntary, whereas you wish to restrict the term to the power to determine oneself only if accompanied by indifference’. We can indeed act freely in cases of indifference, but the ability to do so is not significant. It is because free will is the power to accept or reject that we are open to praise and blame and can acquire merit or demerit” (pp. 188-189).

This seems to further confirm that human freedom in Descartes is an elaboration of neo-Stoic concepts, rather than a continuation of the scholastic liberum arbitrium, or power of arbitrary choice.

“For Descartes, then, ‘voluntariness and freedom are one and the same thing’, and the proper use of freedom is to lead us to act only from clear and distinct perceptions. But these are hard to obtain, in large part because the soul is tied to the body. The body causes us to have imperfect perceptions of objects in the world. These perceptions are confused and indistinct thoughts that what is perceived would be good or bad for us. The desires they tend to lead to are usually desires for what is in fact not as good as it is made it seem. Only knowledge can help us; yet even though we desire knowledge when we see how good it is, we cannot always get it” (p. 189).

The association of freedom with acting on clear and distinct perceptions combines Descartes’s own criterion of clarity and distinctness with the Stoic theory of assent. This is the result we would expect when both are affirmed.

“Descartes’s remedy for ignorance lies in the second maxim of his provisional morality: to be as decisive as possible and to be constant in acting even on doubtful opinions, once he has made a decision. He later rephrases the rule as requiring ‘a firm and constant resolution to carry out whatever reason recommends’, even when we know we may not have the final truth. Virtue, he adds, ‘consists precisely in sticking firmly to this resolution’. If we had clear and distinct knowledge of the good, it would give order to our action. Because we lack such knowledge, only the will’s strong resolve to be constant can create order. If we are resolute, we act firmly even on beliefs we are not sure of. The free will, Descartes repeatedly says, is what comes closest to making us like God. God is utterly constant. As long as we are constant and act on what seem to us after reflection the best reasons, we will never feel remorse or regret. We will have nothing with which to reproach ourselves” (ibid).

This is the richest elaboration of the Stoic virtue of constancy that we have seen. In the inevitable presence of uncertainty, the best we can do is to consistently act based on our best assessments, and not to abandon our current best assessment of any given matter until we have a better one. He is making the point that vacillation is not evidence of open-mindedness. Rather, it is due to a lack of constancy.

“Descartes’s definition of virtue as resolute constancy of will puts self-governance squarely at the center of his ethics” (ibid).

In order to achieve this, we must not be swayed this way and that by passions. This is a Stoic criterion.

“Our final goal ought to be to obtain the supreme good…. Next, he supposes that the sovereign good must be something that is wholly within our power. Plainly wealth, power, and other external goods are not so. If anything is, it is our thought” (p. 190).

That our highest good must be something that it is within our power to achieve again recalls the precept of Epictetus that only things within our power are properly called good or evil. Descartes does not, however, share the Stoic goal of eradicating the passions.

“But because the passions are to be accepted and are in any case not eliminable… We must form the habit of thinking that only what lies wholly within our power is good. What lies wholly within our power is the exercise of our will…. [T]o show that we have free will, we can suspend action…. Suspension for Descartes … is an act that enables us to make a better decision” (p. 191).

What he calls suspension here is again the Stoic withholding of assent that Epictetus says is always within our power. This shows how constancy as a criterion leads to a concept of self-governance. To hold consistently to right reason is to show constancy, and the ability to show constancy only emerges as a consequence of self-governance. Right reason itself is not reducible to any set of fixed rules. It is rather a higher-order criterion of coherence. In this way, it is not unlike Kant’s criterion of unity of apperception, which is also a higher-order criterion. Stoic self-governance is the remote ancestor of Kantian autonomy. According to Schneewind’s front matter, this is the single most important thesis of his book. No Greek philosopher would agree with the medieval and early modern reduction of morality to obedience.

” ‘It is the nature of love’, Descartes says in his longest discussion on the subject, ‘to make one consider oneself and the object loved as a single whole of which one is but a part; and to transfer the care one previously took of oneself to the preservation of this whole’ ” (p. 192).

For all his emphasis on the individual cogito, Descartes recognizes that those we love are from a moral point of view part of us.

