Stoicism For Dummies by Tom Morris & Gregory Bassham

Author:Tom Morris & Gregory Bassham [Morris, Tom & Bassham, Gregory]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781394206292
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2023-12-11T00:00:00+00:00

As we noted in the Introduction, in recent decades there’s been a major revival of Stoicism. As we shall see, however, current versions of Stoicism often differ in major ways from ancient Stoicism. One big difference involves natural law. Nearly all leading modern Stoics either quietly ignore or reject natural law, and many state that ethics is a purely human invention, answerable to no natural or higher law.

In ancient Stoicism, natural law has its source in the reason and will of the Logos. Its principles were thought to have the force of law because they were commands issued by a wise and good Lawgiver and Ruler of the universe. Many modern Stoics reject the concept of natural law because they deny the existence of a God or any kind of higher power. So, Lawrence E. Becker, author of A New Stoicism (rev. ed. 2017), argues for a thoroughly secular form of Stoicism that rejects all ancient Stoic cosmology and theology and places ethics on a purely humanistic basis. William B. Irvine, author of A Guide to the Good Life (2009), offers a “modernized” version of Stoicism based in evolutionary science, not religion. And in his A Field Guide to a Happy Life (2020), Massimo Pigliucci proposes a version of Stoicism he calls Stoicism 2.0 that rejects any notion of God and sees ethics entirely as a human invention.

There are advantages to dropping all talk of God and natural law from Stoicism. Stoicism has wider appeal if it can formulated in a way that can be accepted by religious believers and doubters alike. And the idea of natural law is controversial both because it presupposes the existence of God and because, as we shall soon see, there are problems with treating “nature” as a moral standard. But without God, many key Stoic ideas, such as providence, fate, radical acceptance, an afterlife, universal moral law, and a cosmopolitan kinship and citizenship based on a shared “divinity within,” appear to be ungrounded. What emerges seems to be a very stripped-down Stoicism with a very different flavor.

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