Oikeiosis (oy-kay-OH-sis) is the Stoic explanation of how a creature that begins by looking after itself ends up caring about other people. The Stoics argued that the impulse which makes you protect your own life, once reason develops, widens to your family, your fellow citizens and finally every human being. The best-known picture of it is a set of concentric circles from the Stoic Hierocles (high-ER-uh-kleez), with you at the centre and the whole human race at the edge.
What the word means
The Greek is οἰκείωσις, built on oikos, the household. The root points to belonging: making something your own, treating it as part of your house. English renderings such as “appropriation” and “affiliation” are used, but Massimo Pigliucci argues that they do not carry the original sense, which is closer to a feeling of belonging, the opposite of alienation (Think Like a Stoic, pp. 148 to 149).
The idea has two arms. The personal arm explains how a creature comes to treat its own life as its concern. The social arm explains how that concern spreads outward. Most modern summaries talk only about the second arm, but the Stoic argument needs the first one to get started.
The first impulse is self-preservation, not pleasure
Diogenes Laertius, who wrote his summary of Stoic doctrine centuries after the school began, reports that an animal’s first impulse is to preserve itself, “because nature from the outset endears it to itself”. He gives Chrysippus (krih-SIP-us) as the authority: “The dearest thing to every animal is its own constitution and its consciousness thereof” (7.85, trans. R. D. Hicks).
The same passage rejects the view that pleasure is where an animal’s impulses start. Pleasure, the Stoics held, is “a by-product”, “an aftermath comparable to the condition of animals thriving and plants in full bloom” (7.86). Then reason arrives and changes the picture: “reason supervenes to shape impulse scientifically”. For a rational being, living by reason becomes the natural way to live.
Seneca states the starting point bluntly in his Letters: “Since I gauge all my actions with reference to my own welfare, I am looking out for myself before all else” (Letter 121, trans. Gummere). He supports it by pointing to young animals that avoid danger before they have had any experience of it. The Stoics did not treat self-concern as a flaw to be trained out. They treated it as the foundation.
Why self-interest and the common good do not pull apart
Epictetus takes on the obvious objection, that all this makes humans selfish. In the Discourses he replies: “This is not mere self-love; such is the nature of the animal man; everything that he does is for himself” (1.19.11, trans. W. A. Oldfather). The reason follows. Zeus himself cannot win his titles “unless he proves himself useful to the common interest”, and in general the nature of the rational animal is arranged “that he can attain nothing of his own proper goods unless he contributes something to the common interest” (1.19.12 to 13).
The next line speaks of one principle of action for everyone, “appropriation to their own needs” (1.19.15). Oldfather’s note explains it as every living thing making its own whatever it needs to stay alive. The Stoic claim is that, for a being with reason, looking after yourself properly includes looking after others.
Epictetus applies the same thought to citizenship. “You are a citizen of the world, and a part of it”, he says, and the work of a citizen is “to treat nothing as a matter of private profit”, acting like a hand or foot that understood it belonged to a body (2.10.3 to 4).
Hierocles and the circles
The image comes from a fragment of Hierocles preserved in the Anthology of Stobaeus (stoh-BEE-us), a later collector of excerpts. Hierocles was a Stoic of the second century CE and little is known about his life. The fragment was translated by Thomas Taylor in 1822, who printed it among Pythagorean material, and it is now attributed to this Stoic. All quotations below are Taylor’s.
Hierocles begins: “each of us is, as it were, circumscribed by many circles”. The first circle is the one “which every one describes about his own mind as a centre”, taking in the body and what the body needs. He then works outward, and his list is longer than most summaries suggest:
- your own mind and body
- parents, brothers, wife and children
- uncles, aunts, grandparents and the children of brothers and sisters
- the remaining relatives
- the common people
- those of the same tribe
- your fellow citizens
- those who live in the vicinity of the city
- those of the same province
- the whole human race
The last is “the outermost and greatest circle, and which comprehends all the other circles”, the circle of “the whole human race”.