“Descartes presents what he calls ‘generosity’ as the quality that leads us ‘to esteem ourselves at our true value’…. We properly esteem ourselves most highly when we find that we know that only our power of free willing belongs to us” (ibid). “Generosity involves control of one’s desires, and leads one to think well of others, as being equally with oneself able to use their free will well. Generosity is thus ‘the key to all other virtues’. The generous person will be led away from love of the kinds of goods that are made less valuable when others share them, such as wealth or glory, and toward love leads us toward the kinds of things whose value is not altered when everyone shares them, such as health, knowledge, and virtue. When the love of God leads us to think of ourselves as part of the great whole he has made, the nobler we think the whole, the more we will esteem ourselves as well” (p. 193).

Descartes’s allergy to Aristotle may prevent him from invoking Aristotelian magnanimity, but when he says generosity is the key to all other virtues, the effect is similar.

“Because believing something and knowing that one believes it are different, ‘many people do not know what they believe’. Innatism is thus compatible with a denial of any cognitive standing to commonsense views of morality; and it is significant that, unlike Herbert, Descartes makes no appeal to common agreement as a test of truth. He does, however, agree with Herbert in stressing that we should each think things through for ourselves…. Self-perfection, either through increased knowledge or, lacking that, through constant will, is the key to all morality. And only seeing for ourselves will give us the knowledge we need” (ibid).

Here we are indeed coming close to the Kantian criterion of autonomy.

Emotion and Belief

“The Hellenistic thinkers see the goal of philosophy as a transformation of the inner world of belief and desire through the use of rational argument. And within the inner world they focus above all on the emotions — on anger, fear, grief, love, pity, gratitude, and their many relatives and subspecies. In Aristotle’s ethical thought we see, on the one hand, a view about the nature of the emotions that adumbrates many ingredients of the more fully developed Hellenistic views. Emotions are not blind animal forces, but intelligent and discriminating parts of the personality, closely related to beliefs of a certain sort, and therefore responsive to cognitive modification. On the other hand, we find a normative view about the role of the emotions inside the good human life that is sharply opposed to all the Hellenistic views, since it calls for cultivation of many emotions as valuable and necessary parts of virtuous agency” (Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire, p. 78).

“Why, then, does Aristotle adopt an analysis of emotion that resembles that of the Hellenistic thinkers, while at the same time advancing a very different normative view of their role?” (p. 79).

That is, Aristotle gives emotions a positive role in virtue, but his Hellenistic critics advocated both the possibility and the rightness of separating oneself from all emotion, root and branch.

“According to some influential modern views that have left a deep mark on popular stereotypes, emotions like grief, anger, and fear come from an animal irrational side of the personality that is to be sharply distinguished from its capacity for reasoning and for forming beliefs. Emotions are simply bodily reactions, whereas reasoning involves complex intentionality — directedness toward an object, a discriminating view of the object. Emotions are unlearned or innate, whereas beliefs are learned in society. Emotions are impervious to teaching and argument, beliefs can be modified by teaching” (ibid).

“This, however, was not the view of the emotions held by any major ancient Greek thinker. If we schematically lay out the common ground of their agreement, we will be in a better position to appreciate Aristotle’s specific analyses :

“1. Emotions are forms of intentional awareness: that is (since no ancient term corresponds precisely to these terms), they are forms of awareness directed at or about an object, in which the object figures as it is seen from the creature’s point of view. Anger, for example, is not, or not simply, a bodily reaction (such as a boiling of the blood). To give an adequate account of it, one must mention the object to which it is directed, what it is about and for. And when we do this, we characterize the object as it is seen by the person experiencing the emotion, whether that view is correct or not: my anger depends upon the way I view you and what you have done, not on the way you really are or what you really have done.
“2. Emotions have a very intimate relationship to beliefs, and can be modified by a modification of belief. My anger, for example, requires a belief that I have been deliberately wronged by someone in a more than trivial way. Should I decide that this belief was false (that the alleged wrong did not in fact take place, or was not in fact a wrong, or was not done by the person in question, or was not done deliberately) my anger will be removed, or shift its target….
“3. All this being so, emotions may appropriately be assessed as rational or irrational, and also (independently) as true or false, depending on the character of the beliefs that are their basis or ground. Thus, rather than having a simple dichotomy between the emotional and the (normatively) rational, we have a situation in which all emotions are to some degree ‘rational’ in a descriptive sense — all are to some degree cognitive and based upon belief — and they may then be assessed, as beliefs are assessed, for their normative status” (p. 80).

