Epictetus’ Enchiridion Expanded_Section §1.14.1.1_If Wishes Were Horses…. Or, How to Avoid Being a Slave.

~by David Aiken~

§ 2 “Ench”, 1.14.1.1

TRANSLATION (AIKEN)— If you would like for your children and wife and [2] your friends to live forever, then you are just being silly; because you are wishing for control over [3] things that are beyond your control, and for matters that are not your concern to concern you. Similarly, if you ever harbor the hope that your [4] child would not fail or not do wrong, then you are being ridiculous; (5) because you are wanting the child’s moral failing to be something other than moral failure.

(6b) On the other hand, if you do not want to miss out on the truth in the matter of what you can control about your life—then this is something that is entirely possible. (7) Train yourself therefore with respect to this: To strive for what is achievable.

2 “Ench”, 1.14.2.1

            One who is master over another, whether others are willing or not willing, is the one who has the means to bestow [3] or to take away. Whosoever wants to be freed then, let him neither crave anything that is under the control of others nor let him try to escape such things. Otherwise, he necessarily sets himself up [5] to become enslaved.

2 “Ench”, 1.14.1.1

         ∆Ea»n qe÷lhØß ta» te÷kna sou kai« th\n gunai√ka kai« 2 tou\ß fi÷louß sou pa¿ntote zhvn, hjli÷qioß ei•: ta» ga»r mh\ e˙pi« soi« 3 qe÷leiß e˙pi« soi« ei•nai kai« ta» aÓllo/tria sa» ei•nai. ou¢tw ka·n to\n  4 pai√da qe÷lhØß mh\ aJmarta¿nein, mwro\ß ei•: qe÷leiß ga»r th\n kaki÷an mh\ ei•nai kaki÷an, aÓll’ a‡llo ti. e˙a»n de« qe÷lhØß ojrego/menoß mh\ aÓpotugca¿nein, touvto du/nasai. touvto ou™n a‡skei,

2 “Ench”, 1.14.2.1

o§ du/nasai. ku/rioß e˚ka¿stou e˙sti«n oJ tw◊n uJp’ e˙kei÷nou qelome÷nwn h£ mh\ qelome÷nwn e¶cwn th\n e˙xousi÷an ei˙ß to\ peripoihvsai 3 h£ aÓfele÷sqai. o¢stiß ou™n e˙leu/qeroß ei•nai bou/letai, mh/te qele÷tw ti mh/te feuge÷tw ti tw◊n e˙p’ a‡lloiß: ei˙ de« mh/, douleu/ein 5 aÓna¿gkh.

In Ms. Carter’s internet translation: 14. If you wish your children, and your wife, and your friends to live forever, you are stupid; for you wish to be in control of things which you cannot, you wish for things that belong to others to be your own. So likewise, if you wish your servant to be without fault, you are a fool; for you wish vice not to be vice," but something else. But, if you wish to have your desires undisappointed, this is in your own control. Exercise, therefore, what is in your control. He is the master of every other person who is able to confer or remove whatever that person wishes either to have or to avoid. Whoever, then, would be free, let him wish nothing, let him decline nothing, which depends on others else he must necessarily be a slave.

§ N. B. On wishes and wishful thinking.

In his short essay on “Wishful Thinking” (Minima Moralia, §127), Theodor Adorno reminds us of an insight about ‘intelligence’, which also happens to be entirely Epictetian in nature– that it is in fact a moral category.

§ Nursery Rhyme Truths in Philosophy.

Disney's Jiminy Cricket & Pinocchio

Philosophically speaking, there is no meaningful difference between a philosopher like Epictetus who tries to teach us the commonsensical silliness of counting on future contingencies, and the more astute nursery rhymes of our childhood that rhyme-teach us the same lesson.  For instance, an ethics teacher might say to his students: “If you hope for your children and wife and your friends to live forever, then you are just being silly…” But how is this really different, at least content-wise, from the rhymes that taught us as children the silliness of idle wishes, which were idle precisely because they were attempts to put some kind of ‘impossible’ grapnel upon an elusive future of contingencies?

Pace to the world of Walt Disney, who threw a monkey-wrench into the works of practical and intelligent philosophical thinking with his version of Jiminy Cricket singing in Pinocchio:

When you wish upon a star
Makes no difference who you are
Anything your heart desires
Will come to you.

French tinker

Because this Disney outlook is only true in an animated world where cartoon reality holds court; but it is not at all true in this here-and-now world where men live out more ordinary and less cartoonish existences. So, let us put aside the Disneyworld anti-philosophy of wishing upon stars complete with the guarantee of ‘getting’ our-heart’s-desire, in order to embrace more humanly relevant, even if rhymed, philosophical counsel that showed us as children the silliness of any and all idle wishing, such as If Wishes Were Horses:

If wishes were horses
Beggars would ride:
If turnips were watches
I would wear one by my side.
And if if’s and an’s were pots and pans,
The tinker would never work!

