Some thoughts about the Stoic School - cosmology and anthropology

Despite this view that everything is bodily, the Stoics' perception is far from being materialistic. For, in their view, world tensions inward and outward, which can not be identified with mechanical centrifugal and centripetal forces, act in world history, but rather in the case of allow the existence of spiritual forces of sympathy and enmity. "Throughout the world there are" logoi spermatikoi ", from which not only plants and animals are formed, but also all bodies called inorganic objects." The Seminary Logos says Ludwig Stein, is such an activity of the pure pneumatic spilled in the world, which, through the tone, awakens and incites to a rational, purposeful origin and the emergence of charging and further development.

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Likewise, the world as a whole, like Logos, has been permeated by Logos, so he is not only a wisely designed whole but also a reasonably living creature. Zenon, Chrysippus and Poseidonius unanimously consider him a reasonable, animate, and thinking creature. Also the individual celestial bodies are living beings. Their parts serve each other and serve the whole, and vice versa - the whole serving of their parts. In organic and inorganic matter, causality and expediency are indivisible. According to Zeno, the moving material power can equally be called the necessary law, as well as providence, or, as Clyant says, it is both "Zeus and Destiny". That's why the world is nicely arranged, like a well-regulated state. Obedience to the laws and objectives of this state gives happiness to man. "You, Zeus, you, destiny, lead me where you have given me," declares Cleanth-I will follow you relentlessly; but if I would cowardly deviate, as though I would be compelled to obey. " Seneca also expressed the same thought: "Fate is gentle to the one who obeys himself, but to force the one who opposes it."

Like Aristotle, the Stoics accept that there are four elements in the world: earth, water, air, and fire, to which is added as the fifth element ether, which is in fact the finest, lightest and most pervasive part of the fire. However, all elements, unlike the atoms of Democritus, are constantly undergoing a qualitative change. Everything in the world is divided into four spheres: an inorganic matter in which the emerging Spirit manifests itself only as a soldering and combining power, plants in which we have a real organizing and forming force, animals that have a desire for instinctual directed spirit in which a reasonable soul . The human soul according to the Stoics is also material and comes from the body, but its matter is the purest and most noble part of the divine fire, which upon the first appearance of humans on earth has penetrated their bodies from the ether and then transmitted by the parents of children. The central, dominant part of the soul is in the heart.