Menu navigation :
Contenu :
The Use of Knowledge: elements of Stoicism in Modern Thought
Organized by
Matthias Rothe
Kulturwissenschaftliche Fakultät, Lehrstuhl für linguistische Medien und Kommunikationsforschung
Europa-Universität Viadrina
Thomas Bénatouïl
Maître de Conférences en philosophie antique
Laboratoire d'Histoire des Sciences et de Philosophie, Archives Henri Poincaré
Université Nancy 2
ARGUMENT
Initial Description
Our conference will be held in English and its concern is directed towards a long neglected tradition: the reception of Stoicism in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries and its influence on the formation of political discourses (natural right, liberalism), on pedagogy, aesthetics and historiography. It is, therefore, an interdisciplinary enterprise in intellectual history or the history of ideas. We wish to offer philosophers, historians and literary scholars the possibility of cooperation and for an exchange of research findings, and we also hope to initiate common research projects.
The Current State of the Research
The fate of ancient Stoicism and its influence on the Early Modern Period has been, as far as Germany is concerned, the subject of a very polarised but nevertheless not very sustained debate. Wilhelm Dilthey (1892/93) and after him Gerhard Oestreich (1954) and Günter Abel (1978) insisted, each for their own reasons, on the thesis that the ancient Stoa, in the form of neo-Stoicism, was of crucial importance to the constitution of what might be called the rationality of the Early Modern Period. By contrast, Hans Blumenberg (1966) and his followers denied this thesis vehemently. These two opposed positions seem to have led, in recent times, to a broad consensus, expressed, for example, at a recent conference in Wolfenbüttel (2001) on the influence of Hellenistic thought on the philosophy of the Early Modern Period. This consensus proposes that the influence of ancient Stoicism on the formation of early modernity existed without any doubt, but has at the same time been widely overestimated.
Both diagnoses, however, as well as the compromise stated above, arise, in our opinion, from the particular perspectives chosen by the participants in this debate. Since Dilthey’s intervention, the discussions have taken place mostly in the field of the philosophy of history. The object of analysis has been an entire epoch: the rationality of Early Modern Period, the formation of modern thinking, etc. And within this perspective yet another limitation was imposed: neo-Stoicism in the tradition of Justus Lipsius was more or less treated as being the only form of influence that ancient Stoicism had upon European modernity. This, however, meant a reduction of the ancient Stoa to its ethical dimension, to the control of affects, to self-discipline, in short: to an ethics of endurance. Such a programme is expressed in an exemplary way by Günter Abel in the first chapter of his book Stoizismus und frühe Neuzeit: “We are going to show the way in which the body of Stoic thought has been reconstructed to function as an individual and a social ethics as well as a political theory in a narrow sense, in order to offer to the well-off and educated middle class an orientation and the possibility to incorporate the demands of discipline and order vis-à-vis an inscrutable world affected by crises.” (p15).
This frame of reference – the ethical formation of an epoch – seems to have been equally accepted by a number of researchers who compiled case studies concerning authors who do not belong to the narrow canon of neo-Stoicism. Their choice of examples – Descartes, Spinoza, Pascal etc – demonstrates a restriction to the Early Modern period and a concentration above all on the ethical consequences of the reception of ancient Stoicism. Research projects which inquire into the effects of Stoicism beyond the 16th and 17th centuries have been few and far between in Germany. A small conference on Stoic Thought in European Politics, Literature and Philosophy from the Ancient to the Modern World, held in Freiburg in 2006 was, however, a rare exception.
More than any other characterisation of Stoicism, it is perhaps still the judgement of Hegel that has contributed to the dominant paradigm of its contemporary characterisation. In the fourth section of his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Hegel refers to ancient Stoicism, taken once again as being a subjective ethical attitude, as being an historical and therefore an already surpassed phase in the development of consciousness. Yet a position like that adopted by Hegel often establishes a broad consensus which at the same time outlasts the context of its original explication, persisting even if the grounds of its initial justification are no longer present. Whoever agrees with Hegel’s position on Stoicism must also devalue its concrete historical settings and tacitly supports a teleological view of history, as has already been highlighted by Günter Abel in his attempt to rehabilitate neo-Stoicism (p253).