The moral task comes next. The person who wants to behave well in each of these relationships should “collect, in a certain respect, the circles, as it were, to one centre”. The popular phrase “draw the circles inward” is a modern paraphrase, but the image is Hierocles’. He even gives a practical device: call cousins, uncles and aunts by the names of brothers, fathers and mothers, which he says will show your attention to them and push you to contract the circles.
It is worth noticing what he does not say. He does not ask you to flatten the circles into equal closeness. “Something of benevolence must be taken away from those who are more distant from us by blood”, he writes, “though at the same time we should endeavour that an assimilation may take place between us and them”. The aim is to narrow the gaps, not to pretend they are not there.
How other Stoics echo the idea
Marcus Aurelius opens Book 2 by preparing for difficult people, and the reason he gives is kinship: the person who wrongs him shares his intelligence, so “nor can I be angry with my kinsman, nor hate him”, since “we are made for co-operation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids” (2.1, trans. George Long). His other lines on the subject are collected in Stoic quotes on dealing with difficult people. He compresses the logic into one sentence: “That which is not good for the swarm, neither is it good for the bee” (6.54). And he warns about the cost of cutting yourself off: “A branch cut off from the adjacent branch must of necessity be cut off from the whole tree also” (11.8).
Seneca gives the circles a body to belong to: “we are the parts of one great body”, and our relations with one another “are like a stone arch, which would collapse if the stones did not mutually support each other” (Letter 95.52 to 53, trans. Gummere). Epictetus, speaking to a man who treats his household slaves badly, reminds him “that they are kinsmen, that they are brothers by nature, that they are the offspring of Zeus” (1.13.4). That passage asks for decent treatment inside an institution the Stoics lived with. It is not a campaign against the institution, and it should not be read as one.
Cicero gives the same idea to the Stoic Cato in De Finibus Book 3, where parental affection is treated as the germ of the community of the human race (3.62 to 63, trans. H. Rackham).
Where the idea is weaker or disputed
Natural is not the same as right. Epictetus has a conversation with a father who ran away from the sickbed of his small daughter. His defence was “I was acting naturally”. Epictetus does not deny the feeling. He asks whether the action is right, and offers a test: whatever is both affectionate and reasonable is “both right and good” (1.11). On this view oikeiosis supplies the raw material, and judgement has to educate it. Pigliucci makes the same connection (How to Be a Stoic, pp. 187 to 190).
The developmental story itself is an argument, not a measurement. The Stoics reasoned from what they saw in animals and infants, and a modern reader can reasonably ask how much weight that evidence bears, especially for the step from caring about yourself to caring about humanity. I treat it as a serious ancient argument with an appealing conclusion, not as settled psychology.
Finally, the number of stages depends on who is counting. Popular four-stage versions are a modern compression. Hierocles names about ten circles, and the ancient sources do not agree on one fixed set of stages. If you meet a confident chart of exactly four steps, check it against the texts.
A small experiment
Hierocles’ naming device is cheap to try. For a week, when someone from an outer circle irritates you, such as a stranger in traffic or a colleague you barely know, think of them under a kin name: somebody’s brother, somebody’s aunt. Pigliucci describes the practice of using such names for strangers (How to Be a Stoic, pp. 59 to 60). Notice whether it changes what you do, not only how you feel. I have no evidence that it works for everyone, so treat it as an experiment with your own results as the data.
Marcus gives a morning version in 2.1: expect the difficult people before you meet them, and remember what you share with them.
Sources
- Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers 7.85 to 86, trans. R. D. Hicks (Loeb Classical Library).
- Hierocles, “How we ought to conduct ourselves towards our kindred”, preserved by Stobaeus, trans. Thomas Taylor (1822).
- Epictetus, Discourses 1.11, 1.13, 1.19 and 2.10, trans. W. A. Oldfather (Loeb Classical Library).
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 2.1, 6.54 and 11.8, trans. George Long.
- Seneca, Letters to Lucilius 95 and 121, trans. Richard Mott Gummere (Loeb Classical Library).
- Cicero, De Finibus Book 3, trans. H. Rackham (Loeb Classical Library, 1914).
- Massimo Pigliucci, Think Like a Stoic (pp. 148 to 149) and How to Be a Stoic (pp. 59 to 60 and 187 to 190).
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