Or, adding a slight spin to the rhythmical twist, there is also A Chapter of Ifs:

If Ifs and Ands were pots and pans,
’Twould cure the tinker's cares:
if ladies did not carry fans,
They’d give themselves no airs:
If down the starry skies should fall,
The starlings would be cheap:
If Belles talk'd reason at a ball,
The band might go to sleep.[…]

The link between parts 1 [1.14.1.1] and 2 [1.14.2.1] of the 14^th section of Epictetus’ Enchiridion, because the two segments present in fact one coherent argument, is the connection that necessarily denies the possibility of any contingent link between yet-future events and our personal all-too-human, here-and-now desire and ability to control the yet-future. Indeed, the belief that we can influence the imminent world in any way whatsoever constitutes for Epictetus a gilded cage of mental imprisonment; this is in fact the very principle of a slavery that is self-sought and self-constituted. For in our frantic desire for control over always uncontrollable future events, we become willing drudges to the ultimately unknowable and unpredictable eventualities of if-then contingencies. Which means that we are constantly either running toward or away from whatever Reality shall itself yield on its own terms, when It gets around to fielding Its impromptu team. So, putting all contingencies aside as The Unknowable Unknown, the working philosophical principle that Epictetus gives us here in §14 is for each of us to know and identify what is in fact controllable in our relationship to future events, which, he says in 1.14.1.4, is the only thing that ‘is entirely possible. Train yourself therefore with respect to this: To strive for what is achievable’.

§ A little comparative expansion on Epictetus’ thinking.

In 1970 Perry Como released his unforgettable hit, originally composed by Armando Manzanero, It’s Impossible.

It's impossible, tell the sun to leave the sky, it's just impossible
It's impossible, ask a baby not to cry, it's just impossible
Can I hold you closer to me and not feel you goin' through me?
Split the second that I never think of you, oh, how impossible…

With a little imagination and a lot of suspended disbelief, one could well imagine that §14 of the Enchiridion represents Epictetus’ archaic version of the contemporary sentiment expressed in Manzanero’s ‘It’s Impossible’—minus the famous melody, of course.

·      In line 1: if you should want [ean theles = ∆Ea»n qe÷lhØß] the IMPOSSIBLE, which is to say that you would like “your children and wife and [2] your friends to live forever,” then the line 3 response is: Well, then, you are just being silly [elithios ei = hjli÷qioß ei], because you are wanting what is not possible.

·      In line 4: And, if you should want [ka·n … qe÷lhØß] the IMPOSSIBLE, which is to say that you would prefer it that your kid should never fail or do anything morally reprehensible, then the line 5 response is: Well, now you are really being ridiculous [moros ei = mwro\ß ei], because you obviously do not want to call a spade a spade in terms of your junior’s morally dubious actions.

But then, after establishing the completeness of our philosophical frivolousness and of our ridiculous, because impossibly counterfactual, attitudes toward life, both present and eventual, by repeating the statement: ‘if you should want’ … (what is obviously IMPOSSIBLE’), Epictetus turns around and stops us in our tracks by showing us in line 6 that there is in fact one and only one thing that is really POSSIBLE for us to control in this world: We do not have to miss out on what is true about the question of ‘control’ in our lives! The only guaranteed ‘possible’ is this, says Epictetus in line 7: It is entirely POSSIBLE for us to obtain knowledge about what type of control men can achieve for themselves in this world. It is therefore a philosophical no-brainer for Epictetus that we should only strive after what is achievable, which is not any sort of participatory control over what may or may not happen in the non-contingent future, but rather knowledge about the actual role we play in our historical present.

           Epictetus’ philosophical advice, of course, is entirely coherent with older ancient Greek gnomological wisdom sources, which seemed partial to manifesting themselves in the form of lists of quotations. In today’s world this would look something like Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac. An example of another Benjamin Franklin for the mid-6^th century BC in ancient Greece was the poet, Theognis [The Elegiac Poems of Theognis, Tufts: Perseus], and particularly relevant to our text in Enchiridion §14, is Theognis’ consoling lamentation to Cyrnus in 33-142.

33-142

No man is himself the cause of loss and gain, Cyrnus; the Gods are the givers of them both: nor does any that labor know in his heart whether he moves to a good end or a bad. For often when he thinks he will make bad he makes good, and makes bad when he thinks he will make good. Nor does any man get what he wishes; for his desires hold the ends of sore perplexity. We men practise vain things, knowing nought, while the Gods accomplish all to their mind [English updated].

Now, although history sees in Theognis a poet given to a more than modest degree of inward gazing, thus categorizing him as elegiac or sad, our poet yet arrives at not-necessarily depressing truths about the human condition that will make the hearts of later Stoic philosophers such as Epictetus ‘soar like an eagle’. For in Epictetian-speak, some 650 years later, this archaic gnomic wisdom will yield:

2 “Ench”, 1.14.2.1

            One who is master over another, whether others are willing or not willing, is the one who has the means to bestow [3] or to take away. Whosoever wants to be freed then, let him neither crave anything that is under the control of others nor let him try to escape such things. Otherwise, he necessarily sets himself up [5] to become enslaved.

§ Contingencies – and standing still.

We have seen already in Enchiridion §12 that Epictetus philosophically juxtaposes over and against the unknowable and finally unpredictable future, our present NOW. Thus, in Enchiridion §12, which anticipates and philosophically amplifies our present section, Epictetus already alerts us to the fact that there is tension in our thinking, not because there is any real possibility of influencing the non-contingent intransigence of the yet-to-come, but because our thinking is fatally flawed and therefore unreasonable on this question. His contingency principle is explained in this manner in §12:

… Philosophically, this is a truly existential moment, where the “perceived” weight of a potential future, over which one has no control whatsoever, at any level at any time, makes us fearful and sorrowful in the present. Epictetus uses the parallel subjunctives in lines 2-3 to create emotional distance from the two examples of proverbial wisdom that he wishes for us to dismiss as counter-factual: 1) If I were to be careless at this point about…; 2) If I should not correct my child… The parallel subjunctives are then followed by parallel verbs in the future tense: 1) I shall never [in future] keep hold of the means for taking care of myself; 2) [my child] shall turn out to be a good-for-nothing, which imply that, at least according to the erroneous traditional beliefs of proverbial wisdom, the future is somehow dependent on our actions in the present. […]

But Epictetus has stopped by to remind us that, in point of fact, we do not have the responsibility for either our own or our children’s future. This is not to say, however, that we should fail to exercise stewardship over our present actions and in our sphere of influence; only that we have no means to control the outcomes of our actions. Sometimes present good shall yield future evil; sometimes present evil shall reveal a future good. For Epictetus, our ethical and philosophical job is limited to acting well in the present, and to thinking correctly in the present about our actions.

Note that Epictetus counters the incorrect thinking of proverbial wisdom with an illustration sandwiched in-between two common Stoic principles (1.12.2.1-4). The example is from the spilled oil: ‘A little spilled oil is the price to pay for [3] peace of mind, and that a little wine gone missing is a small price to pay for a calm spirit.’ The illustration [viz., oil, wine] uses present tense verbs, so that our attention is grammatically riveted on the present, on what is happening around us right here and right now. So, although the world around us may find itself caught up in the fury of the maelstrom, it is precisely this focus on the Here & Now that allows us to maintain the calmness of spirit [aÓtaraxi÷a] so prized by the Stoic philosophers.]

§ A Promising Observation and Intuitions About Words: (hamartanein) and (thn kakian)—Lines 5-6a.

Missing the Mark_Bruce Peterson

Hamartanein (aJmarta¿nein), in line 5, means, blandly, ‘to fail to hit the target with a spear’, or in contemporary Americaneze, ‘to be unable to shoot worth a damn!’, which broadly translates as, ‘to miss the mark’, ‘to err’, and ‘to make a mistake’. But hamartanein also has a second level meaning, especially in Christian circles: as a moral failure, and especially in the New Testament sense of to ‘do wrong’ and to ‘sin’. This secondary meaning is confirmed in Enchr. §14 by associating hamartanein with th\n kaki÷an (thn kakian = bad or evil) in line 6a. Now, kaki÷an can have a fairly banal quasi Stoic sense, philosophically speaking, such as in the proverbial usage in Matthew 6.34: So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today's trouble is enough for today [ὴ οὖν μεριμνήσητε εἰς τὴν αὔριον, ἡ γὰρ αὔριον μεριμνήσει αὑτῆς· ἀρκετὸν τῇ ἡμέρᾳ ἡ κακία αὐτῆς.], where the suggestion is clear that at issue are the cares and worries associated with daily living, e.g., paying bills, putting food on the table, and fixing and repairing things around the home that periodically need fixing and repairing. So, the Ellicott’s Commentary for English Readers rightly interprets this NT text in a Stoic sense:

(34) Take therefore no thought for the morrow.--No precept of divine wisdom has found so many echoes in the wisdom of the world. Epicurean self-indulgence, Stoic apathy, practical common-sense, have all preached the same lesson, and bidden men to cease their questionings about the future. […]  Men were to look forward to the future calmly…

That said, however, kaki÷an more generally translates with emphasis on badness in quality (as opposed to ἀρετή (arete = excellence), cowardice, faint-heartedness, moral badness, evil, ill-repute, and dishonor. In the Pauline texts of the NT, for example, this term consistently reaffirms its negative ethical associations.

·       I Corinthians 5:8 -- Therefore let us celebrate the feast, not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth [ὥστε ἑορτάζωμεν, μὴ ἐν ζύμῃ παλαιᾷ μηδὲ ἐν ζύμῃ κακίας καὶ πονηρίας, ἀλλ’ ἐν ἀζύμοις εἰλικρινίας καὶ ἀληθείας].

·       I Corinthians 14:20 -- Brethren, do not be children in your thinking; yet in evil be infants, but in your thinking be mature [Ἀδελφοί, μὴ παιδία γίνεσθε ταῖς φρεσίν, ἀλλὰ τῇ κακίᾳ νηπιάζετε, ταῖς δὲ φρεσὶν τέλειοι γίνεσθε].

Which brings us back full-circle to Epictetus:

Similarly, if you ever harbor the hope that your [4] child would not fail or not do wrong, then you are being ridiculous; (5) because you are wanting the child’s moral failing to be something other than moral failure. [ou¢tw ka·n to\n  4 pai√da qe÷lhØß mh\ aJmarta¿nein, mwro\ß ei•: qe÷leiß ga»r th\n kaki÷an mh\ ei•nai kaki÷an…

A perhaps gratuitous, but certainly suggestive, amplification of meaning for kaki÷an with its moral implications and overtones, might be to consider an equally challenging, because arcane in the highest degree, phrase from the pre-Socratic philosopher Anaximander, which juxtaposes injustice (adikia) and justice (dikia). It would seem after all, at first intuitive blush and without further ado, that what makes a failing (hamartanein) a kakian type of failing, as opposed to a simple and banal, “Oh nuts! I missed the target yet again” type of failing, is that the non-banal type of failing may be, and certainly even must be, somehow linked to an ancient Greek notion of justice/injustice. The fragment in question from Anaximander is Fragment 1:

[link] He says [the material cause and first element of things was the Infinite] is neither water nor any other of the so-called elements, but a substance different from them, which is infinite, from which arise all the heavens and the worlds within them. And into that from which things take their rise they pass away once more, "as is ordained; for they make reparation and satisfaction to one another for their injustice according to the appointed time," as he says in these somewhat poetical terms. —Phys. Op. fr. 2 (R. P. 16).

The specific passage of interest to our intuition in this first fragment is penultimate (from line 5): "as is ordained; for they make reparation and satisfaction to one another for their injustice according to the appointed time" (χρεών· διδόναι γὰρ αὐτὰ δίκην καὶ τίσιν ἀλλήλοις τῆς ἀδικίας κατὰ τὴν τοῦ χρόνου τάξιν.   (5)).

Now, while some philosophical study ultimately linking kakian to the idea of dikia and adikia might be philosophically enlightening in a Heideggerian type of way, there may also be reservations about such studies. Initially, because the critical literature on Anaximander seems overwhelmingly to want to read the dikia-adikia connection as a fundamental materialism linked to causality, see especially Vlastos (156), who interprets this language as a basic law of ‘Cosmic’ measure among the elements. However, while the vast majority of scholars are content to hang their hats on the materialist peg and proceed on to other, less spicy things, there are yet those few, enough, who seem to do some very-slight doffing of the proverbial cap, in a by the by kind of way, to the moral tones that seem, also, to abide in the terms dikia and adikia, thus justifying a possible parallelism between dikia and ‘not a moral failing’ (mh\ ei•nai kaki÷an), and adikai and a ‘moral kakian’.

§ On the Servant Mentality. Epictetus’ pre-Nietzschean Critique of Proto-Christianity. Line 5.

2 “Ench”, 1.14.2.1

            One who is master over another, whether others are willing or not willing, is the one who has the means to bestow [3] or to take away. Whosoever wants to be freed then, let him neither crave anything that is under the control of others nor let him try to escape such things. Otherwise, he necessarily sets himself up [5] to become enslaved.

2 “Ench”, 1.14.2.1

o§ du/nasai. ku/rioß e˚ka¿stou e˙sti«n oJ tw◊n uJp’ e˙kei÷nou qelome÷nwn h£ mh\ qelome÷nwn e¶cwn th\n e˙xousi÷an ei˙ß to\ peripoihvsai 3 h£ aÓfele÷sqai. o¢stiß ou™n e˙leu/qeroß ei•nai bou/letai, mh/te qele÷tw ti mh/te feuge÷tw ti tw◊n e˙p’ a‡lloiß: ei˙ de« mh/, douleu/ein 5 aÓna¿gkh.

Gilded Cage_Talha Khan

For the nonce, the bit that most intrigues in this fragment is line 5, where Epictetus admonishes his students not to allow themselves to become lost in a type of mindset that must necessarily result in reducing them to slavery, or in them becoming servile to situations that can lead only to mental and emotional thralldom. And, of course, this admonition is entirely about the vassalage we demonstrate as we commit so easily to our lives of non-thinking. Epictetus wants to speak to us about freedom, which is really about our having ownership of our own thinking; this, he says, we can absolutely achieve… on two conditions: neither 1) to let one covet or long for a thing that is outside of one’s grasp to obtain, nor 2) to let one try to flee from things from which one cannot possibly escape. The one who does either of these two things, affirms Epictetus, necessarily sets himself up to become enslaved. [ei˙ de« mh/, douleu/ein 5 aÓna¿gkh].

            This Epictetian encouragement toward personal and mental freedom is, of course, diametrically opposed to the “new” teaching that was beginning to emerge in the same 1^st century period, which was being promoted by proponents of the Jesus movement, and especially the proselytizing Paul, and which encouraged listeners to become servants, or bondsmen, of the Lord. Thus, Paul will call himself in Romans 1:1, the “slave of Jesus Christ.”

The general attitude of the NT toward slavery is certainly not morally censorious in the slightest, but rather reflects fairly accurately the widespread mores of the pluralistic Roman empire. There is, for example, the lazy slave motif in Matthew 25:26; and Jesus himself speaks of the impossible position of a slave who is trying to serve and please two masters at once, comparing that slave to those who are torn between service to God and service to Mammon (Matthew 6:24, Luke 16:13). Indeed, it would seem that the early Jesus movement was particularly attractive to those who were themselves slaves, to judge by passages such as I Corinthians 7:21, I Timothy 6:1, and I Peter 2:18. The NT, and not only the Pauline letters, also enjoins slaves to obey their masters, as in Ephesians 6:5ff., Colossians 3:22ff., I Timothy 6:1-2, I Peter 2:18, and Titus 2:9-10; and, it would also seem that some Christian masters were treating their slaves poorly, because there is a call for them to treat their slaves better (Ephesians 6:9, Colossians 4:1).

 ‘To become enslaved’, as we find it in Enchiridion §14, 5, is the verb douleuein (douleu/ein), which is, quite literally speaking, to be a slave, to serve, to do service. But the verb is generic in its applications. Enslavement can be used of persons, as it can be used to refer to nations being in subjection to other nations. In the NT, for example, the Apostle Paul will famously make the case in Galatians 4:25 that the Jews are under the yoke of (=slaves to) the Mosaic law. Of course, as always with words, there is also a second level, non-literal or metaphorical meaning to douleuein, where the sense is to submit to, to obey. For the positive, albeit troubling sense: the Christians are called to yield obedience to those who are in authority over them as unto God himself (Romans 13:1-2):

Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. ² Consequently, whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves (NIV).

Likewise, the Christian is expected to obey God, etc. For the negative sense, on the other hand, the NT speaks of those who become slaves to, or who yielded themselves to, some baser power, such as to sin (Romans 6:6), or to the Law of sin (Romans 7:25), or to pleasures (Titus 3:3), or to acquiring wealth (Matthew 6:24), or to the ‘elements [i.e., probably neo-Platonic deities] of this world’ (Galatians 4:9).           

So, we see that there arises in the 1^st century of the common era two opposing philosophies toward the idea of freedom: the Christian philosophy that admonishes slavery to God and a life of service to the brethren, and Epictetus’ philosophy, which invites us to become emotional and intellectual freemen.

A later embodiment of exactly Epictetus’ philosophy of mental and emotional freedom is found in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche. In the particular, in Genealogy of Morality (1:7ff), a true masterpiece of proto-existentialism, Nietzsche writes about “the slave revolt in morality” as a speculative historical by-product of the West’s religious inheritance, as both religious historical happenstance, and our birthright. This slave revolt supposedly led to the great inversions in morality whose genealogy Nietzsche sketches out for us in the G of M, where the natively good and admirable qualities of physical prowess and strength, commonplace in the ancient heroes, were transformed into evil attributes. Consequently, heroes like the Homeric Achilles, because he was simply too powerful and too overwhelming—a veritable force of nature against whom few dared even to stand, became a ‘bad’ man in the eyes of Christian morality—his natural virtues, in the most literal sense of that word, became evil and immoral traits. This slave revolt oversaw the inversion whereby the heroically noble became the ‘bad’; where those who responded to Life with feebleness and vulnerability, with the Nein-sagen, who insisted on otherworldliness for their validation, became the bedrock of virtue; where the weak and pathetic, fueled by ressentiment, assumed the high place of new ‘virtue’ and morality; where the will to death (Nein-sagen to Life) replaced the will to life (Ja-sagen to Life). In fact, in his writings Nietzsche traces out for us Moderns nothing short of the enslavement of the entire Western way of thinking, a thralldom to a Life-defying, subjugating morality that perverts life-affirming thinking, a morality that is untimely precisely because it is committed to death and the already mentally dead, instead of to life and the emotionally alive.

Epictetus seems to sense already in his 1^st century AD how this mental and emotional enslavement will come about—through unjust thinking. And, to borrow upon Frostian tones, he warns us against taking this road ‘just as fair’, as the more traveled road into captivity.

Further reading: Phrontisterion’s translation of Epictetus’ Handbook

• ·      Epictetus’ Enchiridion Expanded_Section §1.13.1.1_ More on Making Intellectual Progress; October 2018
• ·      Epictetus’ Enchiridion Expanded_Section §1.12.1.1_Wrong Thinking About (Perhaps) Right Action; September 2018
• ·      Epictetus’ Enchiridion Expanded_Section §1.11.1.1_On the Ownership of Things; August 2018
• ·      Epictetus’ Enchiridion Expanded_§1.8.1.1, 1.9.1.1 and 1.10.1.1_Bits & Bobs of Fine Advice: Being presumptuous; December 1, 2017
• ·      Epictetus’ Enchiridion Expanded_§1.7.1.1_SeaFaring Ways; October 1, 2017 
• ·      Epictetus’ Enchiridion Expanded_§1.6.1.1. On Receiving Compliments, On Possessions, & On What is Rightfully Yours; July 1, 2017
• ·      Epictetus’ Enchiridion Expanded_§1.5.1.1. ABOUT SH#T THAT HAPPENS; January 1, 2017   
• ·      Epictetus’ Enchiridion Expanded_§1.4.1.1. On Activities. BATHING HABITS…., AMONG OTHER THINGS; August 1, 2016   
• ·      Epictetus’ Enchiridion Expanded_§1.3.1.1. ON THINGS… AS THINGS. Or, AN OLD ONTOLOGY; July 1, 2016   
• ·      Liberty Through Grammar... Epictetus’ Enchiridion Expanded_§1.2.1.1-1.2.2.1; June 1, 2016    
• ·      More On the Question of Freedom_Or, How to be the Consummate Control Freak_Epictetus Expanded_§1bis; August 1, 2015
• ·      Epictetus' Enchiridion Expanded_§1_On the Question of Freedom; July 1, 2015

References and related reading:

Nursery Rhymes:

·      https://allnurseryrhymes.com/if-wishes-were-horses/

Anaximander:

·      Engmann, Joyce. “Cosmic Justice in Anaximander.” Phronesis, Vol. 36, No. 1 (1991), pp. 1-25 [Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4182374].

·      Mansfeld, Jaap. “Anaximander’s Fragment: Another Attempt.” Phronesis, Vol. 56, No. 1 (2011), pp. 1-32 [Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41057453].

·      Seligman, Paul. The ‘Apeiron’ of Anaximander. University of London: The Athlone Press, 1962.

·      Vlastos, Gregory. “Equality and Justice in Early Greek Cosmologies.” Classical Philology, Vol. 42, No. 3 (Jul., 1947), pp. 156-178 [Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/265987].

The NT and slavery:

·      https://www.bibleodyssey.org/en/passages/related-articles/slavery-in-the-new-testament

·      https://www.studylight.org/lexicons/greek/1398.html

On Teachers

~by David Aiken~

There is much that has been said and written on and about teachers and teaching. And although much of it is complete rubbish, it is certainly reasonable to argue that, despite the essential nature of the need to continue training our upcoming generations of citizens, there are still significant systemic flaws and shortcomings in the institution of School, which will ensure that all manner of folks will continue to hold forth, for the worse and, on the odd occasion, for the better, about teachers and teaching.

            No matter what anyone says, though, there are two things that remain absolutely bedrock true in my increasing experience of the world: 1) Teachers are amazing people, and the village that raised me was populated by such as these; and 2) I was never a very good school student, by everybody’s standards.

When I was growing up in the burbs of the US east coast, our next-door neighbors were the T… family, first generation immigrants from Greece who spoke English poorly, but who had a work ethic and a desire to succeed second to none. I remember that my parents left for work every morning around 6:30 or 7:00 am, so getting myself ready for school was typically given over to my own self-motivation, which is even nowadays a somewhat dicey affair. It was predictable, then, that somewhere around the age of 10-11 a morning came where my own motivation of the self-starting sort was not au rendezvous, and I decided in a moment of youthful existential enthusiasm that on that day I would not be going to school, which was about a 20-minute walk from the house. So, following an apparent (and certainly at that time unbeknownst to me) telephonic colloquium and collaboration between my ‘evil’ stepmother and our neighbor, who was clearly ratting me out on the telephone behind my back, believe it or not, Mrs. T, the Greek immigrant neighbor with the poor English, came over to our house, came in the kitchen door, and threatened, in her version of English, to paddle me if I did not get my self-motivation into gear and hie my hinter hence (literally translated = get my butt on the road) to school! And then, in the face of my still struggling and clearly underwhelmed self-motivation, she proceeded to provide the external power source for this wanna-be self-affirming 10-year-old existentialist—she grabbed me by the ear and marched me the entire way to school, by the ear, even sitting me down in my classroom chair!

            Now some folks might have some reservations about this manner of motivating young people to get their schooling, but I am still thankful to this simple immigrant lady, to Mrs. T, because she valued education enough to make us both get uncomfortably involved in mine that morning. She did not take any guff off of a snot-nosed 10-year-old throwing a temper tantrum. For my modestly educated immigrant neighbor it was education first, last, and always… tantrums, if tantrums there must be, come after school.

Our other neighbor, from across the street, was Mrs. B…, my English teacher in the 6^th grade. I remember to this day how her classroom was laid out – there was a blackboard to the front and to the side of the classroom, the opposite side was a bank of windows, and the cloakroom was at the back of the room. (The classroom geography is significant to this memory!). My desk was right at the front of the room, next to the teacher’s desk, so she could “keep an eye on me” (apparently, I was a sometimes distracted kid…). Anyway… Mrs. B… was at the side board showing us how to diagram prepositional phrases (Really…!), and I obviously was not paying any attention whatsoever. In fact, I was actually looking, with my head resting on my hand (you know that ‘bored kid’ posture), in exactly the other direction, at two things: At my heart-throb’s (Debbie T…’s) 6^th grade legs; and then framing those juvenile legs from the far side were the bank of windows, which were drawing me toward the Outside, where the bells of Freedom were busy ringing for the rest of the world. At some point during my grammar-hour musings, Mrs. B…, finally perceiving that I was (as usual) paying more attention to Debbie’s legs and the Greater-World beyond than to otherwise undoubtedly fascinating prepositional phrases and sentence diagrams, actually threw the rather compact grammar book at the back of my head from across the room. What really sticks in my mind, though, is that her aim was right on the money—she absolutely nailed me with that book on the first shot, then sent me off to stand in the cloak-room!

            I spent more time in Mrs. B…’s cloak-room (the old-school equivalent to modern time-out) than in her English classroom. Yet I have grown up to torture my own university students with clearly disobliging reflections about dangling participles and split infinitives in their academic writing, and I know that several of my former students of ancient Greek have never fully recovered from being forced to diagram their sentences on the white board in Greek, in order to learn that Meaning derives from functions and context of language, which are not at all magical, but grammatical.

Several years after graduating high school I was very surprised to discover that one of my high school teachers, whom I had had for only one class—and that was a Typing class to boot (--how much interaction does a student actually have with the Typing teacher, after all?!), absolutely “got” me. He had written in my class evaluation that, while I was bright enough on the whole, in classes that did not interest me I would only do the barest minimum of work to get by with a passing grade. Somehow, magically, this one-time teacher of mine had seen the ‘pattern’ of student-me—that I only did well in classes that interested me. Frankly, that pattern has not changed a whit in all these years.

            My high school Typing teacher correctly (and very perceptively) saw that my pre-Nietzschean Will was at work in the process of my education; because although most of the classes in the curriculum I had to take were compulsory, I still refused to engage my full efforts in subjects that had no interest for me, compulsory or not. As I reconstruct through my adult eyes this teacher’s vision of younger-me, it seems that he must have seen a perfectly regulated hot or cold student – ‘A’s and ‘C’s… nothing in between. Judging myself by what I remember of my efforts and interests, I am of course interpreting my high school ‘B’s as simply ‘C’s gone wrong.

My high school PE teachers, who were also our athletic coaches, and most of whom were ex-US marine corps, really saved my hash in high school. I absolutely know this. I was not a punk or delinquent, nor a bad kid, just an unsupervised and therefore undirected source of vital energy. And my high school PE teachers took the initiative to direct that energy into sports—both in school and after school. But they also instilled in us the sense of an old-timey military code of honor… that we were to conduct ourselves well, honorably, because we had become role models for the younger ones. Not only were we scholar-athletes, but we were in training to become America’s future defenders… we were the next generation of the brave and the free. My high school PE teachers did not leave me the leisure, materially or morally, to go off and diffuse all my energy into ‘trouble’, which, as I look back, was actually quite a likely possibility.

These teachers of my memory were simply people; they had problems and private lives, just like everyone else. But these teaching-people were in our neighborhood, they were our neighbors, they were the guardian angels of our village who lived in our village. And, although most of them were not intimate friends of my family and never would become so, all of them watched over all of us. All of them were involved, day-by-day, every day, in the job of training up America’s next generations in the way they should go.

(Reprised from an original essay posted 092512).

Bellybuttons in the Lost & Found of World Without End.

~by David Aiken~

Sometimes we are just lost. Not necessarily in the “real” or outside world, but internally—in our thinking. It would seem, though, that the Human Mind-Body comes equipped with its own built-in navigation system, in the form of the modest bellybutton, which can help us to get back “home” again… if we just stand still long enough to pay attention.

The umbilicus, the navel, the tummy-button… the (seemingly) commonplace bellybutton, is actually much less anodyne than it might appear at first blush. There are in fact many denizens of the bellybutton world. There are innies, which, according to at least one source, may serve a variety of interesting purposes ranging from storage space (our own personal lint containment center…), to a handy way to tell twins apart (who’d a thunk?!), to a drinking glass (better not to ask). Then there are outies, which also, according to the same source, express a diversity of functionalities, from trampoline, to microphone, to doorbell. Just for the record: it certainly seems more than obvious that the hyperlinked source of this information is not really in the business of information about the bellybutton, but rather of working through all of the ramifications of the third-grade imagination and the one-track mind on this subject.

           

Albrecht Dürer Adam & Eve (1504)

That said, however, the belly button has not only been an inspiration for humor; it has also been a source of controversy.  In the throes of newfangled evolutionism, for instance, the nineteenth century understood that the bellybutton was central to understanding a great mystery about Adam and Eve. If Adam was like all men, and the Apostle Paul does remind us that Adam was our “father” according to the flesh, then Adam must have had a bellybutton. But, then, this would also imply that he had a pre-“history,” i.e., a birthing event, that is neither recorded for us nor ever suggested in the biblical texts, and which in fact flies in the face of the Edenic narrative. Eve, of course, did not partake in divine equality and is therefore let off the hook; she could not have had a bellybutton of her own to contemplate because she was drafted from the rib of Adam. Unless of course she did. Imagine the nightmare for the Renaissance artists, who must have struggled intensely with the idea of how to depict an Adam and Eve who looked like our human ancestors, but who were not, logically speaking, inalienably endowed by their Creator with all that our post-natal humanness implies.

