Discourses and Selected Writings Read online

  Epictetus’ Stoicism is distinctive in other ways too. Because his interest is in ethics primarily, he does not engage with certain theoretical issues that were debated by the original Stoics and their rivals. The controversy over whether there was a place for free will within their deterministic system is nowhere engaged directly. To be sure, he emphasizes repeatedly that our thoughts and actions have immediate and inescapable consequences: ‘You have only to doze for a moment, and all is lost. For ruin and salvation both have their source inside you’ (IV 9, 16). ‘Very little is needed for everything to be upset and ruined, only a slight lapse in reason’ (IV 3, 4). Or, to quote Tacitus again, ‘Once the choice is made… the subsequent sequence of events cannot be altered.’ But, as noted above, humans do have freedom to shape mental events – Epictetus is equally adamant about that. And in this area, as he says more than once, ‘not even God has the power of coercion over us’.

  Other paradoxes, or points of controversy, such as whether there was a moral state intermediate between perfect virtue and utter depravity (the old Stoics denied it), are tacitly deprecated. No one reading deeply in Epictetus can doubt that he believes humans are capable of moral progress, and that it makes sense to distinguish between degrees of virtue and vice. Indeed, nearly every reference to the Discourses, from antiquity to the present, assumes that they have no other goal than moral improvement. The Discourses are primarily Stoic documents, but since Stoicism along with the other philosophical sects closed up shop in the sixth century ad, over the centuries many more non-Stoics than Stoics have read them with appreciation. If they continue to speak to the contemporary reader it is because they are grounded in common experience and common sense.

  EPICTETUS’ INFLUENCE

  Epictetus’ influence has been enormous. We only have space to pass a few highlights in review. His outreach programme was evidently successful, to judge by the long commentary devoted to the Enchiridion by the neo-Platonist philosopher Simplicius (sixth century ad), otherwise known mainly for writing commentaries on Aristotle. In the Preface, Simplicius explains that Epictetus’ maxims are beneficial to those who want their bodies and desires to be ruled by rationality.

  Marcus Aurelius, in the acknowledgements at the head of his Meditations, mentions the discovery of a copy of the Discourses as a crucial event in his own intellectual development. The Meditations in fact abound in quotations and paraphrases of the Discourses. That a Greek slave should be the acknowledged maître à penser of a Roman emperor illustrates in a most literal way the famous line of the poet Horace: ‘captive Greece captured her uncivilized captor [i.e. Rome]’.

  Of decisive importance for his currency during the Middle Ages (and no doubt one reason his writings survived antiquity) is that he was among a handful of pagan authors approved for reading in the early Church. Epictetus himself was esteemed an anima naturaliter Christiana, by reason of the supposed consistency between his principles and practice. Besides giving incidental proof of his own reading of Epictetus at many points in his work, the Christian apologist Origen reports that by the third century his fame exceeded even Plato’s: ‘Plato,’ he writes, ‘is only found in the hands of those reputed to be philologists. By contrast, Epictetus is admired by ordinary people who have the desire to be benefited and who perceive improvement from his writings’ (Contra Celsum VI, 2). With a few minor editorial changes (such as the regular replacement of Socrates’ name with that of St Paul), the Enchiridion was adapted to monastic use and in its Christian habit served the monks of the Eastern Orthodox Church for centuries as an ascetic rulebook.

  Through Syriac Christian scholars Epictetus’ thought became well known in the Islamic East. The ninth-century philosopher al-Kindi (according to the Muslim historian Ibn al-Nadim (d. 955), ‘the best man of his time, called The Philosopher of the Arabs’)2 was appointed by the Abbasid Caliph al-Ma’mun to the House of Wisdom, a centre for the translation of Greek philosophical and scientific texts in Baghdad. His own work of ethics, ‘On the Art of Dispelling Sorrows’, shows the unmistakable influence of Stoicism in general and Epictetus in particular. There he lays emphasis on the importance of freedom from the world and highlights humans’ status as agents, who through their ultimate independence are responsible for their own happiness and independent of others. The weight Epictetus puts on the ephemeral nature of worldly goods is recalled; from chapter 7 of the Enchiridion al-Kindi borrows the comparison of earthly life to a ship which has, during the course of its voyage, temporarily anchored at an island and allowed its passengers to disembark; passengers who linger too long on the island risk being left behind when the ship sets sail again. The implicit warning, as in Epictetus, is that we must not become attached to material things (represented by the island and its foodstuffs), because they will invariably be taken away from us when the ship relaunches.

