LECTURE

Platonists & Stoics on the Self

Chaired by Victor Suchar

Prof. Richard Sorabji

University of Oxford

24 February 2005

There was a new interest in being true to your individual self among the Stoics of the 1^st centuries BC and AD. Cicero tells us of the first such Stoic, Panaetius, who died just before 100 BC and the second is the famous Stoic, Epictetus, who started as a slave.

In making decisions, you must first ask yourself what a rational being would do. ;This, the Stoics think, will rule out wrong conduct, and this is what Kant was to advise nearly 2000 years later. But the Stoics saw what Kant has been accused of failing to see, that 'a rational being' is too vague a term to give you more than negative guidance. There are many ways of being rational and you must choose one that is true to your individual self. This applies not only to moral decisions like whether to defy a tyrant--you should only do so if you have it in you to take the consequences; otherwise it is the wrong decision. It also applies to practical decisions like what career to choose. If you try to please your parents and the choice is against your individual nature, you will fail. Cicero reports an extraordinary idea. When Julius Caesar won the civil war and became dictator, what was it right for those on the losing side to do: Cicero himself and Cato? Cicero says it was right for Cato to commit suicide, rather than surrender, but not right for anyone else (himself included) in the same circumstances. This sounds the very opposite of Kant's view, which is so widely accepted today, and which sounds so reasonable, that what is right for one is right for all in the same circumstances. I think it is opposite in spirit to Kant even though Kant can be made verbally consistent with it. What the Stoics have rightly seen is that Cato stood for an uncompromising austerity which could not be described in a few words, but only by telling his biography, and it was this that made it right for him alone to commit suicide. Of course, if there had been anyone else with the same sort of biography, it would have been right for that person too to commit suicide. But the morally interesting point is that there was no one else like Cato, and in any case, his biography could not be summed up in the kind of concise moral rule that Kant would have wanted.

Cato's decision depended on his whole past history. There was a Platonist contemporary with Epictetus in the 1^st century AD, Plutarch. Plutarch thought you should look at the whole of your past life for a different purpose, to gain tranquillity. For this purpose, you should, weave the story of your life, including the bad parts as well as the good. I wonder if you ought not to weave in future projects as well. Without the weaving, Plutarch thought you would not have created an identity for yourself.

My good colleague, Galen Strawson, wrote an article ‘Against Narrativity’ in the Times Literary Supplement for November 2004. He was against precisely the kind of narrative-weaving that Plutarch thinks essential. His basic reason was that he does not regard himself as having more than a sequence of short-term identities.

What would the Greek and Roman philosophers have thought about this? Whatever may be the case about Plutarch's tranquillity, they would have been unanimous over more than a thousand years from 500 BC - 600 AD about our other question: how to make decisions. To make good decisions, you will sometimes have to look at your past or your future as a whole, they all agreed. Indeed, how could you avoid sometimes having to ask yourself, ‘who am I and who do I want to be?’

The need sometimes to consider one's past or future as a whole, so obvious to all ancient philosophers, has been much less noticed in modern philosophy. On this, as on the need to be true to yourself, the Stoics of the 1^st centuries BC. and AD were right.

Richard Sorabji