In France, the philosophical debate about Stoicism has differed significantly from that in Germany but has also suffered from similar, though less entrenched, limitations. Ancient Stoicism in itself also played a surprising and substantive, albeit discrete, role in French philosophy. Gilles Deleuze offered in his Logic of Sense (1969) a very stimulating actualisation of important aspects of Stoic ontology, logic and ethics in the context of French structuralism. At the same time, however, this early work of Deleuze has been far less influential than his later works, and he in any case soon abandoned this early emphasis upon Stoicism. Roman Stoicism was also one of the key themes of Michel Foucault’s late work, as is evidenced by his Care of the Self (1984). Yet this work was often misinterpreted as representing an ethical turn and a rehabilitation of subjectivity, without inquiring about its wider implications (see below).
As for the French debate about the influence of Stoicism on modernity, it was by and large restricted to historians of ideas or historians of philosophy. Lagréé (1994) and others have devoted a number of studies to neo-Stoicism in the strict sense (Lipse, Du Vair), or have written works on the influence of Stoicism in the 16th and 17th centuries . The later influence of Stoicism has been rarely considered, a notable exception being the penetrating studies of Jaffro (1998) on Shaftesbury.
Pierre-François Moreau (1999) distinguished three stages of modern Stoicism. He diagnosed a first reception of Stoic doctrines in the 14th and 15th centuries, in combination with other ancient forms of knowledge that had been used, according to Moreau, to enable new methods of reflection that could bypass scholastic demands. A second stage is then constituted by what Moreau describes as neo-Stoicism in a strict sense. In the 16th century and at the beginning of the 17th century, he argues, a systematic transformation of the ancient Stoic system can be witnessed, and one of the main protagonists of this movement was Justus Lipsius. In the course of the 17th century, however, this ‘systematic Stoicism’ had, in Moreau’s view, all but disappeared, although it still figured, no longer in its original form, either as a body of thought that could be opposed in order to profile other systems, or as a disintegrated system with fragments that could be integrated into new theories.
The Alignment of Our Project
We do not intend to announce a fourth stage of modern Stoicism at our conference. Instead, by following Moreau’s results, we want to inquire into the fate of these fragments, while at the same time avoiding the hitherto tendency of characterising them in relation to the formation of epochs or the development of ethical positions.
It is not difficult to identify references to Stoicism far beyond the 17th century, for example: in the work of Shaftesbury, Adam Smith, Buffon, Diderot, Rousseau; in Schelling and the German romantics; or in the work of Emerson and Thoreau, Baudelaire, Deleuze, Foucault and so on. We are going to explore some of the references to Stoicism in these sources in order to address the following questions: Do such references simply function as mere ornaments added on to already existing and independent philosophical positions ? Or are they actually deployed in order to resolve the inner problems of the theories which use them? Finally, are they in fact constitutive of new discursive presuppositions, commonplaces or topoi, and if so, in what ways?
A positive answer to the final research question raised above would certainly give rise to a most significant and interesting conclusion. Without at this stage resolving this question in advance of our conference, it can certainly be claimed that the authors listed above played important roles in developing and anchoring discursive presuppositions or topoi which were, needless to say, already ‘in the air’ at the time. Adam Smith for example developed his famous concept of the ‘invisible hand’ based upon the Stoic idea of providence, while Alexander Rüstow (1945), a founder of the new liberal economic school, eventually revived this concept. Through Buffon Stoic ideas have influenced natural history and early biology, while with Rousseau they entered into the fields of pedagogy and politics. Finally, in the 19th century, Stoic discourses may have participated in the establishment of a new art of living: that of dandyism.
From this perspective it should also be possible to resume the above-mentioned debate concerning Stoicism and its possible contribution to the formation of an epoch: first and foremost that of modernity. The question to be posed would, however, concern the function of references to Stoicism, considered independently from the validity of such references. Within this context, one may think not only of Dilthey, Oestereich and Abel but also of Otto Brunner and his claim concerning a traditional “Old Europe”, reaching from Antiquity to the 18th century.
