The full understanding of core notions in Stoicism, such as reason, order, and the good (notions whose meaning is closely interconnected), depends on this combination and integration of branches of philosophy. In broad terms, the world view offered by Stoicism is both naturalistic and idealistic. It is naturalistic in rejecting the Platonic contrasts between soul and body, or forms and particulars, and in insisting that there is one (material) world that is the object of both perception and knowledge. It is idealistic in maintaining (in sharp contrast to Epicureanism) that this world is shaped by purposive, divine rationality and order (Long and Sedley, 1987, ss. 44-5, 53-5).
Ethics: Values and Development
Since Stoicism has this strongly unified character, "education" depends on understanding and integrating all three branches of philosophy and on putting this understanding into practice. Ethics may be the best point of access to Stoic thinking about education, though it needs to be taken with related aspects of logic and physics. Ethics was itself seen as a highly integrated set of topics, including categories of value and a theory of
development (Long and Sedley, 1987, s. 56).
A core ethical claim, going back to Zeno and taken to stem, ultimately, from Socrates (Long, 1996, chapter 1), is that virtue is the only good, and that other so-called goods (such as health, wealth, and beauty) are, by contrast, "matters of indifference" which have no effect on happiness. For Aristo, this seems to have been both the beginning and the end of Stoic ethics. But Zeno, followed by the main line of Stoic thinking, maintained that things such as health are, at least, "preferable indifferents," and that we are naturally inclined to
"select" such preferable things rather than their opposites (Long and Sedley, 1987, s. 58). This process of "selection" forms a key part of the way we develop as rational human beings. But a crucial part of this process lies in coming to recognize that what matters, ultimately, is not obtaining preferable things but selecting them in the right way - that is, virtuously - and, to that degree, coming to know and express the good.
Stoic concepts of value are closely bound up with their thinking about development, a distinctive feature of their theory that is clearly relevant to the subject of education. Development is analysed by them as oikeiosis, "familiarization" or "appropriation"; it consists in making the world "one's own" (oikeios) and in enabling the world (understood as a providential and rational system) to make one "its own."
This process has several different aspects and stages. At a basic level, all animals, including humans, are seen as instinctively motivated to seek those things that maintain and nurture their own distinctive character or "constitution" (Long and Sedley, 1987, s. 57A). (There is a sharp and deliberate contrast with the Epicurean
view that animals, including humans, naturally pursue pleasure (Long and Sedley, 1987, s. 21 A). For human beings, who are fundamentally rational, this process comes to take the form of (rationally) "selecting" such things as being "preferable" to their alternatives. If human development takes its proper course, such selection
becomes progressively more internally coherent, based on rational considerations and (in principle) open to rational justification. Also, selection is increasingly based on proper norms for "appropriate actions" (or "proper functions," kathekonta). In this respect, selection comes increasingly to exhibit the features (consistency, order, rationality) that constitute "the good" for Stoicism. But a crucial further dimension is the realization, noted above, that what matters, ultimately, for human happiness is not obtaining the "preferable" things but selecting them in a rational and ordered (that is to say, virtuous) way. One comes to realize that "virtue is the only good" and the only thing that should be chosen for its own sake (Long and Sedley, 1987, s. 59D). This can also be expressed by saying that the ultimate goal of human life is living "according to virtue (or reason)," which can also be characterized as living "according to nature" (as the Stoics understand "nature") (Long and Sedley, 1987, s. 63).
A second dimension of development, which is also presented as a profoundly "natural" one, is the social one. Common to all animals, and built into their physical and psychological constitution, is the capacity for reproduction and (more crucially) the motivation to care for, and nurture, their offspring. This motivation is the most obvious manifestation of a more pervasive desire to "familiarize" oneself to others by bonding with them and benefiting them. For adult human beings, this process normally takes the form of full engagement in family and communal life or in other forms of positive social relationship, such as that of teaching philosophy.
Another side of this process is the progressive extension of our concern to those outside our immediate family and community and the recognition that, as fellow rational human beings, we are also "familiarized" to them (Long and Sedley, 1987, s. 57D-H). The relationship between these two aspects of development is not as fully explained in our sources as we would wish. But it seems clear that both are taken as key features of a developmental process that contributes toward, and includes, a more theoretical understanding of the good. Social engagement, both within and outside our immediate community, provides a context through which we can learn to select "appropriately" between preferable things and, thus, learn how to act virtuously and to recognize that this is, ultimately, all that matters in human life. Also, both the processes of rational discrimination and of appropriate bonding can be understood as ways of actualizing the order, rationality, and benefit that are the salient marks of the good. To that degree, both aspects of development are interconnected facets of learning to live the life "according to nature/reason/virtue" which is human happiness, as the Stoics understand this. (See further Inwood, 1985, chapter 5; Annas, 1993, chapters 5 and 12.2; Striker, 1996, chapters 12 and 13; Algra et al., 1999, chapter 21, especially pp. 677-82.)
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