Entering A Garden: Stoicism, Nature, and Metazoa · Stoicism Today

Welcome to Stoicism Today! This week we bring you an article about a less discussed aspect of Stoicism: Stoic physics and, specifically, Stoic natural science. Author Judith Stove responds to recent work by Australian philosopher of science, Peter Godfrey-Smith, to suggest that the Stoics were ahead of their time in locating human life firmly in its animal context.

Lyceum or Stoa?

When people today encounter Stoicism, it is usually through hearing about aspects of the ethics: the four key virtues; appropriate ways to act, in order to live the best life; the pursuit of wellbeing. Ethics, though, is only one of the three traditional divisions of Stoicism; the others are physics, and logic. A subset of Stoic physics, Stoic natural science remains relatively neglected except by a minority of specialists; even Stoic logic has tended to receive more recognition.

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Some decades ago, as interest revived in Hellenistic philosophy, it was the ethics of Aristotle, not the Stoics, which attracted prominence at first.[1] Similarly, it has been Aristotle’s school which has been a focus of ongoing work in ancient biology (see, e.g., Lytle 2022). Just as Stoicism’s practical ethics has since far surpassed Aristotle’s in widespread acceptance, we may now revisit some biological insights of the Stoics - with a focus on the Stoic-coded zoological epic, Oppian’s Haleutica. Starting from key principles in ancient Stoic physics, this essay will suggest that the Stoic worldview was ahead of its time, in locating human life firmly in its animal context. Against this background, it will explore recent work by philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith, whose sensitive observations of nature seem to align earlier traditions with the latest cognitive science.

The Stoic View of Nature

For the Stoics, only bodies exist.[2] A major reason for maintaining this was that, in their view, only bodies could be causally active: in Seneca’s terse formulation, ‘Whatever is active is a body’ (quidquid facit corpus est, Letters to Lucilius 117.2). All bodies consist of pneuma, ‘breath,’ in varying states of tension: a rock has the same components as a plant or an animal, but in different amounts and arrangements. A rock breaks down into soil, forming the medium for plants, insects, and other animals, the food for other species, and ultimately for humans.

‘Universal nature,’ the great Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius writes, ‘molded universal substance, as if it were wax, and made, let’s say, a horse; and then, after dissolving the horse, it reused its matter to make a tree, then a man, and then something else, with each of these things subsisting for only a very short time’ (7.23, Waterfield translation). Such a view underscores the inter-relatedness of humans with other species, even with what would today be considered inorganic nature.

This is featured, too, in the accounts we find in Diogenes Laertius Book 7, which identified plants, animals and humans as sharing key modes of being, arguing first from unified nature towards its various developments:

Nature, [the Stoics] say, made no difference originally between plants and animals, for she regulates the life of plants too, in their case without instinct and sensation, just as also certain processes go on in us of a vegetative kind [e.g. digestion, respiration]. But when, in the case of animals, instinct has been superadded, whereby they are enabled to pursue their needs, for them, say the Stoics, living according to Nature is following instinctive drives. But as living by reason has been given, as a more advanced standing, to reasoning beings, for them life according to reason becomes the natural life. For knowledge thus supervenes on instinctive drives.

(7.86, Hicks translation, lightly revised by author)

The natural drives indicated are, first, for self-preservation, and secondly, to reproduce. The first of these was identified by the ancient Stoics as oikeiōsis, ‘becoming like family,’ which we can usefully understand, in the first instance, as the organism’s proprioception of its body and how to use it. Over time, as the organism matures, oikeiōsis would expand to enable it to form relationships with con-specifics (and members of other species), potentially very widely.

The second drive (related to the first) gave rise to parental and family love, conceived by the Stoics to form one of the building-blocks of the cosmos in general, and specifically of human society. Cicero, working from a lost Greek original by the Stoic philosopher Panaetius, explains the broader outcomes afforded by instinctive drives when modified by reason, memory and a sense of the future, along with human sociality:

Common to all animals is the instinct to have sexual intercourse, in order to procreate offspring, and care for them to a degree. But the most marked difference between humans and animals is that the animal, as much as it is motivated by its senses, only adapts its behaviour to the present moment, with little or no concept of past or future. A human, on the other hand, because he/she is a participant [particeps] in reason, through which he/she assesses outcomes, sees the causes and development of things, taking account of the relevant background; makes analogies between similar things, adds in the current situation, ties it in with the future: he or she readily surveys the whole course of life, and makes the required preparations for going forward.

(On Duties, 1.11, translation by author)

The significance of these Stoic passages, often neglected, cannot be overstated: they denote a worldview which we should not hesitate to call scientific. The notion that all animals including humans, and plants, share a common, ‘natural,’ origin, along with bodily processes, is a simple and powerful principle. Yet it was not until the nineteenth century, or even the twentieth, that the notion of ‘basic drives’ shared across biological groupings – rather than unsupported claims of divine decrees, or allegorical ‘teaching moments’ - reappeared in the discourses of science.[3]

Furthermore, something like the Stoics’ two basic drives would seem to underlie the theory of natural (as, indeed, of artificial) selection. If organisms happened not to be particularly directed towards survival, and/or reproduction, they would be unlikely to produce even one new generation. We can imagine, for example, a world in which many species were subject to the sorts of factors which appear, in our world, to impede, if not endanger, the survival of giant pandas: restricted fertility window; inept copulation; apparent preference for solitude (Lewis 2015). As it happens, though, on our planet, the panda model seems somewhat unusual. Organisms do, indeed, seem to be impelled, in general, to secure their own survival, the generation of offspring (of one kind or another), and (for many animals) their offspring’s survival.[4]

All this may appear obvious, but in fact, it took uncommon acuity in the ancient Stoics to infer, from everyday observations, general principles across the biological network which, even now, we consider to be fundamentally correct. Indeed, in the second half of the nineteenth century, some thoughtful proponents of Darwin’s theory, among them Thomas Henry Huxley, considered that classical Stoicism was not only consistent with the new biology, but had actually anticipated forms and elements of evolutionary theory: ‘It was reserved for the Stoics to return to the track marked out by the earlier [pre-Socratic] philosophers; and, professing themselves disciples of Heracleitus, to develop the idea of evolution systematically’ (Huxley 1893, loc. 1075[5]).

Advancing the Stoic View of Nature Today

Contemporary research may permit us to appreciate the insights of the ancient Stoics in fresh ways. In his 2020 book Metazoa: Animal Minds and the Birth of Consciousness, philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith has developed an approach to exploring ‘other minds,’ in particular those of mostly marine species.

In our era, the older view of beings as ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ – Aristotle’s ‘continuous scale of ascent’ (History of Animals 8.588b 10) - has been emphatically rejected, on the pretext of its unjustified elevation of humans. Yet, ironically, we now find neuroscience focusing on human mental activity as the benchmark against which other species are to be measured, through (sometimes grotesque, unkind, or degrading) experimentation, and often found wanting. Godfrey-Smith gently shows us a far more inclusive way in which to consider the lifeworld of other animals (and also, perhaps, of plants), introducing our cousins of other species with courtesy, respect, even reverence. There is, of course, a long tradition of this broader kind of natural science, based in close observation. Godfrey-Smith mentions Aristotle, whose school continued for centuries to undertake study of marine fauna (Lytle 2022), but not the Stoics (understandably, as we have noted that their work has largely been overlooked).

Hearts and Minds

As we have seen, the Stoics insisted that what we call mind or soul is corporeal. Clearly, a firmly corporeal and unified worldview avoids many difficulties which continue to attend study of mind, when conceived as somehow distinct from, while in relationship with, the body. Godfrey-Smith explains that his own commitment is to a form of materialist monism, ‘an underlying unity in nature’ which sees evolutionary development as having given rise to minds (2020, p. 16).

Further, like Aristotle, the Stoics considered that the seat of executive agency (hēgemonikon, ‘command centre’) lay in the heart; they did not share our preoccupation with brains (we may note that increasingly, in our time, researchers are finding a range of interactions between heart activity and brain function: Forte and Casagrande 2025; Scheitz et al 2026). For the Stoics, rationality is not an isolated, formal, algorithmic process; rather, it is an active dispersal of order throughout nature.