Such ‘theoretical movements’ cannot be accounted for by reducing the afterlife of ancient Stoicism to its ethical dimensions. Instead, we would like to redirect attention to the ways in which Stoicism has allowed us to make ethical, political or other practical uses of specific bodies of knowledge about nature or the world. One of the most original aspects of the ancient Stoa surely lies in the fact that the practices of the self were not insulated from the other aspects of the doctrine; rather, they were constantly and precisely based upon and guided by the knowledge of nature. In his last series of lectures, Foucault (2001) captured this original element of Stoicism in the notion of a “spiritual knowledge” (“savoir spiritual”). For precisely this reason, transformations, continuities and ruptures in the relation between ancient and modern Stoicism will above all identified, especially in relation to how they combine concepts concerning nature and knowledge, and how they inform practices based upon these ideas.
PROGRAM
Friday, 03.07. 2009
15.00 - 15.15 Thomas Bénatouïl, Matthias Rothe : introduction
I. Stoic order and nature in the XVIIIth century
15.15 - 16.15 Jeffrey Barnouw (Professor, Department of English, University of Texas at Austin)
Intelligent Design in Shaftesbury
16.15 - 17.15 Stefanie Buchenau (Maître de Conférence en études germaniques, Université Paris 8)
„Die Moralpropädeutik des berühmten Wolffs“ and its Stoic Basis
17.45 - 18.45 Thierry Hoquet (Maître de Conférences en philosophie, Université Paris 10-Nanterre)
Anti-Lucrèce and Anti-Polignac : Order, Chance and Nature in France in 1749
Saturday, 04.07.09
9.00 - 10.00 Gabrielle Radica (Maître de Conférences en philosophie, Université de Picardie-Jules Verne)
Stoic Elements in Rousseau’s Emile: Living Beings, Nature and Order
10.00 - 11.00 Bastian Ronge (Doktorand am Institut für Philosophie, FU Berlin)
“Sensitive Stoicism” – A New Perspective on Adam Smith’s Stoicism
II Stoicism between metaphysics and aesthetics in the XIXth and XXth centuries
11.30 - 12.30 Christopher J. Delogu (Professeur, Département d'Anglais, Université Jean Moulin-Lyon III)
Emerson, Stoicism, and the Question of Responsibility
14.00 - 15.00 Simon Swift (Lecturer in English Literature, University of Leeds)
‘Take courage, and withdraw yourself from ways/ That run not parallel to Nature’s course’: William Wordsworth and the courage of (neo)-Stoicism
15.00 - 16.00 Cornelia Wild (wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin am Institut für Romanische Philologie LMU München)
Exercising Modernity: Stoic Practice in the Works of Baudelaire and Foucault
16.30 - 17.30 Thomas Bénatouïl (Maître de conférences, Département de philosophie, Université Nancy 2)
A new ontology or an aesthetics of existence ? Stoicism between the first Deleuze and the last Foucault
Sunday, 05.07.2009
III The Role of Stoicism and Neostoicism in modern history and XIXth-XXth century historiography
9.30 - 10.30 Angus Nichols (Lecturer, German Department at Queen Mary University, London)
Stoicism and the Development of the Human Sciences: Wilhelm Dilthey’s Reception of Stoicism
10.30 – 11.30 Tracie Matysik (Assistant Professor, Department of History, University of Texas at Austin)
"The Hidden Influence of Stoicism in Nineteenth-Century German Philosophical Critique of Modern Natural Sciences (Tönnies, Friedländer, Berendt)"
11.30 – 12.15 General discussion
ABSTRACTS
Stefanie Buchenau
„Die Moralpropädeutik des berühmten Wolffs“ and its Stoic Basis
Since interpreters of Christian Wolff have generally proceeded according to a Kantian perspective, they have not always presented the most sympathetic picture of the Wolffian approach to practical philosophy. Following Kant, who condemned Wolff’s approach as « impure » and empirically flawed, they have not paid much attention to Wolff’s arguments concerning practical philosophy (and more generally, to the practically oriented German Enlightenment philosophy as Weltweisheit). Heiner Klemme, whose paper at the First International Christian Wolff Congress in 2004 lists the reasons for Wolff’s philosophical « inferiority » in comparison to Kant, is in this respect still representative. The present paper suggests a radical change of perspective. In order to appreciate the Wolffian philosophical contribution, it is imperative to begin by reconstructing the Stoic argumentative basis to his thought and to explore the affinities between Stoicism and Wolff. In fact, Wolff’s formulation of the moral law « Do what makes you and your condition, or that of others more perfect ; omit what makes it less perfect », goes back to earlier Stoicism, especially Zeno, who first identified morality with order and coined the term homologoumenos zen to express the idea that morality consists of order, harmony and consistency of conduct. After having explored the common practical philosophical, psychological and cognitive tenets shared by Stoicism and Wolff’s philosophy, the paper examines the genuinely modern aspects in Wolff (such as his views on practical rationality and motivation and its mechanistic background) and offers a set of fresh conclusions concerning Wolff’s and Kant’s respective positions and their philosophical justifications.
