Abstract
The relation of reason/rationality to passion/emotion emerges in Posidonius’ Platonic-inspired polarization of our rational and passionate faculties. I compare Posidonius’ position to Chrysippus’ converse impression that reason and passion derive from the same internal faculty. In noting that for Posidonius the faculty responsible for our passion/emotion is self-regulating, we can ask whether even in his model reason and passion share similarities. Game and Metcalfe’s perspectives become useful in response through their criticism of sociology’s exclusion of passion from objective rationalizations. For Game and Metcalfe the sociologist’s rationalizing drive actually derives from one’s passionate/emotional faculty. This insight helps us to reconsider how firmly Posidonius really separates reason from passion. From this, I evaluate whether Game and Metcalfe exhibit more consistencies with Chrysippean or Posidonian Stoicism. Despite the preceding considerations, Posidonius is adamant that we must individually arrest any traces of passion in rationality. This relates to his concern about our being alienated from our true internal nature. Conversely, for Game and Metcalfe, when we individually arrest our impassioned impulses, we unsuccessfully attempt to enact a collectively standardized alienation of ourselves from our passionate self.
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Notes
- 1.
James Davis’ In Defense of Civility exemplifies the argument that there is a modern perpetuation of “certain dualisms inherited from Greco-Roman culture” (Davis 2010, 133). One such dualism is the nature-culture divide that opposes a culture of “civility” from an otherwise natural human condition. This is consistent with the interpretation offered in Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents in which civilizing processes break from an unordered natural origin. Civilization for Freud protects humans accordingly from what is dangerous about nature, whereby civilizing “activities and resources are useful to men for making the earth serviceable to them, [and] for protecting them against the violence of the forces of nature” (Freud 1989 [1930], 42).
- 2.
Michel Foucault (1977 (1975)) offers one of the more historically prominent discussions of this modern transition in how a state punishes its citizens. Punishment’s pre-modern forms involve highly visible public spectacles that declare a state’s power via the destruction of the perpetrator’s body. Modern punishment shifts to a more controlled and concealed regulation that works through offenders’ bodies in a productive manner.
- 3.
For Jeremy Blumenthal the “appropriateness of various emotions for the substantive law” (Blumenthal 2005, 1) is a continually negotiated question. The supposition of a distinction between the rational objectivity of law and the subjectivity of emotion also emerges in Hans Kelsen’s legal theory. The belief emerges that contrary to law, something like “political ideology has its root in volition, not in cognition; in the emotional, not in the rational … it arises … from interests other than the interest in truth” (Kelsen 1945, xvi). Not all scholars share the opinion that law is rationally objective, polarized from the emotional and ideological drivers of other aspects of society. Katherine O’Donovan commentates on feminist theory’s critique of the failure of law to provide objective “equality,” serving to “demystify law and to show its rule as a legitimating ideology” (O’Donovan 1989, 127).
- 4.
Marcus Aurelius regularly argues that along with the nature of all other humans his “nature is both rational and social” (Marcus Aurelius 1964, 6.44, 2). To complement this translation from Maxwell Staniforth, see also Gregory Hays’ translation of this phrase as where our nature is “rational and civic” (Marcus Aurelius 2002, 6.44).
- 5.
For a proof of this, see Epictetus’ Discourses. Epictetus posits that a liberation from one’s emotions is a liberation from the external things in the world with which such emotions are associated and that might master us. By instead demanding our indifference toward such emotions, he proclaims that if “I liberate myself from my master—which is to say, from the emotions that make my master frightening—what troubles can I have? No man is my master any longer” (Epictetus 2008, 1.29, 63).
- 6.
Posidonius completed his education in Athens under the Stoic philosopher Panaetius, whose influence reportedly attracted Posidonius to Rhodes. In the Bibliographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers Ian Durham informs us that as Posidonius developed his scientific interests from such education he became “responsible for an early measurement of the circumference of the Earth” (Durham 2007, 927).
- 7.
Norman Pratt agrees this is the typical reading of Epictetus’ argument that rational and emotional states in the healthily directed individual arise from a singular faculty. Pratt states that for Epictetus emotional disturbance occurs when the rational individual is unable to “fend off irrational external influences” (Pratt 1983, 59). The consequent “irrational behavior” is internally motivated though and is “not to be attributed to a non-rational component of the soul” (59).
- 8.
For a more comprehensive breakdown of this definition of pathê, see John Cooper’s chapter “Posidonius on Emotions” (1998, 71–72).
- 9.
