Stoicism, a Philosophical Basis for Ecology?

Abstract

Through its ideal of "living in harmony with nature", the Portico appears to be a philosophy that invites man to take his relationship with the world seriously. In order to achieve wisdom, the essential mark of which is sobriety, it has established principles, some of which seem to have an ecological value. While considering nature as an organic and spiritual entity whose parts together form a whole, stoicism posits that it constitutes the destiny whose laws are inescapable and instructs man never to rebel against the already established order but always to seek the best way to collaborate with it so as not to suffer the evils of his action. With the principle of "universal sympathy", he adds that everything is intertwined and interdependent so that one cannot touch one element of the cosmos without acting on the whole. Through the principle of oikeiôsis, i.e. the appropriation of oneself, a familiarity with what is close, extending from the human species to other natural beings, to the whole earth, develops. Apart from all these doctrinal considerations, we discover paradoxically that Seneca's work conceals several clues relating to the environmental problem. In this sense, it would be difficult to deny that the philosophy of the Portico has nothing to do with the foundation of ecology. Rather, its interest would lie, in terms of effectiveness, in the education of virtue, consisting of a habitus animi, a disposition of the soul in a certain way, which naturally implies ecological behavior.