On the Question of Freedom_Epictetus' Enchiridion Expanded_§1.

There are just going to be days when we feel, or perhaps we have the absolute certitude, that we have no control over our lives. Days that are chock full of the ‘Oh, sh—t!’ moments that the world hands off to us from time to time, and far too often for most of our tastes. However, the very fact that we at least realize that we are being clocked by life is a very good thing indeed, philosophically speaking, because it shows that we are observant about how life in this world actually works!

            (NB—I appreciate that this line of conversation sounds a little like the tired old joke about how good the Irishman feels after he stops whacking his head against a brick wall, but we need to do this just a little bit longer.)

As a matter of fact we do not have control over every single thing in our lives, but we do, always, have the ability to control some things in our lives. The trick is to learn what kinds of things we can control, and to go for it, and what kinds of things we cannot control, and to walk away from them! This is a lesson well learned by a former slave, Epictetus, whose thinking encourages us to imagine that, in the midst of a world full of confusion and chaos, there are still some things about our lives that we can control.

            Despite this hectic, compulsion-driven world that seems to think we are some kind of Raggedy Ann or Raggedy Andy to be tossed about on the winds of fate, this once-upon-a-time slave still thinks that it is possible to make meaningful choices in our lives relevant to how best to live out our days.

Here is E’s first Stoic recipe, amplified for our thinking pleasure, for a life of freedom from oppression — both from within and from without:

Epictetus, On Things Within Our Control: “There are certain things we can control and then there are those things that are beyond our control.”

            OK… one has to admit, this is a promising if rather uneventful beginning.

“Types of things we can control are our own (re)actions, such as thoughtless assumptions, impulsiveness, cravings, and allowing ourselves to be led by our inclinations –in a word, those types of (re)action that come from ourselves.”

            We can control our own actions-reactions, says E, because after all we own them—they are the works of our own flesh, as the Apostle Paul might have said; the fruits of our loins, as it were, which no one has pushed on us from the outside; the first-born children of our own personal imaginings.

            First, on this non-exhaustive list of personal (re)actions that we can absolutely control, are thoughtless or hasty assumptions, which include unformed and uninformed opinions, a suspicious mind or knee-jerk reactions, rejoinders and comebacks (smart, snotty, and other), and any manifestation of the will to mis-take or to mis-understand someone or some situation. The rather straightforward way to break out of the prison we create for ourself by the thoughtless assumption is to take a little time to educate ourself concerning ‘stuff’ happening around us. The old adage, attributed to 18^th-century English poet Alexander Pope, has it that “a little learning is a dangerous thing”; but the will-to-ignorance is ultimately lethal: its asphyxiating effects on the mind are no different than wrapping chains around the slave’s body.

            Next, on Epictetus’ shopping list of ‘stuff’ that we own all by ourself and that we can therefore control, comes impulsiveness, which is all about us rushing about like a lunatic; being in a hurry; being emotionally hasty because we are too lazy to be emotionally thoughtful; and, in general, being way-too-eager about wanting what we want.

            Then come the cravings, a concept reminiscent of the old biblical notion of coveting. But beyond not coveting ‘your neighbor’s wife’ (which is the obvious biblical no-no), Epictetus reminds us that craving after anything, that longing or yearning for anything (aside from the occasional Ben & Jerry’s, of course), is an attitude that chains the craver to the cravee—and that we effectively sell ourselves into slavery, we become ‘owned’ by the cravee (e.g., by the Ben & Jerry’s) until our craving is sated. We become the perpetual unsatisfied… the eternal malcontent, and as the otherwise permanent inhabitant of our own private winter of discontent, we begin slowly freezing to death.

            By way of closing out his list of controllable attitudes and emotional strategies—finally, says Epictetus, we ‘go to jail’ without a get-out-of-jail-free card when we allow ourselves to follow our inclinations, both intellectually and bodily; because this means that we ‘tend’ to or ‘incline’ to exclude things based on feelings or on predispositions instead of thinking about them, which means that, very often, we may tend to reject things (good, bad, and indifferent) out of hand, or we may refuse to try new things. Is it possible that Immanuel Kant borrowed his thinking on practical reason, esp. in terms of inclinations, from this slave of yore?

