2 “Ench”, 1.3.1.1.
TRANSLATION
(Aiken)—On Things. For each thing
that you find glamorous, or handy, or that you really care about and enjoy—beginning
with the most insignificant things, keep repeating the mantra in your mind: “what
kind of a thing is it?” If you have favorite wine glasses, for example, keep
repeating to yourself: ‘I really like these wine glasses, but they are glass after all! If you do this, when
they eventually break or get broken, which they will, you will not become devastated.
And each time you affectionately embrace your child or your wife, keep
repeating to yourself that you are tenderly embracing a mortal human; for then, when the day of their mortality is at hand,
you will not become devastated.
∆Ef’
e˚ka¿stou tw◊n yucagwgou/ntwn h£ crei÷an pareco/ntwn h£ stergome÷nwn me÷mnhso
e˙pile÷gein, oJpoi√o/n e˙stin, aÓpo\ 3 tw◊n
smikrota¿twn aÓrxa¿menoß: a·n cu/tran ste÷rghØß, o¢ti "cu/tran 4
ste÷rgw". kateagei÷shß ga»r aujthvß ouj taracqh/shØ: a·n
paidi÷on 5 sautouv katafilhvøß h£ gunai√ka, o¢ti a‡nqrwpon
katafilei√ß: aÓpoqano/ntoß ga»r ouj taracqh/shØ.
In order to show the contrast in terms of clarity of
meaning and image, in our previous Phrontisterion
reflections on Epictetus’ Enchiridion
we began to juxtapose our translation with that done by Elizabeth Carter, the 18th century English
poet, classicist, writer, translator, and Bluestocking Circle-ite
whose translation is housed at The Internet Classics Archive.
Carter Translation 3. With regard to
whatever objects give you delight, are useful, or are deeply
loved, remember to tell yourself of what general nature they
are, beginning from the most insignificant things. If, for example,
you are fond of a specific ceramic cup, remind yourself that it is
only ceramic cups in general of which you are fond. Then, if it breaks, you will not be disturbed. If you kiss your child, or your wife,
say that you only kiss things which are human, and thus you will
not be disturbed if either of them dies.
§ Ontology – Definition.
Ontology comes
from the Greek word, on (on), which means a
‘thing’, superglued onto the -logia
ending, which every school student learns means, ‘the study of’. So simply
stated, ontology asks the question: what makes a thing a particular thing?
§ Reflections on Grammar.
One of the interesting
grammatical goodies in Section 3 of the Handbook
is the simple language structure that Epictetus uses in order to focus our attention
on each and every ‘thing’ in our world as objective item. The prepositional phrase at the beginning of the paragraph, ef’ ekastou [∆Ef’
e˚ka¿stou], which will govern all three of the genitive plural
participles to follow in Line 2 (Psyxagogounton, yucagwgou/ntwn; chreian parexonton, crei÷an pareco/ntwn; and, stergomenon, stergome÷nwn], structurally reduces the quasi
infinite plurality of things within our various circles of attention (per Mary
Douglas’ theory…), to each and every thing as some very specific and particular
item, which thereby becomes special for
us not only by virtue of garnering our focused attention, but also and more
importantly, because we recognize that each thing-as-some-particular-thing has
its own very real and pertinent reality apart
from our interest in or our perception of it. As we take into consideration
each ‘thing’ in terms of what it really ‘is’, and not just for what function it
may serve for us in our world, then that thing becomes the object of our
special awareness—we truly see ‘it’ for what it is in itself.
Keep in mind 1) “for each and every one of those things that
you find glamorous” [Psyxagogounton, yucagwgou/ntwn]… For those who
have grown up in the post Harry Potter world, the notion of something as glamorous has shifted away from the yesteryear
image of the Hollywood ‘glamour’ stars, such as Rita Hayworth, Gloria Swanson, and
Marilyn Monroe, to embrace an older and more magical idea that our eyes can be
deceived by a ‘glamour’ cast by the magician or the fairy godmother, which is
intended to delude us by making us see a handsome prince where there is only,
in reality, a rather gross-looking toad. The only difference in Epictetus’
philosophical imagination, is that we do not really need at all the external
provocateur—the magician, because we have the cosmetic-inducing function [Grk: kosmos, nous] of our own minds, which comes with a complete cast of
characters, including pre-conceptions, personal preferences, desires, dreams,
and wishes, all of which provide us with a “made-up” world masked over by a
layer of theatrical make-up, all of which serve to cast a glamour of illusion
over the world of simple, ‘there’-type realities [Grk: physis]—the world that ‘is’ there in front of us, present in all of
its simplicity.
