The Stoic Creed - College of Stoic Philosophers

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PREDECESSORS OF STOICS IN ETHICS 127
was not the way of the schools of ancient Athens ;
and, as a matter of fact, neither the Stoics,
1 nor any
of the early post-Platonic sects, owned a large debt to
Plato. On the contrary, they went, for the most part,
on entirely different lines, and reverted to the views of
pre-Socratic thinkers, who, one would have supposed,
were superseded. In Stoicism, the spiritualism of Plato
was supplanted by materialism, and his imposing
Theory of Ideas was not merely ignored but deliberately
rejected. This certainly needs explanation, and more
reasons than one immediately suggest themselves.
On the one hand, there is the consideration that the
Platonic teaching, being so supremely speculative, was
little in touch with common life and the everyday world.
"
Plato was the dragon to use a simile of Confucius,
when comparing Laotsze with himself he soars in the
air, ignoring terra firma. Neither the mode of thinking
nor the subject-matter of thought was the same to
Plato as to the Stoics : it is
very much the difference
between viewing ethics from the high contemplative
and purely theoretical side (including its aesthetic
aspect), and viewing it as a practical thing, designed as
a rule of life and a guide to conduct. On the other
hand, the Platonic ethics subordinated the individual
to the State, and hardly recognized him as an individual
at all ;
whereas the moment had now come (politically
determined) when individualism in Greece had strongly
asserted itself (just as it did, centuries afterwards, in
Western Europe, at the time of the Renaissance and the
Reformation),
and Zeno and his immediate successors
1
Things were different, of course, with the later Eclectics, such
as Seneca.