Liberty Through Grammar... Epictetus' Handbook Expanded.

Epictetus’ Enchiridion Expanded_§1.2.1.1-1.2.2.1.

Oxford Frontispiece ca. 1715

In our perambulations through Epictetus’ Handbook or Manual, which is formally called the Enchiridion, we must remember that it is actually a compilation of his Stoic ethical witticisms and otherwise pithy sayings, which was done by Arrian, a mid-second century AD disciple of Epictetus (AD 55-135). The great virtue of Epictetus as philosopher, of course, is that he did not conceive of philosophy as a discipline for abstract thought and theory, but advanced rather the common Stoic idea that philosophy is the art of living well, and not just some handy-dandy knack for thinking and discoursing on abstruse stuff in order to bamboozle the bewildered and otherwise bedazzled audience.

So the Handbook is not a simple summary of Epictetus’ Discourses. Rather, it is one of the earliest self-help manuals of Western philosophy, which Epictetus cleverly styled for increasingly short attention spans by avoiding long and sustained philosophical arguments full of metaphysics, logic, and other such nasty tools of reasonable thinking and correct thought.

            There are several internet versions of the Handbook, free to all for the downloading. The version hosted by The Internet Classics Archive was translated by Elizabeth Carter (1717-1806), who, as everyone probably does not know, was an English poet, classicist, writer, translator, and a member of the Bluestocking Circle, a Society founded in the 1750s, which, according to the Wiki-battalions, was “an informal women's social and educational movement in England in the mid-18th century [that] emphasized education and mutual co-operation.” From the same source we learn that Ms. Carter ‘rendered’ into English, which is the old way of saying ‘translated’, texts from the French, from Italian, and from ancient Greek. Our source continues that Ms. Carter’s “position in the pantheon of 18th-century women writers was, however, secured by her translation in 1758 of All the Works of Epictetus, Which are Now Extant, the first English translation of all known works by the Greek stoic philosopher. This work made her name and fortune, securing her a spectacular £1000 in subscription money.”

            In addition to her various translations, Ms. Carter’s rendering of Epictetus’s Handbook has the virtue of being in the public domain at present, which means that it is therefore free for the taking for anyone who, like The Internet Classics Archive, has a mind to publish the text. To her credit, however, free does not mean poorly done; for the Carter rendering is a fairly faithful reflection of Epictetus’ original language; it shows that the author had some notions about the variety of elements that are part and parcel of Stoic philosophy; and she had at least some rudimentary, albeit to our modern ears somewhat time-worn, sense of the English language, which one can certainly accept with grateful heart from a writer departed, lo these two+ centuries.

            A second internet version of the Handbook can be found at Guthenberg.org., which offers, to date, “52,125 free eBooks to download.” There is no doubt that the Project Guthenberg is in general a wonderful public service. Unfortunately, the translation of the Handbook on offer at Gutenberg.org is a bane to any ilk or brand of the English language, thanks to its wooden-indian level of sensitivity concerning speech forms, and it is anathema to the spirit of Stoic philosophy because of the translator’s complete and blithering obliviousness of Stoic psychology. The text was rendered by Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823-1911), a Harvard College graduate, American Unitarian minister, author, Civil War abolitionist, and soldier. But while I say ‘rendered’, I have my doubts as to whether Higginson actually rendered anything, but suspect that, notwithstanding his expensive education, he simply hashed up, made an opaque muddle of, and served up again for our dubious edification Ms. Carter’s more famous translation, which had been published roughly 100 years before. That said, instead of allowing this American edition to descend into well-deserved obscurity, The Liberal Arts Press (NY) picked up the Higginson text in public domain and published it in 1948. It was subsequently picked up (2014) by Project Guthenberg.

Now on to our task at hand. We are still in the introductory paragraphs of the Handbook, and Epictetus’ thinking hinges on our recollection of Stoic Big Idea Number One, that, as he says in the opening sentence, “There are certain things we can control and then there are those things that are beyond our control.”

2 “Ench”, 1.2.1.1

         Me÷mnhso, o¢ti ojre÷xewß e˙paggeli÷a e˙pituci÷a, ou∞ ojre÷ghØ, 2 e˙kkli÷sewß e˙paggeli÷a to\ mh\ peripesei√n e˙kei÷nwˆ, o§ e˙kkli÷netai, kai« 3 oJ me«n <e˙n> ojre÷xei aÓpotugca¿nwn aÓtuch/ß, oJ de« <e˙n> e˙kkli÷sei 4 peripi÷ptwn dustuch/ß. a·n me«n ou™n mo/na e˙kkli÷nhØß ta» para» 5 fu/sin tw◊n e˙pi« soi÷, oujdeni÷, w—n e˙kkli÷neiß, peripeshvø: no/son d’ a·n (2 “Ench”, 1.2.2.1) e˙kkli÷nhØß h£ qa¿naton h£ peni÷an, dustuch/seiß.

