Cleanthes

Therefore, again, the soul must be corporeal.

In the belief of Cleanthes, the souls of all creatures remained to the next period of cyclic conflagration.

Chrysippus believed that only the souls of the wise and good remained.

Coming finally to the ethics of the Stoic philosophy, we find for the chief end of life this definition, a life consistent with itself, or as it was otherwise expressed, a life consistent with nature.

We're not asking someone who looks like they're struggling or in pain what they need.

There's a story about Cleanthes.

He's walking through Rome and he sees this man sort of beating himself up.

And he just stops him and he says, you're not talking to a bad person.

For what they did was to substitute for the Stoic logic a logic of their own, dealing with the notions derived from sense, much in the same way as Bacon substituted his novum organum for the organon of Aristotle.

Cleanthes, we are told, recognized six parts of philosophy, namely dialectic, rhetoric, ethic, politic, physic, and theology, but these are obviously the result of subdivision of the primary ones.

Of the three departments, we may say that logic deals with the form and expression of knowledge, physic with the matter of knowledge, and ethic with the use of knowledge.

The division may also be justified in this way.

Over against these there were two comprehensive vices, barbarism and solecism, the one being an offense against accidents, the other against syntax.

one does not associate the idea of poetry much with the austere sect of the Stoics.

Still, it should be remembered that the finest devotional utterance of paganism is Cleanthes' Hymn to Zeus, and that Eratus among the Greeks, and among the Romans, Manilius, Seneca, Perseus, and Juvenal, may be set down to the credit of the school.

Amphiboly was defined as diction which signifies two or more things in the strict prose sense of the terms and in the same language.

There's an ancient story that shows how far that discipline could go.

Diogenes Laertius tells us that Cleanthes, who would later succeed Zeno as head of the Stoic school, arrived in Athens as a former boxer with next to no money.

So that he could study philosophy by day, he spent his nights drawing water from the wells to irrigate the market gardens.

The story goes that he was hauled before a court to explain how he made a living, because he looked healthy and strong, with no known occupation, and that the gardener he worked for came forward to vouch for his nights of toil.

The judges were so impressed they wanted to give him money, and Zeno wouldn't let him accept it.

Cleanthes didn't complain about his tired body.

He used it to win himself hours of study.

Many mornings begin with the body being dragged along, from the mattress to the hot shower, from the shower to the car, from the car to the desk chair.

the question of happiness is no longer as with aristotle and still more with plato one for the state but for the individual in both schools the speculative interest was feeble from the first and tended to become feebler as time went on both were new departures from pre-existent schools stoicism was bred out of cynicism as epicureanism out of cyrenaicism both were content to fall back for their physics upon the pre-socratic schools the one adopting the firm philosophy of heraclitus the other the atomic theory of democritus both were in strong reaction against the abstractions of plato and aristotle and would tolerate nothing but concrete reality the stoics were quite as materialistic in their own way as the epicureans with regard indeed to the nature of the highest god we may with seneca represent the difference between the two schools as a question of the senses against the intellect but we shall see presently that the stoics regarded the intellect itself as being a kind of body the greeks were all agreed that there was an end or aim of life and that it was to be called happiness but at that point their agreement ended as to the nature of happiness there was the utmost variety of opinion democritus had made it consist in mental serenity anaxagoras in speculation socrates in wisdom aristotle in the practice of virtue with some amount of favor from fortune aristippus simply in pleasure these were opinions of the philosophers but besides these there were the opinions of ordinary men as shown by their lives rather than by their language zeno's contribution to thought on the subject does not at first sight appear illuminating he said that the end was to live consistently the implication doubtless being that no life but the passionless life of reason could ultimately be consistent with itself.

Cleanthes, his immediate successor in the school, is credited with having added the words with nature, thus completing the well-known Stoic formula that the end is to live consistently with nature.

it was assumed by the greeks that the ways of nature were the ways of pleasantness and that all her paths were peace this may seem to us a startling assumption but that is because we do not mean by nature the same thing as they did we connect the term with the origin of a thing they connected it rather with the end by the natural state we mean a state of savagery they meant the highest civilization we mean by a thing's nature what it is or has been they meant what it ought to become under the most favourable conditions not the sour crab but the mellow glory of the hesperides worthy to be guarded by a sleepless dragon was to the greeks the natural apple hence we find aristotle maintaining that the state is a natural product because it is evolved out of social relations which exist by nature nature indeed was a highly ambiguous term to the greeks no less than to ourselves but in the sense with which we are now concerned the nature of anything was defined by the peripatetics as the end of its becoming another definition of theirs puts the matter still more clearly what each thing is when its growth has been completed that we declare to be the nature of each thing following out this conception the stoics identified a life in accordance with nature with a life in accordance with the highest perfection to which man could attain now as man was essentially a rational animal his work as man lay in living the rational life and the perfection of reason was virtue hence the ways of nature were no other than the ways of virtue and so it came about that the stoic formula might be expressed in a number of different ways which yet all amounted to the same thing the end was to live the virtuous life or to live consistently or to live in accordance with nature or to live rationally division of philosophy philosophy was defined by the stoics as the knowledge of things divine and human it was divided into three departments logic ethic and physic this division indeed was in existence before their time but they have got the credit of it as of some other things which they did not originate neither was it confined to them but was part of the common stock of thought even the epicureans who are said to have rejected logic can hardly be counted as dissentients from this threefold division for what they did was to substitute for the stoic logic a logic of their own dealing with the notions derived from sense much in the same way as bacon substituted his novum organum for the organum of aristotle cleanthes we are told recognized six parts of philosophy namely dialectic rhetoric ethic politic physic and theology But these are obviously the result of subdivision of the primary ones.

Of the three departments we may say that logic deals with the form and expression of knowledge, physic with the matter of knowledge, and ethic with the use of knowledge.

According to the high Stoic doctrine, there was no mean between virtue and vice.

All men indeed received from nature the starting points for virtue, but until perfection had been attained they rested under the condemnation of vice.

It was, to employ an illustration of the poet-philosopher Cleanthes, as though nature had begun an iambic line and left men to finish it.

until that was done they were to wear the fool's cap the peripatetics on the other hand recognized an intermediate state between virtue and vice to which they gave the name of progress and proficience yet so entirely had the stoics for practical purposes to accept this lower level that the word proficience has come to be spoken of as though it were of stoic origin seneca is fond of contrasting the sage with the proficient the sage is like a man in the enjoyment of perfect health but the proficient is like a man recovering from a severe illness with whom an abatement of the paroxysm is equivalent to health and who is always in danger of a relapse It is the business of philosophy to provide for the needs of these weaker brethren.

So Zeno comes first.

He's followed by his pupil, Cleanthes, who is then followed by Chrysippus.

And of these early Greek Stoics, the standard view is that Chrysippus is really the important one.

He's the intellectual heavyweight.