School of Plotinus

While Plotinus was still joined with mortal body, his philosophy was constantly going through slight alterations - although the broad details remained same, there were always uncertainties in details, which Plotinus hadn’t decided upon. When the soul of Plotinus returned to its pure state, time stopped also for the natural development of his philosophy. Instead, reinterpretation began almost instantly. Plotinus was regarded as an almost mythical figure, who had an instant line to the more divine levels of reality. One of his disciples, Porphyry, rearranged his philosophical texts, often dividing continuous essays into separate texts. His aim was apparently to systematise the philosophy of Plotinus. He put first texts dealing with ordinary human life, then through the study of corporeal world rose to the levels of soul and intellect. The final texts in Porphyry’s reordering should have concerned the primordial unity, but perhaps because there is so little to say about it, he also appended Plotinus’ discussion of categories and numbers to the final part.

Porphyry himself was a true polymath, who could both interpret Homer’s writings and follow Ptolemy’s account of musicology. In addition, he also combined all he knew into a worldview with clear Platonist origins. Thus, when reading in Homer a description of a cavern of water nymphs with two entrances, Porphyry regarded it as a symbolic representation of Platonic cavern or world, water being linked to impurities of embodied life, and two entrances marking the journey of soul both to and from world. And Ptolemian account of the study of musicology inspired Porphyry to discuss the general method for true knowledge: a reasoning being used perception (such as perceived sounds) as a tool for covering universal patterns (such as quantitative relations behind different melodies), which the reasoning being in its highest state could recognise as belonging to an immaterial realm of paradigmatic models.

Mostly just fragments of purely philosophy works of Porphyry have survived, but he was clearly influenced by Plotinus. Like Plotinus, Porphyry spoke of a hierarchy of body, soul and intellect, in which body was enlivened by and served soul and soul was enlivened by and served intellect. But whereas Plotinian intellect was something clearly removed from embodied soul - a state of pure self-reflection - with Porphyry it seems to be closely linked to soul as its controlling force.

Furthermore, Porphyry calls the highest point of his hierarchy God, thus linking his ideas more to a religious context. His God appears to be also quite active force, taking care of the physical world, yet, unlike Christian God, Porphyry’s God was not interested of punishing anybody. Now, Porphyry noted that God was helped by a real hierarchy of lower spiritual entities, such as demons and heroic souls. Some of these lower entities might be less helpful and even work against the common interest.

The connection to the spiritual entities and especially to God is the only method for stable happiness for human soul, Porphyry says. Despite the religious connotations, Porphyry notes that traditional forms of worship have little to do with establishing this link, and many religious ceremonies he considered to be even harmful. For instance, it makes no sense to sacrifice food for God, who as an incorporeal entity does not eat anything. Especially to be avoided is animal sacrifice, which at most attracts malevolent gaseous entities (that is, demons) that devour smoke rising from burning flesh. Besides, animals take part in the common rationality of living nature and should therefore not be killed vainly.

Similarly, Porphyry is mostly skeptical of conventional means for receiving messages from God. God himself would not even feel a need to contact anyone, so such messages would at most come from beneficial incorporeal entities and in worse cases from the delusions of oneself or deceptions of evil entities.

Instead, Porphyry emphasises the importance of lawful behavior. Law in question is not conventional law of some community, but, firstly, the natural law governing the affairs of physical world, and secondly, the divine law, connecting natural world with higher realms of existence, when soul gets rid of its bodily shackles.

The rule of behaviour in natural law emphasises healthy use of one’s bodily and mental faculties and its aim is to stifle unbridled passions. The divine law, on the other hand, means severing the ties between soul and body, through such practices like abstinence. The universe of material bodies is in a sense just a projection of souls, when they have lost their connection with their innermost selves - souls project these vanishing bodies into the barely existing canvas of matter, which as completely featureless cannot change into anything. Bodies governed by souls can generate other bodies, which at first lived in womb like plants, with no motion of their own and nourished by an umbilical cord. When such a body finally leaves the womb, another soul, which feels an interest on the newly born body, will voluntarily connect itself with the body and control it. While in itself an indivisible unity, in connection with body it might be said to have parts, because it attends to different parts of its body with its different capacities.