“Even the bodily appetites — hunger, thirst, sexual desire — are seen by Aristotle as forms of intentional awareness, containing a view of their object. For he consistently describes appetite as for, directed at, ‘the apparent good’. Appetite is one form of orexis, a ‘reaching out for’ an object; and all the forms of orexis see their object in a certain way, supplying the active animal with a ‘premise of the good’. In other words, when a dog goes across the room to get some meat, its behavior is explained not by some hydraulic mechanism of desire driving it from behind, but as a response to the way it sees the object. Aristotle also holds that appetite — unlike, for example, the animal’s digestive system — is responsive to reasoning and instruction. He is talking about human appetite here, but he recognizes much continuity between humans and other animals, with respect to the capacity for acting from a (modifiable) view of the good” (p. 81).

“Where specifically human appetite is concerned, the case for intentionality and cognitive responsiveness is clearer still. Aristotle’s account of the virtue of moderation, which is concerned with the proper management of the bodily appetites (the appetites, he frequently says, that humans share with other animals), shows that he believes suppression is not the only way to make appetite behave well. Indeed, suppression could produce at best self-control, and not virtue. The virtue requires psychological balance (sumphonein), so that the person does not characteristically long for the wrong food and drink, at the wrong time, in the wrong amount. But this is achieved by an intelligent process of moral education, which teaches the child to make appropriate distinctions, to take appropriate objects. The object of well-educated appetite, he holds, is the ‘fine’ [or beautiful, or morally noble] (kalon)” (ibid).

“[A] loud noise, or the appearance of enemy troops, may produce a startling effect, even on a brave person. The person’s heart may leap from fright or startling, without its being the case that the person is really afraid…. If the person is only startled and not afraid, it is clear that he will not run away: as the De Motu argues, only a part of the body will be moved, and not the entire body. The De Motu analysis suggests that we see in such cases the effect of phantasia, or ‘appearing’, without any concomitant orexis, reaching out, or desire. (Emotion is a subclass of orexis.) The question must now be, What would have to be added to this being startled, in order to turn it into real fear?

(Nussbaum’s translation and commentary Aristotle’s De Motu Animalium inspired my early brief note The Animal’s Leg Joint. That book of hers also contains a very down-to-earth elaboration of Aristotle’s notion of unmoved moving, using biological rather than astronomical examples.)

“The example resembles another one used by Aristotle in the sphere of perception, where he distinguishes simple phantasia, appearing, from belief or judgment. The sun, he says, appears a foot wide: it has that look. But at the same time, we believe that it is larger than the inhabited world” (p. 83).

Here she translates phantasia as appearance. Often it is rendered as “imagination”. When I write about imagination in Aristotle, it is phantasia. This is an important term for Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics as well, for whom it stands in between sensation and thought. For the Stoics, phantasia is a fundamental mode of presentation or representation in the soul that is also the object of a physical and physiological theory of image transmission that supports a kind of epistemological realism.

“Here it is clear that the something that needs to be added, in order to turn the mere appearing into the usual sort of basis for human action, would be an element of conviction or acceptance. It is in this that mere phantasia differs from belief. Although the contrast between phantasia and belief in Aristotle is sometimes depicted as one between non-propositional and propositional cognitive attitudes, it is clear that this cannot be quite the right story for our case. For the phantasia of the sun as a foot wide involves, at the very least, combination or predication. It is a little hard to see where to draw the line between this and the ‘propositional.’ The real difference between phantasia and belief here seems to be just the difference that the Stoics will bring forward as the difference between phantasia and belief: in the former case, the sun strikes me as being a foot wide, but I don’t commit myself to that, I don’t accept or assent to it. In the latter case, I have a conviction, a view as to how things really are” (p. 84).

“Further pursuit of the question shows clearly, however, that no technical distinction between phantasia and believing is at issue in any of these analyses of emotion: phantasia is used, in the rare cases where it is used, simply as the verbal noun of phainesthai, ‘appear’. The passage contains no suggestion that phantasia is being distinguished from doxa, belief. And indeed Aristotle feels free to use belief-words such as dokein and oiesthai in connection with his analyses of emotions” (p. 85).