           

Each of these attitudes or mindsets is manageable, says our freed slave-turned-teacher-of-the-good-life, and it is important that we should govern them, because they tend to come to us like Christmas presents: all wrapped up in decision-making strategies that are personally oppressive and enslaving, and which contribute to the construction of the walls fortifying our own personal mental prisons. At this point Epictetus lets drop the other shoe—because it is not enough just to know that self-control is possible and what it is that we can control about ourself; we must also become aware of things over which we have no control, and of the best way to handle such ‘monsters in the night’ when they inevitably come pounding on our door.

Epictetus, On Things Beyond Our Control: “Types of things we cannot control, on the other hand, are our body, possessions, our reputation, legal or political power that others have over us, and in a word, types of (re)actions that do not come from ourselves.”

            Alright, says Epictetus, we have seen some types of things, mostly our own personal (re)actions, over which we can exercise some control. So la vie est belle, right? Well, almost; and not always—because there are also things in and of this world that seem, whether we will or no, to be able to move us around like the proverbial winds of fate, helter-skelter and higgledy-piggledy, like so many Raggedy Anns and Andys.

            First of all there is our body itself, which, it would seem, has its own mysterious ways about it, and is not always the most agreeable or good-natured partner in the mind-body duo. Damage control in this area is going to be pretty much a full-time job, says E. Have you ever tried to master some skill, like playing the piano or ballroom dancing or doing some sport or playing darts, only to discover that your body has its own ideas about performing the necessary tasks at hand? And what about all this aging business? ‘Nuff said.

            Then, of course, there are all those pesky, ego-satisfying possessions we have to think about. Why is it that we spend so much time and money on getting lots of toys, lots of stuff, property, and acquisitions of all sorts, only to discover after we ‘own’ all the stuff that, in an ultimate and tremendously unfunny irony, it is really the stuff that owns us? A simple case in point: we take out student loans to get a college education; we consume the education we choose, whose diploma is out of date even before we have finished chewing, swallowing, and taking a drink of our beverage; and then we pay off the student loans for the next 20-30 years. Where is the ‘ownership’ in this scenario, and who has it? Who is slave and who is free, who possessing and who possessed?

            Do you care what people think about you? Big mistake, says Epictetus; because reputations always hang in the balance and on a whim. How can movie or stage or pop stars ever hope to have everyone like or at least appreciate their work? It is true that they can hire P.R. guys to work on public opinion, image, et al, but at the end of the day the opinion others have of us is all their own. “Our” reputation is ultimately just “their” opinion. And because we have no real way to control “their” opinion, Epictetus advises us just to walk away from it. Sometimes “their” opinion will be fair, sometimes not; but always the opinion will be theirs, although the reputation will be ours!

            Finally, the world being what it is –full of bean counters and all, Epictetus reminds us that there will always be those who have legal or political power over us. E calls these folks simply magistrates [aÓrcai], but we have the post-historical luxury of being able to fill in the blank with our favorite words for those, both well-intentioned and a---holes, who administer our daily life, such as judges, bureaucrats and administrators, bankers, lawyers, politicians, and other ‘seech vermin’, to borrow on yesteryear’s hillbilly tones from Walter Brennen.

            Perhaps one way to amplify Epictetus’ thinking on the inequality in the power relationship between those who have been given bureaucratic authority and those who are called to submit to bureaucratic authority, is to consider the issue in the light of the timely topic of gay marriage. Here is the scenario: the U.S. Supreme Court just recently (June 26, 2015) legalized gay marriage and the recognition of gay marriage in all 50 of America’s states. This means that, for better and for worse and whether the individual want it or not, nine American magistrates have decided, and have imposed their ‘decision of nine’ on all 318.9 million (2014) Americans, that gay marriage is now the ‘law of the land’ in the United States. And yet, one might ask, how should the individual think about this and what might he eventually do, given that a panel of nine is compelling all Americans to accept something that, perhaps, many individual Americans might not privately wish to accept?

            Well, it seems pretty clear at least how one group of Americans, Christian Americans, are called to act in this scenario. In Romans 13:1-7 the Apostle Paul, who is by the way, Epictetus’ almost exact contemporary, lays out a perfectly clear course of conduct to be followed by the Roman Christian community in moments when it is actually important to recognize the inequality of power between those who have legal or political power over us, what Paul will call “governing authority,” and the rest of us who do not have that authority. First, says Paul, the overarching principle for the Christian to respect is that “The authorities that exist have been established by God,” and that Christians therefore should bend the knee before the governing authorities as though to God Himself. This is actually the meaningful end and conclusion of Paul’s argument at this point, because it obviously means by application, in the context of our gay marriage scenario, for instance, that the nine U.S. Supreme Court justices are “God’s servants,” and that the will of God Himself is favorable to the idea that equal standing before the law should govern marriage of any sort in the United States, hetero- as well as homo-sexual. Following Paul’s reasoning, God is obviously pro-gay marriage in his contemporary dealings with the United States.