The aim of the practices severing the tie between soul and body, according to Porphyry, is to return soul to itself, to its original unity with itself. Soul cannot be said to exist in a place, except in the sense that it is inclined to something which has a place. In its earthly state, soul is interested in body and objects impinging on it. At this state, soul then directs its sensation to these objects and projects a life force to direct the body. Soul cannot change the basic character of the body, such as whether it is male or female, but it can guide the body to a healthier life. For instance, dietary choices, like abstinence from meat, weaken the link between soul and body.

Depending on the life lived, soul can choose a new life for itself and thus go through many personalities. When it turns more and more toward its own non-vanishing nature, it combines with more starry bodies. Finally, at the moment of its perfection, soul becomes intellect, which timelessly thinks perfect models of all entities, all at the same time, and in this world of perfections it also contemplates itself. Through this self-thinking intellect soul can finally unite with divinity, which for Porphyry is the truth of all existence.

Although his ideas resemble Christianity in some measure, for Porphyry it is just one sect among many others. He is quick to note that the history of Christianity had been coloured by internal strife from the start, when Peter and Paul had debated about letting uncircumcised into the church - how could single truth be found among these contentions? Porphyry is also skeptical about the various ways in which Christians had interpreted their holy writings. He is especially wary of Origen’s creative readings, which have in his eyes almost no connection with Bible itself.

Still, Porphyry is also critical of more literal readings and holds the opinion that Christians are completely wrong about the supposed high age of such biblical figures like Moses. Furthermore, Porphyry raises doubts towards the prophecies in Old Testament - for instance, he thinks that prophecies in book of Daniel were actually no tales of times to come, but histories, written in a form of prophecy to raise the credibility of the book.

Porphyry’s criticism is not restricted to questions of exegesis. He also notes that it makes no sense that God would have punished people for eating fruits that gave people knowledge - not just of evil, but also of good. Indeed, even the act of planting such a deadly tree he holds to be beneath the character of divinity.

Porphyry also criticises the Christian notion of Logos. Either this Logos is just some internal aspect of divinity - its “reason” - and then no independent entity, or it is like a literal word, that is, an expression of the power of divinity, but thus also something evanescent in comparison to the divinity, in other words, not God itself. Indeed, he thinks that Jesus, this supposed incarnation of Logos, was at most a person who because of his pure behaviour was in contact with God, but still was no God.

Porphyry also ridicules the notion that Jesus would have been born in order to save all humanity. Why, he asks, did Jesus then come to world so late, when a number of people could have had no chance of hearing about him? Because of all these contradictions Porphyry notes that Christianity is not a doctrine fit for philosophers, but suitable only for people of low intellectual talent. In a rather misogynistic fashion he implies that it is all due to women having such a big role in Christian societies.

Despite - or perhaps because of - this criticism, Christian writers commented quite a lot on Porphyry’s writings, explaining how Porphyry had understood their sacred writings completely wrong, Still, the greatest influence Porphyry had in the history of at least western Christendom occurred in the area of logic, as his Isagoge, an introduction to works of Aristotle, happened for a long time to be almost the only work on logic surviving the fall of Roman empire in the Western Christendom.

Isagoge is essentially just a clarification of some basic concepts. Just like lines can be drawn from forefathers to their ascendants, forming a sort of tree, a similar tree could be formed starting from highest genus. The lines would descend, always dividing into two, according to differences like rational and irrational, which shape the genus like material into lower genera. This tree goes all the way down to lowest species, which are just above individuals. In addition to genera, differences and species, Porphyry mention salso various characteristics, some of which (properties) characterise certain species, like capacity to laugh characterises humans, while others are accidental to the species, either because we can conceptually distinguish them (like blackness from crows) or because they really are just accidental features (like walking is something we are not always doing).

