The doctrine that the world is a living being, rational, animate and intelligent, is laid down by Chrysippus in the first book of his treatise On Providence, by Apollodorus in his Physics, and by Posidonius… And it is endowed with soul, as is clear from our several souls being each a fragment of it. (DL 7.142-3)[1]
Some people think the idea of a conscious cosmos is an antiquated relic of ancient Stoicism that we must abandon in light of modern science. However, numerous modern scientists and philosophers describe the nature of the cosmos in ways that are compatible with the intuitions of the ancient Stoics. Some now suggest consciousness must be a fundamental aspect of the cosmos and refer to a mind-like background in the universe. A few boldly claim the universe is conscious, just as the Stoic did more than two thousand years ago. Modern thinkers frequently label this idea panpsychism, which entails consciousness as a fundamental aspect of the cosmos.
When we consider a concept like a conscious cosmos and relate it to ancient Stoicism, we first must acknowledge that the Greeks did not have a word for conscious. The word first appears in English in the seventeenth century. Next, we must admit that many definitions of consciousness exist today. The ancient Stoics argued the cosmos is a living being (organism) that is rational, animate, and intelligent. I cannot imagine an entity that meets all those criteria we would deny is conscious. Instead of a conscious cosmos, we could say a rational, animate, and intelligent cosmos; however, that will not appease those who believe the universe is mechanistic, reductive to matter, and governed by laws that just happen, accidentally, to be conducive to life as we know it here on Earth. Therefore, the term conscious serves quite well as a substitute for a living being (organism) that is rational, animate, and intelligent.
The ancient Stoics considered their unique conception of a conscious, providentially ordered cosmos a necessary element of their holistic philosophical system. They did so for good reasons. Today, Traditional Stoics think this conception of the cosmos is still viable. First, despite the objections offered by those who adhere to the metaphysical assumptions of the current scientific orthodoxy, there is no objective scientific reason to abandon the conscious cosmos of Stoicism. More importantly, Stoic practice relies on the essential relationship between the way the world is (physics) and the way we should act in the world (ethics). Chrysippus, the third head of the Stoa, argued that universal nature is the source of our knowledge of virtue, good and evil, and happiness.
Further, according to Plutarch, Chrysippus asserted, “physical theory turns out to be ‘at once before and behind’ ethics.”[2] As I have written before, the conscious and providential cosmos is the soul of the Stoic philosophical system. Speaking of soul, the ancient Stoics believed the cosmos has a soul, and it is God. As Plutarch notes:
In his On providence book 1 [Chrysippus] says: ‘When the world is fiery through and through, it is directly both its own soul and commanding-faculty.[3]
Unfortunately, many people recoil, almost reflexively, from the concept of a conscious cosmos because it entails some form of intelligence that preexists human consciousness. They mistakenly assume such a concept necessarily invokes a supernatural divinity akin to those of traditional monotheistic religions. Likewise, many people are unaware of the increasing number of scientists and thinkers breaking out of the pre-twentieth-century, mechanistic, materialist, reductionist box and arguing that consciousness is a fundamental aspect of reality. I will highlight a few of those thinkers shortly.
Consciousness was ignored by the mainstream hard sciences, including psychology, at the beginning of the twentieth century. Science could not explain consciousness via reductive materialism; therefore, they either ignored or explained it away as an illusion or epiphenomenon. They promoted the simplistic notion that the mind is what the brain does. Behaviorist psychology, a product of Logical Positivism, ignored the person’s internal experience (consciousness) and treated the human mind as a black box. Behavior was quantifiable and could be subjected to the scientific method. Consciousness, on the other hand, was a metaphysical mystery.
Quantum theory challenged the objective observer model of science at its foundation by discovering that consciousness interacts with the physical world. As a result, during the twentieth century, an ever-increasing number of scientists and thinkers began to give due consideration to the nature and role of consciousness. Many have suggested that consciousness, in some form, must be a fundamental property of reality. Interestingly, some are beginning to describe the essential nature of the cosmos in ways that sound remarkably like the intuitions of ancient thinkers such as Plato and the Stoics. Lothar Schafer, a physical chemist, points out several modern thinkers who think it is reasonable to infer consciousness to the cosmos. Here is an extended quote from his recent book:
However you look at the matter, it seems reasonable to think that the human mind isn’t self-contained or self-sustained, but connected with a mindlike wholeness. “We can ‘infer’” Menas Kafatos and Robert Nadeau suggest, “that human consciousness ‘partakes’ or ‘participates in’ the conscious universe.
