Research Article

The Origins of ancient Skepticism, Epicureism and Stoicism in the Age of Empires

Emilia A Tajsin*

Department of Philosophy and Media communications, Kazan University of Power Engineering, Tatarstan, Kazan, Russia

Submission: July 12, 2024; Published: July 24, 2024

*Corresponding author: Emilia A Tajsin, Department of Philosophy and Media communications, Kazan University of Power Engineering, Tatarstan, Kazan, Russia

How to cite this article: Emilia A Tajsin*. The Origins of ancient Skepticism, Epicureism and Stoicism in the Age of Empires. Rec Arch of J & Mass Commun. 2024; 1(2): 555560. 10.19080/RAJMC.2024.01.555560

Abstract

Classical periods in history are relatively short: like any top of the peak, they take only decades, centuries at most. The “valleys” between these peaks are much longer: the Middle Ages lasted for 1000 years; Hellenism, according to various estimates, from 300 to 800 years. The main philosophical directions of the Hellenistic era were five: Kynicism, Epicureanism, Skepticism, Stoicism and Neoplatonism. All of them, except for the Cynicism that arose somewhat earlier, developed as a psychological and, more broadly, ideological reaction to the economic, social and spiritual changes that occurred because of the transition from a democratic city-state to an imperial way of government. Reviewing these trends, we will dwell in some detail on three of them: skepticism, Epicureanism, and stoicism deserving relatively deeper explanations.

Keywords: History of Philosophical Systems; Contemporaneity; Cynicism; Skepticism; Epicureanism, Stoicism; Neoplatonism

Introduction

The development of society is accelerating: the past is quickly turning into history in the present; the present “today” immediately becomes the past. Personal memories in an ever-changing world play a limited role in people’s memory: more important than there are certain supporting milestones of artifacts and events. There is no doubt that the optimal mediators ensuring the conti nuity of culture are books; and Greece was the prototype of European book culture.

Some scholars opine that philosophy itself was born from the “spirit of writing”; in any case, starting with the works of J. Derrida, this opinion has become a kind of maxim of postmodernism. There also exist sacred places and rituals, writings and family graves, connecting the “space” between the past and the present. “They are places of continuity where the individual can encounter the profound experience of belonging to a larger community.” [1].

The human of the “era” of postmodernism is distinguished by the fact that, in a certain sense, s/he is the heir of all previous eras – and no one in particular. For example, knowledge of the philosophical and artistic classics from Homer and Hesiod to Žižek and Meillassoux is considered necessary for any educated person. The wide spread of university education (which added erudition but did not surplus talent) made this requirement not only a sine qua non – since postmodernism feeds on these texts, it is built as their critical commentary, rollcall, endless re-interpretation etc. – but also new fashion. To quote appropriately Dante and Shakespeare in half with Nietzsche and Heidegger, while mentioning, for example, Thomas a Kempis, became an inherent quality of an opinion leader. Postmodernism has acquired clear features of epigonism. In a certain general sense, this is a New Middle Age, repeating essential medieval ideological features on a new basis. The dilemma of nominalism and realism has been restored; laughter culture; fear culture; commentary on commentary; interpreting interpretations; a renaissance of all beliefs and cults; hermeneutics elevated to the rank of a universal methodology, etc. This condition is best conveyed by the modern term “cultural heterotopia” created by all cultures together (M. Foucault).

These are spatial places that “neutralize, distort, or reflect the relationships and laws typical of the culture that creates them.” In such chronotypes “all variants of spaces that exist in this society are combined, but they are reflected and inverted, and... the temporary connections we are accustomed to do not always work in them.” [2]

At present, for Russia, and not only her but for other countries, too, it looks crucially important to bring closer the study and re-analyze the time of Hellenism to better understand contemporaneity. The purpose of this article is to draw historical parallels between our time – and Hellenism for the sake of a clearer ideological picture and worldviews of our contemporariescompatriots. As far as one can judge, our philosophers have not yet set such a goal. There are, however, works in the field of literary criticism; some authors also emphasize the cultural affinities of these time periods [c. f. Romanov]. However, our task is primarily ontological and gnoseological: to show how similar conditions of social existence give rise to similar modes and ways of thinking. As the modern Hungarian political scientist Ferenc Bódi writes, “...cultural memory makes the memory of the lost one’s part of the community’s own identity. And so past and present meet and merges amending the fragmentation of time.” [1].

