On Stoic sympathy
This chapter analyses the Stoic concept of cosmic sympathy. The Stoics contribute to the conceptualization of a web of interconnected natures in antiquity by making sympathy visible as a feature of the world, encompassing both humans and non-humans. Holmes argues that the Stoic conceptualization of sympathy offers an experiment in thinking through the contradictions of cosmic organicism or “cosmobiology” insofar as it affirms both the integrity of individual natures and the rigorous unity of the cosmos as a whole, to which its parts are subordinated. By taking cosmobiology to an extreme, the Stoics have to deal with how to affirm the integrity of individual natures within a cosmos organized by Nature as a totally determined life, to which each part must be subordinated. Revisiting Deleuze’s reading of the Stoics in the Logic of Sense, she argues that sympathy is not only the expression of a totalized Nature but must also be seen as the surface effect par excellence in the Stoic cosmos, namely, the paradoxical reality of god’s becoming.