Keep in mind 2) “for each and every one of those things that
you find handy” [chreian parexonton, crei÷an
pareco/ntwn]…
Scientists remind us that we are animals that use tools. And it certainly does
seem that humans have a ‘bent’ for translating objects from being into function. In fact, the plot for the 1980 South African film, The Gods Must Be Crazy, actually
revolves around precisely this premise. A Kalahari bushman finds an empty
Coca-Cola bottle lying in the desert, and takes it with him home to his
village, thinking that the gods have given him a gift. It goes without saying
that he has no idea what soda-pop is, nor that it comes in bottles, nor that one
drinks it from a bottle. So the simple reality of the ‘item’ at hand is
entirely lost to him. His family, on the other hand, is not at any loss to
interpret the item-at-hand in terms of possible functions—it can function as a
rolling pin or masher for cooking uses, or as a musical instrument when one
blows across the opening of the item-at-hand, or as a weapon when a brother
wants to antagonize an aggravating older sister (actually, this latter may be
from the plot of my own childhood!). In fact, the item-at-hand has so many
potential functions—as numerous as the grains of sand in the desert, that it
seems to have no specific or fundamental truth of its own about its own nature,
which means that, in and of itself, it is no real thing at all. Rather, it is an intersection event where no-thing is
wedded to every-thing, becoming pure, unbridled function. The bushman concludes
that the gods must be crazy to create such a thing that is no specific thing,
at which point he returns the no-thing-‘gift’
back to the desert where he first found it.
This is the ontological layer of make-up that Epictetus adds
when he asks us to remember that for each and every one of those things that we
find handy or useful, its handiness and its utility does not belong to ‘it’ at
all in any essential fashion, but rather to us, the outside observer, and to our
subjective translation of the item-at-hand. And somehow, through a movement of
the mind or thought, Epictetus invites us to philosophically navigate beyond
the infinite variety of functions that may translate the item-at-hand, and
which derive from our interpretive cosmos, in order to discover the nature of
the particular thing that the item-at-hand is, in and of itself.
Finally, Epictetus applies his ‘Keep in mind!’ to 3) “each
and every one of those things that you find that you really care about and
enjoy” [stergomenon, stergome÷nwn]. C.S. Lewis famously wrote
about four different types of love in his eponymously titled book, The Four Loves (New York: Harcourt,
Brace, 1960) – storge, philia, eros, and agape. Everyone
is pretty familiar with philia, of
course, made mundane by incorporation into the city-name, Philadelphia (USA),
the City of Brotherly Love. Deriving from companionship, according to Lewis, philia bespeaks the freely chosen bonds
of friendship that unite free hearts and minds, a condition so aptly described
by the aged, wandering hero, Ulysses,
in the moving words of Tennyson (1809-1892), the Victorian era’s principal Poet
Laureate:
My
mariners,
Souls that have tol'd and wrought, and thought with me-
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads -
Souls that have tol'd and wrought, and thought with me-
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads -
The
freedom that surrounds philia also
gives added meaning to the activity of philosophizing—the free movement of
binding oneself over in friendship to sophia,
to wisdom, to the virtuous life of thinking and creating the good and the
beautiful (kaloskagathos).
Unlike philia, eros evokes images of eroticism and the erotic,
and even has distinctly religious overtones in the world of the earliest
Greeks. In the Theogony, for example,
Hesiod (ca. 700 BC) names Eros as one of the oldest generations of gods. Wiki sources remind us, though, that in contrast either to usage among
the ancient Greeks, or to more modern connotations and associations, eros was for Lewis “love in the sense of
'being in love' or 'loving' someone, as opposed to the raw sexuality of what he
called Venus.”
Perhaps most well-remembered among the four loves is Lewis’
notion of agape love, which he translates
as Charity – the only love that does not have its origins in the natural order
of things: the unconditional love of God. Lewis calls agape the greatest of the loves, because it is self-sufficient,
originating in God Himself, and therefore unchanging.
Which
leaves us to consider now only the first of Lewis’ four loves: storge, whereby we discover his common
ground with Epictetus. According to Lewis, storge
is an affection or fondness for the familiar, in the sense of the fond feelings
or emotion that one has for members of one’s family; it is, for example, a
natural love or affection of the parent for a child. The notion of storge is ubiquitous in Greek
literature, and is at once much less lofty than Lewis’ presentation, and yet
also more informative in its association of images. In fact, the strongest image
associated with storge is perhaps
that found in a text from Xenophon, On Hunting:
[7.12] “As a rule when [the dogs] are hungry the
master should feed [them] himself; for when they are not hungry they do not
know to whom that is due; but when they want food and get it, they love [storge] the giver.” Storge, then, is curiously used to describe the very interesting love
of dogs for their masters. Lewis is correct, however, in also seeing storge as the mutual love of a familiar
and familial sort, between parents and children, brothers and sisters, and husbands
and wives, as this is attested by usage in Sophocles, Euripides, Herodotus,
Thucydides, etc., although it also extends figuratively to the type of
affection that is said to exist between a country and her colonies, and between
a king and his people.