Our second task is to arouse the interest of the reading public, using a style of presentation that is close to an essay, to turn historical information into memorable “comprehending” ideas.

General characteristics of Hellenism

Hellenism was a time when democracy, born in the squares of the ancient Greek city-states, perished and died – Ancient Rome of the first era was also a city-polis – and the opposite form of government, the empire, reigned.

Russian philosopher A. N. Chanyshev indicated the following dates: “The beginning of the Hellenistic period is usually associated with 338 BC – the year of the military victory of Macedonia over Greece. The end of the Hellenistic era is 30 BC, when the last Hellenistic state, ... Egypt, ceased to exist, being occupied by the Roman army.” [3]. But there are other assessments that we are inclined to join: Hellenism, at the beginning, was marked by the creation of the empire of Alexander the Great, and at the end – by the date of the abolition of the Western Roman Empire in 476 AD [4-6], for ‘Hellenism’ is likewise applied to Rome.

This abolition “was expressed in an almost painless, shocking and rather symbolic act: the German mercenary Odoaker deprived the young emperor Romulus of nominal power, sending him to a southern Italian dacha, and forwarded the attributes of imperial power to Constantinople.” [4]. Let us emphasize that the subsequent thirty-year successful reign of Theodoric, king of the Ostrogoths, was essentially imperial. Theodoric grew up as an honorary hostage of the Byzantine court, receiving appropriate education; he preserved the political institutions and civil structure of Rome. Byzantium made many attempts to help Rome, starting wars with the Goths and other Germanic peoples that lasted 20 years or longer. In Rome itself, according to Appian, armed clashes began between the Senate and the plebs, starting with the attack of (exiled) Marcius Coriolanus [7]. However, this came already in subsequent centuries. The further history of Europe was called the Middle Ages.

There were certainly present some positive features in the imperial system of government. Peoples became acquainted with other peoples and cultures: the Greeks – mainly with the Eastern ones, the Romans, later, with the Western ones, learning, if not to respect the “barbarians”, the “aliens”, then at least to conduct a dialogue with them. The first scientific center, the Museion, was opened in ancient Alexandria, with collections of rare minerals and animals; at Museion there was a library with handwritten books transferred by Demetrius of Phalerum from the collection of Aristotle. After the Roman conquest of Egypt, the library retained its importance for the new administration. Along with the Alexandrian one, libraries were opened in Antioch and Pergamon.

The Romans were famous not only for their disciplined army and unsurpassed architecture; they, for instance, invented “codes”: bound books; before that, scrolls were used. And even in the 5th century AD Alexandria maintained a high status as a scientific center.

However, there were also irreparable losses... In the vast empires that mixed peoples, cultures, beliefs, the unity of man and citizen, which previously coincided in one person, disintegrated, and the former free citizens who decided the fate of their state became subjects of which little or nothing depended anymore. The absorption of ethics into politics, which called for responsibility for one’s homeland-polis, disappeared; a new morality arose. This was already evident in the monarchies of the Diadochi, especially in Ptolemaic Egypt, who received this “allotment” after the death of Alexander and began a successful rivalry with Athens.

People of the Hellenistic era, who experienced the death of their homeland in the form in which they or their immediate ancestors found it at birth, reacted to this historical turning point in different ways. The “fan” of feelings of the subjects was very diverse. Worldviews ranged from the hopeless protest of the Kynics to the emotion of the eclogue, which made Neoplatonism (with an admixture of Stoicism) the philosophical basis of Christianity.

However, it is still possible to find common features in these dissimilar reactions, to analyze how a new ideology became a worldview, what specific experiences that became ideas and maxims formed the basis of newly emerged or updated pictures of the world.