Cicero provides an example of this definition in The Nature of the Gods when he writes that for the Stoic Balbus, just “as other natural substances are each generated, made to grow and sustained by their own seeds, so the nature of the world has all the movements of volition, impulses and desires which the Greeks call hormai , and exhibits the actions in agreement with these in the way that we ourselves do who are moved by emotions and sensations” (Cicero 1997, 2.58).
- 10.
Plato similarly proposes in Timaeus that the “appetitive” part of the soul does not fully understand reason but instead is attracted to “images and phantasms” (Plato 2008a, 71a). The appetitive faculty is accordingly where an idea is transported via one’s reason/intellect. This makes the appetitive faculty an image of reason that can “act as a mirror for thoughts stemming from intellect, just as a mirror receives impressions and gives back images to look at” (71b).
- 11.
Situating this source of evil or corruption internally does not in Kidd’s commentary (Kidd in Posidonius 1999, 687) mean for Posidonius that we have an evil daimon in the irrational part of our soul. Gretchen Reydams-Schils notes that such a thesis would “turn Posidonius into more of a dualist” (Reydams-Schils 1997, 474). For a discussion on the daimon’s role as our rational guide see Chap. 2’s discussion with Epictetus.
- 12.
John Cooper (1998) and Christopher Gill (1998) express concerns regarding the value orientations of Galen’s commentary on Posidonius. The intricacies of each argument go beyond the requirements of our concerns here. It is nevertheless worth recognizing that in Gill’s estimation there might be greater similarities between Platonic psychology and Stoic thinking, “both Chrysippean and Posidonian, than Galen allows” (Gill 1998, 1). Similarly for Cooper, in one regard it is “clear that Posidonius did indeed disagree openly, seriously, and explicitly, with Chrysippus” on the status of emotions in relation to reason. It is also evident that Posidonius “cited and praised Plato precisely for having recognized that human nature encompasses two other psychic powers besides that of reasoning and decision” (Cooper 1998, 71). In another regard however, Cooper is suspicious about the extreme position that Galen affords to Posidonius and explores whether it is “right to say simply that Posidonius abandoned the standard Stoic view (Chrysippus’) about the psychic source and nature of the emotions” (71–72). Gill also explores in “Galen and the Stoics: Mortal Enemies or Blood Brothers” (Gill 2007b) whether there are contradictions in accounts of an ideological opposition between Galen and Chrysippean Stoicism. Consistent with this concern, Gill elsewhere describes the “shift back to Plato … in later Hellenistic thinkers such as … Posidonius … as a change in the explicitness with which the relationship between Platonic and Stoic thought is discussed [rather] than as a move towards an eclectic combination of the two approaches” (Gill 2007a, 192).
- 13.
Galen states strongly: “I can find no answer to Posidonius on these points, nor do I think anyone else will be able to either, to judge from the evidence of the facts and from contemporary Stoics. My generation has not lacked Stoics either in number or distinction, but I have heard no convincing statement from any one of them to answer these difficulties put forward by Posidonius” (Galen in Posidonius 1999, Fragment 164).
- 14.
In Stobaeus’ Anthology an early Stoic voice is described as stating that “‘irrational’ means the same as ‘disobedient to reason’” (Stobaeus, 10a, Text 102, in I&G, 138). Various scholars, including Malcolm Schofield (Schofield 2003, 236–238), attribute this voice to Chrysippus.
- 15.
Posidonius’ reading of the hierarchized relation between the rational and irrational faculties is consistent with the Platonic conception of the rule of reason. This is a relation found in Plato’s Republic that we earlier discussed (Plato 2012, 4.441e).
- 16.
The only Australian-authored book to ever receive a nomination for the European Amalfi Prize for Sociology and Social Sciences.
- 17.
For the reader who has worked through the chapters of this book sequentially, Game and Metcalfe’s concern here will evoke our earlier engagement with Max Weber. In The Vocation Lectures (2004) Weber critiques the increasingly rationalist foci of the sciences of his era.
- 18.
Durkheim ’s consistent characterization of social facts is that they are external to each human and “independent of individual will” (Durkheim 1938 (1895), 2). Because an individual’s behaviors are driven by this externally collective regularity and not by subjective contingencies, the social sciences can study such behaviors as objective phenomena. This direction mirrors for Durkheim the objectivity of the “natural sciences” (xxxix).
- 19.
A basis for this position possibly presents in The Symposium where Plato details how the “happy being, the god” that is “Love possesses self-control in very large measure. For all agree that self-control means overcoming pleasures and desires” (Plato 2008b, 196c).
- 20.
As found in Barthes’ The Responsibility of Forms (1985).
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Johncock, W. (2020). Is Reason External to Passion? Posidonius, Ann Game, and Andrew Metcalfe on Self-Division. In: Stoic Philosophy and Social Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43153-2_12
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