So in our present text from the Enchiridion, Epictetus invites us to take stock of “each and every
one of those things that you find that you really care about and enjoy” [stergomenon, stergome÷nwn], and to continually bring
into and keep in the front of our minds the truth about the world’s reality—about
the ephemeral nature of each thing that is any-thing, by reciting the mantra:
“what kind of a thing is it?” From the fancy suit that catches our eye in a
store window, to the utility vehicle, a.k.a. people-mover, that we find so
useful in our soccer-mom lives, to the profoundness of the emotions that define
our relationships with our significant others, everything is something
that flees from us by its nature.
We have already seen in our previous Phrontisterion essay, “Liberty Through Grammar [§1.2.1.1-1.2.2.1]”
the expression: “Keep repeating the mantra in your mind – [Me÷mnhso; memneso]. We saw this
perfect imperative of remembering in Handbook,
3, §1, L.1, where we learned that the idea of the verb in the perfect
tense is a sustained activity, begun in the past, and continuing in the
present. So: “You
must continue to keep in mind…” And what we are supposed to keep in mind with
respect to all manner of things, is
to epilegein [e˙pile÷gein],
or as the dictionary says: to “cite ‘as proof’ or
to pronounce or to attribute, to utter as if pronouncing a spell.” When we drink wine from those fine, fancy wine glasses
of ours, Epictetus calls us to utter the mantra in the quiet of our minds, as
if pronouncing an unspoken spell, that the wine glass we are so tremendously caressing
and enjoying is made of glass and will break one day, and that the wonderful wine
we are savoring and enjoying is already poured out. That, in the language of
Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat, “The Bird of
Time has but a little way/ To fly—and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing.” Time has
the natural ownership of All Things.
 |
| A pipkin |
Now there is an obvious
difference between Phrontisterion’s translation
of ‘wine glasses’ in Line 3, and Ms. Carter’s translation: “If,
for example, you are fond of a specific ceramic cup, remind yourself that it is
only ceramic cups in general of which you are fond.” The word is chutran [cu/tran], and
means earthen pot or pipkin, of the sort in the accompanying images. So the
translator has a choice: either to translate, as Ms. Carter has chosen to do,
according to the materiality of the object, and thus speak about ceramic cups –our
initial translation was actually going to be in the direction of favorite coffee
mugs! —or in terms of the pipkin’s natural function, which was certainly to
pour out something to drink. And since it pleased me to think of Epictetus
drinking wine from his ephemeral pipkin, Phrontisterion
opted to translate according to function. This is the translator’s free choice,
as long as the meaning is not lost.
However, Ms. Carter makes a
translating error, both grammatical and philosophical, in translating Lines 4
and 5 “Then, if [the cup] breaks, you
will not be disturbed.” Epictetus’ first example, which we might call of
the spilled milk variety, is followed by the second, more dependent sounding
condition clause: “If you kiss your
child, or your wife, say that you only kiss things which are human, and thus
you will not be disturbed if either of them dies.” But Epictetus is not
giving us hypotheticals in either of these clauses, which means that Ms. Carter
has not grasped the philosophical implications of Epictetus’ illustrations. The
genitive absolute in Line 4 tells us just as plain as day that Ms. Carter’s
‘cup’ will inevitably break just as surely as milk spills, in the same way that
it tells us in Line 5 that it is absolutely not a question of ‘if’ either the
child or wife dies, but rather, of ‘when’ the time comes for them, as Homer
might have said, to meet the day of their fate.
But what does all this
grammatical mumbo-jumbo really add up to? The aorist participles in the genitive absolute construction
in Line 4 and at the end of Line 5, per Greek grammar, mean that “instead of while
and as, after and when are the conjunctions in translations.”
By means of the grammatical road-signs he uses, Epictetus tries to help us fathom,
to visualize for the mind’s eye, the inexorable inevitability of the glass breaking and of the mortal dying: not
‘if’ it breaks, but ‘when’ it breaks, as break it must and will, not ‘if’ they
die, but ‘when’. Because, says this Stoic philosopher, if we have right thinking
about this simple reality—about the true nature of things as things that are designed to pass out of
our lives, then we will not be overwhelmed on the day when that reality comes
busting in through our front door.