Like An Octopus

On this basis, the Stoics considered that capacities for varying functions could be dispersed throughout the human body, in a manner described in one ancient source as ‘like the tentacles of an octopus’:

From the command centre there are seven parts of the soul which grow out and stretch out into the body like the tentacles of an octopus (kathaper hai apo tôu polupodos plektanai). (3) Five of these are the senses, sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch. Sight is breath (pneuma) which extends from the command centre to the eyes, hearing is breath which extends from the commanding-faculty to the ears … (4) Of the remainder, one is called seed, and this is breath extending from the commanding-faculty to the genitals. (5) The other, … which they also call utterance, is breath extending from the command centre to the pharynx, tongue and associated organs.

(Aëtius 4.21.1–4 = SVF 2.836, part, quoted in Long and Sedley, p. 470, slightly revised)

This simile of octopus sentience could not be more pertinent to the concerns of Godfrey-Smith, a specialist on octopus behaviour. He speculates about the extent to which the octopus, with its central nervous system and apparently extended agency in each limb, operates as an experiencing unit:

[Octopus arms] probably have enough complexity in there for experience—enough neurons. An entire bee has only a million neurons, and an octopus arm has tens of millions. But most likely, arms never become selves of the right kind, given their connections to the networks of neurons in the other arms and to the center. There is, after all, a 1+1 view on the table as well as a 1+8 view; this reflects the fact that the neural networks in each arm are not self-contained, even when (as it appears) the arm is allowed to wander and do its own thing.

(2020, pp. 157-8)

The Stoic simile of the octopus would only have occurred in a culture accustomed to scrutiny of the animal in its natural setting. In part, of course, such scrutiny was due to the octopus’s enduring popularity in Mediterranean cuisine, just as food production was, throughout history, the practice which promoted the growth of information about artificial selection of crops and stock; but there was also a literary and scientific tradition at work in our surviving sources.

Oppian’s didactic epic

Stoic and Stoic-adjacent authors were strongly represented in the genre of didactic, which sought to teach ‘true things, beautifully’ in Spencer A. Klavan’s fitting phrase concerning Aratus, author of the highly influential astronomical work Phaenomena (thought to be composed in the same era as the early Stoic school). For our purposes, a relevant didactic text is the Halieutica, ‘Fishing,’ by the second-century CE author Oppian. This was a hexameter epic in five books, describing, with biological detail and literary flair, the denizens of the deep.

Oppian makes connections between the behaviour of marine species and humans, in a way which – entirely consonant with Stoic doctrine – emphasises common features. He also records surprising facts, such as that octopuses (which feature prominently in the work) can eat their own feet, but that the feet can regrow (2.243-6); octopus autophagy in certain situations has been confirmed in the twentieth century (Budelmann 1998).

Cetacean Friends

Oppian recalls the famous story of the musician Arion, rescued by a dolphin from the clutches of pirates. He adds an anecdote from recent times: a friendship between a young man and a dolphin, over a period of years. The dolphin would come when called by name (4.474-491), while the youth would ride on the dolphin’s back. Oppian asserts the belief that dolphins, in the remote past, had been human:

Now all the viviparous denizens of the sea love and cherish their young but diviner than the Dolphin is nothing yet created; for indeed they were aforetime men and lived in cities along with mortals, but by the devising of Dionysus they exchanged the land for the sea and put on the form of fishes; but even now the righteous spirit of men in them preserves human thought and human deeds.

(1.646-654)

Science has confirmed that cetaceans – dolphins, whales and porpoises - are indeed descended from land mammals. While modern writers avoid anthropocentric language, they essentially confirm Oppian’s point: cetaceans solve problems, show empathy, teach their young, and exhibit grief, joy and playfulness. Godfrey-Smith adds his own moving anecdote about a recent dolphin-human connection:

‘Wild dolphins sometimes have a strikingly close engagement with people. A few years ago I saw a lone dolphin who regularly visits Cabbage Tree Bay, the marine reserve near Sydney that was the site of much of my earlier book Other Minds. This dolphin, well-known along those shores, is a female—I will stay with “is,” though she has not been seen there for a couple of years now, as far as I know. She lives on her own, after losing her pod some time ago, and does not seem too concerned about her unusual life. That day in the water, a lot of swimmers hung around, many just to see the dolphin. We kept a distance, but she would zoom in. She took a particular liking to a young man with red hair. When he dived down, she would come rocketing in and bring her face very close to his, repeatedly, so close that it looked like she was going to kiss him.