Methodology

The article is based on a combination of historical and logical methods of cognition. In essence, the logic is the same historical, but taken each time in its own acme, that is, in the most clearly expressed, perfect form. “The course of development of science can be correctly understood only if the logical and the historical are not separated from each other; the logical is not considered as the demiurge of the historical, but, on the contrary, the historical is considered as primary and determining in relation to the logical.” [8].

A philosophical approach helps to transform emotions into a conscious understanding of the world. The paper specifically dwells on this process of transforming perceptions into a worldview and purposeful cognition with the construction of integral onto-epistemological concepts that form the basis of ethics and social philosophy. The author’s particular attention was drawn to the principle of ascent from the concrete to the abstract developed by the Russian logician Dmitry Gorsky.

The path to the discovery of the laws of nature and new truths that reveal these laws is associated with abstraction from the entire wealth of characteristics of an object in the process of its cognition; and this is not an impoverishment of knowledge, but, on the contrary, its enrichment and progress. “The transition to thinking associated with abstracting activity, with language... makes the possibilities of our knowledge truly limitless. …This opens the way for inferential activity.” [8].

The explanatory power of the so-called “reversal of the method”, originally discovered by Karl Marx for differential calculus, is also used. In his “Mathematical Manuscripts”, K. Marx “traced how differential calculus and its specific symbolism grow from the relations of elementary algebra, and how in the future what was historically primary becomes secondary in a certain system of scientific knowledge.” [8]. This leads to the fact that the derivative becomes the source for a new round of cognition, thereby turning into its opposite; the basis turns into justification, and the previous starting point, the object of cognition, becomes secondary, dependent on the new method used in the search for foundations. [9]. Initially, the differential was introduced (by Leibniz) only as a symbolic shortcut for finding the derivative of a certain function. Marx noted that differential symbols, “which initially arise only as symbolic expressions of algebraically accomplished processes of differentiation, are necessarily transformed again into independent starting points, into symbols of operations that have yet to be performed, or into operational symbols. As a result of this, the symbolic equations that arise on the algebraic path turn into symbolic operational equations.” [9]. The “reversal of the method of differentiation” occurs. [9]. Since when Leibniz and Newton introduced differential symbols, their roots remained unclear – and they are algebraic – their removal within the theory was not mathematically justified. From this point of view, any starting point of any methodology must be justified by appeal to its origin, or foundation.

We use the reversal to demonstrate how theory and method, sensation and abstraction, are interchanged. For example, sensationalism as a way of organizing knowledge can outgrow the format of a method and become a theory and even a philosophical trend. We can also say that the construction of Neoplatonism was at first a speculative anti-sensualism. Distrust of the testimony of sensations gives rise to philosophical skepticism as a serious teaching, and in more recent times – the agnosticism of Kantianism and the “neo-Kantianism” of postmodernism, etc.

Results and Discussion. Five main “pictures” of Hellenism

The main lines of thought of the philosophers of that era which led to the painting of the main pictures of the world of that time, are as follows. Fierce protest of the state system even in the era of the Peloponnesian Wars, which were long and lost all meaning, was expressed by the elder Kynics at the end of the 5th century BC. Antisthenes, same as his like-minded people, considered himself a fighter who fought against human and social vices: dogmatism, orthodoxy, acquisitiveness, inequality, tyranny and vanity. Diogenes of Sinope was the first to call himself a cosmopolitan, but not in the sense of a citizen of the world, but in the sense of an anarchist. Kynicism rejected domination in any form, demonstrating indifference to conventional “establishment.” The nihilism of the Kynics was directed from the very beginning against the state and laws that “brought corruption” to native people, naturally good, born equal. Their invective was not always shameless buffoonery. “The rejection of reality and radical criticism characteristic of it, while remaining enviably stable, had an attractive force for all those opposed and hostile to the existing order.” [10]. Moreover, these fighters for universal morality sincerely believed that ascetic virtue was their weapon. Antisthenes was the first to ostentatiously wear the clothes of the poor.

