Philosophy/ Stoicism - Essay Example

Rather, Logos is literally the universe embodied. Any given man, at the root of his being, is part of the workings of a much larger scheme. It can be said that instead of man having influences on Nature, Nature influences man to the point of complete control. Remembering, now, that in Stoicism Nature is synonymous with God, we can take this to mean that natural occurrences and human action and thought are not indeed two separate occurrences, happening at random. Instead, they are both consequences of one thing - Logos.

Nature and Stoicism Since the Logos can be thought of as both Nature and the Reason, or psyche, of man, one can logically deduce that to live a virtuous life means living a life according to what is natural. Nature, as was believed by the Stoics, is perfect and rational. Therefore, to live an ethical life meant to simply live in accordance with the rational order of things. And since, to the Stoics, 'virtuous' and 'happiness' are the same, it can be said that one must find happiness in "clearly perceiving what is and what is not in our power, and .

regarding the latter as wholly indifferent, neither to be eagerly avoided nor earnestly pursued." (Davidson, 143) True freedom, they believed would only come when one would do away with what they thought of as irrational desires, i.e. wealth, lust, domination, and passions. Without such desires, and by reducing our wants to the lowest possible number, it was believed that a man would, being an extension of the cosmic order, naturally fall into a satisfied state of living in accordance with Nature.

“The best way into the thicket of Stoic ethics is through the question of what is good, for all parties agree that possession of what is genuinely good secures a person's happiness. The Stoics claim that whatever is good must benefit its possessor under all circumstances.” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1299) Being an extension of the natural order of the world, it was believed by the Stoics that men were born 'good'. The soul of a man is that part of man which contains reason and guides him "to live agreeably to nature" (Davidson, 142) So far, it is complex to explain this, because Stoics also assumed that good and evil are polar apart and divergent – in order to have one, one is but bound to have the other.

This is not an unfamiliar concept to us. How can one define poverty if there is no wealth? How can one be happy unless there is sadness? Without one, the other cannot exist. The stimuli of any given experience of a man are only an antecedent, and therefore the response is found in the man's Logos, the action as attributable to him. The fact that a man's Logos is pre-determined, therefore, makes the response pre-determined as well. “Stoic ethics achieves certain plausibility within the context of their physical theory and psychology, and within the framework of Greek ethical theory as that was handed down to them from Plato and Aristotle.

It seems that they were well aware of the mutually interdependent nature of their philosophical views, likening philosophy itself to a living animal in which logic is bones and sinews; ethics and physics, the flesh and the soul respectively (another version reverses this assignment, making ethics the soul). Their views in logic and physics