Zeno The Philosopher

By Dr. Adel Beshara

Hellenic Culture

The five centuries from about 300 B.C to A.D. 200 were predominantly centuries of Hellenistic cultural influence. Hellenism had replaced pure Greek philosophy as the fundamental philosophy of life not only in Greece proper but throughout the Hellenic World and in every country that stumbled under Alexander's crusade. According to William Ebenstein, ''history has never witnessed again such a long hegemony of one civilization; the nearest parallel to it, French cultural leadership in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, lasted for about 200 years, but it was not nearly so expansive and creative, in the sense of entirely transforming existing national societies into an alien pattern of language, art, philosophy, science, and thought.'' The Hellenistic period was characterized, however, not only by the impact of Greece on the outside world but also by the entry of non- Greeks into Greek life. In fact, the most representative and influential philosophical school of the Hellenic era was not Greek or Macedonian but Syrian called Stoicism. Founded by Zeno, Stoicism outlasted the Hellenic era and extended far deep into the Roman period of cultural rejuvenation

The Man and his Character

Zeno was a Phoenician, born at Citium in Cyprus, at some time during the latter half of the fourth century B.C. Citium had a population which was largely Phoenician in origin. It was ruled by a dynasty of Phoenician petty kings, whose names figure in Punic inscriptions. According to Bertrand Russell, "it seems probable that [Zeno's] family were engaged in commerce, and that business interests were what first took him to Athens." At Athens, then a centre of intellectual vibrancy, a new world opened for Zeno: "people here are talking about things larger than commercial gain and loss, and we are shown Zeno going ardently from one philosophie school to another." Athens thus became Zeno's second home and, as he gradually sank into its life, he carne to feel that he himself had a message to deliver. At the same time, Zeno maintained a bond of piety to Citium and pnde in his Phoenician origin. When his name was put up in some public inscription at Athens as 'Zeno the Philosopher', they added of Citium' at his own request. Of the books which Zeno wrote nothing survived but the titles and a few detached phrases. Our knowledge of his life and thought is confined to a number of anecdotes. Athenian story- tellers are another source as are the writings of Stoic Philosophers who succeeded Zeno. One thing is certain however, and it is that the title of his works covered a wide field - metaphysics, logic, physics, and rhetoric. In the beginning, Zeno found the Cynics a most congenial group. They taught him to pursue self-restraint with artistic elaboration and refinements. 'More self-restrained than Zeno', became a proverbial phrase in Athens. According to Edwyn Bevan, "He had learned from the Cynics a bluntness of speech which outraged polite convention. And he delivered himself with a dogmatic conviction, having a peculiar way of throwing his assertions into the form of short com-pact arguments, of hard syllogisms, which gave them an appearance of mathematical certainty." In the later part of his life Zeno emerged as a man of considerable figure to whom Athens as a whole turned in political emergencies, to whom kings like Antigonus and Ptolemy paid court.

