When a dog is tied to a cart, if it wants to follow it is pulled and follows, making its spontaneous act coincide with necessity, but if it does not want to follow it will be compelled in any case. So it is with men too: even if they do not want to, they will be compelled in any case to follow what is destined.
—Attributed to Chrysippus, the 3rd head of the Stoic school, or Cleanthes and Zeno, the 2nd head and the founder, respectively
One of the primary roles of philosophy is to help us make sense of the universe around us. Why are we here? What should we be doing? What control, if any, do we have in our lives?
The Stoic answer to this last question starts with the dog and cart metaphor. Not only does it provide a framework for fate, universal power, an omnipotent creator or some such ultimate source of direction in the universe, it attempts to show us that we do have some choice in our lives— the power to control ourselves.
This basic metaphor boils down to two component parts— the “cart,” which is the universal power, and the “dog” which is humanity. The cart moves on a predetermined path, exerting full influence over the dog. The dog has only two choices, with the same outcome either way— joyfully go along with the path that is set or be dragged along.
This is where the power of Stoic choice comes into play— the only true choice that the dog has is over its attitude, outlook and perception. The cart is going to continue on its path, whether the dog likes where it is going or not.
Fate has already determined what is in store, and we can choose to accept that or rebel against it.
This is a useful metaphor for understanding what is inside of our control and what is outside of it, but it needs expansion. Are we really this powerless? If everything is predetermined, why do anything at all?
To start, the usefulness of a predetermined order can be best understood by focusing on the present moment. We can never know if every moment of our lives was meticulously planned by a higher power (until our lives are over, at least, depending on the religious tradition), but acting as though it is all planned is more useful than not.
The truth of this comes from looking at the present moment. Every choice you have ever made has gotten you here, and every coincidence, seized opportunity or turn of fortune has resulted in the here and now. If everything were truly random, then things matter less. The stakes are lower. The responsibility of the present moment is taken away, replaced with arbitrary nihilism.
Looking forward, the choices you are making right now are links in the causal chain that will connect to the next iteration of you. In this way, you are creating fate through your choices. Are you in control of everything? Hardly. But the things you are in control of will alter the next thing, and so on until the path is created before you.
Heraclitus, the forerunner to the Stoics, said “character is fate.” Building your character is the most important use of the present moment, and the most consequential for your future. This is training resilience, developing reliable habits of virtue, aligning yourself with your Personal Philosophy— essentially, preparing for the cart to make an unexpected turn and learning to seize the opportunity or survive the distress.
This, then, returns the power in your life to you. You may not know which things are coming, but you can be ready for them. Fate is not something that happens in the future, it is right here, right now.
Additionally, there is a third component of this metaphor that goes unacknowledged— the tie to the cart. While the implication of the metaphor is that the cart has all the power and the dog has none, the dog does have a range of motion, a sphere of influence, over its surroundings, however small it may be. This is vital— this is where goodness and agency originate.
Because we are not aware of the path we are on in the present moment, we can take action over our sphere of influence in a meaningful way. Will our actions cause the cart to alter course? Probably not. Can they still positively impact our immediate surroundings? Always. The reality is, we don’t know the difference that we can make, but we are given a range of options we can take in the present moment that hold unlimited potential.
Take a meaningful conversation. Providing safety to explore new ideas or emotionally-charged topics can result in shifts in a person’s perspectives or attitudes. Will this alter the course of the future, change fate? Not necessarily. But it is a far better choice than attacking or creating hostility. A single conversation can go in any variety of directions, and that is the sphere of influence that we can control.
So why act, then?
Because we don’t know the significance of our actions. We have a range of goodness that we can enact, even though we are limited. And, as the Stoics would say, if you have to go along anyway, why not be good?
A Second Application
The dog and the cart analogy, while specifically designed to deal with the question of fate, is also an apt analogy for morality in many ways. Think of the distinction between one’s individual morality and community-driven morality, developed through habitual, evolved collaboration. Like the dog tied to the cart, an individual is tied to their collaborative community, and when their two moralities do not align, a decision must again be made whether to jump on board or resist.
Community morality is independent to the individual— theoretically, the amalgam that is community morality does not need the specific individual to exist, but the individual depends on community morality. Yes, the community is made up of individuals, but the consensus exists regardless of individual contrarians— one can try and make a case that murder is not inherently immoral, but they are ultimately governed by a community morality, founded in collaboration, that disagrees.
In this way, groups can have differing opinions regarding right and wrong, as long as they work within the larger framework of collaboration. This is where the tie to the cart comes into play, the sphere of influence that accounts for acceptable differences. In an example like murder, it is cut and dry. But what about when that transforms into questions of acceptance— of other religions, sexual orientations, genders, interpretations of the Constitution? Then it becomes more difficult.
Community morality determines that societies tend to become more accepting as time passes. This is the principle captured in the Martin Luther King Jr. quote, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” According to collaboration-based morality, this is a logical conclusion— why should my personal feelings about other groups deprive them of rights? Society functions better when more people are protected under the law, when more people have access to the resources they need, when more love and acceptance can be shared— when there is more collaboration. The dog can follow the cart happily or be dragged along.
But what happens when there is no clear collaborative advantage? This is where the sphere of influence gives rise to disagreements. Take a relevant example in American politics— is it more collaborative to forgive students of predatory loans? Or to revitalize repayment structures but not forgive anything? Or to have them pay back in full what they borrowed? This gets into a much more nuanced debate, but the point is apparent— there is not a clear violation of the collaborative principle, so there is room to have the debate in the first place.
In this way, morality, like fate, has components that are independent and dependent, with a zone of control in each that has been allotted to us. Far from being a call for nihilism, this is a call to action. We can create goodness, create a better world, create our fate out of the little that has been given to us— the present moment.
Edited by Jeremy Harr and Abigail McKay Cherry
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