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A BRIEF HISTORY OF GREEK PHILOSOPHY – The Common Ground of the Stoics, Epicureans, and Sceptics

GREEK PHILOSOPHY – II. RATIONALISM

§ 20 – The Common Ground of the Stoics, Epicureans, and Sceptics

Widely distinct as the schools of which we have just been speaking may seem to be, a comparison of them with each other and with the schools preceding them brings to light a very important point of agreement among them. As distinguished from the thinkers of the first period of Greek philosophy, the period of the nature-philosophers, these three schools, together with Plato and Aristotle, have their principle in the subjective (mind) instead of the objective (nature).

But with Plato and Aristotle, the subjective embraces positively the objective in its sway; with the later schools the subjective stands in a somewhat doubtful relation to the objective, preserving a quasi-independence, either in the midst of the objective, as with the Stoics, or in retirement from, and a negative attitude towards, the objective, as with the Epicureans and Sceptics. A relatively higher value is placed upon the particular individual subject than had been placed upon it by Plato and Aristotle, and the universal subject has a tendency to become purely transcendent. The sources and avenues of knowledge are supposed to lie in those things which are characteristic of man as an individual, i.e., in the senses chiefly, and the highest end of conduct is seen in that which has primary, if not sole, reference to the general individual as such. The philosophy of the Stoics, the Epicureans, and the Sceptics is, in tendency, if not in actuality, the philosophy of the individual as such determining itself: it is Socraticism developed on its narrower side and is the most advanced stage then yet reached by philosophy in this direction. In Scepticism the pure abstract individual is hardly distinguishable from the abstract universal, and Scepticism is therefore at the very threshold of a philosophy of self-determination. In Stoicism and Epicureanism the practical renunciation of all outside the individual self is incomplete. They are, therefore, slightly less advanced stages of the thought that constitutes the essence of Scepticism. In the stress laid by all these schools upon the individual, lies their strength as well as their weakness. But they only implicitly posited the individual as the universal.