German Stoicisms

From Hegel to Sloterdijk

Kurt Lampe, Andrew Benjamin, Kurt Lampe, Andrew Benjamin

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781350195462
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350081888
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Philosophy

Stoicism has had a diverse reception in German philosophy. This is the first interpretive study of shared themes and dialogues between late nineteenth-century and twentieth-century experts on classical antiquity and philosophers. Assessing how modern philosophers have incorporated ancient resources with the context of German philosophy, chapters in this volume are devoted to philosophical giants such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Wilhelm Dilthey, Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Hans Jonas, Hans Blumenberg, and Peter Sloterdijk. Among the ancient Stoics, the focus is on Seneca, Epictetus, and doxography, but reference will also be made to texts that have so far been neglected by non-specialists.

Often references to Stoic texts are playful, making it hard for non-specialists to reconstruct their understanding of the sources; by illuminating and enhancing the philosophical significance of these receptions, this book argues that they can change our understanding of Greek and Roman Stoic doctrines and authors, twentieth-century continental philosophy, and the themes which coordinate their ongoing dialogues. Some of these themes are surprising for Stoicism, such as the poetics of tragic drama and the anthropological foundations of hermeneutics. Others are already central to Stoic reception, such as the constitution of the subject in relation to various ethical, ecological, and metaphysical powers and processes; among these are contemplation and knowledge; identity and plurality; temporality, facticity, and fate; and personal, social, and planetary forms of self-cultivation and self-appropriation.

Addressing the need for a synoptic vision of related continental readings of Stoicism, this book brings ancient texts into new dialogues with up-to-date scholarship, facilitating increased understanding, critical evaluation, and creative innovation within the continental response to Stoicism.

1

Stoicism and Modern German Philosophy

Kurt Lampe and Andrew Benjamin¹

1. Introduction

What is the historical and philosophical significance of Stoicism? The answer depends to a substantial extent on the place and time on which we choose to focus. Scholarship has made enormous progress in synthesizing and interpreting the difficult evidence for Greek and Roman Stoic doctrines and arguments in their original intellectual, practical, and cultural contexts. These ideas and exercises have recently taken on new life through the emergence and rapid expansion of Modern Stoicism.² Stoic reception has also become increasingly vigorous in the field of inquiry (e.g., Spanneut 1973; Colish 1990; Strange and Zupko 2004; Sellars 2016). Yet, even the 1,307 pages of Stoizismus in der europäischen Philosophie, Literatur, Kunst und Politik: Eine Kulturgeschichte von der Antike bis zur Moderne (Stoicism in European Philosophy, Literature, Art, and Politics: A Cultural History from Antiquity to Modernity, ed. Neymeyr, Schmidt, and Zimmerman 2008) pursue philosophical reception only as far as Friedrich Nietzsche. The presence of Stoic texts or ideas in German philosophy during the last 140 years is almost entirely uncharted.³

The present volume aims to begin mapping this territory. It has emerged from an international networking project devoted to the reception of ancient Stoic philosophy in modern continental philosophy.⁴ One part of this project has brought together classicists, Germanists, and experts in modern European philosophy. Our aim has been not only to gather, elucidate, and critically evaluate existing responses to Greek, Roman, and neo-Stoic texts, but equally to create new conversations between these historically and conceptually distant systems of thinking and living. Given the novelty of this field of research, we cannot pretend to have achieved an exhaustive survey; indeed, we hope that other scholars will identify texts and topics for future research.⁵ That being said, we hope to have opened up new vistas in intellectual history and revealed new philosophical significance in Stoic doctrines and practices.

The remainder of this introduction will not simply survey the chapters to come. Rather, our first aim is supplement their analyses with some additional contexts. Our second aim is to synthesize the coming chapters in order to hazard some general conclusions about German reception of Stoicism.

