The Roman Stoics: Self,
Responsibility, and Affection by Gretchen Reydams-Schils is an important
contribution to the English-language literature on Stoicism, with particular
value on account of its focus on Roman Stoicism. Rome’s adoption of Greek
philosophy is one of the most important moments in the history of Western
thought because so much of the later Western tradition receives the products of
Greek civilization as Romans interpreted and imparted them. An impression of
the general tenor of Roman society, however, and its hard-nosed suspicion of
theoretical speculation, has perhaps tended to blind us to the fruitfulness of
Roman philosophy in its own right. Reydams-Schils refuses to trivialize
thinkers like Seneca or Marcus Aurelius for their determination to apply
Stoic principles to the pressing demands of their society instead of just
discussing them. She displays a particular gift for discerning the enduring
influence of Stoic metaphysics in the Roman Stoics despite the fact that their
writings deal almost entirely with meeting concrete and personal challenges. In
this resolutely practical orientation, Reydams-Schils argues, the Roman Stoics
in fact fulfill a theoretical potential innate to Stoicism that ensured that
its destiny would diverge from that of Cynicism or Epicureanism, both of which
"thrived on the margins of ordinary life and on the outskirts of
society," (p. 92).  

Central to her account of Roman
Stoicism is the concept of the self. The Stoics, as she points out, possessed
"the most unified soul model in ancient thought," (p. 16). Stoicism
does not have the strong notion of transcendence that introduces
discontinuities into the Platonic worldview, nor does its physics resolve
living unities into atomic vortices. Its commitment to the power and
pervasiveness of reasoning, and to the principle of universal access to that reason,
similarly serves to integrate all the fields in which the self is active and to
foster the sense of a "core" to the self. But the Stoic self "is
in essence a mediator, and not its own final end," (p. 13). The Stoic self
is unified without being in any sense closed in upon itself, for it acquires
its unity through mediation. The soul is for Stoics a totally corporeal
entity, and yet through a lifelong process of "appropriation," oikeiôsis,
through mediating, that is, between impressions, reason, and impulse, the
soul’s "commander", hêgemonikon, the self’s core, achieves
real normativity and, in the person of the sage, becomes the very embodiment of
the providential ordering of the cosmos.

Throughout her book,
Reydams-Schils skillfully contrasts the Stoic picture with the Platonic one.
Because the Stoic ideal is immanent and concrete at all times, the sage’s
illumination is a real world-historical achievement, while for the Platonist
the soul’s "recollection," anamnêsis, of the ideal is itself
an ideal and eternal "event," sharply distinct from the plane of
"existential" memory, the learning through life experience
culminating in the choice, after death, of a new life. Once this choice is
made, however, the process of reincarnation dissolves existential memory, of
which only its consequences remain, consequences which the regenerated
Platonic self must deal with just as if they were objective circumstances, and
not the results of any "choice" at all. In this sense, the Platonic
self is never embedded as a whole in the world, nor is the ideal ever wholly
personal. The Stoic self, by contrast, mediates between the universal and the
particular here and now, and it is in their commitment to thinking through the
self’s singularity without abstracting it from its context that Stoic thought
truly comes into its own. The Stoic sage has constituted ideality for
herself in the world and entirely out of the materials that nature and society
have provided her.

This is where Reydams-Schils
brings out the distinctive contribution of Roman Stoicism. Roman Stoics, having
successfully grasped in theory the mediation between the ideal and the
concrete, the universal and the particular, which forms the core of Stoic metaphysics,
apply themselves to the work of mediation: mediation between
self-sufficiency and the bonds of love and friendship (chap. 2); between
political engagement and philosophical detachment (chap. 3); between reason and
emotion (chap. 4); between a human nature universal in principle and human
beings inextricably entwined in socially constructed relationships, such as
gender roles, which can and do fall well short of reciprocity (chap. 5).

A brief review can scarcely do
justice to the skillful balance of insight, erudition, argumentation, and
easygoing exposition with which Reydams-Schils moves within and amongst her
ancient sources, weaving together cutting edge philology with an appreciation
for the broader intellectual context in which Stoic thought has influenced
thinkers from Montaigne to Foucault. She thus finds a way to make the Stoics
speak to contemporary theoretical concerns, such as intersubjective
recognition, without lapsing into ventriloquism. Without ever stepping outside
the boundaries of rigorous historical criticism and philosophical analysis, she
manages to set the reader thinking through for herself the problems the Stoics
set for themselves, and it is to be hoped that this book will provide an
incentive for readers outside a narrow academic specialization to take up the
texts of Marcus Aurelius, Seneca or Cicero, and let these thinkers, candid in
their voice, generous with their wisdom, passionately devoted to
cosmopolitanism but never dazzled by utopianism, speak to us again.

© 2006 Edward Butler

Edward Butler received his Ph.D.
from the New School for Social Research for his dissertation, "The
Metaphysics of Polytheism in Proclus."

Categories: Philosophical