This is a great read, looking at Stoicism through the lens of one of France’s great 20th century philosophers, Gilles Deleuze. What’s interesting for me is Johnson’s exploration of Stoic ontology. We focus too much on Stoicism’s cosmology which seems implausible to most modern readers but Stoicism has a sophisticated and defensible materialist ontology. At its core is the innovative notion that material AND immaterial things fall underneath a higher genus of “something”, which circumvents the binary of being and nothingness. This allows for immaterial things to “subsist” on the material substrate.

So back to Cosmology vs. ontology - the ancient Stoics developed their ideas in a profoundly religious culture, their belief that the Cosmos is God is a corollary to their core reasoning that the Cosmos is one unified body. Delueze fully agreed with this anti-transcendental description of the world. He saw the Cosmos as pure immanence of an impersonal life of all things taken together. This is a world that stands up by itself, there is no template, nothing outside, no higher realm, nothing giving it form or function; there is just the Cosmos, it’s all here, all the way down. And we can understand this thanks to the invention of “Something”.