Doing Justice to Others 43human convention: the cynics and the stoics. Th e cynics— the word means
literally “doglike” in Greek— resolved to live their lives exclusively according
to nature. Th ey therefore did not regard themselves as in any way bound by
the peculiar conventional laws of any of the city- states. Th eir most promi-
nent fi gure, Diogenes, was famously at home in a barrel, shunning all of the
fripperies of then- modern life and claiming nothing more nor less than the
whole world as his city- state.
Th e stoics were much of the same persuasion as the cynics— though a
great deal more conventional in their lifestyles— in holding the laws of na-
ture to be of far greater consequence than the laws of man. Th ey produced
a far larger body of systematic writing on that subject. In contrast to the
cynics’ focus on personal ethics and lifestyle, the stoics gave a great deal
more thought to cosmological questions. In fact, they were the fi rst school
of philosophy to place the entire universe (or kosmos) at the very center of
their thought. Ultimately, in their view, the entire human community must
be seen as one single outsize city- state of polis— as, in the Greek terminol-
ogy, a “world- city” or kosmopolis, from which our word “cosmopolitan”
derives.
Th e stoics went on to posit some very striking features of this universe.
For one thing, in keeping with mainstream Greek thought, they regarded
the universe not merely as a single entity, but even as a single living entity.
Th ere was a single “breath of life” (or pneuma) that permeated the entire
universe, animating all living things— and in the pro cess, binding all living
things into, ultimately, a single great universal organism. Th is great organ-
ism, like organisms in general, had a life cycle, unfolding over time in the
manner of an acorn gradually being transformed into an oak tree. But how
much greater was the whole universe than a single oak tree! For this whole
universe, there was ultimately one single body of law, comprising the innate
properties of the great universal organism. Some stoics believed, further-
more, that the organic life cycle of the universe was unfolding according to
a rigorously predetermined plan, with every action of every creature, for all
eternity, plotted out to the smallest detail. For those who are attracted to
grand systems characterized by interconnection and interdependence, sto-
icism can hardly be surpassed. Its grand (and slightly dizzying) universal
vision has never been equaled as an extravagant, baroque, all- encompassing
system of natural law.