As I have made sure to emphasize, science can’t prove that the universe is conscious. At the same time, the numerous suggestions by serious scientists, including Bohm, Dürr, Eddington, Fischbeck, Jeans, Kafatos, Lipton, Nadeau, and me, that a cosmic spirit exists can’t all be shrugged off as signs of dementia in these authors. It makes more sense to conclude, as psychiatrist Brian Lancaster has done, that “consciousness amounts to a fundamental property, irreducible to other features of the universe such as energy or matter.”[4]
Likewise, the renowned American philosopher Thomas Nagel provoked a heated exchange about consciousness in 2012 when he challenged the core of the “neo-Darwinian conception of nature” in his book Mind & Cosmos. In one passage, Nagel speculated about the connection between human nature and the cosmos as a whole. His position is remarkably similar to the Stoic conception of that relationship. He wrote:
We ourselves are large-scale, complex instances of something both objectively physical from outside and subjectively mental from inside. Perhaps the basis for this identity pervades the world.[5]
The Stoics agree with Nagel. Reason (logos), which permeates the cosmos, is the basis for our identity as humans. The idea that rationality existed in the cosmos before human rationality plays a central role in Stoic theory. As Pierre Hadot notes:
all the dogmas of Stoicism derive from this existential choice. It is impossible that the universe could produce human rationality, unless the latter were already in some way present within the former.[6]
Arthur Eddington, an astrophysicist, was a little more direct than Thomas Nagel in the 1930s when he wrote:
To put the conclusion crudely—the stuff of the world is mind-stuff… The mind-stuff of the world is, of course, something more general than our individual conscious minds; but we may think of its nature as not altogether foreign to the feelings in our consciousness… Consciousness is not sharply defined, but fades into subconsciousness; and beyond that we must postulate something indefinite but yet continuous with our mental nature. This I take to be the world-stuff.[7]
Eddington admits, “It is difficult for the matter-of-fact physicist to accept the view that the substratum of everything is of mental character.” Nevertheless, as he points out, “no one can deny that mind is the first and most direct thing in our experience, and all else is remote inference—inference either intuitive or deliberate.”[8] Furthermore, he asserts.
We have seen that the cyclic scheme of physics presupposes a background outside the scope of its investigations. In this background we must find, first, our own personality, and then perhaps a greater personality. The idea of a universal Mind or Logos would be, I think, a fairly plausible inference from the present state of scientific theory; at least it is in harmony with it.[9]
It is fascinating to see a physicist use a phrase like universal Mind and the word logos. Bernard Haish, another astrophysicist, agrees. He wrote:
I am proposing that an equally likely—and perhaps even slightly more likely—explanation is that there is a conscious intelligence behind the universe, and that the purpose of the universe and of our human lives is very intimately involved with that intelligence.[10]
These are not the ramblings of crackpot pseudo-scientists. As Paul Davies, another physicist points out:
An increasing number of scientists and writers have come to realize that the ability of the physical world to organize itself constitutes a fundamental, and deeply mysterious, property of the universe. The fact that nature has creative power, and is able to produce a progressively richer variety of complex forms and structures, challenges the very foundation of contemporary science.[11]
In his book, The Goldilocks Enigma, Davies argues,
Intelligent design of the laws does not conflict with science because it accepts that the whole universe runs itself according to physical laws and that everything that happens in the universe has a natural explanation. There are no miracles other than the miracle of nature itself. You don’t even need a miracle to bring the universe into existence in the first place because the big bang may be brought within the scope of physical laws too, either by using quantum cosmology to explain the origin of the universe from nothing or by assuming something like eternal inflation.
The designer-of-laws is responsible for the universe, and might be thought of as upholding its existence at every moment, but does not tinker with its day-to-day operation. The type of God I am describing comes close, I think, to what many scholarly theologians—and for that matter quite a few scientists—profess to believe in.[12]
Later in the book, Davies makes an argument for what he calls “The Self-Explaining Universe” and comes remarkably close to describing a conscious cosmos:
To invert the famous dictum “garbage in, garbage out,” I am claiming something like “meaning out, meaning in.” If the universe runs on an ingenious cosmic code, and if the existence of the code is attributed to a self-consistent, self-explanatory loop, then the state of the universe has to be, at some point in its evolution, equally as ingenious as the laws that underpin it. The universe clearly cannot be self-explanatory without containing the ability to explain itself! If there is to be a complete explanation for the universe as a loop, the universe has to know and understand the laws it is responsible for in order to bring those laws into being. How could it be otherwise?[13]
Finally, the physicist Menas Kafatos, a pioneer in the attempt to converge science and philosophy and promote a rational spirituality, wrote:
Yet in discovering a new limit to our ability to fully comprehend physical reality, we are presented with a view of nature in which consciousness, or mind, can be properly defined as a phase in the process of the evolution of the cosmos implied in presupposing all other stages. If it manifests or emerges in the latter stages, and has been progressively unfolding from the beginning stages, then it would follow the universe is in some sense conscious.[14]
Remarkably, Kafatos then posits the same relationship as the Stoics did between cosmic and human consciousness:
Rather than merely view acts of cognition in classical terms as representations or images of independently existing facts, the empirical foundation for these acts in the physical substrate of the human brain must now be viewed as intimately connected with the whole.[15]
Does any of this ‘prove’ the cosmos is a living organism that is rational, animate, and intelligent, as the Stoics asserted? Certainly not. Will these arguments convince committed atheists a conscious cosmos is not the equivalent of an imaginary flying spaghetti monster? No! However, that is not the point.
