Athens and Rome, c. 300 BC – AD 180

The Stoics

Everything happens by fate, an unbroken chain of causes. Yet what we do still depends on us, because fate works through our own natures. The Stoics were the first compatibilists, and they had already answered the objection that fate makes effort pointless.

The view

Stoicism was founded in Athens by Zeno of Citium around 300 BC and systematised by its third head, Chrysippus (c. 279–206 BC), whose writings are almost all lost. It remained the leading philosophy of the Roman world for centuries, through Seneca, Epictetus and the emperor Marcus Aurelius.

The Stoics held that the world is a single rational whole, governed by a divine reason that is also fate: an everlasting, unbroken sequence of causes. Nothing happens without a cause, and every cause is itself caused. Their critics, especially the Epicureans and the sceptics of the Academy, objected that this left no room for anything to be up to us, and so no room for praise or blame. The Stoic reply is the first sustained defence of compatibilism.

The argument

Fate leads the willing, and drags the unwilling. Seneca, Letters 107, translating Cleanthes (our translation)

Chrysippus distinguished kinds of cause. Push a cylinder and it rolls; push a cone and it spins on its point. The push is the same, and it is needed to start the motion. But the way each one moves comes from its own shape. In the same way, impressions from the world strike the mind, but whether the mind assents to them, and acts, comes from its own nature, which is its character. Our acts are fated, but they are fated to happen through us, and that is enough for them to be ours.

A later image, attributed to Zeno and Chrysippus, makes the same point. A dog is tied to a moving cart. If it wants to follow, it trots along freely, doing what it wants as well as what it must. If it does not, it is dragged anyway. Try both dogs.

The Stoics also answered what came to be called the lazy argument. If it is fated that you will recover from an illness, you will recover whether or not you call a doctor; if it is fated that you will not, calling one is useless. So, the argument concludes, never call the doctor. Chrysippus replied that some events are "co-fated". If you are fated to recover, it may be fated that you recover by calling the doctor. Your effort is not bypassed by fate; it is one of the ways fate gets things done.

Where they meet Dennett

On almost every structural point. The cylinder is a two-thousand-year-old version of Dennett's insistence that what matters is the design of the agent, not whether it is caused. The reply to the lazy argument is exactly his distinction between determinism and fatalism: in a determined world, outcomes still depend on what you do. Dennett's "evitability", the avoiding of what you foresee, is co-fated effort with a modern name.

Where they part

The Stoic universe is providential. Fate is the plan of a rational god, and the good life consists in bringing one's will into line with it, so that the willing dog's freedom is, in the end, a freedom of acceptance. Dennett's universe has no plan and no planner. Its order comes from natural selection, not providence, and the freedom he defends is not resignation but the power to change things: to see what is coming and avoid it. Where the Stoic sage accepts the cart, Dennett's agent would also look for ways to steer it.

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Further reading

• Cicero, On Fate (De fato): the main surviving source for Chrysippus's cylinder.
• Susanne Bobzien, Determinism and Freedom in Stoic Philosophy (Oxford, 1998).
• Stoicism, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.