Abstract
Collectively sanctioned protocols dictate how affectionate we are to the various kinds of people in our lives. Hierocles’ impression that we categorize people in concentric circles becomes relevant here. His response to such categorization is to request that we decrease the distance between ourselves and the people in our outer circles. Hierocles evidences his Stoic orientations in describing this as an individuated impulse that is in accordance with our internal nature. I compare Hierocles’ conception with Lévi-Strauss’ reading of the incest prohibition and associated kinship rules. For Lévi-Strauss, bringing an “outer circle member” closer specifically for mating has socialized motivations in terms of maintaining communal relations and improving group security. This possibly conflicts with Hierocles’ call that dispersing our general affection to those in our outer circles is reflective of our individually proactive, internal self-awareness. In navigating this difference, I attend to the collegial orientations in Hierocles’ account of cosmopolitanism. From this, we can argue that for both Hierocles and Lévi-Strauss the regulation of affection is not simply reflective of an individual’s nature but has social imperatives.
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Notes
- 1.
These classifications often distinguish between people who are family members and those who are friends. Such a distinction in turn fuels debates regarding what constitutes our “kin.” Lewis Morgan (1871) offers a traditional anthropological definition of kinship according to rules of biological descent. David Schneider alternatively expands kinship to a system of symbols and meanings that includes friends (Schneider 1984, 53–54). Ethan Leib counters Schneider’s type of perspective by arguing that “if a relationship is one of kinship, it cannot also be classified as a friendship” (Leib 2011, 15–16). This distinction is necessary for Leib to discriminate the social contributions that friendship and kinship relations respectively make. Paige Digeser responds that this sharp distinction between friendship and kinship is “less a matter of principle and more a matter of strategy” that reflects Leib’s investments in the relative legal recognitions afforded to different relationships (Digeser 2016, 202).
- 2.
Seneca’s ninth letter “On Philosophy and Friendship” from Letters from a Stoic gives a utilitarian impression of friendship as servicing personal development. For Seneca the practicing Stoic and “wise man, self-sufficient as he is, still desires to have a friend if only for the purpose of practicing friendship and ensuring that those talents are not idle” (Seneca 1969, 9.9). Aristotle provides another interesting ancient perspective on friendship in two books of The Nicomachean Ethics. Here he explains that there is no doubt we need friends. More complex debates in his opinion concern “under what circumstances do we need them most? Is it in good fortune, or in bad fortune that we have the greater need of friends?” (Aristotle 2004, 9.11.1171a20–24).
- 3.
Hermann Schibli explains in Hierocles of Alexandria that not only do we lack biographical information on Hierocles but that we are also without much information on Plutarch, with whom Hierocles appears to have studied. Despite this, we can establish a relationship between the two through the reports of other ancients. That Hierocles “pays express homage” to Plutarch is asserted by Schibli, for whom later “Platonic doctrines indicate that the influence of Plutarch on Hierocles’ philosophical formation was considerable” (Schibli 2002, 6).
- 4.
As Ramelli notes in her Introduction to the original translation of Hierocles’ texts, there is enough distinction between the styles of the Elements and Stobaeus’ extracts that scholars are convinced they belong to two different works (Ramelli in Hierocles 2009, xxix–xxx).
- 5.
Julia Annas describes this as where “the aim is to think of all humans impartially, giving them all equal concern” (Annas 1993, 268). See later in this chapter for Annas’ doubts regarding whether such egalitarianism would eventuate.
- 6.
See Brennan (2005, 154–168) for a discussion of how this interpersonal feature of Hierocles’ theory speaks to broader Stoic considerations about oikeiôsis. Oikeiôsis involves one’s self-regarding or self-preserving inclinations. Brennan accordingly describes how oikeiôsis informs “my directing my impulse towards the preservation of that thing I recognize myself to be” (156). In commentating on Elements of Ethics Gretchen Reydams-Schils also describes this work as the “best evidence on the highly sophisticated Stoic notion of ‘appropriation’ (oikeiôsis), which stipulates that by nature and from birth, animals and human beings come equipped with a self-awareness and self-love that guides them toward self-preservation” (Reydams-Schils 2010, 566). Becker is conscious though, as are Reydams-Schils and Brennan, that there is more to this account of socialized oikeiôsis than “self-love alone” (Becker 1998, 74–76).
- 7.
Readers familiar with either foundational sociology or the second chapter of this book would recognize this title’s similarity to Durkheim ’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1995 [1912]). Lévi-Strauss intends this play on words. In “History and Anthropology,” the introductory chapter of his Structural Anthropology, Lévi-Strauss approves as a “classic study” (Lévi-Strauss 1963 [1958], 5) the anthropological investigation found in Durkheim and Marcel Mauss’ Primitive Classification (1967 [1903]). Despite this endorsement, in The Elementary Structures of Kinship Lévi-Strauss commentates that Durkheim shares a “historicizing” fault of nineteenth-century evolutionists such as Herbert Spencer. This fault of Durkheim’s is to “attempt to establish a universal phenomenon on, an historical sequence, which is by no means inconceivable in some particular case but whose episodes are so contingent that the possibility of this sequence being repeated unchanged in every human society must be wholly excluded” (Lévi-Strauss 1969, 22). From this Lévi-Strauss criticizes Durkheim’s theory of incest prohibitions (19–23), presenting his contrary interpretation that we engage in this chapter.
- 8.
- 9.
This coheres with Lévi-Strauss’ general belief in the division of nature and culture. In The Savage Mind when discussing the cultural exchange of women, he differentiates between the homogenous woman “as far as nature is concerned,” and the qualitatively pluralized woman that is “declared to be heterogeneous from the point of view of culture” (Lévi-Strauss 1966 [1962], 123). That culture structures the conceptual correlation of women with nature provides for Lévi-Strauss an insight into the “control” of nature by culture. This interpretation of a cultural domination of nature is evident in Lévi-Strauss’ Tristes Tropiques where he posits that Jean-Jacques Rousseau “poses the central problem of anthropology, viz. the passage from an unbridled nature to an ordered society” (Lévi-Strauss 1992 [1955], 229). Lévi-Strauss identifies this progression from nature to culture in the way that Western culture (himself as the anthropologist) imposes itself onto more “primitive cultures” (Brazil’s Nambikwara tribe that he researches). I comprehensively review this interpretation, via Derrida’s critique of it (Derrida 1976 [1967]), in my book Naturally Late (Johncock 2019).
- 10.
In The Savage Mind Lévi-Strauss tempers this characterization of women as objects that hold a certain exchange value. There he observes that women are not exactly the same as socially manufactured goods. Rather, as natural creatures whose “exchange value” is subsequently culturally constructed, “the ‘system of women’ is, as it were, a middle term between the system of (natural) living creatures and the system of (manufactured) objects” (Lévi-Strauss 1966, 128).
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Johncock, W. (2020). How Do We Regulate Our Affection for Others? Hierocles and Claude Lévi-Strauss on Kinship Circles. In: Stoic Philosophy and Social Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43153-2_9
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