🌐 Module 4 — The Circles of Concern | Hierocles Course
Updated: Sep 6
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Module 4 — The Circles of Concern
A flat tire on the way to work can sour an entire afternoon. The same morning, a report crosses the screen that an earthquake on the other side of the world has killed thousands of people, and it earns a wince, a shake of the head, and a scroll to the next thing. Almost everyone has noticed this in themselves and felt faintly uneasy about it. Concern runs hot up close and cold at a distance. A stubbed toe can outrank a famine, as long as the toe is one's own and the famine is far away.
Hierocles did not treat this as a moral failing to be scolded out of people. He treated it as a plain fact about human beings, the natural starting shape of concern, and then he asked the sharper question: if that is where concern begins, can it be deliberately moved. His answer is the most famous thing he ever produced, and it is the reason a man known to almost no one drew a picture that ethicists, activists, and philosophers are still redrawing eighteen centuries later.
What the Circles Are
Hierocles asks his reader to picture a person standing at the center of a set of rings, like the rings around a struck target or the ripples spreading from a dropped stone. Each ring holds a different group of people, arranged by how close they stand to the center. The nearest rings hold those a person already loves and lives among. The far rings hold strangers, and the farthest holds all of humanity. This is the diagram now usually called the circles of concern.
The claim attached to it is simple to state and hard to live. That natural arrangement, with intense concern at the center fading toward almost nothing at the edges, is only the starting position. The work of a good life, Hierocles holds, is to draw the outer rings inward, to pull the distant closer to the center than nature first set them.
One misreading has to be cleared before anything else, because it makes the whole teaching sound absurd. Hierocles is not demanding that a person feel precisely the same about a stranger in another country as about their own child. The degrees are real, and they are meant to stay real. A philosophy that flattened every bond into one identical feeling would not be wise; it would be deranged. The task is not to erase the distance between the rings. It is to shorten it, to bring the far a little nearer, to widen the reach of a concern that would otherwise stop at the family door.
The Circles, From the Center Out
Most popular versions of the diagram show four or five tidy rings. Hierocles' own version, preserved in the excerpts that survived him, is more crowded and more human than that. It runs roughly like this, from the center outward.
The self. At the very center sits the mind, and around it the body and whatever serves the body. This innermost point is where oikeiosis, the self-appropriation at the root of his whole philosophy, first takes hold.
The immediate family. The next ring holds parents, siblings, spouse, and children: the people most readily felt as one's own.
The near kin. Beyond them stand uncles and aunts, grandparents, nephews and nieces, the relatives a step removed but still plainly family.
The wider kindred. Further out lies the broader clan of more distant relations, the cousins of cousins, the family one rarely sees.
The community. Past blood entirely come fellow townspeople, then members of the same tribe, then fellow citizens of one's city, people bound by shared place rather than shared birth.
The country. Wider still are the inhabitants of neighboring towns and, beyond them, the whole of one's country or region.
The human race. The outermost ring encloses everyone else: every human being alive, most of them strangers one will never meet, all of them, on Hierocles' account, still inside the circle.
The point of laying it out in such detail is not to memorize a ranking. It is to make visible something usually felt only as a vague gradient: that concern has a structure, that it weakens by degrees as it travels outward, and that this structure is the thing the rest of the teaching goes to work on.
Drawing the Circles Inward
Here is the move that makes the diagram a teaching rather than a chart. Hierocles holds that the well-tempered person works, steadily and on purpose, to draw the circles toward the center. The aim is to treat each ring a little more like the ring just inside it: to regard relatives with something nearer the warmth owed to immediate family, and to meet distant strangers with something nearer the concern owed to a neighbor.
It is worth being exact about the direction of this, because the direction is the whole point. The work runs inward. People are not pushed out toward the cold edges and dismissed as too distant to matter, the way most lives quietly sort them. They are pulled in, transferred from the enclosing rings toward the enclosed ones, brought nearer than they began. A person doing this well does not end up loving everyone equally. He ends up with wider rings of real concern than he started with, and fewer human beings parked at the edge where concern runs out.
The Naming Practice
Hierocles does not leave this as a noble sentiment. He offers a concrete method, and it is stranger and more practical than most philosophy gets. The method is to adjust the names.
