Epictetus’s tough brand of Stoicism

Dear All,

Epictetus’s juxtaposition of appropriate responses to breaking a jug and losing a loved one is startling. Both newcomers to the text and even old timers are bound to find it shocking if not repellent. While Massimo and Greg have ably rebutted the charge of Epictetus’s “psychopathic” insensitivity to ordinary feelings, he clearly intends to pull us up sharp, as when he counsels (Enchiridion 11): “Never say you have lost anything (e.g., your little child or wife) but only: they have been returned.”  

His Stoicism, as he repeatedly insists, is an extremely tough regimen, unsuited to everyone. He is not advocating an ethical theory of categorical imperatives but a way of life conditional on the supreme value of subjecting all experience and agency to dispassionate reasoning. It makes no concessions to conventional expectations of comfort and congeniality. Life in agreement with nature (i.e., the way things are) is “not for the fainthearted but for those willing to go without sleep, work really hard, stay away from family and friends … and come off worse everywhere” (Enchiridion 29, repeated in Discourses 3.15).

According to standard translations, what you gain from such responses is not being “troubled” or “upset” or “disturbed,” but these renderings for the Greek word tarachthesei are too weak. Contexts where this word is at home are a storm at sea or the sack of a city.  Better to translate: you will not be thrown off balance or shattered. 

Epictetus is not saying that we shouldn’t be fond of things or have positive attachments. That would negate the premise of his argument. What we should acknowledge is the vulnerability of the external things we are naturally attached to. Because they are not “up to us,” they are too transitory to completely set one’s heart on, making our well-being and rational agency liable to happenstance. For the purpose of his shock therapy Epictetus lumps together all emotional responses that evince failure to understand that “everything is perishable.”

This maxim reinforces the main lesson of the Enchiridion concerning the distinction between what is and what is not up to us. The Stoics wrote copiously on the theme of praemeditatio malorum, “anticipation of misfortunes” (see P. Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, p. 85).

I tend to agree with Greg that an ancient Stoic could admit to feelings of sadness. That fits various passages of Seneca, though I don’t find them in Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius. One should note, though, that there is no “good feeling” or “rational emotion” corresponding to the inappropriate passion of grief or the false belief that something truly bad has happened. This absence of “good grief” is probably to be explained by reference to the providential doctrine according to which nothing except vice is bad by nature.

Vale,
Tony