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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2023

How Does Nature Allot to Each Its Due?

Résumé

In Med. 8.7 Marcus Aurelius states that the universal Nature, i.e., the unhindered, rational, and just principle governing the world, assigns to each being several things equally and according to some value (κατ’ ἀξίαν): these include certain shares of time, substance, cause, activity, and experience. This claim raises two questions, an ontological one, and, so to speak, another concerning “theodicy”: what kinds of things are being dispensed by Nature, and what is the parameter of its distribution? Some scholars have already, to some extent, convincingly dealt with the former issue, and Marcus’ use of the same vocabulary elsewhere in his work helps us understand what he means by such terms as χρόνοι, οὐσία, αἰτία, ἐνέργεια, and σύμβασις. Instead, the latter problem remains unsolved. Med. 9.1 implies that the ἀξία serving as the parameter of the “cosmic allotment” pertains to the individual beings benefiting from it. However, this chapter rules out the theoretically most (though factually least) obvious hypothesis, viz. that Nature gives to each being commonly desirable or undesirable things according to their merit, e.g., pleasures to good people and pains to bad ones. This intriguing puzzle regarding the justice that rulesthe world is all the more urgent since it entails an ethical and political dilemma. It is not by chance that Marcus describes this operation of Nature with the same words appearing in the Stoics’ definition of the virtue of justice, explicitly endorsed by Marcus: since, from his Stoic perspective, human nature is part of the universal one, the latter ought to be taken as a model of conduct by humans, and, along the same lines, the justice of universal Nature must serve as a paradigm for justice as a human virtue. Therefore, grasping the rules of cosmic allotment is fundamental for humans to become just. In my paper, by analysing the Stoic conception of justice and Marcus’ polyvalent use of the vocabulary of value, I suggest that underlying this question of theodicy is an interactive analogy between cosmology and morality: if, on the one side, human justice has the divine organization of the world as its axiological criterion, on the other, the cosmos can be metaphorically depicted as ordered by a principle of justice, to make its complexity intuitive. As a result of this exegesis, the parameter of cosmic allotment, i.e., individual worth, proves to represent the destiny that universal Nature has granted to each reality and that they must accept as beneficial to the fulfillment of Nature’s providential plan for the world as a whole. These findings not only lead us to appreciate the richness of Marcus Aurelius’ self-didactic resources, but they also have a backlash on our understanding of the relationship between Stoic physics and ethics, usually grasped in terms of a natural foundation of morality. Contrariwise, the case examined here shows that this relationship is not that straightforward: physics and ethics sometimes concur to shape a single doctrine, which is thus essentially poised between different domains.

Domaines

Philosophie
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Dates et versions

hal-04093660 , version 1 (10-05-2023)

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  • HAL Id : hal-04093660 , version 1

Citer

Gabriele Flamigni. How Does Nature Allot to Each Its Due?: Marcus Aurelius on a Question of ‘Theodicy’. The Royal Holloway Stoicism Workshop “Stoic Physics Workshop”, Pr. John Sellars; Pr. Liz Gloyn, May 2023, Londres, United Kingdom. ⟨hal-04093660⟩
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