  The first printed edition of the Discourses appeared in Venice in 1535; within a century they had been translated into all the major European languages; and in one version or another they, and the Enchiridion, have remained continuously in print.

  Two of the greatest minds of the seventeenth century witness to the fact that Epictetus survived the transition to the modern era with no loss in reputation. Pascal, in his ‘Discussion with Monsieur de Sacy’, praises Epictetus for his delineation of human duties and his recommendation that we submit to the will of a providential God. He objects, however, to the assumption, common among ancient philosophers, that human nature was perfectible without the need of God’s grace.

  [Epictetus] believes that God gave man the means to fulfill all his obligations; that these means are within his power, that happiness is attained through what we are capable of, this being the reason God gave them to us. Our mind cannot be forced to believe what is false, nor our will compelled to love something that makes it unhappy. These two powers are therefore free, and it is through them that we can become perfect.3

  That the redemptive message of the Gospels was not available to the ancients makes their morals incomplete. But this Christian caveat aside, Pascal shrewdly identifies and correctly describes a central tenet of Epictetus’ teaching. Stoicism purported to be an internally consistent system the doctrines of which were mutually self-entailing across all three branches – logic, physics and ethics. Pascal’s contemporary Descartes was deeply affected by his reading of Epictetus, and he seized on one of the philosopher’s most original moves, the way he enlists epistemology (specifically humans’ use of appearances) in support of his moral principles. In Descartes too we find a close fit between the method of doubt he adopts regarding the truth of our impressions and opinions and his philosophy of life. In the Rules for the Direction of the Mind, he states:

  The aim of our studies should be to direct the mind with a view to forming true and sound judgments about whatever comes before it… [A person should consider] how to increase the natural light of his reason… in order that his intellect should show his will what decision it ought to make in each of life’s contingencies.4

  Over long stretches Descartes’ Discourse on Method, the first classic of modern philosophy, reads like nothing so much as a paraphrase of Epictetus. One programmatic passage will have to do by way of illustration:

  I undertook to conquer myself rather than fortune, and to alter my desires rather than change the order of the world, and to accustom myself to believe that nothing is entirely in our power except our own thoughts… Here, I think, is the secret of those ancient philosophers who were able to free themselves from the tyranny of fortune, or, despite suffering and poverty, to rival the gods in happiness.5

  Clearly Epictetus remained one of the ancient sages whom an educated person could be expected to know well, as it was assumed there was still much of truth in him.

  We conclude by jumping ahead to the present, noting his surprising importance in the history of psychotherapy. Psychologist Albert Ellis has acknowledged Epictetus as one of the chief inspirations behind the development of Rational-Emotive Behavi
our Therapy (REBT), arguably the foremost modality in counselling today. As a college freshman in an informal study group devoted to reading and commenting on major philosophers, Ellis was struck by Epictetus’ insistence that ‘It is not events that disturb people, it is their judgements concerning them’ (Enchiridion 5). Ellis openly credits Epictetus for supplying his guiding principle that our emotional responses to upsetting actions – not the actions themselves – are what create anxiety and depression; and that (a point basic to Stoic psychology in general) our emotional responses are products of our judgements – are in fact (irrational) judgements tout court: ‘Much of what we call emotion is nothing more nor less than a certain kind – a biased, prejudiced, or strongly evaluative kind – of thought. What we call feelings almost always have a pronounced evaluating or appraisal element.’6 Ellis points out that irrational beliefs often appear in the way people talk to themselves. Compare Epictetus at IV 4, 26-27:

  Someone says, I don’t like leisure, it’s boring; I don’t like crowds, they’re a nuisance. But if events ordain that you spend time either alone or with just a few other people, look upon it as tranquillity and play along with it for the duration. Talk to yourself, train your thoughts and shape your preconceptions.