A certain Pyrrho from Elis who laid the foundations for the worldview of skeptics took part in Alexander’s campaigns, returning home to Greece in 323. The vanitas vanitatum was revealed to him in those campaigns... He himself did not write anything, but it was from then that “adiaphoron” – “indifference”, “ataraxia” – “non-anxiety”, “apathy” – “dispassion”, “epoche” – “abstention from judgment” and “eudaimonia” – “bliss”, the state of a sage, became categories. Everything really flows and changes, and therefore nothing can be said with certainty. Skeptics do not talk about what exists, but only about what seems, or appears. The inconsistency of all judgments does not allow us to recognize anything as a lie or as the truth. “...The expression ‘Every word has its opposite’ leads to abstention from judgment: if things contradict each other, but words are equivalent, then ignorance of the truth follows. Moreover, this word itself has the opposite, since it, having refuted the others, turns around and destroys itself...” [11].

Dogmatists accused skeptics of resorting to dogmas like “we do not define anything.” However, this judgment is incommensurate, for example, with the statement “the world is spherical.” You can admit that you see and think, but how we see and how we think is unknown to us. [11]. The underlying basis of the phenomena is unclear to us; That’s where we stand.

Pyrrho’s student Timon of Phlius, a postmodernist before any postmodernism, who wrote many plays (of them, only “Scillas” has reached our time), presented the famous Three Questions: 1. In what form do things exist? – Things are indistinguishable and unstable. 2. How should we treat them? - Incredulously. 3. What behavior follows from this for us? – We cannot decide anything about things, or say anything about them, and therefore we must have complete freedom of our judgments and statements. [5]. De omnibus dubitandem, the Romans would later say, and this motto would be even adopted by Karl Marx.

The most prominent of the school of skeptics, Sextus Empiricus, not as rigoristic but as pedantic and meticulous as Hegel, and who also successfully used triads for his explanations, taught in the Three Books of Pyrrho’s Propositions: “We affirm that the beginning and cause of skepticism lie in the hope of equanimity... The main thing... is that any position can be opposed to another, equal to it because of this... we come to the need to abandon all kinds of dogmas”. [12]. However, this is not a vain denial; it was not for nothing that Sextus was nicknamed the Empiricist before any empiricism. All his arguments are closely related to the data of his contemporary science – physics, physiology, zoology, and especially medicine. Descartes, for example, borrowed his proof of the unreliability of perceptions [13].

Skepticism, long before modern times, raised the classic question: “Wie verhalten sich unsere Gedanke über die uns umgebende Welt zu dieser Welt selbst?” (Engels), that is, “how do our thoughts about the world relate to this world itself?” Depending on the answers, the eminent Russian philosopher Alexei Losev distinguished five different types of ancient skepticism. [5]. Basically, skeptics showed caution in their judgments and made the wise decision to behave, just for the case, “like Jones” i.e., “like everyone else,” – even if holding extreme theoretical relativism. Laertius wrote that skeptics in everyday life adhered to generally accepted behavior, just to be on the safe side.

Later, a different understanding of what had happened with classical polis was born.

The most optimistic, bright and calm worldview developed among the first Epicureans. Patience and a smile came: there, there, easy, guys, what happened? Remember the saving power of intelligent activity! You are philosophizing subjects; so, accept this reality. Political life is fundamentally unnatural. Let’s shake off this capital city’s ashes, let us organize a colony further away, in the garden, in a country estate! We’ll plant olives and oranges, grow tomatoes and lemons together, and learn to enjoy life again. Learn happiness, learn to see it in everything, in the absence of thirst, hunger and cold, and most of all in the imperturbable calm of a philosopher. There will be no ideological disputes in our garden, in our community! Yes, life in a city-state leads to endless unrest, it frightens and divides people. So, let’s free ourselves of it!

Today’s conflictology teaches that there are five main strategies of behavior in a crisis, including a conflict between an individual and a group (state, society): adaptation, avoidance, compromise, cooperation, and competition. Of these, the prudent early Epicureans chose avoidance.