Although this simple scheme itself was important to medievals, perhaps even more important was what Porphyry left out. He specifically mentions he won’t deal with the nature of these genera and species. Are they perhaps something that exists only in our thoughts? Porphyry would probably have said that they are something more real, but are they then something material? Again, Porphyry would most likely have denied this, but might they exist only within and as completely dependent on individual things? Although he doesn’t say it, it is probable Porphyry thought that they existed independently of individuals.

Followers of Plotinus were more and more inclined to provide an alternative to Christianity. This was evidenced by an interest in Pythagoras, who is a topic of a biography with both Porphyry and his student Iamblichus and who is presented by them as a purer type of sage than Jesus. Just like Jesus, Pythagoras is told to have instructed fishermen to get a good catch - but unlike Jesus, Pythagoras apparently convinced them to release the fishes. 

Pythagoras is also viewed as an exemplar and instigator of all virtues, who was acquainted with all the divine secrets, taught wisdom to selected students, disciplined his followers to withstand all bodily temptations and act bravely in all circumstances, and created a just society which nurtured harmonious relationships between its members. Iamblichus goes even further and points out statements suggesting Pythagoras was an embodiment of some divinity like Apollo. Furthermore, Iamblichus tries to interpret obscure elements in Pythagorean cult as allegories, with profound truths hidden behind metaphors - thus, command to not urinate toward sun is seen as a reminder that divinities (metaphorical sun) do not enjoy bodily crassness.

In addition to Pythagoreanism, Plato’s dialogues were seen as a route toward higher knowledge. These dialogues, Iamblichus says, are organic wholes, where each element serves a single purpose, that is, the theme of the dialogue. Indeed, Iamblichus considers in his commentaries not just the strictly philosophical content of the dialogues, but also the external setting of the dialogue as information of hidden knowledge.

An important thing for Iamblichus is also the order in which the dialogues should be read. One should start from Alcibiades, because it urges the reader to study oneself and to raise oneself above the concerns of everyday life. The ending point is Philebus, a dialogue about what is good in all levels of being and also what is the ultimate paradigm and source of goodness. Or then one could just read Timaeus and Parmenides, two dialogues summarising the whole of Plato’s philosophy, first describing Plato’s view on temporal world and second describing things beyond temporal world.

Iamblichus is also eager to regard common religious rituals as containing important truths about reaching the divine realm, thus taking Platonism into a direction Porphyry was not willing to take it. Just like Porphyry and Plotinus, Iamblichus speaks of a hierarchy of entities, adding that rungs of this hierarchy were described by different parts of Plato’s Parmenides. Like with his predecessors, Iamblichian hierarcy begins from the Primary source or primordial unity. Just below the unity is the self-conceiving intellect or the proverbial Creator, which provides being among other things also to itself. Together with Creator, there are other immaterial entities or divinities, which are completely removed from the realm of matter and embody some abstractions, working in a similar role as Platonic ideas, for instance, the sources of sameness and difference.

Between the realm of wholly immaterial deities and sense world, Iamblichus places the realm of mathematical entities, which interested the Pythagorean school. These entities share characteristics with both the more immaterial entities (such as non-temporality) and sensuous beings (such as being divisible) and thus work for human beings as a road from the one to the other. While sensuous beings fluctuate even as we view them and the same finger might seem both a unity and a multiplicity, mathematical entities are stabler. They also are controlled by the abstractions of the more ideal realm - for instance, mathematical entities could be either similar or dissimilar with one another - and control sensuous entities, which also have their quantities.

Because of their mediating place, Iamblichus notes, mathematical entities cannot be perceived, but they have to be thought of, while this mathematical manner of thinking cannot reach ideal divinities. Still, they at least form the first stepping stone that lead us to think the ideal realm. The mathematical entities are derived from various unions of unity and multiplicity and are either combined sets of diverse units (objects of arithmetic, which have a natural lower limit, but no highest limit) or unities divisible into multiple parts (objects of geometry, which have a natural highest limit, but no lowest limit).