  The more one reads in the literature of self-help, therapy, recovery and so forth, the more apparent it becomes how much is owed to this regularly rediscovered author, whose ideas have proven useful in disciplines such as applied psychology that in his own day had hardly made a start.

  NOTES

  1. Tacitus, Annals VI 22.

  2. Al-Kindi, ‘Encyclopaedic Scholar of the Baghdad “House of Wisdom”’. http://www.muslimheritage.com/day_life/default.cfm?ArticleID=691&Oldpage=1. Accessed 4 September 2007.

  3. Blaise Pascal, ‘Discussion with Monsieur de Sacy’, in Pensees and Other Writings, trans. H. Levi (Oxford, 1995), pp. 182-92, at p. 187.

  4. René Descartes, ‘Rules for the Direction of the Mind’, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 2 vols., trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and Dugald Murdoch, vol. 3 including Anthony Kenny (Cambridge, 1988), vol. 1, p. 10.

  5. René Descartes, ‘Discourse on Method’, in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, ed. E. S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross (Cambridge, 1931), pp. 80-130, at pp. 96-7.

  6. Albert Ellis, ‘Early Theories and Practices of Rational-Emotive Behavior Theory and How They Have Been Augmented and Revised During the Last Three Decades’, Journal of Rational-Emotive & Cognitive-Behavior Therapy, vol. 21, nos. 3-4 (December 2003), pp. 219-43, at p. 232.

  Further Reading

  Interest in Epictetus is currently experiencing one of its periodic upsurges, and some works of secondary literature deserve notice in this connection. Pride of place belongs to the comprehensive study by A. A. Long, a leading scholar of later ancient philosophy: Epictetus: A Stoic and Socratic Guide to Life (Oxford, 2002). Long is also co-editor, with D. Sedley, of the standard sourcebook for Stoicism and the other philosophical schools that post-date Aristotle: The Hellenistic Philosophers (Cambridge, 1987).

  Readers of the present translation may derive some benefit from my commentary on Book I (Oxford, 1998), though it is intended mainly for academic use. The part logic plays in Epictetus is the subject of an acute study by J. Barnes, Logic and the Imperial Stoa (Leiden, 1997).

  A personal account of how Epictetus helped a prisoner of war endure extremes of hardship and degradation can be found in J. Stockdale’s Courage under Fire: Testing Epictetus’ Doctrines in a Laboratory of Human Behavior (Stanford, 1993). Stockdale is remembered mainly for being third-party candidate Ross Perot’s running mate in the US presidential election of 1992, but during the Vietnam War he spent seven years as a POW, four of them in solitary confinement – solitary, it seems, except for a copy of the Discourses. Two lectures, collectively entitled ‘Stockdale on Stoicism’, are available online: http://www.usna.edu/Ethics/Publications/stoicism1.pdf; http://www.usna.edu/Ethics/Publications/stoicism2.pdf. As testimonials to Epictetus’ enduring value they are probably unsurpassed; but by any measure they make very compelling reading.

  The ethics of Epictetus feature prominently in the 1998 bestselling novel by Tom Wolfe, A Man in Full (New York, 1998), based largely on Wolfe’s conversations with Stockdale. Stockdale’s essays promoting the wisdom of Epictetus and the values of Stoicism have in recent years been studied by officer candidates in all branches of the American armed forces. Nancy Sherman, a teacher at the US Naval Academy, has published Stoic Warriors: The Ancient Philosophy behind the Military Mind (New York and Oxford, 2nd edn 2007).

  In two of his final books the French philosopher Michel Foucault singled out Epictetus for his contribution to what he called ‘technologies of the self’: refined procedures whereby a person learns to control his feelings, thoughts and desires. Epictetus’ advice to monitor our thoughts and appearances (or ‘representations’), Foucault argues, anticipates Freud: Technologies of the Self (Amherst, 1988); The History of Sexuality: The Care of the Self (Harmondsworth, 1990).

