Chrysippus’s Cylinder
The push is not the rolling
If every event has a cause stretching back before you were born, in what sense is anything you do yours? Chrysippus answered with an object on a floor. Give it a shove and watch what happens next, because what happens next is not the shove.
One push, three natures
The hand at the bottom is fixed. It delivers the same force, in the same direction, from the same spot, whatever is sitting there. The only thing you can change is what you put on the floor.
Cylinder. Rolls, and keeps rolling, if the analogy holds. Push it and see.
Cicero’s own case. The push gave it a beginning of motion, and nothing else. Everything after the first instant, the distance, the line, the fact that it rolled at all rather than skidding, came out of the cylinder. This is what Chrysippus wants: a motion fully caused from outside at its start and fully explained from inside thereafter.
Two kinds of cause
Chrysippus does not deny that the push is fated. He concedes it, and then says it was never the interesting cause.
The auxiliary cause
causa adiuvans et proxima
The nearby push. It explains why the thing moved now rather than later, and it comes from outside. Chrysippus grants the whole of it to fate without flinching: the push is not yours, and it was always going to come.
The hand at the left of the floor. Identical every time, whatever you set on the floor.
The principal cause
causa principalis et perfecta
The thing’s own nature. It explains not that the thing moved but how: why this one ran true and that one came back to where it started. The push cannot account for the difference, because the push did not change.
The shape itself. It is the only thing you are allowed to change.
They grant that sentiments cannot arise without some corresponding action of the sense, yet they say that this action, having a proximate cause, not a principal one, takes place as Chrysippus conjectures.
The same floor, in a mind
This is what the analogy is for. An impression arrives and strikes: that is the push, and it is not yours. What you then agree to is the rolling. Hold the impression still and change the character, exactly as you held the push still and changed the shape.
Someone talks over you in a meeting, then repeats your point as their own and is thanked for it.
Has worked on the one thing that is its own: what it agrees to. The impression arrives with the same force as for anyone. What follows is shaped by the work.
The impression says: you have been robbed and made small. The trained mind notices that two things arrived together, an event and a verdict, and that only the first is outside. It lets the verdict go and keeps the event, which is that the point is now in the room, where it was needed.
The three characters are ours, not Cicero’s. What is his is the claim underneath them: that the impression is the same in every case, and the difference is the thing it landed on.
The passage
As then, says he, a man who pushes a cylinder gives it a principle of motion, but not immediately that of revolution; so an object strikes our sense and conveys its image to our soul, yet leaves us free to form our specific sentiment concerning it; and, as has been said in the case of the cylinder which is set in motion from without, it will continue for the future to move according to its own proper force and nature.
The argument is not that you are outside the order of causes. It is that you are one of them. The push is fate’s; the rolling is yours; and a thing can be fully caused and still be the kind of thing it is.
Take a side
Does the cylinder save responsibility, or only rename the problem?
Opening the board…