The first illustration, then, is
about remembering to correctly ‘grasp’ our favorite wine glasses, and the
second illustration is about remembering to take our loved ones in our arms, tenderly,
because both glasses and loved ones are limited editions, and our relationship
to them is not at all ‘iffy’. This is in stark philosophical contrast to Ms.
Carter’s rendering in the second illustration, however: “If you kiss your child, or your wife, say that you only kiss things
which are human, and thus you will not be disturbed if either of them dies.”
This ‘if’-conditional should rather be translated by the notion of
‘whenever’—so: whenever I embrace my child and wife, I have to remember that
they are fragile items defined naturally by their built-in-obsolescence. One
day they will no longer be present for me to embrace tenderly, so I should kiss
them indeed, but with an understanding about their fragileness that brings out
a tenderness to my embrace. The moral of the story is, that because we
understand what we are and what the ‘other’ is, our gestures should be infused
with gentleness.
Finally, there is the notion of
being ‘devastated’ that returns like a bad penny in Section 3 of the Enchiridion. Ms. Carter renders this
idea as being ‘disturbed’, which certainly seems to have diminished in import in
the English language over the last several centuries. One is disturbed, for
instance, by the dog jumping up on the bed when he is wet, or by an importune ringing
of the telephone or doorbell; one is disturbed when a nice bottle of wine is bouchonnée, or when a favorite shirt
has become a little too snug around the shoulders and waist—due to shrinkage,
of course. We may even be disturbed when our ceramic cup or coffee mug breaks,
as Ms. Carter suggests. But, at least nowadays, we are more than just ‘disturbed’
by the death of a wife or child; and in fact, ‘disturbed’ does not seem quite
to get to the job of describing this type of loss. But whether of favorite wine
glasses or of wife and child, whether of things trivial or profound, Epictetus
reminds us that the effects of any of our losses during the course of our life
should not be ‘devastation’.
‘To not become devastated’, or ataraxia, is an
expression that originally comes to Western philosophy from Epicurus (died 270
BC), and it will subsequently become a fixed philosophical notion for the three great schools of
philosophy in ancient Greece: Epicureanism, Pyrrhonism, and Stoicism; Epictetus,
of course, who died almost 400 years after Epicurus, is classified as a later
Stoic philosopher. The dictionary definition of this
future passive verb [ouj
taracqh/shØ; ou taraxthese] is,
to get stirred up or troubled; to confound, to agitate, to disturb or disquiet.
In its passive form, which we have here, it denotes to be in a state of
disorder or anarchy (per Thucydides and Democritus). The literature (in the
form of Xenophon) also provides a nice figurative image: to be shaken in one’s
seat on horseback.
The translation, ‘devastated’,
as in, “you
will not become devastated,” seems to get to the heart both of
Epictetus’ word choice [ouj taracqh/shØ; ou
taraxthese],
and of the philosophical distance that Epictetus encourages us to acquire as we
learn to respond to Loss in our lives. We have
written elsewhere that ‘not-taraxia’ or ataraxia is a mental state that one can
learn; it is “the tranquility of mind that characterizes someone who is free
from worry and distress.” It is this discipline of keeping in mind the real
nature of the world—the limitations of materiality in general, which Epictetus
is here trying to teach us.
This brings us back full circle, then, to our expanded translation
of Section 1.3.1.1 of Epictetus’ Enchiridion.
TRANSLATION (Aiken)—On
Things. For each thing that you find glamorous, or handy, or that you
really care about and enjoy—beginning with the most insignificant things, keep repeating
the mantra in your mind: “what kind of a thing is it?” If you have favorite
wine glasses, for example, keep repeating to yourself: ‘I really like these wine
glasses, but they are glass after
all! If you do this, when they eventually break or get broken, which they will,
you will not become devastated. And each time you affectionately embrace your
child or your wife, keep repeating to yourself that you are tenderly embracing
a mortal human; for then, when the
day of their mortality is at hand, you will not become devastated.
§ Reflections on the Reading of Texts.
In the language of ancient Jewish hermeneutics,
we tend almost intuitively to read special texts, such as sacred writings or
the teachings of sages, first through the moralizing lens of practical
applications of the text to everyday life. In Jewish thought this is called halakhah interpretation. The parameters
of hermeneutics for the Hellenistic period, however, which historically and
intellectually included the thought-world inhabited by Epictetus, would be more
or less single-handedly established by Origen of Alexandria (184/185-253/254
A.D.). A level of Hellenistic interpretation corresponding to the Jewish halakhah, for example, would be the
anagogical or mystical level of exegesis (i.e., ‘reading’, or Rudolf Bultmann’s
Aus-legung), because it tended to
speak to and for the betterment of our mind or spirit, and therefore to make us
more complete (perfecti) in our
spiritual or intellectual (not soulish!) person. It is therefore especially
appropriate to value this interpretative approach when we read the teachings of
Epictetus, because this former-slave, Stoic philosopher understands that in our
day-to-day lives, with and by means of right reasoning, we can actually act intelligently,
deliberately, and with a great degree of purposiveness, and therefore live
liberated lives.