TRANSLATION (Aiken): You must continue to keep in mind that the promise implicit in desire is in fact to obtain [something], which is to say that you actually grasp the thing you are striving after; (2) and that the promise implicit in avoidance or in your refusal to pursue, is not to embrace that thing you are deliberately trying to avoid. [You must keep in mind], as well, (3) that the one who is caught up in desire is miserable when he fails to obtain the thing sought after, and that the one caught up in avoiding pursuit, if he does not refuse to embrace, (4) is doubly miserable. So if you embrace a philosophy of avoidance only with respect to those things that you can control, (5) then you will embrace nothing at all, because you have chosen to avoid them. (2 “Ench”, 1.2.2.1) But if you ‘fail to avoid’ suffering, or death or poverty, [which you inevitably must!] then you will be doubly miserable.

Ms. Carter: Remember that following desire promises the attainment of that of which you are desirous; and aversion promises the avoiding that to which you are averse. However, he who fails to obtain the object of his desire is disappointed, and he who incurs the object of his aversion wretched. If, then, you confine your aversion to those objects only which are contrary to the natural use of your faculties, which you have in your own control, you will never incur anything to which you are averse. But if you are averse to sickness, or death, or poverty, you will be wretched.

There are many interesting grammatical tidbits in this section of Epictetus’ Handbook that invite our attention. The first of these is the almost list-like enumeration of imperatives, or the command form of verbs, as if to remind us, from teacher’s mouth to student’s ear, that there are indeed certain things the Stoic philosopher must do in order to live a liberated life. There is the imperative to Remember: “You,” says Epictetus, “must continue to keep in mind…” This is an intellectual exercise distinctly different from simply ‘remembering’, just as ‘I have to remember to turn off the lights’ (punctual, in the sense of one-off) is a remarkably different mental activity from ‘keeping active in the front of your mind’ (ongoing action) that, for example, every day your children need to be picked up after school or that you must always tell your wife how beautiful she is today (memneso - Me÷mnhso; §1, L.1). Then there are the imperatives to “avoid or decline” (aron - a°ron; §2, L.2); to “abolish” (anele - a‡nele, §2, L.4); to actively replace the ‘thing’ that you used to abolish incorrectly with the thing you ought to abolish in its place – “[abolish] instead” (metathes - meta¿qeß, §2, L.2); and finally, there is the imperative to the budding Stoic philosopher to “be prepared to furnish” (crw, §2, L.7) the activity of getting started and then moving forward in stopping all the tomfoolery about avoiding certain types of things that are generally unavoidable. All the negatives in the passage are, I admit, a little overwhelming.

A second juicy language item is the very interesting use of parallel word families, because Epictetus playfully uses one noun or verb to illuminate meanings in another. In Greek, for example, the root idea of tuki (tuch) hovers around the notion of chance or luck; hence, kali tixi means ‘Good Luck’ in modern Greek. So here in our late Stoic text we have a dance, as it were, between various forms that each derive from this tuki-root, but which cast shadows on each other by their differences in nuance. First, there is the idea of being successful in obtaining the desired object, which is as if to say that we go beyond (epi-) the point where luck would normally land us (epi-tuki, e˙pituci÷a, §1, L.1); this is closely followed and informed by a-tuki (aÓtuch/ß, §1, L.3), because not having any luck in obtaining the desired item makes us miserable (a-tuki, or not having luck); then we are given another variation on the theme, which is to say an augmentation on the theme of being miserable, by dis-tuki (dustuch/ß, §1, L.4 and §2, L.1), which is to say that we are really, really miserable if we screw up big time on obtaining the desired effect; and this is followed up finally by its verb variation in §2, L.1 (aÓtucei√n)-‘you will necessarily be miserable’ (a-tuki).

            Another nifty word-play in this section of the Handbook is the parallelism that highlights the chemistry between ‘airo’ (a°ron) in §2, L.1 and ‘an-aireo’ (a‡nele) in §2, L.4, both of which derive from the root verbal idea of airo or aireo, whose fundamental sense is one of taking up, raising, or lifting up. You actually have to get down to the 4^th entry among the dictionary meanings and usages to get to the sense of ‘to lift and take away, to remove’ for airo, which usage is then blamed on Aeschylus (5^th century BC) and on the NT (1^st century AD). I suppose we may now also include Epictetus in this minority cadre of linguistic recalcitrants. As for ‘an-aireo’ in §2, L.4, its sense of ‘to make away with’, ‘to destroy, to abolish or annul’, is blamed on Homer and Herodotus, which is great company to be in, albeit only Homer among them makes it into Dante’s great circle of Hell reserved for virtuous pagans, among whom notable others are Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. If there is any divine justice, though, we might be able to take some comfort in the notion that Herodotus will not be hidden away in any other outer Erebos for his only slightly ‘ex-centric’ usage of ‘an-aireo’. When all is said and done, then, the ‘airo’ / ‘an-aireo’ parallelism in this section allows us to render our text: “Put away, therefore…” in the sense of, get rid of or have the waiter just take away this silly strategy of doing [X], and instead, “Completely abolish [Y]!”  