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            On the other hand, would Epictetus have us think and act any differently in this situation of gay marriage in the United States? Well, yes and no. Paul advises the Roman Christians to cultivate both submission and right attitude in such situations, which are beyond our personal control, calling them not only to accept but also to respect the Supreme Court’s decision as a ‘good’ because it is a ruling that derives from “servants of God” acting at the behest of the Big Guy Himself.  So, like the Apostle Paul, Epictetus also recognizes that there are going to be things beyond our control. However, unlike Paul, E does not encourage us to participate in any sort of trans-psycho-babble-ation whereby we forcibly translate such things either into something ‘good’ (because, for example, it is said to correspond to the unveiled will of God) or into something ‘evil’. Rather, E encourages us to be indifferent to all things that are beyond our control: “We must,” he says, “consider things beyond our control as of lesser importance, as enslaving, as restricting us, as alien to us because they come from others.” So what is important to Epictetus is not whether we like or dislike the specific things those in authority over us do that concern us, but rather to acknowledge whatever real control we have had in and over the situation, and to make the occurrence of such situations a background issue of being alive in the world, rather than a foreground issue of high drama and high blood pressure.

Full translation (Aiken 2015) of the first precept of E’s Enchiridion:

            Says Epictetus About Things Within Our Control: There are certain things we can control and then there are those things that are beyond our control. Types of things we can control are our own (re)actions, such as thoughtless assumptions, impulsiveness, cravings, and allowing ourselves to be led by our inclinations –in a word, those types of (re)action that come from ourselves. Types of things we cannot control, on the other hand, are our body, possessions, our reputation, legal or political power that others may over us, and in a word, types of (re)actions that do not come from ourselves.

            Now, naturally, the types of things we can control are easily accessible to each one of us, they are without coercive force, and they do not restrict us. On the other hand, we must consider things beyond our control as of lesser importance [aÓsqenh = unimportant, irrelevant, feeble], as enslaving [douvla = slavish, unquestioning, unoriginal, mindless; submissive-subservient, servile], as restricting us, as alien to us because they come from others.

[Here is the Greek text for you hellenophiles. Notice the efficiency of language, which is pretty predictable give the aphoristic structure of this handbook for good thinking and conduct.]

            Tw◊n o¡ntwn ta» me÷n e˙stin e˙f’ hJmi√n, ta» de« oujk e˙f’ hJmi√n. e˙f’ hJmi√n me«n uJpo/lhyiß, oJrmh/, o¡rexiß, e¶kklisiß kai« e˚ni« lo/gwˆ o¢sa hJme÷tera e¶rga: oujk e˙f’ hJmi√n de« to\ sw◊ma, hJ kthvsiß, do/xai, aÓrcai« kai« e˚ni« lo/gwˆ o¢sa oujc hJme÷tera e¶rga. kai« ta» me«n e˙f’ hJmi√n e˙sti fu/sei e˙leu/qera, aÓkw¿luta, aÓparapo/dista, ta» de« oujk e˙f’ hJmi√n aÓsqenhv, douvla, kwluta¿, aÓllo/tria. [Epictetus, Enchiridion (TLG reference: Author 557, Work 2 “Ench”, .1.1.1.1, etc.)]

A brief background of The Enchiridion of Epictetus.

            The Enchiridion or The Manual of Epictetus is an aphoristically short guidebook of Stoic ethical advice, of practical precepts for living the good life, which was collected and assembled by Arrian of Nicomedia (c.87 - after 145), Greek historian and senator of the Roman Empire, in the 2^nd century C.E.

            According to Wiki sources: “For many centuries, the Enchiridion maintained its authority both with Christians and Pagans. Two Christian writers – Nilus and an anonymous contemporary – wrote paraphrases of it in the early 5th century and Simplicius of Cilicia wrote a commentary upon it in the 6th. The work was first published in Latin translation by Poliziano in Rome in 1493; Beroaldus published another edition in Bologna in 1496. The original Greek was first published in Venice with the Simplicius's commentary in 1528 and an English translation appeared as early as 1567. The book was a common school text in Scotland during the Scottish Enlightenment. Adam Smith had a 1670 edition in his library, acquired as a schoolboy.”