Zeno's Philosophy

Zeno followed earlier philosophers in seeing the end of life as eudaimonia (happiness) and, like them, he emphasized the necessity of arete (excellence/virtue) for achieving this. For Zeno, Happiness required what is good, but differed from the Greek philosophers like Aristotle by making the claim that what is morally good is good. Therefore, happiness depends entirely on virtue and a good life, according to Zeno, is one lived in accordance with it: living in this way is identified with life in conformity with phusis (nature). The emphasis on nature is felt throughout Zeno. He believed that there is no other or more appropriate way to approach the subject of good and bad things than from universal nature and the dispensation of the universe. Nature is a creative, rational force, guiding the workings of the world so that it forms one coherent universal system. Everything in the universe has its own individual nature, happiness is no exception. In this universal nature, human beings occupy the distinctive role as moral agents. Like nature, mankind possess logos (reason), but at the same time to this they have it in their power not to act in accordance with nature. But mankind's task, according to Zeno, is not to compete or destroy his nature through the power of reason, but to learn to live with it and to comprehend the way in which it works. Zeno's attitude is that for a person to live in accordance with nature their reason must be perfectly developed; only then will they measure up to nature's evaluative standard. The only person who achieves this is the sophos, the wise man (sage). It was said earlier that the end of life is happiness, defined as life in accordance with nature. Zeno now takes one step ahead of the Greek philosophers. Unlike them, he drew a sharp distinction between bad and good. For him, what is morally good is good, and only that what is morally bad is bad: everything else is indifferent. Thus, much that earlier philosophers such as Aristotle had considered good is now indifferent, such as health, wealth and life itself. Thus in turn means that nothing which is morally indifferent can in itself be necessary for a life in accordance with virtue. The preferred indifferents of life are therefore the materials of virtue not virtue itself. Nor are they essential for virtue. It is the attitude and intentions of the agent that are important for attaining happiness not the success of action. Zeno therefore had no patience with metaphysical subtleties. Virtue was what he thought important, and he only valued physics in so far as they contributed to virtue. God, in this schema, is defined as the fiery mind of the world and virtue is equated with one's holy calm.

Zeno's Political Philosophy

Zeno wrote a short work called the Politeia (Republic). It was a philosophical enquiry which speculated about the nature of a society of wise men. No other work by Zeno, or indeed any Stoic, attracted as much attention or as much abuse as this one. It there-fore provides a suitable starting point into Zeno s political philosophy. The Politeia proposed an ideal society, but there is much dispute as to the nature of this society and its ex-tent. W W. Tarn, for instance, argues that it was a small city-state, containing both sage and fools, modeled on the helot-based society of Sparta. H. C. Baldry, on the other hand, see it as a society of the wise alone and of indeterminate extent. There are strong grounds for believing that this latter interpretation is largely correct. The ideal society, according to the Politeia, would be one where there would be no temples, law-courts, gymnasia nor images of the gods. There would be no coinage. The institution of marriage would be abolished and there would be community of women; men will feel paternal affection for all children. There would be no distinction in the dress of men and women but a community of equals. Slavery would be abolished which, to Zeno, meant an emancipation at all levels of society. Moreover, the ideal society of the Politeia represented one of moral perfection. For instance, the abolition of temples is maintained on the ground of human logic. Men, according to Zeno, should have the divine within their mind because it is in the mind not in temples that the gods are honoured. Elsewhere Zeno says that a city should be embellished not by offerings to the gods but by virtue. In this ideal society, also, moral perfection is achieved through human wisdom because all in society are equally wise and, therefore are equally virtuous. Similarly, law-courts are dispensed with because men living in harmony will not need them. In other words, there is no need for law courts in a society where all are friends: it is only the fools who require them. This provides a further reason for believing that the ideal society would contain only the wise. Gymnasia, on the other hand, were rejected because bodily welfare was not relevant for the true happiness of the wise, which is an- other way of saying that it was indifferent. The rejection of the institution of marriage follows the same theoretical reasoning. To maintain the institutions of marriage and the family and associated sexual taboos would be to impose unnecessary restrictions on the behaviour of the sage, who should be perfectly capable of freely making his or her decision on the matter. But there is one passage in the Politeia that is often taken to suggest that marriage might be tolerated. Here Zeno is implying that marriage could be allowed in the form of a freely chosen permanent relationship. Finally, there remains the question of how the ideal society would be governed. There is no explicit answer to this question in the Politeia. Possibly such a question is superfluous in a classless society where all are sage. Plato had justified the rule of one class over another by arguing that those with wisdom should impose wisdom on those who lacked it. This is irrelevant in a society where there are no degrees of wisdom. Nevertheless, since even the sage are not omniscient, there would have to be some form of official for administrative purpose, chose, for instance, by election or by lot on the basis of seniority. In short, the wise men will both rule and be ruled in accordance with human virtue and democratic freedom as a moral principle.

