Epilogue

Greek Philosophy beyond the Gym

The practice of opening philosophical schools in gyms ended with Aristotle. Yet the gym’s agonistic spirit lived on in the intellectual contests between rival schools. These proceeded on a number of fronts: logic, physics, scientific method, and so on. When it comes to moral philosophy, the two main debates pick up threads we have already encountered.

The first debate centers on moral theory. In laying out his account of a life well lived, Aristotle looked to elite performers and argued that happiness consists in a life of excellent activity. Yet, to use a sports analogy, he was unclear whether excellent activity consisted in actually winning or merely how one played the game. This ambiguity is reflected in NE’s talk of good fortune and wealth as ornaments (kosmoi), which usually accompany virtuous activity. In the centuries to follow, Epicureans embraced the first option along with an idea Aristotle dismissed as fit for cows: the ultimate goal in life is pleasure. Yet rather than locating the highest pleasure in some kind of flow, Epicurus argued that pleasure reaches its limit in the absence of pain. So, while Aristotle encourages us to aim high in the pursuit of divine pleasures, Epicurus advises us to aim low so that we can avoid unnecessary stress and disappointment.¹ This is as far from the gym as Greek philosophy ever gets.² The Stoics embraced the second option, arguing that the only good is virtue and that human flourishing consists exclusively in how we play the hand we are dealt.³ Pleasure, pain, life, death, wealth, family, and everything else outside of one’s own virtue are, for the Stoics, a matter of indifference. Since everything else includes bodily health and athletic victory, the Stoics sever what for Plato, and to a lesser extent Aristotle, was a vital connection between the gym and moral education. Games, however, provide a useful set of analogies for Stoic living. Scholars have begun to explore Cicero on archery, Seneca on gladiators, and Epictetus on wrestling.⁴ In modern terms, the Epicurean/Stoic divide provides a clear articulation of consequentialist and nonconsequentialist ethics, prefiguring the now more famous debate between Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill.

The second debate focuses on philosophical pedigree and practice. Apart from the Epicureans, all major schools in the centuries following Aristotle claimed Socrates as their founder one way or another. To this end, the Stoics rejected Plato’s division of the human soul into rational and nonrational parts, arguing instead that all human thought, emotions included, was ultimately a matter of belief. This is in line with the idea that Socrates explores in Laches and elsewhere that all virtues boil down to wisdom. The central goal of Stoic philosophy, therefore, is to remove false beliefs—for instance, that pleasure is good and pain is bad—so that people may reason correctly. Medical imagery abounds.⁵ At the same time as Stoicism was developing these ideas, Plato’s successors at the Academy turned from the positive Platonic theories we saw in Symposium and Republic to embrace a Socratic life of inquiry. The Academic skeptics, as they are now called, developed their characteristic approach to philosophy through centuries of competition with other schools, the Stoics first and foremost. The result is a formalized version of Socratic cross-examination that shoots down all claims to knowledge yet provisionally treats some ideas as more “plausible” than others.⁶

For whatever reason, Stoicism is trending right now, from positive psychology to self-help books to online forums for misogynists and white supremacists.⁷ Some of this is useful, some of it is dangerous, most of it is harmless. As I said in the preface, however, when it comes to offering frameworks for living one’s life, all of this suffers from the same flaw: it speaks with a single voice. Attempts to adapt Aristotle to modern life suffer from the same problem. To provide an approach that embraces multiple voices, I will end, as I began, on a Socratic note.

Marcus Tullius Cicero is most famous as a lawyer, politician, and literary figure. During his youth, however, he studied philosophy in Athens and befriended the leading philosophers of his day. During Rome’s civil war, he clashed with Julius Caesar and was briefly pushed out of the political spotlight. Under what was effectively house arrest, Cicero wrote a series of dialogues presenting Greek philosophy to Roman readers. He presents this as a service to the state as he translates ideas not only into the Latin language but also into Roman sensibilities. Like the Athenians, the Romans loved taking each other to court. Cicero thus put his legal skills to use by modeling dialogues after court cases. His works are set at country villas, where Roman senators and generals spent their leisure time (Latin, otium). Cicero’s own villa contained two gyms, which he called the Academy and Lyceum. Each dialogue proceeds through paired speeches, which imitate lawyers arguing prosecution and defense. One character lays out a school’s view of a given topic, and the next character rips it to shreds.⁸ At the end, characters play judge and vote for which of the views on offer seems, if not true, at least the most plausible or truth-like. Here at the end of Philosophy at the Gymnasium, I invite you to do the same. My goal has not been to convince readers of any particular Socratic, Platonic, or Aristotelian theory, but to give each view a critical airing and leave readers to take what is useful to them in their own lives. As Cicero puts it: “The Academics typically do not set out their own ideas. Instead, they approve of views that seem to come nearest to the truth, to compare arguments, to draw out everything that can be said in support of any position and without claiming any authority of their own, to leave inquirers free to make up their own minds. This is the method that was handed down from Socrates” (Cicero, On Divination 2.150).