Below the immaterial realms in Iamblichean hierarchy is time, which is an image of eternity and which confers to temporal entities a kind of being, which is divided into what was and what is and what will be. Highest of these temporal entities are souls, which Iamblichus thinks are a sort of mix of ideal and material realms. In other words, souls as such have their own, immaterial activities, but in contact with matter they produce new activities, such as bodily memory.

Iamblichus notes that some souls are less material than others. Of the souls, the least connection with matter have divinities which rule over the most general entities of temporal world or stars. Below these is a being who fashioned the earthly realm and is thus connected with the earthly matter or ultimate lack of being, but also gazes upon the immutability of the heavens and the immaterial ideas and tries to replicate this immutability in its own works - Iamblichus compares it to a sophist, who tries to fool people with his imitations of truth.

Below gods are demons, which transform the invisible effects of divinities into visible goods to be used by lower entities. Next after demons are heroes or demigods, which appear to be human souls of the purest kind, capable of better life than ordinary humans. Some of them might be people like Pythagoras, who have been able to raise themselves permanently above the human condition through their heightened awareness, although they might occasionally have to enter the lower world because of preordained rules. In practice, Iamblichus seems to have suggested even further levels of entities between gods and human souls - archangels, angels and various archons - but it is unclear what their role in the hierarchy is.

The lowest rank in the hierarchy is held by ordinary human souls, which have took on more and more material and solid encasings, being finally encased in human bodies, which they try to control, although at the same they are completely overwhelmed by bodily urges. The human soul still have a reason or capacity to look upon the higher realms and thus a possibility to improve itself. If purified enough, at the time of death the human soul will rise again to more heavenly realms and control the sensible world with the higher entities, leaving only an irrational shadow behind it.

Unlike Plotinus and Porphyry, Iamblichus emphasises that purification of human soul is of religious nature. All the entities higher than human souls, Iamblichus notes against Porphyry, have to be beneficial, because they have been generated by the very source of goodness. All of them have to be also celebrated with proper rituals, Iamblichus says, and indeed, one could not straightaway move to the highest level of the hierarchy, before becoming tuned with its lower rungs.

Iamblichus does not completely deny the possibility of evil entities fooling people taking part in false religious rituals. Yet, with proper rituals no such deception is possible. Even if divinities contacted with such rituals might appear to act in an evil fashion and hurt people, there always is a good reason for such a behaviour. For instance, these divinities might punish humans because of crimes they have committed in previous lives. Furthermore, the seeming divine punishments might actually be beneficial, although our inferior human souls cannot comprehend this. Another possibility is that the seemingly evil actions are caused by some intermediary material cause muddying the original beneficial purpose - or they were the result of our soul turning away from the beneficial influence of gods.

Now, religious rituals seemingly speaking to highest ranks of divine hierarchy, Iamblichus insists, are not meant to command entities in these highest ranks, unlike Porphyry disparagingly suggested. Instead, they are meant to open up the soul to an occasion in which a divinity or some other higher entity has freely chosen to connect with the mundane level. Through such a connection divinities can reveal truths more important than those known by scholars of mundane matters. Thus, although someone with knowledge of the seasons could foretell the weather, this is nothing in comparison to an oracular divination.

Unlike Porphyry, Iamblichus is not critical even of animal sacrifices. Indeed, he says, higher beings might well come in contact with material things, without losing their own purity, just like some of these beings controlled stars. Of course, they do not need matter for their sustenance, which would have made divinities and demons ridiculously dependent on their worshippers. Instead, the idea of sacrifice is to purify matter with fire and thus raise it to the level of higher beings. Even the crassness of some mysteries have their purpose, Iamblichus noted. A sexual imagery is meant to be taken as a symbolism of generative forces of life, while even more radical rituals are supposed to shock and so sever soul from its material connections.

Divine knowledge revealed by religious rituals is then, according to Iamblichus, something profoundly higher than mere scholarship, which is based on mere human cognitive faculties. Just like beyond self-aware Creator is the primordial unconscious unity, Iamblichus thinks that beyond cognitive faculties is a higher activity connecting us mystically to all of existence. Indeed, innocent youth might well have a more intimate connection with divine reality, because of the purity of his soul. Some religious rituals are just supposed to purify the soul to a more divine level. With the connection to divine established, human being might have the ability to command and threaten lower powers, which would normally be above her level.