Christopher J. Delogu
Emerson, Stoicism, and the Question of Responsibility
My paper will first outline the generally admiring regard of Emerson for the classical Stoical tradition (Marc Aurelius and Seneca, notably) before focusing on Emerson's status as an "engaged spectator" (Aron) of some of the major American conflicts of his lifetime, especially the questions of slavery, women's rights, and the expansion of political involvement beyond business and industrial elites during the Age of Jackson. Making use of observations by Tocqueville about the America of Emerson's day and by Christopher Newfield ("The Emerson Effect") about more recent American tendencies, I will argue that Emerson's life and writings exemplify at once the nobility and the pitfalls of a certain stoicism in everyday American life.
Thierry Hoquet
Anti-Lucrèce and Anti-Polignac : Order, Chance and Nature in France in 1749.
1749 is the year in which two important books were published: the French translation of Polignac’s long Latin poem, L’Anti-Lucrèce, Poème sur la religion naturelle, and the first three volumes of Buffon’s Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière. The comparison between those two books helps us to understand the relevance of the debate concerning
Epicureanism and Providentialism in the 1740s and the influence Stoicism had on this debate. On the one hand, Polignac struggles against those systems of "physique" which put forward the importance of chance in natural processes and, and thus reactivates several ancient stoic
objections to epicureanism: Polignac claims for example that they necessarily will lead to atheism and immorality. On the other hand, Buffon is called the «Anti-Polignac », since accidental events – like, for example, the appearance of a comet – play an important role in his system in that he tries to avoid any reference to God in his natural history. Nonetheless, it would be difficult to argue that Buffon’s "physique" corresponds with the realm of pure chance, since Buffon is paying a great deal of attention to the laws of nature. Thus, far from being reducible to a new Lucretius, Buffon incorporates in his system ideas that can be traced back to stoic physics, such as the approach of natural beings from the point of view of human needs. The case of Buffon, and additional remarks taken from La Mettrie, actually suggests
that between design and chance, we have to take into consideration a third term: nature.
Tracie Matysik
Spinoza Reception in Germany: The Hidden Influence of Stoicism in Nineteenth-Century Philosophical Critique of Modern Natural Sciences
Angus Nicholls
Stoicism and the Development of the Human Sciences: Wilhelm Dilthey’s Reception of Stoicism.
In terms of his reception of Stoicism, Wilhelm Dilthey is well known for arguing that the rehabilitation of Stoic philosophy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is causally related to the foundation of modernity. This view has been vehemently contested by Hans Blumenberg, yet this dispute has also obscured some of the methodological aspects of Dilthey’s reception of Stoicism. After revisiting the aforementioned critique of Dilthey offered by Blumenberg, this paper will argue that Dilthey’s argumentation concerning Stoicism was also formulated in terms of a methodological purpose that Blumenberg neglects to consider, rather than merely in relation to an exclusively historical argument concerning the development of modernity. In short: it will be proposed that Dilthey finds in Stoic natural law the ground of a sensus communis which will later make possible the foundation of a new form of science: the Geisteswissenschaften or “human sciences.”
