1.4: Hellenistic Philosophy

The Hellenistic age is defined negatively, as the interregnum between two empires. It starts with the death of Alexander the Great in 323 bc and the collapse of his empire, and ends with the battle of Actium in 31 bc, the official start of the Roman Empire. Its main positive feature is the ‘Hellenization’ of – that is, the spread of Greek culture to – much of the Mediterranean world, especially the East. A high proportion of the converts to the Hellenistic philosophical schools flocked to Athens from the cities of western Asia, and a sense of excitement about Greek culture was one factor in the emergence of new philosophical schools. A favoured alternative explanation is that the collapse of the old Greek polis, or city state, had left people feeling lost and in need of philosophical succour, but it is doubtful whether that hypothesis, even if sustainable, could account for more than a fraction of the new converts.

Although Alexandria eclipsed it as a centre of learning, Athens remained the headquarters of philosophy almost throughout the era. Hence in many ways Hellenistic philosophy would better be dated from 306 bc, when Epicurus founded his school in Athens, to 88 bc, when the Athenian schools were badly weakened in war, never fully to recover their institutional supremacy. The succeeding era was marked by a philosophical diaspora throughout the Roman Empire.

A Hellenistic doctrinal philosophy was a complete system, which had to offer: (1) an understanding of the world’s origins, components and organization, and of our place in it; (2) a methodology of discovery, which included in particular naming one or more ‘criteria of truth’; (3) an account of what the ‘goal’, happiness (see Eudaimonia), consists in. These three areas correspond to what had become the standard tripartition of philosophy into (1) physics, (2) logic and (3) ethics.

Hellenistic philosophy can be broken down into five movements:
  • Cynicism, which argues nature is the opposite of society’s conventions and norms. All that the ordinary social herd is interested in is getting on in this world…. Social conventions, then, are nothing but bad habits, that damage the soul.
    • In contrast, the good life is lived according to nature, and it is a life of self-sufficiency. Self-sufficiency can be realized through training (ascesis)…. This achievement is described as apatheia, ‘indifference to suffering.’ [….] Cynics were noted for their bold speech and ‘shameless’ behavior.
  • Skepticism, which asserted the likelihood of being able to achieve certain knowledge about any of the topics of philosophical concern listed previously was slim. Far better to own up to this, and seek ‘tranquillity and happiness through suspension of judgment’ (Sharples, 9).
    • Pyrrho of Elis (c. 365/360-275/270 BCE) was the first celebrated Skeptic. He was said to have accompanied Alexander to India. His philosophical position was that we can only know how things appear to us, and we can’t rightly resolve disagreements as to what appears. This is all very disturbing. Wouldn’t it be better just to suspend judgment and live according to probable opinion and custom?
  • Epicureanism, which like Stoicism sought to give ataraxia, or peace of mind. For Epicurus the aim of life was pleasure; the highest pleasure was absence of pain; pleasure of the mind was preferable to that of the body. The soul dies with the body, so we must not fear death or afterlife; the gods exist but do not concern themselves with humanity or natural phenomena (all of which can be explained scientifically); we should avoid public life and emotional commitments in order to escape the pains likely to be caused by them. The physical world was explained by the atomic theory adapted from Democritus.
  • Stoicism, which forwarded that the world is entirely material and perfectly ordered [so] it is also thoroughly determined. Thus, it is also correct to name the divine as fortune. The earlier Stoics put a brave spin on this, and said that the plan evidenced divine providence, a reassuring God. Later Stoics, who must have been a bit discouraged by suicides, exiles and the like, thought that the plan was more like an impersonal, implacable fate.
  • Neoplatonism, which accounts for the emergence of a seemingly inferior and flawed cosmos from the perfect mind of the divinity by declaring outright that all objective existence is but the external self-expression of an inherently contemplative deity known as the One (to hen), or the Good (ta kalon). Plotinus compares the expression of the superior godhead with the self-expression of the individual soul, which proceeds from the perfect conception of a Form (eidos), to the always flawed expression of this Form in the manner of a materially derived ‘personality’ that risks succumbing to the demands of divisive discursivity, and so becomes something less than divine. This diminution of the divine essence in temporality is but a necessary moment of the complete expression of the One. (See the videos on the next page for more information.)