There is a final morsel of grammatical interest in this text, which comes in the form of parallel infinitives (the ‘to’ form of the verb) in §2, L.6, ‘orman’ and ‘aph-orman’ (oJrma◊n kai« aÓforma◊n), both of which hang on the strong verb in the context, xrao (crw), although this verb very coyly shows up only afterwards, in L. 7. This particular parallelism also cradles a word-play deriving from the root, ‘ormao’, which means ‘to start chasing [something]’ or to ‘set off after [something]’. Epictetus wants us to understand that each one of us must make an effort by bringing something to the philosophical table in this game of living liberated lives, which is that we must be prepared [xraw] to undertake two activities: 1) to begin making a start (orman) on our journey, and 2) to move forward (aph-orman) away from where our journey started.

            There are also a couple of verbal niceties in these sections that are worth our attention and scrutiny. The first, of course, is the very first imperative memneso (Me÷mnhso; §1, L.1), which is in the perfect tense. Standard Greek grammars remind us that verbs in the perfect tense carry the idea that the progress of an action has been completed in past time and that the results of that action are ongoing—such as, I started chewing gum, (and I am still chewing gum to this day). This perfect imperative of the idea ‘to remember’, then, is that we knew or learned something in past time, and that we still today are keeping what we learned in mind. Hence our interest in rendering Epictetus’ phrase, not with Ms. Carter’s foreshortened “Remember that…,” but rather with the more sustained idea: “You must continue to keep in mind that the promise implicit in desire…”

            Our second imperative in the text is aron (a°ron; §2, L.2), which I render by, you must “avoid or decline.” The tense of this imperative is called an aorist, which means that the past action, no matter how long it may have taken to accomplish in real time, stands now as accomplished. Ms. Carter renders this verbal idea as, “Remove…”; but this simple preterit fails to capture the full sense of aron as a past time, completed action; so we translate it instead as, “You must have put away from you, therefore, once and for all…”

            The last little nugget of interest is from §2, L.4, which Ms. Carter translates with: “But, for the present, totally suppress desire…”  So rendered, the reader is left to understand from this text that, at least for the nonce, he must “totally suppress desire,” in the hope, one might suppose, that one day he will perhaps be allowed to give full reign to his wild lusts and cravings. Mh ge÷noito (me genoito - Hell, no!), as the Apostle Paul was wont to bellow (thundering it out some 14 times in the NT)! The issue, which is staring us right in the face of course, is how to translate the prepositional phrase, epi tou parontos (e˙pi« touv paro/ntoß). Ms. Carter’s rendering is grammatically possible, but it shows a lack of any Stoic insight or intuition, because Epictetus does not want us to do anything for the nonce! In the Stoic philosophical life, we do everything for keeps, always, every single day! So, coupled together with our two tandem aorist imperatives, airo (a°ron) in §2, L.1, and an-aireo (a‡nele) in §2, L.4, this prepositional phrase has the philosophical sense of First, or Now, or At Present, “actively set about to do away completely with desire, (6) if it is not as yet possible for you to do anything else.”

             The moral of the story, of course, is that you should avoid doing the kind of things that ensnare your desires and thereby enslave your soul, and instead, you should do everything within your power not to become the servant to your desires. For on this path lies liberty.

a°ron ou™n 2 th\n e¶kklisin aÓpo\ pa¿ntwn tw◊n oujk e˙f’ hJmi√n kai« meta¿qeß e˙pi« 3 ta» para» fu/sin tw◊n e˙f’ hJmi√n. th\n o¡rexin de« pantelw◊ß e˙pi« 4 touv paro/ntoß a‡nele: a‡n te ga»r ojre÷ghØ tw◊n oujk e˙f’ hJmi√n 5 tinoß, aÓtucei√n aÓna¿gkh tw◊n te e˙f’ hJmi√n, o¢swn ojre÷gesqai kalo\n 6 a‡n, oujde«n oujde÷pw soi pa¿resti. mo/nwˆ de« tw◊ø oJrma◊n kai« aÓforma◊n 7 crw◊, kou/fwß me÷ntoi kai« meq’ uJpexaire÷sewß kai« aÓneime÷nwß. [Epictetus, Enchiridion (TLG reference: Author 557, Work 2 “Ench”, 1.2.1.1-1.2.2.1)]