(2020, p. 244-5)

As we have seen, Stoicism, once again, seems ahead of its time in conceiving sociality as key to animal and human development. In Godfrey-Smith’s terms:

Social interaction creates a complex environment for an animal, and is very often a driver of the evolution of intelligence. This principle was originally developed for primates, where especially large brains are found in the more social species, but it has a broader application, and fish look like a likely case.

(2020, pp. 178-9)

The Stoics Observe Nature

The first audience for Oppian’s Halieutica was Marcus Aurelius, along with his son Commodus and his court; and we may conclude that he thought highly of it, as he is recorded as awarding the author a generous gift of gold.[6] Marcus’s own engagement with nature was profound. In a magnificent passage, he explains the importance of attending even to seemingly random features, and aspects which many might find obvious, unpleasant, or confronting, as evidence of fundamental processes:

One should also take careful note of things such as the fact that even the by-products of natural phenomena have a certain charm and attractiveness. For example, in the process of baking bread, the loaf breaks open in some places, and although these cracks in a sense represent a failure of the baker’s art, they do somehow catch the eye and, in their own way, stimulate the desire to eat the bread. Or again: when figs are fully ripe they split open, and in the case of ripe olives the very fact that they are on the verge of rotting gives the fruit a specific kind of beauty. The same goes for ears of wheat bowing down to the ground, a lion’s wrinkled brow, a boar foaming at the mouth, and many other things. They are hardly lovely if viewed in isolation, but they enhance the appeal of the natural phenomena of which they are concomitants, and so we find them attractive.

So there’s almost nothing that a sensitive person, with a deep enough understanding of the workings of the universe, will fail to find pleasing in its manifestations, including these incidental concomitants.

(Meditations 3.2, Waterfield translation)

In sections such as this we see not only Marcus’s consummate artistry, but the kind of passion for investigating nature which today’s biologists may share.

Conclusion

To retrace our opening reflections: there have been sound reasons why Aristotelian ethics, so prominent early in the virtue-ethics revival, has proven to retain, over the interim, relatively niche appeal. By contrast, Stoicism’s insistence on the radical equality of persons with universal rational agency, rejecting Aristotle’s ‘natural slaves’ (Politics 1.1254a 20) and inferior women (1254b 10), continues to invite adherents. At the same time, Stoicism’s focus on active virtue – rather than contemplation - has proven attractive to many.[7] When it comes to biology, Stoicism’s approach, in considering fauna and flora as co-implicated throughout a dense causal ecosystem, may promote fruitful readings, including, as sketched here, in areas of continuing relevance such as animal sentience and behaviour (including cross-species parallels), and human body systems.

Finally, the great Stoic and Stoic-adjacent works of natural science – such as Seneca’s Natural Questions – can enrich our understanding of the Stoic worldview. At times, Stoic writers likened their philosophy - intimately interweaving physics (the world; causation; order), logic (epistemology; reasoning; grammar; dialectic) and ethics - to an organic community, such as an orchard or garden (Diogenes Laertius 7.40). Appealing to a similar theme, Godfrey-Smith’s finale to his beautiful work (2020, p. 281) concludes that human sentience may indeed be something like the experience of a ‘walled garden’:

We create an arena, a field, filled with both things that arise and things we furnish. We enter a garden.

About the Author

Judith Stove is a Sydney writer, co-organiser of Stoicon-X Melbourne (2022-) and now Stoicon-X Sydney (2026-), and facilitator of the online New Southern Star Stoics (a group in close oikeiōsis with its parent, Conversations With Modern Stoicism).

Works Cited

Budelmann, B. U. ‘Autophagy in Octopus,’ South African Journal of Marine Science, 20(1), 101–108, 1998, published online 8 April 2010, https://doi.org/10.2989/025776198784126502

Cicero, On Duties (translated by Walter Miller), Loeb Classical Library, 1913

Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers (translated by R.D. Hicks), Loeb Classical Library, vol. II, 1925

Ellis, Rosemary, ‘The Remarkable Minds of Whales and Dolphins,’ International Marine Mammal Project, 23 October 2024, The Remarkable Minds of Whales and Dolphins - International Marine Mammal Project

