Seeing with Different Eyes - Cosmology and Divination

12
Chapter One
the physicists. 19 But first we need to gain a clearer understanding of Stoic
causation.
Stoics have an idiosyncratic (from our point of view) idea of what a
cause is, and also what a chain of causes is. We tend intuitively to think of
causes as events, and these events might precipitate other events and so
progress forward in time. But the Stoics are insistent that causes are not
events, but bodies. A famous example preserved in Sextus Empiricus will
help illustrate this:
The Stoics say that every cause is a body which becomes the cause to a
body of something incorporeal. For instance, the scalpel, a body, becomes
the cause to the flesh, a body, of the incorporeal predicate “being cut”. 20
A cause, strictly speaking, is the cause of an incorporeal predicate,
which cannot by strict Stoic thinking be a cause of anything, since only
material things can act as causes. So there is an immediate impediment
within Stoic physics to thinking of causal chains as marching forward in
time as cause precipitates effect which becomes a cause of something else.
Causes instead operate on one another, in Stoic thinking. Odd as this
sounds, again, it is a very well attested position in Stoic thinking. Clement
of Alexandria is characteristic of the evidence that shows causal
interactions are not one way at all, but reciprocal: “the knife is the cause to
the flesh of being cut, while the flesh is the cause to the knife of cutting.” 21
With this aspect of Stoic causation in mind, we revisit the notion of a
chain of causes (the Greek usually is alusis, chain, or heirmos string—
Cicero’s ordinem seriemque causarum). These terms often represent a
reference to temporal succession, to be sure, but they also mark (and
perhaps more prominently mark) a simultaneous and mutual interaction. A
chain, after all, represents temporal succession only after a metaphorical
jump. Its primary meaning is of a series of items synchronously linked
together in reciprocal interaction. Cicero’s ordo means a rank of solders
first and then many other ordered lines of objects. The idea of a sequence
of successive events appears only in definitions 8-12 (out of 15) in the
Oxford Latin Dictionary. Similarly a series is first a line of things and
second a sequence in time. Pushing this line of thinking further, in the
Stoic texts, fate is also often described as a “web” epiplokê of interwoven
causes, a description which is incongruent with temporal succession. 22 A
further example from Clement’s discussion of the mutuality of causation
cited above makes the point rather nicely: “the stones in the arch are
causes to each other of the predicate ‘remaining’”. 23 (Of course, fate has
something to do with what will happen next, but more prominent in the
evidence is a thesis about mutual interrelation among things at a given