🌐 Module 4 — The Circles of Concern | Hierocles Course
Updated: Oct 30
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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 only a wince before the thumb scrolls 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. Even 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 a struck target or the ripples spreading from a dropped stone. Each ring holds a different group of people, arranged by distance from the middle. Loved ones and daily companions occupy the nearest bands, strangers fill the farther ones, and all of humanity rests at the outermost edge. 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. For Hierocles, the work of a good life lies in drawing the outer rings inward and pulling the distant closer than they were first placed.
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 that way. A philosophy that flattened every bond into one identical emotion would not be wise; it would be deranged. The task is to shorten the distance between the rings rather than erase it, bringing the far a little nearer, so that concern reaches past its usual stopping point, which for most lives is somewhere around 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.
Immediate family. The next ring holds parents, siblings, spouse, and children: the people most readily felt as one's own.
Near kin. Beyond them stand uncles and aunts, grandparents, nephews and nieces, the relatives a step removed but still plainly family.
Wider kindred. Further out lies the broader clan of more distant relations, the cousins of cousins, the family one rarely sees.
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.
Country. Wider still are the inhabitants of neighboring towns and, beyond them, the whole of one's country or region.
Humanity. 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: regarding relatives with something nearer the warmth owed to immediate family, and meeting distant strangers with a concern closer to what a neighbor would receive.
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.
Modern practitioners of Stoicism have pointed out that this is, in effect, an ancient form of what would now be called cognitive restructuring: swap the habitual word to shift the habitual thought, and the behavior that follows will shift with it. Anyone who has watched a workplace change when "the new guy" finally becomes "Marcus" has seen the mechanism operate. 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.
Two More Levers
The naming lever is the one Hierocles wrote down. Practitioners working the circles today commonly add two companions to it, both running on his logic and small enough to use before lunch.
Fact lever. Anonymity is what holds the outer rings out. A stranger is, almost by definition, a person about whom nothing is known, and nothing-known is easy to keep at a distance. So the lever is to learn one true thing: the pharmacist's name, a quiet coworker's homing pigeons, or which country and city the new neighbor's accent comes from. A single real fact converts a category into a person, who then sits naturally a ring closer. The step is simply this: pick someone currently filed as scenery, ask a genuine question, and remember the answer, because retention is the part that moves the ring.
Transfer lever. This one borrows behavior instead of words. Choose something ordinarily done without hesitation for an inner ring, and do it, once, deliberately, for the ring outside it: cook for an ailing neighbor the meal a sick sibling would get, remember a colleague's birthday with the care usually reserved for a close friend, or offer the fumbling stranger at the front of the line the patience a beloved grandfather receives automatically. Nothing needs to be felt in advance. The Stoic bet, and it is a shrewd one, is that the feeling follows the act far more reliably than the reverse.
None of the three levers is dramatic, and that is their design. Contraction of the circles is not accomplished in a single blaze of universal love. It happens through smaller moves: a better word, one learned fact, some borrowed kindness, repeated until the rings shift.
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, the famously blunt Greek philosopher 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 took up the same image in a well-known book called The Expanding Circle. Singer argued that the history of moral progress is the story of the circle widening: concern that once stopped at the tribe reached the nation, later covered all of humanity, and, in his hands, stretched outward again toward animals capable of suffering. Notice the difference in verbs, because it is a genuine difference in emphasis and not a contradiction. Singer speaks of expanding the circle, pushing its boundary outward to let more beings in. Hierocles speaks of contracting the circles, pulling those already inside the outer rings closer to the heart. One enlarges the map; the other shortens the distances on it. Both are working the same insight: that the reach of concern is not fixed.
Martha Nussbaum, making the modern case for cosmopolitanism, reached directly for Hierocles and quoted his own instruction to draw the circles somehow 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, whether to a family or a country or a single 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 nothing about the labor reduces their weight. The task 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 through attention, habit, and even the words a person chooses.
Philosopher's Practice: The Circle Map
The famous diagram has waited long enough. It is time to draw it, and not from imagination. The Mine Page built earlier in this course was gathering evidence for exactly this moment.
Open the Philosopher's Notebook to a fresh two-page spread and title it The Circle Map. Then build the map in four steps.
1. Draw seven rings. A full page, nested circles, nothing artistic required; wobbly rings work precisely as well as perfect ones. Label them from the center out the way Hierocles did: self, immediate family, near kin, wider kindred, community, country, humanity. Adjust the labels to fit a real life; chosen family belongs wherever it actually lives, which for many people is the second ring regardless of blood.
2. Populate the rings from evidence. Go back through the Mine Page and place every person, group, and belonging that appeared there into the ring where the week's reactions actually put them, not where convention says they should go. This is the honest part, and it can surprise a little. A cousin may land further out than a coworker, while an old friend three time zones away sits nearer than a next-door neighbor. Record what is, because Hierocles' whole method starts from the natural arrangement as it stands, never from the flattering one.
3. Mark the frontier. Somewhere on the map there is a ring where real concern currently runs out and scenery begins. Draw a small arrow at it. That arrow is the working edge, the place where the levers get applied.
4. Run a one-ring-inward week. Choose three targets at or near the frontier, one per lever. Pick a person who could be re-named a step closer, in speech or even just in thought, another about whom a true fact could be learned, and a third who could receive an act ordinarily reserved for a nearer ring. Work the three levers over the week and log each attempt on the facing page in a line or two: what was tried, what happened, and whether the person feels any nearer now than the map first placed them.
At the week's end, add a short reflection in your own first person: Which lever came easiest to me? What ring resisted? And if I redrew the map today, where would a ring have moved?
Keep the map where it can be found again, because it is now a working instrument of this course rather than a souvenir. The lesson ahead walks through what is actually owed within those rings, bond by bond, in Hierocles' own surviving words, and the map is where those duties will land.
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