The cosmos cannot be ‘proven’ to be a living organism that is rational, animate, and intelligent to the satisfaction of anyone who holds an alternative metaphysical view. Nevertheless, the concept remains a reasonable, philosophically defensible theory for moderns. Those who assert the ancient Stoic worldview as unreasonable, irrational, unscientific, etc., are throwing stones from within their own metaphysical glass house. These assertions are not supported by science. Instead, they are the beliefs of scientism, which are based on a set of unprovable metaphysical assumptions. When scientists step outside the bounds of the scientific methods to make metaphysical assertions, they are going beyond the facts they claim we must follow. They are expressing a worldview. Unfortunately, once a worldview is entrenched in the scientific and academic community, it becomes dogma and does not relinquish its hegemony willingly. As psychologists Imants Baruss and Julia Mossbridge point out:
The problem is that materialism, and its offspring neuroscientism, are not just theories. We have already seen that they can function as worldviews and schemata. But they also function as dogma… Once an ideology becomes dogmatic, it is held in place by the usual mechanisms of social compliance acting within academic, scientific, and political institutions.[16]
The Nobel prize-winning physicist Max Planck experienced this resistance to change within the scientific community and wrote about it in his autobiography. He noted,
a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.[17]
The history of science makes one thing certain: There’s a good chance the best scientific theories of today may be scoffed at a century from now. Science does not speak in unison. There is room for rational, reasonable, and scientific-minded people to disagree on the nature of the cosmos while simultaneously respecting those with whom they disagree. In 2010, twenty-three philosophers contributed papers expressing their concern with the inadequacy of materialism. The back cover of that book reads:
Twenty-three philosophers examine the doctrine of materialism and find it wanting. The case against materialism comprises arguments from conscious experience, from the unity and identity of the person, from intentionality, mental causation, and knowledge.[18]
Additionally, panpsychism is entering the scientific mainstream. The next generation of scientists will be familiar with the idea of consciousness as a fundamental aspect of nature. Those who are still beholden to the mechanistic, reductive, materialistic conception of the cosmos will eventually retire from their positions as authority figures, and a new generation of more open-minded thinkers may find themselves considering metaphysical ideas thought ludicrous a generation prior.
My argument is this: the cosmic worldview of the ancient Stoics is still a viable option for twenty-first-century practitioners of Stoicism. Certainly, some of the details of their cosmology need to be updated; however, the concept of a living, conscious cosmos remains viable for modern Stoics. Despite what many people, even some moderns who self-identify as Stoics, assert, the conscious cosmos of Stoicism is not untenable in light of contemporary science.
Ultimately, this question is metaphysical and beyond the scientific method’s domain. We may never conclusively settle the age-old battle between the Epicureans and the Stoics over the nature of the cosmos. The existing evidence can be used to support both positions. As a result, we see brilliant minds on both sides of the argument.
However, some open-minded scientists and thinkers are beginning to posit a new path forward—a rational form of spirituality based on the new understanding of the nature of reality provided by quantum theory and panpsychism. My argument is that practicing Stoics do not need to reject the concept of the cosmos as a rational, animate, and intelligent organism. There is room in the open space between fundamentalist atheism and fundamentalist religion for the rational and spiritual practice of traditional Stoicism. If you step into that open space between the extremes and try the idea on for a while, you might be surprised by the attitudinal changes it fosters. You may just set your practice of Stoicism on Fire.
ENDNOTES:
[1] Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers
[2] Plutarch, De Stoicorum Repugnantiis 1035c–d, tr. Cherniss
[3] Plutarch, De Stoicorum Repugnantiis 1053-b, tr. LS 46F
[4] Schäfer, L. (2013). Infinite Potential: What Quantum Physics Reveals About How We Should Live. Random House, p. 157
[5] Nagel, T. (2012). Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. Oxford, p. 42
[6] Hadot, P. (1998). The Inner Citadel: The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. Harvard University Press. pp. 308-9
[7] Eddington, A. (1928). The Nature of the Physical World: Gifford Lectures. Cambridge University Press. p. 276
[8] Ibid, p. 281
[9] Ibid, p. 338
[10] Haisch, B. (2010). The Purpose-Guided Universe: Believing In Einstein, Darwin, and God. New Page books, p. 10
[11] Davies, P. C. (1988). The Cosmic Blueprint: New Discoveries in Nature’s Creative Ability to Order the Universe. Templeton, p. 5
[12] Davies, Paul (2006). The Goldilocks Enigma: Why Is the Universe Just Right for Life? Allen Lane, p. 226
[13] Ibid, p. 289
[14] Kafatos, M., & Nadeau, R. (1990). The Conscious Universe: Part and Whole in Modern Physical Theory. Springer-Verlag, p. 177
[15] Ibid
[16] Baruss, I., & Mossbridge, J. (2016). Transcendent Mind: Rethinking the Science of Consciousness. American Psychological Association. p. 24
[17] Planck, M. (1949). Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers (F. Gaynor, Trans.). Philosophical Library. pp. 33-34
[18] Koons, R. C., & Bealer, G. (Eds.). (2010). The Waning of Materialism. Oxford. back cover