However, in all
reading there is also a different layer of possible meaning-taking, which
corresponds to the literalism of the Jewish Cabbalists, or to Hellenism’s
lowest level of interpretation, i.e.,
simple literalism, which reflects the simplicity and straight-forwardness of
bodily existence (simpliciores)
without any particular subtleties or metaphorical flourishes. This
interpretative approach is also relevant to our passage from Epictetus, because
after all, we are being invited here to remember what type of a thing each
thing is, and therefore to understand that by its very materiality fine
glassware is just waiting for an opportunity to break into pieces, and that
human mortals are precisely that –vassals of Mortality. In Epictetus’ straight-forward
ontology we are dust in the making, and by our very natures our lives hang in the balance each instant. It is also on this level of
recognizing things as the specific things they are, that we shall encounter the
later philosopher of new ontology, Martin Heidegger.
Martin Heidegger took his first plunge into the history of
philosophy by being submerged in, and then by swimming against, the prodigious
floodwaters of idealism in German
philosophy. Historically speaking, idealist expressions in German philosophy
seem to have percolated up from British currents of thinking wending their way
through Europe at that time, roiling notably from the pens of philosophers like
Hume (Scotland) and Berkeley (Ireland), and which were to give sustenance to
the thinking of Immanuel Kant. Kant’s form of idealism was to become, in turn,
a pervasive and permeating tide in the history of German philosophy,
manifesting itself in various and diverse eddies in the philosophies of Fichte,
Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and eventually Husserl, Heidegger’s one-time
teacher and mentor.
 | |
| Archimedes, by Fetti |
As we were saying, then, Heidegger found himself
paddling around in the rising waters of idealism (both epistemological and
metaphysical) where it was obvious, at least to him, that philosophy was
increasingly backstroking away from the world and things in the world as things, and was therefore losing its this-worldly
relevance. In an Archimedean moment of
(self)-discovery (probably complete with a leap out of the bathtub accompanied
by a shout of ‘Eureka!’), Martin Heidegger became radicalized (in the sense of putting
out roots), in a philosophical kind way, which is to say that he went back to
the true, metaphysical or ontological “roots” of thinking, which are in the
‘thing’-ness or the ‘fact’ of the world (per Parmenides). So for the History of
Philosophy, MH became the philosopher of new ontology, or Being. Unfortunately,
he seized control of this so-called ‘return’ to ontology, making it for all
intents and purposes his own personal, pot-bound bailiwick, by soaking the
language of ontology in obscuring and off-putting jargon. This has ever since created
feeding frenzies among the pseudo-initiated or wannabe initiates, who have wanted
to make at least the effort to decrypt the verbiage in order to understand some
sort of philosophical profundity, where there is in fact essentially only
linguistic novelty. For the muddy backwaters characterizing Heidegger’s language-acts
about ontology, derive palingenetically from the calm and limpid headwaters of
Aristotle’s basic ideas about the stuff of the world, which are not at all dissimilar
to those one finds in Epictetus’ writings, and which are expressed very straight-forwardly
in Aristotle’s introductory lectures on first philosophy, called the Metaphysics.
Significantly, both Epictetus and Heidegger
allow for the notion of multiple entelechies – for an entelechy that is
anchored in the natural, particular physis
of an item-at-hand, and then for those types of entelechy of an item-at-hand
that are derived from the kosmos of
the subjective gaze. This is the import, after all, of the later Heidegger’s
rather difficult statement: “the death of an animal, is it to die or rather to
arrive at its end? (quoted in Payen, 466; from Les Concepts fondamentaux de la métaphysique (Paris: Gallimard,
1992, p. 387)
Sources
and Further Reading:
·
Guillaume
Payen, Martin Heidegger, Catholicisme, révolution, nazisme, Perrin: Paris, 2016.
·
Mary
Douglas, Thinking in Circles, Yale
University Press: New Haven and London, 2007.
·
Omar Khayyam, The Rubaiyat,
Thomas Y. Crowell Co.: New York, 1964.
·
C.S.
Lewis, The Four Loves, Harcourt,
Brace: New York, 1960.
·
Alfred,
Lord Tennyson, Ulysses.
·
Hesiod,
Theogony.
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