2. Altertumswissenschaft and Philosophy ca. 1850–1950

In Anglophone literature it is a commonplace that Hellenistic philosophy, including Stoicism, received relatively little attention until the mid-1970s. While it is true that Stoic doctrines are much better understood today than they were forty years ago, it is worth noting that they have been a major topic in German scholarship for well over 150 years. Some of the research produced around the turn of the century is still cited today. For instance, scholars still read Adolf Bonhöffer’s studies of Epictetus (1890, 1894), and Hans von Arnim’s compilation of the fragments of the Old Stoa—whose organization implies a comprehensive interpretation of their doctrinal system—remains the standard source for specialists (1903–5). Max Pohlenz completed his doctoral dissertation—in Latin—on Posidonius about the same time that Bonhöffer and von Arnim were writing (1898). Pohlenz’s teaching and research on Stoicism would culminate fifty years later with Die Stoa: Geschichte einer Geistigen Bewegung (The Stoa: History of an Intellectual Movement, 1948), parts of which are still consulted today.

Of course, bare citations tell us little about the content or significance of this scholarship. In this regard two observations can be made. The first is that several important German philosophers conducted in-depth research on Stoicism early in their careers. It is well known that Friedrich Nietzsche’s doctoral dissertation was on the sources of Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of the Illustrious Philosophers, which contains one of our most important Stoic doxographies (DL 7.39–160, Nietzsche 1868). But there are far more striking examples. Few today remember Ludwig Stein, though he was internationally renowned as both a professor of philosophy and sociology and a journalist of international affairs (“Dr. Ludwig Stein,” 1930; Haberman 1995). After completing rabbinical studies and a doctorate in philosophy, Stein become a protégé of the great historian of philosophy Eduard Zeller, with whom he cofounded the still-influential journal Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie. Stein not only completed a Habilitationschrift on Die Psychologie der Stoa (The Psychology of the Stoa, 1886) but followed this with the much-longer Die Erkenntnistheorie der Stoa (The Epistemology of the Stoa, 1888). In the latter he makes significant progress toward rectifying Zeller’s misunderstandings and dismissive judgments about Stoic logic, epistemology, and philosophy of language (Zeller 1865: 63–81). Stein’s analysis is theoretically ambitious, since he tries to think through Stoic doctrines about concepts (ennoēmata), universals (ideai, eidē, genē), and “sayables” (lekta) in terms of a non-Stoic conception of linguistic and metaphysical “nominalism” (LS 30, 33; Stein 1888: 276–300). In this he develops a suggestion by Prantl (1855: 416), who was asking thought-provoking questions about this material as early as the 1850s (1855: 416–37; compare LS 28–29). It bears remarking that this attention to the metaphysical implications of Stoic theories about language foreshadows Émile Bréhier’s much more well-known claims about Stoic sayables in La théorie des incorporels dans l’ancien stoïcisme (The Theory of the Incorporeals in Ancient Stoicism, 1908).

The second observation is that German scholarship has had surprisingly little impact on German philosophical reception of Stoicism. Bréhier’s bold claims exerted considerable influence on Gilles Deleuze’s Logic of Sense and several other thinkers (1969; see Lampe 2020). But the explorations of Prantl, Stein, and others have not inspired twentieth-century German philosophers in the same way. This point can be illustrated with another philosopher who began his career with a monograph on Stoicism. Günter Abel’s Stoizismus und Frühe Neuzeit (Stoicism and the Early Modern Period, 1978) joins an ongoing debate about the role played by neo-Stoic cosmology in the emergence of what can loosely be called the “modern western worldview” (see Section 7). Yet German scholarship on Stoic philosophy of language does not appear to be among the inspirations for Abel’s later work, central to which are theories of signification and interpretation.

