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Living according to nature: isn’t that a logical fallacy?
“Zeno was the first (in his treatise On the Nature of Man) to designate as the end ‘life in agreement with nature’ (or living agreeably with nature), which is the same as a virtuous life, virtue being the goal towards which nature guides us.” (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, VII.87)
Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism, was not actually the first one to argue that life should be lived in agreement with nature, as we find the idea in Plato’s Republic, at 428e. In fact, pretty much all the Hellenistic philosophies, as well as at least some Eastern traditions (e.g., Daoism) are established on essentially the same foundation.
These philosophies do differ, however, in how exactly they cash out the slogan. What does it mean to live according to nature? For the Stoics, for instance, it meant to use reason in order to live prosocially, because they took reason and prosociality to be fundamental to human nature. The Epicureans, by contrast, thought that pleasure, and especially absence of pain, where fundamental, so that’s how they interpreted the idea of living naturally.
Who was right? Actually, that’s not what I want to discuss today, though I think that they all got something right. It is certainly true that human beings are capable of reason and are naturally prosocial. It…
