From ancient to new Stoicism: III — Stoic ethics
A conceptual map of where Stoicism came from and where it may be going
Let us continue our exploration of what a possible Stoicism for the 21st century and beyond might look like by finishing first to survey its ancient forerunner. So far we’ve looked at Stoic physics and logic, it is now time to turn to the crucial topic of ethics, which is supposed to be the fruit of studying the other two fields of inquiry. What we want is to arrive at an understanding of how we can live a life worth living (ethics), and in order to do so, according to the early Stoics, we need to grasp something about how the world works (physics) and to reason correctly about it (logic). As in the previous two occasions, I’m going to refer the reader to the excellent treatment by Marion Durand and Simon Shogry, published in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, if you are interested in digging deeper.
Stoicism as eudaimonism
To begin with, Stoicism is a type of eudaimonism, i.e., a philosophy that posits eudaimonia, or happiness in the broad sense, as the telos, or goal, of life:
“The end, for the sake of which everything is done, but which is not itself done for the sake of anything else.” (Stobaeus, Anthology, 2.77)