  Epictetus is accorded two chapters in a philosophically rich and wide-ranging study by R. Sorabji: Self: Ancient and Modern Insights about Individuality, Life, and Death (Chicago, 2006).

  Finally, a new translation of the Manual with detailed commentary can be recommended: Epictetus’ Handbook and the Tablet of Cebes: Guides to Stoic Living (London, 2005) by K. Seddon.

  Note on the Translation

  My translation is based on the most recent edition of Epictetus’ complete works in Greek, that prepared by J. Souilhé (Paris, 1948-65) in the Bude series of classical texts. The footnotes list instances where for various reasons I have chosen not to use Souilhé’s text as the basis for my translation.

  Epictetus has been called a ‘rhetorical wizard’, but certain features of his style are less congenial to print than they would have been to oral delivery. An example is his recourse to repetition. This is no sign of a poverty of ideas but, along with his aggressive style, frequent use of metaphor, dialogue, personal example, etc., part of an effort to make his message memorable. Obviously the rationale for returning to the same themes is largely absent when his lectures are available in print, since we can reproduce the same effect for ourselves by reading and rereading them ad libitum. Consequently I have omitted from my translation of Books III and IV a number of discourses that I judge to be little more than restatements of ideas developed to better effect elsewhere.

  The innumerable editions of the Enchiridion attest to the fact that in this form students’ acquaintance with Epictetus has for centuries begun and ended. The Enchiridion purports to distill his philosophy to essentials, without such stylistic superfluities as the snatches of imaginary dialogue that regularly enliven the exposition of ideas in the Discourses. Unfortunately in the process Epictetus is flattened to the point of sententiousness; argument is omitted in favour of bald assertion; and to readers with some background in contemporary (especially analytic) philosophy the book makes a disappointing impression. Epictetus comes across more as a ‘moralizer’ than an authentic philosopher. Nonetheless the Manual no doubt still has its uses; readers may find it helpful in orienting themselves to Epictetus’ thought before exploring the Discourses themselves.

  The complete set of thirty-odd fragments has been translated from the text of W. A. Oldfather in the Loeb series (London and Cambridge, 1925–8) which is based in turn on H. Schenkl’s edition in the Teubner series of classical texts (Leipzig, 1916).

  THE DISCOURSES

  Arrian to Lucius Gellius, greeting:

  I have not composed these words of Epictetus as one might be said to ‘compose’ books of this kind, nor have I of my own volition published them to the world; indeed, I acknowledge that I have not ‘composed’ them at all. But whatever I used to hear him say I wrote down, word for word, as best I could, as a record for later use of his thought and frank expression. So they are what you would expect one person to say to another ex tempore, not compositions originally
intended to be read by posterity. Such being their character, they have somehow, without my knowledge or intention, fallen into the public’s hands. Yet I little care whether I shall be judged incompetent in the art of composition; and for his part Epictetus does not care at all if anyone should despise his Discourses, since in uttering them he was clearly aiming at nothing except moving the minds of his audience towards what is best. So if these Discourses achieve that much, they will have exactly the effect that a philosopher’s words, in my opinion, ought to have. But if not, the reader should realize that, when Epictetus spoke them, his audience could not help but experience just what he intended them to feel. If the Discourses on their own do not achieve this, then perhaps I am to blame or it simply cannot be helped.

  Farewell.

  BOOK I

  I 1 Concerning what is in our power and what is not

  [1] In general, you will find no art or faculty that can analyse itself, therefore none that can approve or disapprove of itself. [2] The art of grammar is restricted to analysing and commenting on literature. Music is confined to the analysis of harmony. [3] Consequently neither of them analyses itself. Now, if you are writing to a friend, the art of grammar will help you decide what words to use; but it will not tell you whether it is a good idea to write to your friend in the first place. Music is no different; whether this is a good time to sing and play, or a bad one, the art of music by itself cannot decide.