Where I Stand: The Modern Practice, the Traditionalists and the Chain v0.1
Where I Stand: The Modern Practice, the Traditionalists and the Chain v0.1
Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.
Present-day Stoicism has three parties: the modern movement, the Traditionalists, and the academics who study the ancient school. This is a plain statement of where I stand toward each, and why.
The Beginning
My first premise is the chain I draw from Grant Sterling’s Core Stoicism. Everyone wants happiness. Incomplete happiness is not worth settling for if complete happiness is available. Complete happiness must lie wholly within my control. Only my assent does. So happiness is correct assent, and assent is correct when it matches the truth about value: only virtue is good, only vice is evil, and everything external is neither.
Everything below is measured against that.
The Test
I sort the parties by one question. Does the practice keep the value assignment? That is, does it train a man to judge that the thing he fears is neither good nor evil, because that is the truth? Or does it train him to carry the fear?
The first corrects a false judgment. The second manages a feeling and leaves the judgment standing.
The Modern Practice
I have audited two lessons of Donald Robertson’s course The Stoic Mind, Lesson 2 and Lesson 3. In neither does any exercise ask the reader to judge the feared thing not evil. The exercises work on his endurance and on how long the feeling lasts. In Lesson 2 the belief that the feared thing is awful is named as a cause of anxiety and then left uncorrected.
Whatever his exposition says about virtue, in these lessons the proposition does no work.
I read the free text only. I have not opened the worksheets, the audio or the remaining lessons, and I claim nothing about them.
On that record I am on the other side from him. This is not a judgment of the man, or of whether his methods relieve distress. It is a finding about what the exercises train. The same question can be put to any modern programme. Where the answer is the same, so is my position.
The Traditionalists
The Traditionalists keep the value assignment. Chris Fisher is the one I have audited. The finding was that a man governed by his framework is pointed where the chain points him: toward the faculty of choice, toward virtue as the only good, with externals indifferent. On the test I use, we are allies.
We differ on the ground. Fisher holds that the ancient physics, theology and ethics are one system, and that removing any part breaks it. I hold that the ethics does not depend on the ancient physics. Sterling says Stoic ethics requires “some (meta-)Physical commitments and some (Epistemo-)Logical commitments,” but not the ancient ones (ISF, 2 March 2022). So the dispute is not whether the ethics needs a physics. It is which one.
By their test I stand with those who set the physics aside. That is accurate. What I did not set aside is the value assignment, and I did not leave the ground empty.
The Physics
I make two claims about the ancient physics, and no more than two.
First, the ethics does not require it. Fisher’s framework makes the ethics depend on Providence: if Providence is false, then on his own account the conclusions lose their ground. Mine carries no such dependency. Only virtue is good whether or not the cosmos is providentially ordered.
Second, determinism in Chrysippus’s form contradicts the chain at free will (C2). If my assent was fixed before I was born, then whether I assent correctly is a matter of fortune, and complete happiness is no longer within my control. Sterling’s judgment is that “in this one case I actually think ancient Stoic Physics hinders Stoic Ethics” (ISF, 4 September 2019).
Fisher does not hold determinism in that form. He rejects mechanical determinism and affirms real choice. Whether his providential order lets a man originate his own assent is not settled in the record I audited, and I leave it open.
I do not call the Traditionalist’s physics irrational. My claim is narrower than that.
What Stands in Its Place
In place of the ancient physics and logic I put six commitments: substance dualism (C1), libertarian free will (C2), ethical intuitionism (C3), foundationalism (C4), the correspondence theory of truth (C5) and moral realism (C6). The positions are Sterling’s. Naming these six as the set is mine. I read C1, C2 and C6 as the replacement physics, and C3, C4 and C5 as the replacement logic.
I do not claim they are proven. Sterling calls his own arguments for free will “inconclusive” (ISF, 17 April 2017). The claim is that the chain needs them. A Traditionalist who wants what the chain promises, complete happiness wholly within his control, needs commitments of this kind where determinism now stands. One who does not want that guarantee is under no compulsion from me.
The Academics
The scholars report the ancient school as it was, physics included. As history they are right, and Sterling agrees: “Please do not pretend that belief in free will is classic Stoic doctrine” (ISF, September 2019). I have no quarrel with the history. What I hold is not a claim about what Zeno or Chrysippus taught. It is a claim about what the chain requires in order to hold.
In Sum
The Traditionalists keep the value assignment, and on that I am with them. Their physics is not required by the ethics, and its determinism, in Chrysippus’s form, contradicts the chain at C2. A Traditionalist who wants the chain’s guarantee needs commitments of Sterling’s kind in its place.
With the modern practice, as far as I have audited it, the difference is at the core: the value assignment is missing from the exercises.
— Dave Kelly
Sources
Sterling’s words are quoted from two study notes that record the original International Stoic Forum posts as opened in full: C1 — What the Commitment Carries: A Study Note v0.1 (the post of 2 March 2022) and C2 — What the Commitment Carries: A Study Note v0.1 (the posts of 17 April 2017 and 4 and 6 September 2019).
Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.
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