Introduction

With their strange surface, Stoic physics and metaphysics enact a philosophical perversion that begins with an articulation of something, an original ontological concept that the Stoics constructed in response to their philosophical predecessors. Tracing Stoic metaphysics to a debate from Plato's Sophist, this chapter will show that there are two modalities of reality in Stoicism: existent corporeality and subsistent incorporeality. To understand the complexities involved in Stoic theory, we introduce a Deleuzian distinction that continues through the entire text: the intensive and the extensive. We conclude by connecting the intensive and extensive to, respectively, two mathematical operations: integration and differentiation. These integrating extensities and differentiating intensities structure the strange surface. With this surface the Stoics push materialism further than anyone before and few after, leading them to develop some of the most fascinating concepts in the ancient world. Let us now begin to construct a Deleuzian system of Stoicism, starting with physics.

Something

To understand Stoic perversity and the philosophical ‘surface’ orientation, we begin with their broadest metaphysical category: ‘something’, τι. Contrary to other ancient schools, writes Seneca, rather than making being (‘what is’, quod est) the highest category, the ‘Stoics want to place beyond [superpowered] this yet another, more primary [magis principale] genus’. Stoics think that the primary genus is ‘something [quid]’.

Something provoked a long history of hostile receptions to Stoic metaphysics – from the ancient critiques in Plutarch's On Common Conceptions against the Stoics and On Stoic Contradictions through Alexander's charges of ‘impropriety’ up to contemporary scholarship, which deems Stoic ontology embarrassing. Responding to these critiques, Jacques Brunschwig argues that the Stoics did not always consider ‘something’ the broadest category. He suggests: