More On the Question of Freedom_Or, How to be the Consummate Control Freak_Epictetus Expanded_§1bis.

So what is the first, and therefore perhaps the most emphatic, lesson we have learned from our slave-turned-sage up to this point? Well, that there are certainly things in our lives that we can control and others that we cannot control, and that therefore our first baby steps on the road to freedom, and then eventually to happiness, which Epictetus defines as Peace of Mind or Serenity, must be to learn to distinguish between prone-to-control and impossible-to-control types of actions/reactions. It is only when we realize that we cannot control every facet of our lives, says Epictetus, that we can finally get down to the business of deciding how to think well and act well in the hustle and bustle of the workaday world. Our text for Lesson #1 from this Handbook of Freedom was:

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 [= unimportant, irrelevant, feeble], as enslaving [= slavish, unquestioning, unoriginal, mindless; submissive-subservient, servile], as restricting us, as alien to us because they come from others. (TLG Author 557, Work 2 “Ench”, .1.1.1.1-1.1.2.1)

Well and good, and we are firing on all four philosophical cylinders—there are a whole lot of things in and about the world that I cannot control, but it is very important to my mental stability that I should be able to identify such things in order to avoid butting my head against the wall of reality. And then there are also those other types of things over which I can exercise some control, and these are mostly in the form of actions and reactions that I generate from my own thinking, my own inclinations, desires, and other particular lunacies.

            In reading through Epictetus’ little Handbook we are reminded that Desire, in all of its various colors and tons, has, in the Western meantime, also become a topic of significant religious, philosophical, and political interest, which becomes evident when reading, for instance, John Ralston Saul’s Voltaire’s Bastards. The Dictatorship of Reason in the West (1992: UK, Sinclair-Stevenson), who groups together what he calls “methodologies” as opposed to “ideologies,” such as Capitalism, Socialism, Christianity, Nazism and Communism, claiming that they all belong to the same grouping, “if for no other reason than that all of them prosper through the cultivation of desire, as indeed does Islam. Of the great world myths, only Buddhism is centered on the reduction of desire in the individual.”

            So, Epictetus’ first important lesson in Stoicism is that Desire is something that a person can and indeed needs to control. But where is Epictetus going to take us from that point?

§3“Remember, then, that if you should mistakenly think that things, which are by their nature enslaving, are really free, and if you should think that you are the source for things that, in fact, really come from others, then you shall be hampered, you shall be distressed, you shall be confused, and you will blame both gods and men. If, though, you should think that only that which comes from you is really yours, and that what comes from others really comes from others/outside, as truly is the case, no one shall ever compel you, no one ever hinder you; nor will you lay the fault on any man, nor blame anything else whatsoever, nor do anything against your will/involuntarily; no one, man or god, shall delude you nor shall you have any enemy; for you shall not be prevailed upon to be hurtful with respect to anybody or anything.”

            Shorter and sweeter: try to have a true perception about the things that are happening around you. In this paragraph Epictetus is going to remind us of another useful fact-of-life, that most of the time the types of problems that confound us come about because we ourselves misinterpret the universe that is busy presenting itself to us. In the history of philosophy we will see that this idea that errors of thinking or judgment derive predominantly from our own misinterpretation of facts & events, will also play a fundamental role in the argument unraveled by René Descartes in his Metaphysical Meditations (esp. Meditation IV).

            We live in a causal environment. So it is inevitable that events surrounding us are all inextricably intertwined in a web of causally linked occurrences. Is this not, after all, the bread-n-butter of religious thinking? That God sends along such-n-such an event, like a car wreck, an illness, a flood, or some other thing, which is then interpreted by us either as a reward for some good behavior or as punishment to teach us (for instance) humility, or to punish us for wicked thoughts, or to [fill in the blank]. The bottom line in such situations is that the assumption itself that ‘God did something’ is absolute HUMAN fantasy (and not faith)! Because what if the beginning of the causal chain was actually Satan?! Then the entire interpretative value of the conclusion ‘God did so-n-so’ is false. From the point of view of the human animal it is impossible to have real knowledge about the beginnings of the causal chains surrounding us; so Epictetus tells us to leave such dubious interpretative adventures aside in order to avoid falling into knowledge traps of our own concoction. For Epictetus, the only sure knowledge I can have about things going on in the world is knowledge about what I am myself actually doing or thinking.

            Finally, at the end of this paragraph Epictetus seems to value as a general ethical principle the idea that we should not be “hurtful with respect to anybody or anything.” This idea was such an established Stoic theme that even Socrates, already some 350 years prior in the Crito [47c ff.], places value on the idea of doing no harm either to others or to ourselves.

§4“When seeking to accomplish great or important things, one just has to remember that it is not possible to desire only moderately when the ambition is to try to achieve goals, but some things must be given up utterly, although it is possible to hold on to others for the present. But if you should wish to achieve such goals, and also to rule and to have wealth, although it may perhaps be possible only to desire them moderately, one shall not bring them about just by ‘desiring’ them more than anything else. Besides, one would most certainly fail to completely accomplish such things.”

            Epictetus is not yet done with the question of Desire, which, although it is obviously an immensely powerful motivator in our lives, yet seems to be for all intents and purposes an almost invisible adhesive binding together all the varied & sundry causal strands wrapped around our thinking and doing. Epictetus’ goal, though, is not that we should necessarily try to get rid of our desires entirely, but rather that we should only try to be aware of our desires as being our own in order to moderate them, to harness them to some degree, so they do not end up controlling us and driving us into some blind fury of fruitless ambition.

§5“To be Free and Thrive is much more advantageous than these other things alone. So in reference to any such crude impression, practice in order to anticipate saying right from the start: “You are simply an impression and not really the Real Thing.” Then, examine the impression closely to determine whether it passes scrutiny according to your standards, but first and foremost by this, whether it concerns things within our power or those outside of our power; and if it should be something beyond our power to control, then because of that very thing be ready and willing to say: ‘This is nothing to me.’”

            As do most teachers of virtue, Epictetus closes this section with an admonition. We saw at the beginning of the opening precept that ‘having’ lots of stuff is our psychological ‘middle passage’ to a life of enslavement, but Epictetus assures us that it is infinitely better for our souls to be Free and Thrive. We have each of us gotten swept up in some desire or another that seems to consume us, and then, when we have finally gotten the object of our desire, we inevitably experience a let-down, a strange disappointment—somehow the object-of-our-desire never seems to keep its promise of bringing us happiness, and we are ‘had’, bound fast in a prison of our own construction. So in this final paragraph Epictetus invites us to remember that just as we are the creators of the world of our own desires, so we are also in a position, more so than anyone else, to control those desires—if we are ready and willing to put them to the side.

Full translation of section 3-5 of E’s Enchiridion (Aiken 2015):

            “Remember, then, that if you should mistakenly think that things, which are by their nature enslaving, are really free, and if you should think that you are the source for things that, in fact, really come from others, then you shall be hampered, you shall be distressed, you shall be confused, and you will blame both gods and men. If, though, you should think that only that which comes from you is really yours, and that what comes from others really comes from others/outside, as truly is the case, no one shall ever compel you, no one ever hinder you; nor will you lay the fault on any man, nor blame anything else whatsoever, nor do anything against your will/involuntarily; no one, man or god, shall delude you nor shall you have any enemy; for you shall not be prevailed upon to be hurtful with respect to anybody or anything.

            When seeking to accomplish great or important things, one just has to remember that it is not possible to desire only moderately when the ambition is to try to achieve goals, but some things must be given up utterly, although it is possible to hold on to others for the present. But if you should wish to achieve such goals, and also to rule and to have wealth, although it may perhaps be possible only to desire them moderately, one shall not bring them about just by ‘desiring’ them more than anything else. Besides, one would most certainly fail to completely accomplish such things.

            To be Free and Thrive is much more advantageous than these other things alone. So in reference to any such crude impression, practice in order to anticipate saying right from the start: “You are simply an impression and not really the Real Thing.” Then, examine the impression closely to determine whether it passes scrutiny according to your standards, but first and foremost by this, whether it concerns things within our power or those outside of our power; and if it should be something beyond our power to control, then because of that very thing be ready and willing to say: ‘This is nothing to me.” (TLG Author 557, Work 2 “Ench”, .1.1.3.1-1.1.5.1)

Piggyback Worlds

Sometimes the life we live is not completely our own. My life, for example, is simply too full of moments when my own personal experience, in addition to being my own, is so representative of just about everyone’s experience of the Human Condition, that I become, even if merely for the blink of an eye, Everyman.

Dream a Little Dream of Me. The other morning my wife informed me that I, yet again, woke her up in the middle of the night with another of my dream-world lectures. Now I am obviously dead asleep at the time and have to trust my wife that she is in fact telling me the truth, but apparently I hold forth as only a sleeping philosopher can—on the damnedest subjects. So my wife, with a giggle, was telling me that on this particular middle-of-the-night my theme was “Wielding his sword,” in which I was discoursing on some Epic Hero, as is my wont, but then the point of my oration (so I am assured, anyway) was that this hero’s “sword” was not really his sword, but rather a metaphor for the hero “wielding” some other, more untoward, object of incision.

            Even afterwards, as I read this paragraph aloud to her, she reminded me in a very sniggering and distinctly ungracious tone, that she had told me the story truly, and that the sword was not a sword at all, but some interestingly comparable human body-part apparently gone berserk.

            So this is a reflection about piggyback worlds; worlds that contain a surplus of realities none of which are ever exactly what they seem; worlds within worlds, or more precisely, worlds in which every other world carries along with it, inseparably and almost indistinguishably, still more other worlds – piggyback worlds. Like the Story told by his wife to the dreamer, who dreamed unawares the Story of an Epic Hero holding a sword which may also have been a sword, but which was certainly perceived by the Dreamer (and giggling wife) to be something rather more. Intruding realities from piggyback worlds are always somewhat vague, their boundaries fluid and unclear; and sometimes these essences of a piggyback sort will be less, but most of the time they will be more than they seem. The piggyback nature of our Worlds is nicely reflected in the classic onion metaphor where, peeling back layer after interminable thin layer of enfolding skins of meaning, we discover a rather small and not terribly tasty “tendril-like” root hiding at the core.

“Being” Invisible. There are many things that I do in the world. I do the things that a teacher does, a husband, a dog-owner, a philosophical blogger, a hardy olive-tree planter, an untalented house painter, a laborer, a traveler—all of which are noun descriptors of a verbalizing sort being used appositionally, which is to say that they point back to the subject/individual in the midst of some function. The verbalizing nouns may then also be strengthened afterwards by adding any number of adjectives, depending on how much obfuscation is desired.

            These verbalizing nouns describe, in fact and in deed, how I am performing my life; but they also collectively beg the question as to whether there is any “tendril-like” “being” invisibly stashed underneath all these actions… some true and authentic “I” that has integrity and inherent worth apart from these myriad life-actions. How are we to interpret or understand the individual body-being who is acting out the functions of living? Some philosophers, like Heraclitus, clearly think that the individual, as such, is not a “thing” separable from its acting; indeed, the individual self has no distinct or unique being apart from its performance of it-self. Therefore, Heraclitus famously writes, “What we do habitually is who we are or who we become.” What- or who-ever I think I am is inseparable from what I do, an observation that has, in Heraclitus’ eyes, almost as much importance metaphysically as ethically. This observation about individual authenticity, of course, will resurge many centuries later to become the “tendril-like” root out of which the tree of modern existential thought will spring.

            As I think of all the things I “am,” what I come up with are the typical interpretive anthropological categories of sex, gender, race, religion, color, etc., etc., etc. (remember to pronounce this like Yule Brenner in the King and I just for the fun of it!), which are really not “me,” but rather piggyback groups that normalize qualities of all who are such-as-me. On this view I “am” by analogy.

            Alternatively, as I think of all the things I “am,” I peel back an almost infinite number of layers of all the things I can be or become as a result of my actions. Through my actions I can position my-doing-“self” in a variety of narrative categories or Archetypes, as Hero, Anti-hero, Villain, Rascal, or Savior. In this case I “am” allegorically.

            “Me” by analogy or “me” by allegory – in either case Heraclitus called it correctly: “me” equals the sum of all the piggyback versions of me-interpreted and me-doing or me-having-done.

The Acts of Living. What a philosopher Shakespeare was… and a phenomenologist of Heraclitean persuasion to boot! Remember Jaques in As You Like It, (Act 2, Scene 7) who translates Heraclitus’ vision of man into theatrical terms: 

“All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.”

Theater (or film or literature) is a wonderful analogy for the piggyback nature both of Human Understanding and of the Human Condition. In the best of cases, the analogy is informative precisely because theatrical re-presentation tends to blur the lines between the layers of our onion-worlds as easily as it blurs the lines between genres, and it seldom makes any pretense of finding some “tendril-like” essence at the center.

            The winner of the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival was the Italian film, Cesar Must Die (Cesare deve morire). What makes this film so challenging, which is also precisely what makes it so very interesting, is that it seems deliberately to confuse the “edges” between metaphor, allegory, social philosophy, cinema, and straightforward theatre. This film, which used real (and some formerly real dangerous) prison convicts as the actors, can be construed to be a meta-type applied-reworking of Shakespeare’s Julius Cesar; or to be a docu-drama, although in a radio interview aired on France Inter’s Cosmopolitaine (Sunday, 21 October 2012) the director brothers denied this interpretation. Likewise, Cesar Must Die can also be considered an updating of Shakespeare’s piece, i.e., a recasting of the Julius Cesar narrative in the modern arena for modern viewers; or, again, as a statement about social politics and the penal system. So what are we members of the audience actually supposed to do with this narrative? How are we intended by the directors to interpret this Story, and is there only one interpretation, or even a best interpretation? Are we supposed to seek some kind of meaningful application to our lives through this narrative, or to become informed on issues of social justice and redemption? Or are we simply to let the visual event wash over us as “entertainment,” with no more thought or value than we might attribute to a Mozart divertimento?

            This brings us to one of the very interesting problems associated with theatrical devices, like metaphor, in marketing and advertising, where the goal is to get the dollars out of our pockets and into someone else’s bank accounts. Oh, the dangers of irony on this stage of our world, which becomes even more pocked should advertisers become “playful” with the already blurry lines between motivated information, i.e., information with an agenda, and deliberate dis- or misinformation.

Sometimes the life we are living is not fully our own. The edges of all of our lives, and the identity of the various personae we play in the course of those lives, are not clear and distinct essences, as a Descartes might have said, but rather are full of blurred lines and abandoned layers of onion peels. Heraclitus gives the preferential reading on the question of our human authenticity: ours is more of a fire-sort of reality. It is inevitable, then, that the roles we play will cross over the boundaries of tragedy and comedy, farce and drama, and that all of our lives will be plagued by interpretations and misinterpretations, hearings and mis-hearings, takings and mis-takings, errors and corrections.