Gabrielle Radica
Stoic Elements in Rousseau’s Emile: Living Beings, Nature and Order
The original form of empiricism put forward by Rousseau in his Émile does not take its starting point in an ignorant soul, but in the idea of an evolving living being. This living being relates to itself and its environment according to norms of order and the requirements of its nature. To be more precise, Émile adapts himself gradually to his immediate environment by varying dispositions resulting from orientations towards “the pleasant” and “the unpleasant”, “the appropriate” and “the inappropriate”, and he eventually follows “the idea of perfection and happiness” given to him by reason. Rousseau calls these dispositions “nature” (OC IV, Pléiade, p. 248). Furthermore, this development is guided by the preference the individual grants to his natural integrity over his pleasures. In short, this description of human development and activities and the order they follow seems to adopt a Stoic frame of reference. After having made this more explicit and after having clarified exactly to which Stoicism Rousseau refers, I will try to contextualize those arguments and to explore their polemical and strategic value (mainly within the context of Rousseau’s debate with Helvetius).
Bastian Ronge
“Sensitive Stoicism” – A New Perspective on Adam Smith’s Stoicism
Most of the studies exploring the Stoic elements in Adam Smith’s “Theory of moral sentiments” (cf. Brown 1992; Heise 1991; Waszek 1984) or in his “Wealth of Nations” (cf. Binswanger 1993; Binswanger 1998; Föllinger 2008; Rüstow 2001; Kopp 1995; Kraus 2000) depart from the idea that a clear distinction can be made between the original Stoic thoughts adopted by Smith (e.g. the theory of the invisible hand, the primacy of self-love and the ideal of self-control) and Smith's own notions, which resulted from his engagement with contemporary thinkers such as Hutcheson and Hume (e.g. the concept of sympathy and the idea of an impartial spectator). The purpose of this paper will be to demonstrate that this heuristic distinction tends to obscure an appropriate understanding of the role played by Stoicism in Smith’s work. Following Günter Abel’s research on 17th century Neo-Stoicism, I will apply the notion of ‘conditional terms’ (cf. Abel 1978, p. 14) to account for Smith’s original transformation of Stoic ideas. Specifically, I will argue that Smith’s adoption and interpretation of Stoic philosophy takes place within the frame of “Empfindsamkeit” (sentimentality). “Empfindsamkeit” was the dominant cultural pattern in 18th century Europe during the time in question (cp. Hohendahl 1977, p. 7), and it is based upon a number of strong anthropological assumptions. Smith’s thinking in general, and his adoption of Stoic philosophy in particular, is guided by a ‘sentimental’ conviction concerning the importance of feelings for the establishment and maintenance of social order. Thus he rejects the Stoic concept of apathy and reworks a number of Stoic concepts accordingly. This transformation brings about a new kind of Stoicism, which I describe as "Sensitive Stoicism".
Therese Schwager
“Political Neo-Stoicism” as a Concept of Historical Science
Gerhard Oestreich’s work about the reason of the state, the military and military theory, as well as his studies concerning the history of human rights, relies heavily on the analysis of the neo-Stoicist thinking of Justus Lipsius. My presentation will analyse the role which the historian Gerhard Oestreich (1910-1978) attributes to “political neo-Stoicism” as far as the development of state and society in Early Modern Europe is concerned, with a special emphasis on the concept of social-disciplining. Moreover, I am going to explore the functions of Stoicism and neo-Stoicism in a number of historical studies inspired by Oestreich, such as Günter Abel’s „Stoizismus und frühe Neuzeit“ (1978) and Werner Siedschlag’s „Der Einfluß der niederländisch-neustoischen Ethik in der politischen Theorie zur Zeit Richelieus“ (1978).
Simon Swift
‘Take courage, and withdraw yourself from ways/ That run not parallel to Nature’s course’: William Wordsworth and the courage of (neo)-Stoicism
Writing of English culture in his essay “Stoicism in English Literature” (1923) , E.A. Sonnenschein claimed that ‘’Roman poetics, Roman thought, Roman philosophy were the main moulding influence for centuries, indeed till comparatively recent times. But the extent of this influence is only partially realised even by many historians of English literature, and the man in the street knows hardly anything about it.’ While Sonnenschein’s claim arguably holds true today, it is also notable that the contemporary reception of William Wordsworth in English literary studies mirrors a key misapprehension of Stoicism in modernity, namely that found in Hegel and his immediate and more recent followers. Hegel’s influential description of Stoicism in The Phenomenology of Spirit as a form of thought ‘which has turned away from the independence of things and returned into itself’ is countered in Marx and Engels’ claim in The German Ideology that ‘The Stoical wise man by no means [pace Stirner] has in mind “life without living development,” but an absolutely active life, as is evident even for his concept of nature, which is Heraclitean, dynamic, developing and living.’ So too, the reduction of Stoicism to an impoverished ethics by the Hegelians is countered in Marx and Engels’ claim that ‘The stoics were able to “say about nature” that physics was on e of the most important sciences of the philosopher.’
