/lit/ - Literature

>Gabor Betegh has proposed that the Stoics, particularly Chrysippus, had convincingly integrated cosmic nature into the foundation of their ethical theory…since physics would be a mere supplement for deepening our understanding of ethics, we would be mistaken in setting out from cosmic nature in order to understand the nature of Stoic ethics. We have already encountered a similar argument in our discussion of Mou Zongsan’s critique of Dong Zhong-shu’s cosmocentrism; however, as we pointed out, morality is not possible without taking the external environment into account, since it is being-in-the-world that is the condition of ethical thought.

>Betegh showed that Plato's Timaeus has an important influence on Chrysippus’s theory of telos. The long passage in the Timaeus upon which Betegh develops his thesis reads as follows:

>Hence if someone has devoted all his interest and energy to his appetites or to competition, all his beliefs must necessarily be mortal ones, and altogether, so far as it is possible to become par excellence mortal, he will not fall the least bit short of this, because it is the mortal part of himself that he has developed. But If someone has committed himself entirely to learning and to true wisdom, and it is these among the things at his disposal that he has most practised, he must necessarily have immortal and divine wisdom, provided that he gets a grasp on truth. And so far as it is possible for human nature to have a share in immortality, he will not in any degree lack this. And because he always takes care of that which is divine, and has the daimon that lives with him well ordered, he will be supremely happy. Now for everybody there is one way to care for every part, and that is to grant to each part its own proper nourishments and motions. For the divine element in us, the motions which are akin to it are the thoughts and revolutions of the whole world. Everyone should take a lead from these. We should correct the corrupted revolutions in our head concerned with becoming by learning the harmonies and revolutions of the whole world, and so make the thinking subject resemble the object of its thought, in accordance with its ancient nature; and by creating this resemblance, bring to fulfillment the best life offered by gods to mankind for present and future time.

>In an apparent echo of the relation in Chinese thought between the human and the Heaven, we find a parallel between the structure and organisation of the individual soul and the world soul — a kind of ‘analogy’. Yet in Plato the relation is not truly analogical, since the human being is also within nature and is a part of the whole. It is possible to bring the rational part of the soul into order and harmony when the soul internalizes the cosmic harmony.