Debating schools

Not so thorough histories of philosophy tend to view Plato and Aristotle as an end of a progression starting from Socrates and even pre-Socratics. Yet, both philosophers did found schools of their own, which were active long after Plato and Aristotle had died. We've already seen that the followers of Plato emphasized the role of numbers even more than Plato had, either discarding the Platonic ideas or identifying them with the numbers – they clearly loved mathematics.

Followers of Aristotle took the opposite route and followed their master in concluding that numbers cannot be the primary explanation of all things: after all, how could unchanging numbers explain world of change around us. Instead, followers of Aristotle, such as Theophrastus, thought that their teacher's notion of a desire for ultimate perfection as the primary cause of all change and movement was at least more promising first principle. That doesn't meant that e.g. Theophrastus would have accepted his teacher's philosophy wholesale. Indeed, Theophrastus might not have accepted even the Aristotelian perfect being as the prime mover: why would an urge to perfection cause many different kinds of movement? Instead, Theophrastus suggests that perhaps e.g. stars do not move, because of an urge to perfect themselves, but because it is in their nature to move in a certain manner.

Despite their differences, Aristotle and Theophrastus shared some clear methodological elements. The most important is their acceptance of reliable experience as a source for testing metaphysical theories. It is then no wonder that Theophrastus spent quite a large part of his life in empirical studies of e.g. plants. But it is not Theophrastus and his even lesser known followers philosophers think of, when they are considering the time after Plato and Aristotle. Instead, it is Epicureanism and Stoicism that come to mind as the epitomes of philosophy in the so-called Hellenistic period of history.

Of these two schools, the Epicureanism was more faithful to its founder Epicurus, and indeed, some of its followers boasted that they still held the original ideas of Epicurus; their critics retorted that initiation in the Epicurean wisdom was like castration in its irreversibility. Stoics, on the other hand, were not so attached to the doctrines of the founder, Zeno, and even if they did not straightforwardly contradict him, they surely attempted to develop his views and emphasized different parts of philosophy according to their own interests.

Just like we saw in Aristotle, philosophy was not seen anymore as an undivided unity, but as consisting of interconnected modules that could be studied independently of one another, although there was a clear hierarchy of more and less important modules. Both Epicureans and Stoics were interested of the question of determining the basic modules and organizing them into a systematic whole. In Stoic school especially, number of schemes were suggested, but soon both school appear to have settled to a the three-part division of philosophy, where different parts answered different basic questions. The first question of the proper way to reveal truth was studied by Epicurean canonic and Stoic logic, while the second question of the structure of the world was studied in both schools by physics, and finally ethics investigated how one should live one's life.

Following Aristotle, both Hellenistic schools conceded that search for knowledge must begin from sensations or perceptions. In fact, they perhaps went a bit further and stated that perceptions were the necessary basis of knowledge, while Aristotle has emphasized the human capacity to recognize basic truths common to all experiences. Epicureans went even so far as to declare all information given to us by senses as true: if we see red, then we definitely see red. It is only when we start to interpret our sensations that mistakes start to happen, for instance, when I assume that there is a real red object causing the red sensation, if it just a hallucination. Still, even in these cases the mistake can be revealed only by other sensations, for instance, by our touch showing that there's nothing but air in front of us.

On the other hand, Stoics emphasized that not all perceptions are trustworthy as such: if I hallucinate, I have the misleading tendency to believe that what I hallucinate is really there. Thus, only some perceptions are to be accepted as reliable indicators of something that truly exists, and it is only such reliable perceptions we can accept as the foundation of truth.

For Epicureans, sensations were enough for knowledge. True, some reasoning might be in order to reveal things that we cannot directly experience, but even here one must be careful and admit the limits of human mind. Thus, they felt no need to carefully determine the intricacies of reasoning: why bother, when it is always better to directly perceive than to reason things.

