Chrysippus · Philosophy
How everything can be fated and yet our actions still our own.
At the heart of Stoic physics lies a bold claim: everything happens by fate. The cosmos is a single, rational, living whole, pervaded by divine reason, and every event in it is the necessary outcome of a complete chain of prior causes. Nothing happens by pure chance; nothing is uncaused; the whole of what occurs is woven together into one seamless web of cause and effect, which the Stoics called heimarmene - fate. Chrysippus defined fate as ‘a natural everlasting ordering of the whole: one set of things following on and succeeding another, and the interconnection being inviolable.’ To know all the causes operating now would be, in principle, to know the entire future.
This is a thoroughgoing determinism, and it sets up the central problem of Chrysippus’ philosophy - indeed one of the central problems of all philosophy. For if every event is fixed by prior causes, then so are my deliberations, my choices, my actions. They too are links in the unbreakable chain. But then how can I be responsible for what I do? How can praise and blame, virtue and vice, mean anything, if everything I do was settled before I was born? The same fate that makes the Stoic cosmos a rational order seems to threaten the very moral agency on which Stoic ethics depends. Chrysippus saw the problem with perfect clarity, and he devoted some of his sharpest thinking to it.
Chrysippus’ solution rests on a distinction between two kinds of cause, illustrated by a homely image: a cylinder rolling down a slope. Imagine you give a cylindrical stone a push at the top of a hill. Your push is the external cause - the ‘auxiliary and proximate’ cause that gets things going. But once pushed, the stone rolls; and that it rolls (rather than, say, sliding or staying put) is due to its own round shape - its internal nature, the ‘principal and perfect’ cause. The push starts the motion, but the kind of motion is the cylinder’s own doing. A cube, given the same push, would not roll; the rolling expresses what the cylinder is.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
Chrysippus held that everything happens by fate - an unbreakable chain of causes - yet defended human responsibility with the cylinder analogy: fate supplies the external push, but how a thing then behaves depends on its own nature. Our assent flows from our character, so our actions are fated and genuinely ours. This…
Leads to Epicurus.
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