He suggests addressing relatives by the terms reserved for closer kin: calling cousins brothers, for instance, or uncles and aunts fathers and mothers, and addressing more distant relations by whatever near family word best fits their age. The reasoning is that language is not a neutral label laid over a fixed feeling. The word does work on the feeling. To call a cousin brother, again and again, is to keep nudging that cousin one ring inward, because the name carries the warmth and the duties of the closer bond along with it. Hierocles treats the practice as both a sign of genuine attention to one's kin and a tool for producing more of it, a small daily lever for the larger labor of contracting the circles.
This is how the Stoics tended to work, and it is worth seeing clearly. The goal is enormous, the single community of all people, but the method is humble and exact, a matter of which word a person reaches for at a family table.
The Citizen of the World
The outermost ring carries the boldest part of the idea. To hold that the whole human race belongs inside one's circle of concern is to claim a kind of membership in a community far larger than any city or nation: to be, in a phrase older than Hierocles himself, a citizen of the world.
That phrase was not his coinage. It belonged first to Diogenes the Cynic, who, asked where he was from, is said to have answered that he was a kosmopolites, a citizen of the cosmos, refusing to be defined by any single city. The Stoics took up the thought, and the vision of one community of all rational beings, governed by reason rather than borders, traces back to their founder Zeno. What Hierocles added was not the slogan but the mechanism. The circles are the clearest picture anyone in the school ever drew of how world citizenship is actually supposed to work: not as a grand abstraction floating free of one's real attachments, but as the patient extension of ordinary concern, ring by ring, outward.
Consider what that asks in a single ordinary moment. A woman named Maya is stuck in a long line behind a stranger fumbling with his wallet, and the easy move is the usual one, to file him at the cold outer edge as an obstacle and an irritation. The teaching asks something small and difficult instead: to register, even briefly, that this is a person who could be drawn inward, a member of the outermost ring who is, by Hierocles' reckoning, already inside the circle and merely waiting to be treated as though he were.
How the Diagram Outran Its Author
It is rare for an idea to outlive its author by eighteen centuries and grow more useful as it ages. Hierocles' circles did exactly that.
In 1981 the philosopher Peter Singer built a well-known book, The Expanding Circle, on precisely this image. Singer argued that the history of moral progress is the story of the circle widening: concern that once stopped at the tribe extended to the nation, then to all of humanity, and, in his hands, outward again to animals capable of suffering. The picture gave him a clean way to describe moral growth as a question of who gets let inside.
Martha Nussbaum, making the modern case for cosmopolitanism, reached for the same diagram and quoted Hierocles' own instruction to draw the circles toward the center. Her argument is that a person can be a citizen of the world without ceasing to love their own country or city, precisely because the circles are not a choice between the near and the far but a way of holding both at once. More recently, Stoic writers have proposed adding a further ring beyond the human race, one that takes in the living world itself, extending the same logic of widening concern to other species and to the environment.
The diagram keeps being redrawn because it keeps solving a real problem: how to think clearly about the fact that human care is naturally narrow and might reasonably be made wider.
The Charge That It Thins Real Loyalty
A serious objection deserves its strongest form. If everyone is to be drawn toward the center, does the whole structure not dissolve into a thin, weightless benevolence, a love of humanity in general bought at the cost of love for anyone in particular. The worry is that a person busy extending concern to all the rings will have less of it left for the inner ones, and that real loyalty, to a family, to a country, to a friend, gets watered down into a vague good will that warms no one.
Hierocles' answer is that this misreads the direction of the work. He never asks anyone to abandon or downgrade the inner circles. The near ones are honored first and most; they remain the center, and the center keeps its full weight. The labor is to extend that genuine concern outward, not to drain it from those nearest in order to spread a thinner film over everyone. A cosmopolitanism that despises the near, that announces its love for humanity while neglecting the people actually at the table, is not what he taught and is nearer to its opposite. The aim is a person whose concern for those closest to him is wholly intact, and who has, on top of that, stopped treating the rest of the species as if it stood outside the circle altogether.
That is the quiet power of the circles. They name the distance everyone feels between themselves and the stranger, and then they insist the distance is not fixed. It is a setting that can be changed, by attention, by habit, even by the words a person chooses. What that change asks for in the concrete obligations of an ordinary life, toward a spouse, a parent, a neighbor, a country, is where the course turns next.
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