For Stoics, on the contrary, the perceptions were only the basis of the truth and they had to still be transformed into the form of rational thought, that is, they had to be given a linguistic shape. In this part of their logic Stoics clearly shared common ground with Aristotle and his methodology: Stoics begin by defining how words are produced, how they are combined in e.g. statements and how statements can be deduced from one another. The main difference between Stoic and Aristotelian logic is that Stoics were far more interested of deductions based on the form of the whole statement: for instance, Stoics noted that a statement of the form ”if A, then B” could be used to deduce statement B from statement A.

In addition to a methods of finding or ascertaining truths, Stoic logic also contained practice for disseminating truths in form of speeches and writings. Epicureans were here also willing to ignore the subtleties and recommend only the use of every-day parlance so that truth would not be hidden behind lofty words.

Both Epicureans and Stoics were in a sense materialistic compared to Platonic and Aristotelian philosophies. This was especially true of Epicureans who had borrowed their worldview from atomists. The Epicurean world consisted mostly of material things, and these things required a container or empty space for movement. As Epicureans could not conceive how bodies might exist and be infinitely divisible, they supposed all division must end at a final point of hard and unbreakable atoms, of which all the other bodies were then composed. Furthermore, they could not conceive any limits for the world, and because in an infinite world, a finite number of atoms would quickly disperse and form no complex bodies, they also supposed an infinity of atoms.

This was as far as Epicureans were willing to let reason guide them. Beyond that, they assumed that the atoms must have somehow coalesced into such wholes as the cosmos we see around us – in fact, there probably were infinity of such wholes in existence. Yet, of the further happenings of such a cosmos, nothing certain could be said – perhaps lightning was caused by these reasons, perhaps by others.

Like in their logic, Stoics leaned in physics also to similar considerations as Aristotle, that is, they assumed that everything in the world consisted ultimately of a featureless material substance, sort of primordial slime. To make this substance into concrete things, an active force was required, on the one hand, to divide the original substance into pieces, on the other hand, to give different characteristics to different parts of the substance.

The Stoic active force was then nothing inseparable from the material substance, but was necessarily incorporated within matter. Some Stoics identified it with a particular thing, such as Sun, others thought only the whole cosmos could suffice as the body of this activity. Needless to say, this materialized force organizing everything played the role of God: it had created the cosmos as we knew it, and one day, when the current world was destroyed by fire, it would build everything anew.

The difference between Epicurean and Stoic notion of the origin of cosmos led to a completely different manners of looking at the world. While Epicureans admitted the impossibility of certainty on individual physical questions, they were eager to note that at least we did not need to assume any divine origin for phenomena: lightning was probably not caused by the wrath of Zeus. Epicureans did not deny the existence of divinities, although they insisted that gods must also be material. Still, they assumed that such perfect beings must be completely uninterested of anything beyond their own never-ending pleasure and thus could not be the cause of physical events. In this manner Epicureans wished to show how irrational it is to fear thunder and other physical events or try to appease gods.

Stoics were, understandably, of the opposite opinion. True, their original divinity was not supernatural either, but it was apparently very interested of the world around it. The cosmos had a purpose and it must show traces of divine influence all around. Stoics went even so far that they accepted traditional forms of divination as more or less reliable methods of ascertaining divine will.

The doctrines of the Epicureans and Stoics concerning the world as a whole reflected also their view of the human beings. Epicureans supposed that human beings must consist of atoms and that within the hard shell of human body existed a finer collection of atoms capable of sensing emanations from other atoms. Without this indwelling finer body, the external body would be just a lifeless heap, but furthermore, without its shell, the finer body would quickly scatter in the wind. No part of human beings could then exist without the body, but Epicureans saw no reason for sadness in this fact. Indeed, they even applauded the thought that human beings had no reason to fear eternal torture after death.

Stoics also shared the idea of two parts within human beings, but with them this view was better justified by their general doctrines. Just like world was passive matter controlled by an active force, all particular beings had a part of both the universal matter and the universal force. In case of humans, this embodied force could be called soul. Stoics were not really sure what happened to this force after the death of human beings. Perhaps it continued its individual existence for some time, if it just found some embodiment beyond its original body, but at least when the whole world was destroyed, the individual souls would return to the original life force and be swallowed in it.