Epicurus, an Athenian by family origin, Samian by birth (like Pythagoras), first arrived in Athens at the age of eighteen to confirm his citizenship. Then he traveled for a long time, organizing the teaching of materialistic philosophy in Mytilene, then in Lampsacus, and returned to Athens as a mature man with a group of like-minded people and founded the “Kepos” school (306 BC). His onto-gnoseology corresponds to the teachings of Democritus; evidence became the criterion of truth. But, like the Stoics after him, and in modern times Kant, Epicurus considered physics and the theory of knowledge the basis for the construction of ethics. Introducing the concept of “clinamen”, the spontaneous deflection of atoms, he substantiated the existence of freedom in the world. [3]. “A free life... cannot acquire much money, because it is not easy to do without subservience to the crowd or rulers; but it has everything in continuous abundance.” (From the Vatican Collection of Sayings. LXVII). [14].

Modesty is one of the main Greek virtues. A wonderful aphorism: “Nothing is enough for those for whom enough is not enough.” And: “One should laugh and philosophize, and at the same time do housework and use all other abilities and never cease to utter the words of true philosophy.” (From the Vatican Collection of Sayings. XLI). [14].

The smart and mocking philosophizing philologist Mikhail Gasparov, in his entertaining book, called Epicureanism “the philosophy of middlebrow.” [15]. This is not true. Sure, everyone chooses one’s own banners; it seems that only Aristotle did not get the “nuts” from Gasparov, everyone else suffered: Aristippus – the philosophy of the “hanger-on”, Antisthenes – the philosophy of the “day laborer”, living on a pittance and proud of his freedom. Even Platonism is branded as the philosophy of the “masters of life”, those who are noble, rich and want power; while skeptics and stoics were not worse to wear. But the philosopher who created such a main commandment could not be just a “philistine”: “Let no one put off studying philosophy in his youth and let no one in his old age tire of studying philosophy... Whoever says that the time has not yet come or has passed for these studies, says that either there is not yet, or there is no longer time for happiness”. Epicurus greets Menoeceus. [14].

And somewhat later than the fair, optimistic phratry of the “Garden”, but at the same end of the 4th century BC, shortly after the death of Alexander, a completely different congregation takes shape in the painted gallery of the official building in Athens, and the sermon of Zeno, “Epicure in reverse” begins. The basis of Epicureanism is the atomistic theory of Democritus; and “Stoicism returned to the materialistic teachings of Heraclitus.” [13].

The first of the Stoics, Zeno of Kition, was engaged in commerce. Soon after Alexander’s death, he arrived in Athens, expecting a trade cargo of purple. It turned out that the ship sank... Zeno exclaimed: “Thank you, fate! You are pushing me towards philosophy, yourself!” Looking for a teacher, he first followed Kratet, but soon realized that he had his own path. After Zeno, Cleanthes took over the leadership of the school, and then the strong logician Chrysippus, who defeated the skepticism of the then academicians. This was not Diogenes’ “day laborer’s philosophy”; it was, “despite all the oddities, the philosophy of a hard worker.” [15].

The Kosmos appeared before the new philosophers not as a democratic polis, but as a large living organism, expedient down to the smallest detail: therefore, you should do your job in your place and rejoice that you are serving the universal body. The onto-gnoseology of the Stoics borrowed a view of the cosmos as a single and whole body, filled with a world soul, pneuma: a mixture of fire and air, — and spiritualized. Sensations are the same pneuma emanating from the “controlling force,” the soul. “Comprehensive representation” was chosen as the criterion of true knowledge: “... Just as light makes you see yourself and what surrounds it, so representation makes you see yourself and what produced it.” [16].

The teaching of the Stoics included elements of hylozoism and pantheism. From this complex mixture the idea was born of the strictest necessity governing the cosmos. It “was combined with the doctrine of the perfection and purposiveness of the world, in which all its parts, all bodies and all beings depend on the whole, are determined by the whole and the perfection of this whole.” [13]. Agreement with this world order brings peace. “Above all, do not disturb your peace. After all, everything is in accordance with the nature of the whole...” [17].

