We must live in harmony with nature, the Stoics had taught since the beginning, so where could the conflict possibly be?
The answer, of course, is everywhere. For instance, what exactly do “nature” and “virtue” entail? Whose definition is correct? Whose prescriptions are best? And who is the true heir to Zeno’s legacy both as the founder of the Stoic school and as the promoter of virtue above all else?
History gives a clear answer—Cleanthes and then Chrysippus (whom you will meet in the next chapter)—though it was never so clean. Written history obscures the also-rans and the contrarians who did not carry the day. There is no such thing as a movement without disagreement, after all, and nothing that involves people does not also involve differing opinions. Stoicism is no exception.
There should be little surprise that knives flashed among the ancient philosophers, as they have and always will flash in academia. A school that venerates reason and grit, courage, and a keen sense of right and wrong above all things is naturally going to attract strong-minded students who don’t like to concede or compromise. The rising popularity of the school only raised the stakes of this conflict.
No one embodied that more than Aristo, the contentious rival son who could have very nearly changed the entire course of Stoic philosophy.
While Cleanthes was Zeno’s favored student and chosen successor in 262 BC, Aristo was an equally promising philosopher, who was far less passive and far less reserved than the hardworking water-carrier who would inherit Zeno’s mantle. Aristo the Bald, of Chios, son of Miltiades, was nicknamed “the Siren” for the persuasive power of his eloquence that wooed audiences, and allegedly led them astray.
A better name would have been Aristo the Challenger, because he was constantly questioning, undermining, and disputing much of the early Stoic doctrine, including their practical rules for daily living.
Some three centuries after the debate with Aristo last ran hot, Seneca would rehearse in great detail the disagreement between Aristo and Cleanthes in a letter to his friend Lucilius, almost in the way a historian might lay out the differences between the American Founding Fathers on the separation of powers.
The dispute? It was over the role of precepts, or practical rules, to guide us in everyday decision making. Rules about how to act in a marriage or how to raise children or how masters ought to treat their slaves. Rules like what to do when your brother makes you angry, or how to respond to the insults of a friend, and what to do when an enemy is spreading lies about you.
These might seem like relatively harmless (and actually helpful) hints, but to Aristo they were crutches that sent people down the path to memorizing a script for the challenges of life. “Advice from old women,” he called it. Aristo argued that the expertise of a javelin thrower in the Olympic Games comes from training and practice, not from studying the target or memorizing rules. You get better by practicing with your javelin. “One who has trained himself for life as a whole,” he said, “does not need to be advised on specifics. He has been taught comprehensively, not how to live with his wife or his son but how to live well, and that includes how to live with members of his family.”
An athlete isn’t thinking on the court or the field; their movements come from the muscle memory of their training, guided by their intuition. It’s from this flow state, rather than from conscious deliberation, that excellence—moral or physical—emerges.
So what Aristo wanted people to focus on were big, clear principles, things that could be internalized by the wise from their training. He wanted the Ten Commandments, not books about what order the sacraments go in. He wanted to give students a North Star to look to—virtue—and believed every caveat and explanation beyond that would lead to confusion.
Virtue was the sole good, Aristo was saying. Everything else was not worth caring about.
This put him at odds with Zeno, who believed there was plenty of gray area in between virtue and vice. Zeno had held that certain things in life, like wealth and health, which have no moral value per se, do tend to approximate the nature of truly good things. Having lots of money isn’t virtuous, but certainly there are virtuous rich people—and like all other fates, financial success presents its own opportunities for moving toward virtue as well as temptations for turning to vice. Zeno’s somewhat ingenious argument was to call these things—being healthy, being handsome, possessing an illustrious last name—“preferred indifferents.” It’s not morally better to be rich than poor, tall than short, but probably nicer to be the former than the latter.
Right?
To Zeno, it was not controversial to say that one could lean toward virtue and still desire wealth or fame or preeminence, for those were tools to employ in the building of an even more virtuous life. In this way, the early Stoics argued that we can and should pursue preferred indifferents as part of the good, virtuous life. It’s a classic middle ground, practical realism to be expected from someone like Zeno who was a merchant before he was a philosopher, as well as precisely the kind of thing that his student Aristo could not stand.
Aristo strongly argued that the goal of life is to live in a state of indifference to everything that is in between virtue and vice, making absolutely no distinction between those tricky things that can be nice to have but dangerous in excess. He didn’t want some complicated list of categories. He didn’t want to rank things in order of their goodness or badness. He didn’t want to consider gray areas or consult a rulebook. He wanted black and white. He wanted to rely on his training and his intuition to immediately know what to do in a given situation.
It’s like the story of a general who, in taking over an important command, was given a thick book of the practices established by the generals who had preceded him. “Burn them,” the general said. “Anytime a problem comes up, I’ll make the decision at once—immediately.”
It certainly sounds impressive: I make no equivocation. There is only good and evil. There can be no in between. A wise man simply knows!
It’s also a pretty ridiculous belief for someone as smart as Aristo, as Cicero would point out. With the refusal to rank or prefer, “the whole of life would be thrown into chaos.” Surely some things are better than others, surely there are general rules that can guide us as we live. We need precedents, because situations are complicated and fast-moving. Because sometimes the people who preceded us were actually wiser, and figured things out by painful experience.
Still, Aristo knew how to argue brilliantly. Disputing Zeno’s notion that health was one of these preferred indifferents, he said that “if a healthy man had to serve a tyrant and be destroyed for this reason, while the sick had to be released from the service and, therewith, from destruction, the wise man would rather choose sickness.” It’s an argument that could be applied to so many of the preferred indifferents. Is it really better to be rich if your wealth makes you the target of those same tyrants? Aren’t there situations where height has disadvantages?
We can easily imagine young students nodding their heads at these disruptive critiques and Zeno struggling to explain himself, despite his relatively commonsense position. (Is it really up for discussion that it’s generally preferable not to be sick?) These questions are also seductively fun to discuss—for in disputing Zeno’s gray area, Aristo was introducing endless amounts of gray himself. He was saying that circumstances always and uniquely alter the value of things.
Aristo’s point in pressing on all these soft spots in the philosophy is that, like the general dispensing with precedents, a skilled pilot doesn’t go to a ship’s manual when he’s hit by a wave—no, he uses his deep grounding in the principles of seamanship and his training and experience to make the right call. There is a part of this argument that appeals to the ego: We want to see ourselves as wise, with flawless intuition. We want to believe that all an athlete is doing is going with the flow. But the best athletes also stick to a strict game plan, they submit to a coach. What tattoos the walls of most locker rooms? Inspirational sayings, reminders, and codes of conduct. There are rules that each athlete is following, that they have to be aware of for their performance to count. It’s less sexy to count those other factors, but it’s the truth. It’s this role—the coach—that Zeno and Cleanthes had attempted to stake out for the philosophy teacher.