This paper will not try to answer the question of whether Wordsworth qualifies as a neo-Stoic or not, but it will assume that Stoicism exerted an important influence on him, through his reading of the Enlightenment philosophes’ responses to Stoicism, as well as through his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s writings about Stoicism and Epicureanism, but most importantly through his own independent reading and thinking about Roman Stoicism, in particular Seneca. The failure to think carefully about the influence of Stoicism on Wordsworth distorts our picture of his philosophical and poetic project. In particular his effort to cultivate a calm and tranquil return to the self and its relation to nature in the face of human suffering needs to be situated with care in relation to Wordsworth’s thinking about Stoicism. Following the lead of The German Ideology, I will argue however that the most important contribution that Stoicism made to Wordsworth’s poetic thinking concerns issues about the energy and vitality of the cosmos, and the issue of a providential design. This paper will explore some of the ways in which the Wordsworth of The Excursion (1814) employs Stoic ideas of the order of the cosmos to challenge the Epicureanism of the Enlightenment, figured in the poem through Voltaire’s Candide, and what Wordsworth took to be its disastrous moral and political consequences; and it will describe how Wordsworth’s use of (neo)-Stoicism worried Coleridge due to its perceived failure to appeal to a personal deity. I will argue finally that opening up this concern with Wordsworth’s physics in turn enables a new perspective on ethical questions in his work, in particular his response to the random and contingent nature of human suffering as well as his reflection on his role as a poet faced with the spectacle of that suffering.
Cornelia Wild
Exercising Modernity: Stoic Practice in the Works of Baudelaire and Foucault
In Charles Baudelaire’s poetics, there are a number of references to Stoic practice, which are constitutive not only for his dandyism. In his private notes and art-theoretical writings, a continuous search for rules about the right conduct of life, conduite de la vie, is discernible. The successful conduct of life consists in finding short and simple maxims that serve as a shield and protection against the hardships of life. The use of such maxims as weapons of self-protection goes back to Stoic exercises in heathen antiquity. They were described by the historian Pierre Hadot, and Michel Foucault has developed his concept of the “technologies of the self” (technologies de soi) in response to them. These Stoic practices have the purpose of warding off unpleasant surprises, so as to protect oneself against life’s difficulties (praemeditatio malorum). In Baudelaire, these maxims fulfil the same function of self-protection. Walter Benjamin was the first to draw attention to these technologies of defence. However, where the Stoic “technologies of the self” as exercices spirituels have a therapeutic function – the aim is the tranquillity of the soul (tranquilitas animi), the sage’s impassibilitas – Baudelaire’s subject trains both its hardening and its sensitivity. The control of the self is simultaneously its submission. What Benjamin calls the condition that fails to “parry the shock” (Schockabwehr) contains the experience of failure, and finds expression in the paradoxical figures of the fragile athlete, or the wounded fencer. This exercise is most apparent in the scene of re-convalescence, against which Seneca warns his pupil Serenus. In Baudelaire, the self exercises re-convalescence in response to reality. However, this exercise does not aim at tranquillising the soul, but instead trains the self to be “infected by the profane” (Blumenberg). Baudelaire thus produces an aporia that was already a problem in antiquity: the impossibility of complete self-control. Only in modernity, however, does this paradox become apparent. In his later works, Foucault was criticised for his fin de siècle dandyism. Indeed, the gesture of a return to antiquity seems to be stuck in the 19th century, and only imitates the gestures that characterise modernity. Modernity constantly desires antiquity. With reference to the exemplary texts of Baudelaire and Foucault, the present paper shall read this desire as an exercise of modernity.