![]() In his On providence book 1 says: ‘When the world is fiery through and through, it is directly both its own soul and commanding-faculty. Speaking of soul, the ancient Stoics believed the cosmos has a soul, and it is God. Chrysippus, the third head of the Stoa, argued that universal nature is the source of our knowledge of virtue, good and evil, and happiness.įurther, according to Plutarch, Chrysippus asserted, “physical theory turns out to be ‘at once before and behind’ ethics.” As I have written before, the conscious and providential cosmos is the soul of the Stoic philosophical system. More importantly, Stoic practice relies on the essential relationship between the way the world is (physics) and the way we should act in the world (ethics). First, despite the objections offered by those who adhere to the metaphysical assumptions of the current scientific orthodoxy, there is no objective scientific reason to abandon the conscious cosmos of Stoicism. ![]() Today, Traditional Stoics think this conception of the cosmos is still viable. The ancient Stoics considered their unique conception of a conscious, providentially ordered cosmos a necessary element of their holistic philosophical system. Therefore, the term conscious serves quite well as a substitute for a living being (organism) that is rational, animate, and intelligent. Instead of a conscious cosmos, we could say a rational, animate, and intelligent cosmos however, that will not appease those who believe the universe is mechanistic, reductive to matter, and governed by laws that just happen, accidentally, to be conducive to life as we know it here on Earth. I cannot imagine an entity that meets all those criteria we would deny is conscious. The ancient Stoics argued the cosmos is a living being (organism) that is rational, animate, and intelligent. Next, we must admit that many definitions of consciousness exist today. The word first appears in English in the seventeenth century. When we consider a concept like a conscious cosmos and relate it to ancient Stoicism, we first must acknowledge that the Greeks did not have a word for conscious. Modern thinkers frequently label this idea panpsychism, which entails consciousness as a fundamental aspect of the cosmos. A few boldly claim the universe is conscious, just as the Stoic did more than two thousand years ago. Some now suggest consciousness must be a fundamental aspect of the cosmos and refer to a mind-like background in the universe. However, numerous modern scientists and philosophers describe the nature of the cosmos in ways that are compatible with the intuitions of the ancient Stoics. Some people think the idea of a conscious cosmos is an antiquated relic of ancient Stoicism that we must abandon in light of modern science. The doctrine that the world is a living being, rational, animate and intelligent, is laid down by Chrysippus in the first book of his treatise On Providence, by Apollodorus in his Physics, and by Posidonius… And it is endowed with soul, as is clear from our several souls being each a fragment of it.
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