For the sake of self-control, a Stoic must renounce all passions and courageously endure the blows of fate. Avoid the passions that give rise to suffering and confuse the soul; have patience; endure reality. The Epicurean ethic of happiness is cheerful; the ethic of duty of the Stoics is harsh. Don’t rejoice in joy, don’t grieve in grief. “The main thing for a person is not trouble, but his attitude towards trouble. ‘His son died’. But it didn’t depend on him! ‘His ship sank’. And this didn’t depend on him either. ‘He was sentenced to death’. Neither was it in his control. ‘He endured it all with courage’. Well – this did depend on him, and that was done good.” [15].

“But aren’t you annoyed at the lot that has been given to you by virtue of the structure of the Whole?” [6]. To cope with internal protest, it is necessary to realize that everything that exists has a clear and reasonable meaning; that the defective only appears imperfect. Later, in Rome, republican and then imperial, Stoicism acquired its greatest attraction for its fearlessness, dispassionate in its submission to fate. [Reale, G., Antiseri, J.: 196–199] Imperial rule has become the norm for almost a millennium. More and more new generations were being born for whom the democratic polis would become a thing of the past, almost a myth. However, not all emperors were tyrants. An example of an enlightened monarch is the “last Stoic” Marcus Antoninus Aurelius. He did not develop the onto-gnoseology of the Stoics: it had already been created. “An adept of Stoicism, he adopted someone else’s teaching, which he sought to follow in his behavior.” [18]. Mark Antonin devoted all his spiritual powers to ethics. The soul covers itself with shame when it is unable to resist pleasure or pain, the philosopher-emperor wrote in Carnuntus, on the Danube, during his campaign against the Alamanni. (“Reflections.” Book two). This is the third maxim; and the first one runs as follows: the soul covers itself with shame when it is indignant against the structure of the world. “The nature of the Whole is occupied with the fact that what exists in one place moves to another, changes it, removes it from here and transfers it there. Everything is subject to change, and therefore there is nothing to fear, lest something new happen. Everything is normal, everyone’s lot is equal.” [6].

And as if in despair, losing hope that in this earthly life something could finally work out for human good – historically, the last stages of the era turned their gaze from earth to heaven, in order, as if after a long journey, to return to homeland. “There are people gifted with the highest ability – ... mental contemplation ... They rush towards the One and remain in the rays of its light.” (Asmus about Plotinus’s “Enneads”). [13]. Recall, too, the lines of Appolinaire: “Des hymnes d’esclave aux murènes / La romance du mal aimé…”

We must not forget about the resistance of the masses to the oppression of the system as well as of the monarch. “In the second half of the 3rd century, throughout all the provinces of the [19] Empire... a wave of uprisings of the oppressed and impoverished lower classes swept through”, a symptom of a crisis of governance. [20]. A deeper understanding of Hellenism is to help contemporary people regain self-awareness and/or lost identity. It can assist to understand, if not philosophy, then the policy of all dictators: rule, otherwise someone will rule you.

Conclusion

It is difficult to admit that Hellenism is truly united in an independent era not only by the political and economic system, but also by a universal worldview. However, all researchers see significant common features in it. The process of selection and logical combinatorics of values, reproducing the past, explains the present and allows us to organize the foreseeable future. Apathy – dispassion, ataraxia – equanimity, autarky – autocracy: these are the three ideological principles inherent in all the voices of that time that expressed the mood of the era. They were caused, from the point of view of the doctrine of being and the doctrine of knowledge, by the rapid change of social existence and social consciousness, namely, the democratic way of life by the imperial system.

Five “pictures of Hellenism” were depicted and given attention to in the article, for the psychological and philosophical reaction to the crisis of democracy and reign of Empires always goes in parallel. Cynicism did not develop theoretical philosophy at all; the philosophy of Epicurus is best accessible to knowledge, and it is born from sensationalism; Neoplatonism became the worldview basis for Christianity, which we are not to consider here. Materialistic Epicureanism, philosophical skepticism as the embodiment of distrust in the testimony of the sense organs and mind, and philosophical stoicism as a manifestation of complete trust in the existing world order reasonableness were analyzed in the article.

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