Stoic epistemology 101: Zeno and the metaphor of the hand movement

(Thanks to Jennifer Lynn Sears [Jennifer@JenniferSears] for the idea of this sequence of emoticons. See text for explanation.)

If we don’t understand, at least approximately, how the world works, we are likely to mislive our lives. This was a cardinal assumption of pretty much all the Hellenistic philosophies. The Cynics, the Cyrenaics, the Epicureans, the Skeptics, and the Stoics all thought that we should live “according to nature,” though they cashed out that phrase in different ways. For the Epicureans, for instance, it was in accordance to nature to seek pleasure and, especially, to avoid pain. For the Stoics, following nature meant to take seriously the fact that we are social animals capable of reason. And so forth.

This approach to ethics (understood as the study of how to live one’s life) has two interesting implications: first, a rejection of what in modern philosophy is known as the is/ought gap, famously described by David Hume:

“In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surprised to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, ’tis necessary that it should be observed and explained; and at the same time that a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it.” (Treatise of Human Nature, section 1, pp. 469–470)

But if you are building a naturalistic ethics, i.e., an ethics grounded in (though not uniquely constrained by) human nature, then there isn’t any sharp distinction between facts and values. This isn’t to say that facts rigidly determine values (I’m going to call this the Sam Harris fallacy), since there will often be more than one reasonable way to interpret any given set of facts. That’s why the Stoics insisted that in order to arrive…