But is is not logic or physics we remember when we speak of Hellenistic philosophy, but ethics. Indeed, both Epicureans and Stoics thought that the aim of philosophy was to show how we should live. As with their physical doctrines, in ethics both schools were influenced by previous philosophers, but they also developed the ideas of their predecessors considerably.

Epicureans were often disparaged as followers of Cyrenaic school, but they were quick to distinguish their views from the views of their hedonistic predecessors. True, Epicureans also admitted that pleasure was the end of good human life, but their pleasure resembled more what Aristotle had called happiness. Epicureans assumed that not all pleasures were of equal rank, because some of them involved pain and uneasiness, just like drinking too much wine results in a headache

Indeed, Epicureans thought it best to search for stable pleasures, like aesthetic enjoyment of art and delight on the presence of good friends, and pleasure that were necessary for human life, such as eating nourishing food when truly hungry. Especially they strived for painless life, and this quest for removing pain required also intellectual capacities. Because bad luck could strike anyone, a capacity to accept and endure even unpleasant states was also required. A truly happy man would then not just live the most pleasant life as possible in the circumstances, but he must also be wise and virtuous.

Stoics were said to have been influenced by Cynics, and indeed, Zeno was apparently thought by a Cynic. Thus, they shared something of the austere way of life favoured by Cynic and especially endorsed the ideal of living according to nature. But unlike Cynics, Stoics had a developed theory of the world and its denizens, and in this case, of the living beings. The aim of every living thing, according to Stoics, is to maintain itself, and therefore even plants feed themselves. While plants are senseless, animals can sense and feel things and therefore they can even feel when they have stumbled on something useful for their own maintenance: in that case they feel pleasure. Humans, on the other hand, have developed even further and have rational abilities to analyse their situation. Thus, they need not pleasure to know what to do, and instead, they should live by the guidance of their reason.

Now, reason and life according to it are then the only truly good thing, without which life would be full of misery. Compared to rationality, all else is useless: you might have fancy clothes or not, and it would not affect the quality of your life. Needless to says, Stoic were quite skeptical of emotions, which were more like a remnant of animal life. Especially negative emotions are to be avoided, and an ideally wise person would at most enjoy life, be cautious of dangers and wish for a good future.

This figure of an ideally acting person or wise sage was then important for both Epicureans and Stoics, and while one emphasized pleasures and other life according to reason, they both accepted that a life of a wise person would be both pleasant and rational. Stoics especially emphasized how different sages were from ordinary people. Radically they insisted that all people who were not sages would live badly, that is, there was no mediate stages between complete wisdom and utter depravity. Then again, becoming a sage was apparently an incontrovertible revolution, and once you knew how to live properly, you couldn't turn back.

Even though both Epicureans and Stoics spoke of ideals of wise persons, their ideals were also different in important points. Epicurean wise man was still in a sense an egoist, because it was only the pleasure of his own and his close friends that interested him mostly. Epicureans were doubtful of all communal efforts beyond association of friends, and they even felt family life to be a hindrance. Still, they suggested that even a wise person should follow the customs of his living environment, just as long as they were not completely against good reason.

The ideas of Stoics provide an interesting contrast to Epicurean views, because while latter accepted social norms, at least early representatives of the Stoic school were apparently still closer to the Cynic teachers, as they insisted that a wise person could ignore common customs, if it was rational to do so: if a sage wanted to cannibalize his companions, then it was good to do so. Later Stoics were, on the contrary, eager to point out that even sages lived usually customary life – they just did it better than others. On the other hand, communal life was far more important for Stoics than it was for Epicureans. Early Stoics spoke even of founding a community of wise people, which apparently resembled in some measure Plato's ideal community, because, for instance, instead of individual marriages, all wise shared their spouses with one another. Even later Stoics admitted that the life of a sage contained working, parenting children and taking part in communal endeavours – no wonder then that Stoicism was more accepted in the state-oriented Roman empire.