Zeno's Cosmopolitanism

One of the distinctive features of Zeno's thought is the belief in one mankind. Unlike most of Greece's philosophers who tended see human relations in divisional terms within and between societies, Zeno emphasized the moral virtue in cosmopolitan terms. For him, equality of men transcended national boundaries and the city-state. Everyone around the world is equal and mankind is one. For nature, wisdom, logic and virtue are not properties of any specific society or nation, but are world-wide attributes. This does not necessarily mean nor should it be understood to mean, a single world government. Zeno's cosmopolitanism is based essentially on the notion of human happiness and individual virtue. It is therefore a moral not a political value. Thus understood, cosmopolitanism is a form of brother-hood in which nations and states work together for the advantage of all as in the ideal society where everyone co-operate to produce the ultimate good.

Hellenism or Phoenicianism?

One question that has been repeatedly asked is: Was the teaching of Zeno a pure development of Hellenic philosophy, or did it owe elements to his Syro-Phoenician background? There is no clear-cut answer to this question nor will there ever be because it is a judgmental query. Those who maintain that Zeno was purely Hellenic do so on the ground of a certain interconnection between his philosophy and the previous philosophic tradition in Athens. This may be true but, as we will show soon, there are also many differences between them. On the other hand, those who maintain an affinity between Zeno and Phoenicia can no doubt show how certain parts of his philosophy was connected to the intellectual climate in the Fertile Crescent. Babylonian and Assyrian clay-tablets and Phoenician Wisdom literature are often cited sources as is his strong attachment to his native land. Some, also, see some- thing in the manner in which Stoicism made Zeno differ from the established type of Greek Philosophy. Edwyn Bevan, for instance, argues that Zeno was more a 'prophet' in the Phoenician sense than a 'philosopher' in the Hellenic way. "Now the curious thing about Zeno, it seems to me, is that while his message was Hellenic, his tone of voice was that of the prophet." Moreover, Zeno's philosophy, when compared with Greek philosophy, shows many remarkable differences. This can be illustrated by a simple comparison between Plato's Republic and his Politeia. According to Andrew Erskine, "Plato's Republic could be interpreted as a philosophical justification of aristocratic society which reflects some of the prejudices that would have been held by a man of Plato's social position. Such a criticism cannot be leveled against Zeno in spite of his division of men into wise and foolish, because in the ideal society there were no classes; all were wise. For Plato on the other hand, the inferiority of one class was an element of the ideal. So Zeno differs from Plato in the absence of such a hierarchy and in the egalitarian nature of his ideal society." Zeno's philosophy also differed from Cynicism, the anti-thesis of Plato's Republic. For while Cynicism was an essentially negative doctrine, Zeno's Politeia was far more positive in many ways. The Cynics were famous for their disregard of convention, but they abandoned convention with nothing to put in its place except the sage. Zeno and the Stoics, on the other hand, set virtue and the sage in the context of a universal system by introducing the study of physics. As such, there was no Cynic ideal society in the constructive sense that Zeno pro-posed. However, a note of caution. Close comparison between Zeno and the Greek philosophers leads to some points of contact. This suggests that Zeno was influenced by Greek and Hellenic philosophies at one point or another.

Summary

Zeno's stoic philosophy constituted integral both a breakthrough into a new way of thinking and a breakaway, though not completely, from traditional Greek phi-losophy. His Academy at Stoa graduated a whole generation of philosophers who carried on his work and ideas for many generations to come. They came to be known as the Stoic philosophers. Among them was Epictetus (about A. D. 50-120), a Greek slave from Phyrge, and Marcus Aurelius (A.D. 121-180), the well- known Roman emperor What we have said of Zeno in this short article is a drop in the ocean, so to speak. Zeno explored many different fields of life and his intellectual influence survived for centuries after his death. In fact, it is almost impossible to talk about early Greek philosophy without reference to Zeno. Yet "Stoicism is less Greek than any [other] school of philosophy ... The early Stoics were mostly Syrian, the later ones mostly Roman."