Theological Origins of Modernity

140 chapter five
more characteristically in terms of reason ruling or being overpowered by
passion. However, the absence of a concept of will did not mean that they
did not understand the diff erence between voluntary and involuntary actions,
as Aristotle’s famous discussion in the Nichomachean Ethics makes
clear.
Hellenistic thought was also deeply concerned with the issue of freedom,
even if the will was something largely unknown to them. 27 For the
Epicureans the end of human life was happiness, which they understood to
be autarchia and apatheia, self-suffi ciency and freedom from disturbance.
Th ey believed that the chief impediment to such freedom was the fear of
death. Since the sources of death in their view were other men and the
gods, freedom and happiness could only be obtained by withdrawing from
civic life into private association with friends and by coming to understand
that the gods were unconcerned with the lives of men.
Th e Stoics understood happiness in a surprisingly similar manner, but
rather than trying to isolate themselves from the world or deny divine intervention
in human life, they sought to become one with the divine logos
that governs all things. To do so was to become a supremely wise man or
sage. Th e sage in their view unites himself with the divine logos by means
of indubitable or veridical knowledge, which he obtains as a result of
kataleptic (clear and evident) sense impressions. In this way he can know
rather than merely opine and become free by becoming one with fate. All
other humans are governed by this incomprehensible fate and thus remain
slaves. Th e wise man, on this account, is not free from the natural causes
that move all things, but has an inner spiritual freedom in his union with
the whole.
Th e Academics (or as they were later called, the skeptics) argued that
the apodictic knowledge that the Stoics sought was an illusion because for
every kataleptic impression one found another equally certain and opposite
impression could also be found. Th ey thus sought to draw the Stoics
into debate to force them to defend their assertions. Th ey believed that the
Stoics in this way would inevitably become entangled in contradictions.
Th e skeptics also denied that the Stoics had rightly understood necessity
because they made an error in imagining that whatever did happen had
happened by necessity, when in fact much that had happened happened because
it was freely chosen. In place of the certainty that the Stoics thought
could alone constitute knowledge, the Academic skeptics sought the “plausible”
or “probable” (to pithanon), which they believed could be obtained
by a rigorous consideration of matters from a variety of viewpoints. Freedom
as the skeptics understood it was thus not an imaginary union with