Who Is My Brother?

Q:“Granted, ancient philosophy offers useful insights into human psychology and good, practical advice that can help us put life’s difficulties into perspective. I also appreciate its emphasis on the pursuit of wisdom and virtue as essential to human flourishing. The old philosophers were good on the subject of self-care: necessary medicine in a world as capricious and troublesome as this one. But what about our duties to others? Our responsibilities to family, friends, neighbors? For that matter, what do we owe, as fellow human beings, to strangers on the other side of the world?”

A:“Each of us is as it were entirely encompassed by many circles.... The first and closest circle is the one which a person has drawn as though around a centre, his own mind.... Next, the second one...contains parents, siblings, wife, and children. The third one has in it uncles and aunts, grandparents, nephews, nieces, and cousins.... that is followed by the circle of local residents...fellow-citizens...people from neighboring towns, and the circle of fellow-countrymen. The outermost and largest circle, which encompasses all the rest, is that of the whole human race. Once these have all been surveyed, it is the task of a well tempered man, in his proper treatment of each group, to draw the circles together somehow towards the centre, and to keep zealously transferring those from the enclosing circles into the enclosed ones.... The right point will be reached if, through our own initiative, we reduce the distance of the relationship with each person.”

-Hierocles, second century A.D., translation by Long and Sedley

Hierocles was a Stoic philosopher who lived in the first half of the second century A.D. Little is known of his life, and his work has survived only in fragments, most of which focus on ethics. His Elements of Ethics was based on the Greek concept of oikeiôsis, an important technical term from Stoic ethics. I’m no linguist, much less a scholar of Greek, but as I understand it, oikeiôsis is derived from oikos, the word for house or home, and conveys, among other shades of meaning, the idea of feeling “at home,” the sense of belonging or appropriateness and of those things which are one’s own by virtue of one's nature (in our case, our human nature). It’s not a static concept; the -sis suffix signals that oikeiôsis is a process, something that changes and matures along with our physical, intellectual, and moral development. Oikeiôsis is, in the words of historian Richard Sorabji, “the process of coming to treat things as belonging.” Sorabji goes on to explain: “One may come to treat one’s own person or one’s own nearest and dearest as belonging. The Stoics came to be interested in the possibility of extending this sense of belonging more widely to one’s fellow humans in general.” (Animal Minds & Human Morals, 1995, Cornell University Press). In the context of oikeiôsis, then, Hierocles wrote, in Elements of Ethics, about self-perception (the first thing that “belongs” to us is our understanding that we exist) and the awareness of the self in relation to others—fundamental concepts in any scheme of ethics.

Another of Hierocles’ works, On Appropriate Acts, is the source of the extended quotation above. His image of the concentric circles of connection and “belonging” that ripple outward from each individual self, and our duty to persistently work at drawing the outer circles inward, is a famous one. It’s also a handy verbal and visual reminder of our shared humanity, our interconnectedness, and, as our understanding grows, our duties and responsibilities in regard to the common good. Hierocles’ circles are also an apt representation of the Stoic ideal of the cosmopolitan, or “citizen of the world.” As Marcus Aurelius describes it, we all carry within us a spark of the divine “fire” of reason (the logos) that pervades the universe. This common coin of humanity, the gift of reason, establishes our kinship and draws us together as fellow citizens and members of the world community. “Universal brotherhood,” is, of course, a hope and a vision that was as thoroughly trounced by political realities in Marcus and Hierocles’s day as it is in our own. But while the final goal may lie beyond our reach, commitment to incremental progress is standard operating procedure for the philosophical/spiritual life, and our fundamental orientation is the important point: We must care for ourselves and our loved ones, and then we must do our best to broaden our sympathies and, as Hierocles says, “reduce the distance of the relationship with each person.”

Copyright © 2019 Mark Garvey