She turns to a discussion of particular emotions.

“In short: fear, as described in this chapter, is a peculiarly human experience with a rich intentional awareness of its object, resting on beliefs and judgments of many sorts, both general and concrete” (p. 86).

“[T]he distress and pain are not independent of the judgment, but result from it. Thus if the judgment changed, we could expect the feeling itself to change — as Aristotle himself insists, when he speaks of the conditions under which fear will be removed” (ibid).

“In short, these emotions have a rich cognitive structure. It is clear that they are not mindless surges of affect, but discerning ways of viewing objects; and beliefs of various types are their necessary conditions. But we can now say more. For we can see by looking at Aristotle’s accounts that the beliefs must be regarded as constituent parts of what the emotion is. Fear and pity are both painful emotions. Nowhere in his analyses does Aristotle even attempt to individuate emotions by describing different varieties of painful or (as the case may be) pleasant feeling. Emotions, instead, are individuated by reference to their characteristic beliefs. We cannot describe the pain that is peculiar to fear, or say how fear differs from grief or pity, without saying that it is pain at the thought of a certain sort of future event that is believed to be impending. But if the beliefs are an essential part of the definition of the emotion, then we have to say that their role is not merely that of external necessary condition. They must be seen as constituent parts of the emotion itself” (p. 88).

“And we can go further. It is not as if the emotion has (in each case) two separate constituents, each necessary for the full emotion, but each available independently of the other. For Aristotle makes it clear that the feeling of pain or pleasure itself depends on the belief-component, and will be removed by its removal. He uses two Greek prepositions, ek and epi, to describe the intimate relationship between belief and feeling: there is both a causal relationship (fear is pain and disturbance ‘out of’ — ek — the thought of impending evils), and also a relationship of intentionality or aboutness: pity is defined as ‘painful feeling directed at [epi] the appearance that someone is suffering . . .’ ). In fact, both relationships are present in both cases” (ibid).

“Anger is especially complex: for it has both a pleasant and a painful feeling component, these being associated with different, though closely related, sets of beliefs. It requires, on the one hand, the belief that one (or someone dear to one) has been slighted or wronged or insulted in some serious way, through someone else’s voluntary action; this, Aristotle insists, is a painful experience. (Once again, the pain is not a separate item directly caused by the world itself; it is caused by the belief that one has been slighted. If the belief is false, one will still feel that pain; and if one has been slighted without knowing it, one will not have it.) Once again, these beliefs are necessary constituents in the emotion. Aristotle makes it clear that if the angry person should discover that the alleged slight did not take place at all, or that it was not deliberately performed, or that it was not performed by the person one thought, anger can be expected to go away. So too, if one judges that the item damaged by another is trivial rather than serious (peri mikron). But Aristotle holds that anger requires, as well, a wish for retaliation, the thought that it would be good for some punishment to come to the person who did the wrong — and the thought of this righting of the balance is pleasant” (pp. 89-90, Becker-number citations omitted).

“The subject of love is a highly complex one in Aristotle’s thought…. The general rubric under which Aristotle analyzes love is that of philia, which, strictly speaking, is not an emotion at all, but a relationship with emotional components…. The relation itself requires mutual affection, mutual well-wishing, mutual benefiting for the other’s own sake, and mutual awareness of all this…. Both in the Rhetoric and the Nicomachean Ethics, the cognitive content of philia‘s emotions is made overwhelmingly clear” (p. 90).

“On further inspection, the beliefs involved in the central cases of emotion have one general feature in common, as Socrates and Plato already observed. All, that is, involve the ascription of significant worth to items in the world outside of the agent, items that he or she does not fully control. Love, most obviously, is a profound attachment to another separate life, which must remain as a separate center of movement and choice, not being engulfed or fused, in order for the relationship of love to be possible at all. And in the loves Aristotle values most highly, the participants view one another as good characters, therefore as fully independent choosers of the good; if one controlled the other, even to the extent that a parent does a child, the love would apparently be less good as love” (p. 91).

“Loves of a more than casual sort require a belief in one’s own lack of self-sufficiency with respect to some of the most important things in life” (ibid).