Farquharson, A.S.L., ΜΑΡΚΟΥ ΑΝΤΩΝΙΟΥ ΑΥΤΟΚΡΑΤΟΡΟΣ ΤΑ ΕΙΣ ΕΑΥΤΟΝ The Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Antoninus, 2 vols. Oxford University Press, 1944

Forte, Giuseppe, and Maria Casagrande, ‘The intricate brain–heart connection: The relationship between heart rate variability and cognitive functioning,’ Neuroscience 565 (2025), 369-376

Godfrey-Smith, Peter, Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection. Oxford University Press, 2009

- Metazoa: Animal Minds and the Birth of Consciousness. William Collins, 2020

- ‘Materialism: Then and Now,’ in Peter Anstey and David Braddon-Mitchell (eds.), Armstrong’s Materialist Theory of Mind. Oxford University Press, 2021, 76-91 https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192843722.003.0006

Huxley, Thomas H., Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays [1893]. Project Gutenberg eBook #2940 (Kindle version), updated 2024

Klavan, Spencer A., ‘A Phenomenal Poet,’ The New Criterion, vol. 44, no. 8, April 2026, 4-8

Lewis, Danny, ‘Breeding Pandas is Incredibly Hard,’ Smithsonian Magazine, Breeding Pandas Is Incredibly Hard, 26 August 2015

Long, A.A. ‘Greek Ethics After MacIntyre and the Stoic Community of Reason,’ Ancient Philosophy 3 (1983), vol. 3, issue 2, Fall 1983, 184-199

Long, A.A. and D.N. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, vol. I. Cambridge University Press, 1987

Lytle, Ephraim, ‘The Red Sea Aristotle,’ Journal of Hellenic Studies 2022, 142, 100-143

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations: The Annotated Edition (translated by Robin Waterfield). Basic Books, 2021

McKeon, Richard, The Basic Works of Aristotle. Random House, 1941

Mills, Claudia, ‘Sharing the Wisdom of Epictetus with Youth,’ Stoicism Today, 2 May 2026

Oppian, Colluthus, Tryphiodorus (translated by A.W. Mair), Loeb Classical Library, 1928

Scheitz, J.F., Villringer, A., Mikail, N. et al. ‘Bidirectional brain–heart interactions in health and disease,’ Nat Rev Neurol 22, 209–225 (2026) https://doi.org/10.1038/s41582-025-01180-w

Sellars, John, Stoicism. Routledge, 2006

Seneca, Letters on Ethics to Lucilius (translated by Margaret Graver and A.A. Long). University of Chicago Press, 2015

Notes

[1] Despite A.A. Long’s spirited rearguard action (1983), offering Stoicism as a more promising candidate for a modern virtue-ethics than the Thomist-Aristotelianism promoted by Alasdair MacIntyre in his bestselling After Virtue (1981).

[2] Except for ‘the four incorporeals’: time, space, the void, and lekta, ‘sayables,’ similar in our terms to ‘meaning.’ To be sure, at times Seneca and Stoic-inflected writers seem to entertain a non-bodily soul surviving death (e.g. Seneca, Letters to Lucilius 65.20-21, and Consolation to Marcia 25; Cicero, ‘The Dream of Scipio,’ On the Republic 6): understandable in literary artists, inheriting traditions about the afterlife from Homer, and (for Seneca) from Virgil.

[3] Aristotle had identified the ‘nutritive appetite’ and reproductive imperative as important (On the Soul 2.415a-b), but his account is more diffuse and less powerful than the Stoic formulation. Badke 2024 offers a good general introduction to the medieval bestiary genre and its theologico-moral aims.

[4] In his 2009 work, Godfrey-Smith explains how many surprising forms ‘offspring’ may take (Chapter 4).

[5] I hope to explore Huxley on evolution and the Stoics at greater length in a forthcoming essay.

[6] Marcus is said in one source to have written a work on fishing himself, probably a confusion with Oppian’s (Farquharson vol. I, p. xxii, n.3).

[7] The concise and portable nature of key Stoic works must also have been a factor: in this journal, Professor Claudia Mills has recently pointed out that nobody writes home asking their mother to send out their copy of the Nicomachean Ethics, but, rather, their copy of Epictetus; and I would add, their Marcus’s Meditations (Mills 2026).

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