From Our Heritage — Our Philosopher Zeno

And part of our heritage is that in ancient times we did not shrink into ourselves as we shrank in the middle ages and the modern ages, and that we set out to seek the truth in every place and every time, and by means of any language whatsoever.

Zeno was born in the year 336 before Christ, of Tyrian Phoenician parents, in the town of Citium, in the territory of Cyprus. His father was a merchant who used to travel to Athens for trade. Zeno went there about the year 314, and he listened to Xenocrates and Polemon in the Academy, and to Crates the Cynic. He took from these men and from others without measure, digested what he took, and begot an opinion of his own. In 301 he founded, in the Stoa Poikile, a school in which he taught philosophy after his own manner. His followers were called Zenonians at first, and then Stoics.

The Greeks admired the opinions of this Tyrian philosopher and the loftiness of his character; they flocked to hear him, took from him, and professed his doctrine. They did not turn away from him because he was not Greek, nor did he turn away from their philosophy because it was not Phoenician. This Phoenician-Greek philosopher was the first to use the two terms 'duty' and 'conscience,' and the first to distinguish between moral and spiritual values and practical values. Zeno's first three successors were Easterners, as it appears; all of them were born in Tarsus. Hence this insistence on submission — because He is the Self-Subsisting who has no peer — and this Stoic idealism that knows no bargaining, and this intense zeal against every deficiency or defect in morals.

Philosophy, for Zeno, lies in the love of wisdom and its practice. Wisdom is the science of things divine and human. It is divided into three parts: natural science, dialectic or logic, and ethics. Knowledge, for Zeno, is sensory. Its root principle is that a thing imprints its image upon the sense by direct action, not by the intermediary of other things, as the Epicureans said. Knowledge of this kind is a true idea which it is impossible to confuse with any other idea. True ideas are the first of the degrees of knowledge, which Zeno likens to the open hand. The second degree he likens to the hand lightly closed; by it he means assent, which arises in the soul in response to the external stimulus, and this assent depends on the will. The third degree is comprehension, which he likens to the fully clenched hand. The fourth and last degree is science, which resembles the clenched hand gripped tight, with the other hand pressed upon it. Science is the organization of sensory knowledge, and it is accordingly the sum of the propositions relating to things. The propositions and arguments which we ourselves construct on the occasion of things constitute the science of logic.