“In pity and fear, we acknowledge our vulnerability before the circumstances of life; we have those emotions, he makes plain, only if we really do think that life can do something to us, and that this something matters. Anger is closely related: for in anger we acknowledge our vulnerability before the actions of other people. Again, if we judge that the slight is trivial, we do not become angry” (ibid).

“Unlike the Socrates of the Republic, Aristotle does not believe that the good person, the person of practical wisdom, is ‘sufficient unto himself’ for eudaimonia, and therefore impervious to grief and fear. According to him, it is right to grieve at the death of a friend, since that is an acknowledgment of the importance of the tie and the person” (p. 93).

“A courageous person will indeed feel fear and pain at the prospect of death, on account of the value that he rightly attaches to his own life” (ibid). “A person who is completely without fear does not strike Aristotle as virtuous (which would imply the possession of practical reason) but, rather, as unbalanced” (p. 94).

“In short, there are things in the world that it is right to care about: friends, family, one’s own life and health, the worldly conditions of virtuous action. These can sometimes be damaged by events not under one’s own control. For these reasons it is right to have some fear. The good person, rather than being a fearless person, is one who will have appropriate rather than inappropriate fears — and not be deterred by them from doing what is required and noble” (ibid).

“Anger is treated in a similar fashion. On the one hand, Aristotle clearly believes that many people get angry too much and for insufficient reasons. His choice of the name ‘mildness’ (praotes) for the appropriate virtuous disposition in this area reflects his conscious decision to pitch things rather toward the unangry than toward the angry end of the spectrum…. If anything, he errs in the direction of the deficiency ‘for the mild person is not given to revenge, but is inclined to be forgiving [sungnomonikos]’…. Reason, however, does tell this person that there are some very good reasons for getting angry, in connection with damages to things that it is really worth caring about…. [A]ssuming one has made deep commitments to people and things that can be damaged by another, not to defend those commitments is to lose one’s own integrity. Anger is said to be a necessary motivation for defending things that are beloved…. It is this conceptual connection between anger and the acknowledgment of importance that explains why Aristotle holds it to be necessary for defensive action — not because it plays some mindless hydraulic role…. The mild person is not especially given to revenge, as Aristotle has said. But in the case of the deepest commitments, not to take some action seems to show a lack of ‘perception’ ; and if one has those practical perceptions, then one seems bound to be angry. Anger, in these cases, is a recognition of the truth” (pp. 94-95).

“Emotions, in Aristotle’s view, are not always correct, any more than beliefs or actions are always correct. They need to be educated, and brought into harmony with a correct view of the good human life. But, so educated, they are not just essential as forces motivating to virtuous action, they are also, as I have suggested, recognitions of truth and value. And as such they are not just instruments of virtue, they are constituent parts of virtuous agency” (p. 96).

“All of this is a part of the equipment of the person of practical wisdom, part of what practical rationality is. Rationality recognizes truth; the recognition of some ethical truths is impossible without emotion; indeed, certain emotions centrally involve such recognitions” (ibid).

“This ethical theory is critical of much that Aristotle’s society teaches. People often value too many of these external things, or value them too highly, or not enough. Thus they have too much emotion in connection with money, possessions, and reputation, some times not enough in connection with the things that are truly worthwhile” (ibid).

“While depending on belief and judgment, the emotions may depend upon a type of belief and judgment that is less accessible to dialectical scrutiny than are most of the person’s other beliefs” (p. 99).

“Aristotle’s students pursue not just their own eudaimonia but that of others: for they think about the design of political institutions, starting from the idea that the best political arrangement is the one ‘in accordance with which anyone whatsoever might do best and live a flourishing life'” (p. 100).

“In short: the apparent conservatism of Aristotle’s dialectical education of Nikidion [Nussbaum’s imaginary character] is only apparent. Radical change is excluded from the part of his educational scheme that deals with her as an individual. But that is not all that philosophy does. The individuals who do come to share in it partake in a task that is both radical and far-reaching: the design of a society in which money will not be valued as an end, in which honor will not be valued as an end, in which war and empire will not be valued as ends — a society in which the functioning of human individuals in accordance with their own choice and practical reason will be the ultimate end of institutions and choices” (ibid).

We still have along way to go toward that noble goal.

Conclusion of this series: A Few Conclusions on Emotion