TRANSLATION (Aiken): You must have put away from you, therefore, (2) once and for all, the strategy of avoidance of things that are not within our power, and abolish instead (3) those things that are within our power. (4) First, actively set about to do away completely with desire, (6) if it is not as yet possible for you to do anything else. For if you reach out for something not within our power, (5) you will necessarily be miserable BOTH with respect to those things, AND with respect to the good of everything else. And all you have to do is to be prepared [xraw] to begin making a start and to move forward (7); yet with a light heart, and with reserve, and whole-heartedly.

Ms. Carter: Remove aversion, then, from all things that are not in our control, and transfer it to things contrary to the nature of what is in our control. But, for the present, totally suppress desire: for, if you desire any of the things which are not in your own control, you must necessarily be disappointed; and of those which are, and which it would be laudable to desire, nothing is yet in your possession. Use only the appropriate actions of pursuit and avoidance; and even these lightly, and with gentleness and reservation.

Full translation of section 1.2.1.1-1.2.2.1of Epictetus’ Enchiridion (Aiken 2016):

            You must continue to keep in mind that the promise implicit in desire is in fact to obtain [something], which is to say that you actually grasp the thing you are striving after; (2) and that the promise implicit in avoidance or in your refusal to pursue, is not to embrace that thing you are deliberately trying to avoid. [You must keep in mind], as well, (3) that the one who is caught up in desire is miserable when he fails to obtain the thing sought after, and that the one caught up in avoiding pursuit, if he does not refuse to embrace, (4) is doubly miserable. So if you embrace a philosophy of avoidance only with respect to those things that you can control, (5) then you will embrace nothing at all, because you have chosen to avoid them. (2 “Ench”, 1.2.2.1) But if you ‘fail to avoid’ suffering, or death or poverty, [which you inevitably must!] then you will be doubly miserable.

You must have put away from you, therefore, (2) once and for all, the strategy of avoidance of things that are not within our power, and abolish instead (3) those things that are within our power. (4) First, actively set about to do away completely with desire, (6) if it is not as yet possible for you to do anything else. For if you reach out for something not within our power, (5) you will necessarily be miserable BOTH with respect to those things, AND with respect to the good of everything else. And all you have to do is to be prepared [xraw] to begin making a start and to move forward (7); yet with a light heart, and with reserve, and whole-heartedly.

The Greek text for hellenophiles.

2 “Ench”, 1.2.1.1

         Me÷mnhso, o¢ti ojre÷xewß e˙paggeli÷a e˙pituci÷a, ou∞ ojre÷ghØ, 2 e˙kkli÷sewß e˙paggeli÷a to\ mh\ peripesei√n e˙kei÷nwˆ, o§ e˙kkli÷netai, kai« 3 oJ me«n <e˙n> ojre÷xei aÓpotugca¿nwn aÓtuch/ß, oJ de« <e˙n> e˙kkli÷sei 4 peripi÷ptwn dustuch/ß. a·n me«n ou™n mo/na e˙kkli÷nhØß ta» para» 5 fu/sin tw◊n e˙pi« soi÷, oujdeni÷, w—n e˙kkli÷neiß, peripeshvø: no/son d’ a·n

2 “Ench”, 1.2.2.1

e˙kkli÷nhØß h£ qa¿naton h£ peni÷an, dustuch/seiß. a°ron ou™n  2 th\n e¶kklisin aÓpo\ pa¿ntwn tw◊n oujk e˙f’ hJmi√n kai« meta¿qeß e˙pi« 3 ta» para» fu/sin tw◊n e˙f’ hJmi√n. th\n o¡rexin de« pantelw◊ß e˙pi« 4 touv paro/ntoß a‡nele: a‡n te ga»r ojre÷ghØ tw◊n oujk e˙f’ hJmi√n 5 tinoß, aÓtucei√n aÓna¿gkh tw◊n te e˙f’ hJmi√n, o¢swn ojre÷gesqai kalo\n 6 a‡n, oujde«n oujde÷pw soi pa¿resti. mo/nwˆ de« tw◊ø oJrma◊n kai« aÓforma◊n 7 crw◊, kou/fwß me÷ntoi kai« meq’ uJpexaire÷sewß kai« aÓneime÷nwß. [Epictetus, Enchiridion (TLG reference: Author 557, Work 2 “Ench”, 1.2.1.1-1.2.2.1)]