The reasons for this missing dialogue between specialist scholarship on Stoicism and contemporary German philosophy undoubtedly vary from thinker to thinker. Here reference will be made to only one dimension of the explanatory background, which has to do with debates about the nature and purpose of Altertumswissenschaft (the “science of antiquity”). To simplify a great deal, models of Altertumswissenschaft were situated between two poles. For one, research aimed at inspiration and transformation of oneself and society, for which reason interpretation was in part intuitive, artistic, and oriented toward the interpreter’s present-day concerns. For the other, research aimed at comprehensive reconstruction of a distant culture, for which reason interpretation was bound by technical methodologies and wholly focused on historicized frames of meaning. In the most famous episode in this debate, Friedrich Nietzsche fell closer to the former pole, while Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf fell closer to the latter (Silk and Stern 2016: esp. 108–56; Landfester et al. 2006). The fact that Wilamowitz proved more influential might have something to do with the schism in the German reception of Stoicism. It would not then be coincidental that Pohlenz, the greatest German scholar of Stoicism in the first half of the twentieth century, was a devoted protégé of Wilamowitz (Dörrie 1962: 635).

This is clear in Pohlenz’s polemic against Karl Reinhardt’s study of the Stoic Posidonius. Reinhardt begins his monograph by decrying the sterility of both biographical and doxographical studies of ancient philosophers. He compares both to reconstructions of extinct animals based only on their bones (1921: 1). His methodology focuses instead on the “inner form” (innere Form) of the evidence:

What we’re calling the inner form does not depend on our discretion; in it we find instead a matter of impersonal and general necessity [ein impersönliches und allgemeines Muß]. Such a necessity, where it becomes known, leads to scientific knowledge [Wissenschaft]. . . . Through its comprehension we may hope, as they say, to reconcile scientific knowing and living [Wissenschaft und Leben zu versöhnen]. (1921: 1)

Reinhardt proclaims that good scholarship must grasp the principle that both animates the evidence itself and allows us to take part in that vitality; otherwise scholars can neither understand the evidence in its historical context nor find it meaningful for the present.⁶ In his review, Pohlenz ironically welcomes Reinhardt’s methodological challenge to the field:

And we won’t let our enjoyment [of Reinhard’s innovative method] be ruined by the fact that R. also finds it necessary every couple of pages, with tedious monotony, to condemn the failure of understanding in all foregoing research; nor will we be annoyed when the author’s inner form is unsympathetic to exact citations. (1965 [orig. 1926]: 173)

Pohlenz’s criticism is clear. Not only is Reinhardt’s referencing negligent and his treatment of prior scholarship dismissive, more importantly, given that none of Posidonius’s works survives, Reinhardt eschews the usual methods of source criticism. Reinhardt supposedly uses his “feeling” (Gefühl) to identify which passages in surviving works represent Posidonius’s influence (Pohlenz 1965: 175–6). For these reasons, Pohlenz thinks that Reinhardt’s approach to scientific knowledge is fundamentally incorrect.

While it would be crude to posit a straightforward causal connection between Pohlenz’s methodological conservatism and German philosophy’s relative neglect of scholarship on Stoicism, there is no doubt that the great francop hone schola...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Stoicism and Modern German Philosophy
• 2 The Indifference of Reason: Hegel and Stoicism
• 3 Stoicism and the Development of the Human Sciences: Wilhelm Dilthey’s Reception of Stoicism
• 4 Nietzschean Stoicism: An Ascetic Strategy in Pursuit of Knowledge
• 5 Sovereign/Creature: Neostoicism in Benjamin’s Origin of the German Trauerspiel and His Response to Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology
• 6 From Oikeiōsis to Ereignis: Heidegger and the Fate of Stoicism
• 7 Hans Jonas, Ancient Stoicism, and the Problem of Freedom
• 8 Dignity and Self-Making: Seneca, Pico della Mirandola, and Hannah Arendt
• 9 Hans Blumenberg and the Anthropology of Stoicism
• 10 Planetary Askēsis: Peter Sloterdijk’s Stoic Journey into Existential Spatiality
• List of Contributors
• Index
• Copyright