            And then, of course, there is also the controversial viewpoint expressed by the Greek comedic poet Aristophanes who, in Plato’s Symposium, reached the epitome of his humoristic glory, and erotic insight, with his discourse on Eros. Aristophanes imagines original man as a sort of one-eyed jack, only plumper, joined in the middle with heads on both ends, who was prone to insolence toward and undue aggravation of the Gods. According to Aristophanes’ account of things: when the Gods reached the end of their collective rope with these tiresome human trouble-makers, Zeus directed Apollo to slice them all in half, creating a bunch of one-eyed, one-legged folk, each fully sexed and hopping around looking for their other half to rub up against, and, failing that, certainly willing to rub up against just about everything else. But this was only the beginning, of course, because the Greek Gods also seemed to be artistic in their creative problem-solving with respect to humans—the problem was how and where to tuck in all the skin left over from the cutting and slicing of the original human.  So, reads the Jowett translation:

Apollo was also bidden to heal their wounds and compose their forms. So he gave a turn to the face and pulled the skin from the sides all over that which in our language is called the belly, like the purses which draw tight, and he made one mouth at the centre, which he fastened in a knot (the same which is called the navel); he also moulded the breast and took out most of the wrinkles, much as a shoemaker might smooth leather upon a last; he left a few, however, in the region of the belly and navel, as a memorial of the primeval state.

And so the knotty (naughty?) history of the curious bellybutton began its meandering journey through the world of men. The physical bellybutton, however, this very material center of our bodies, is not exactly the subject of this present Reflection.

Rather, what really interests us is the immaterial bellybutton, which constitutes our internal center, and acts as the North Star set in the firmament of our-Selves. We reflect in metaphor, of course, for the Self is not precisely a thing, nor does it “have” precisely a center. There is no true center of the Self beyond the physical location of our bodies standing behind their very-physical bellybuttons at any given moment. Our Self is not defined by some “What” that is at our core, but rather by all the stuff that moves directionally away from, or toward, the locus “where” this body (center, ego, self) lives… everything is going in every direction to or from this locus, this ambulatory GPS point in the center.

Many philosophers have had this insight, from Heraclitus to Plato to Nietzsche. But the 20^th century Irish poet Yeats showed great good sense, and also true philosophical insight, when he poetically articulated this metaphor-idea as a general truth about the world. For it is an insight that tells us the really-real story of our bodies – that things fall apart; there is no center, and even if there were, as Yeats famously versed in The Second Coming, it still would not hold. 

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

Omphalos

The prototype for this idea of the immaterial bellybutton, which was understood originally to be the bellybutton of the world, comes from highest antiquity, from the Greek Omphalos, which was discovered by archeologists in Delphi at the oracle of Apollo. The Omphalos represents the original Axis Mundi, which is not a materiality of any sort, but rather an invisible, a supposed axis that permits us to align and therefore to orient strata of meanings about the World.

According to Kathleen Freeman (in Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers, Harvard University Press, 1983), Plutarch tells us that Epimenides of Crete, sage and epic poet (early 5^th century B.C.), “refuted the [original mythological] story that eagles or swans setting out from the ends of the earth met in the middle at Delphi, the so-called Omphalos): There was no Omphalos, either in the center of the earth or of the sea. If any there be, it is visible to the gods, not visible to mortals.”

            The concept of the Omphalos went on to have a very fruitful career in the history of Western ideas with Mircea Eliade, the Franco-Romanian philosopher of religion, who identified the immaterial Omphalos of the world with man’s collective unconsciousness. This Jungian twist is not necessarily inconsistent with the greater Greek worldview, however, which saw the material world, the earth, as a physical type of dwelling, a physis, but the immaterial world that is created by the interpreting mind (Descartes’ later imaginando or the imagination), as an intelligible or noetic kind of dwelling, i.e., the kosmos, the world first “seen,” then tidied up and organized by human thought and language.

So why are we interested in reflecting on internal bellybuttons, on the axis mundi condensed to fit the individual’s inner cosmos? Perhaps just to give ourselves some perspective so that the next time we are throwing stones into a pond in our external dwelling in order to watch the concentric rings, we remember that with our mind’s eye we are actually also “seeing” that in those very physical rings the metaphor of our internal dwelling-life is also being writ, but just in visible language for our eyes and ears. When we realize that our life, both material and immaterial, happens in the midst of concentric rings moving out and away from us, then we also begin to understand certain organic relational truths – that things that are closer to us are inevitably more relevant to us, and why it is also and necessarily true that things in our more remote rings “feel” less relevant to us. To be sure, things remote to us are not in and of themselves less important, they are just ex-centric to us – more removed from our center or axis, further away, and therefore less immediately imposing. This is not some new truth about human imagination that needed to wait on a contemporary anthropologist to be discovered (cf. Mary Douglas, Thinking in Circles: An Essay on Ring Composition, Yale University Press, 2007).

It is important that we keep our Internal Bellybuttons turned on and tuned in for all sorts of relationships (personal, interpersonal, and other), because relationships are, well, relational or perspectival. There is no such thing as neutrality. Points of view, both for the philosopher and the psychologist, begin with the Self/I; then they expand to include the immediately surrounding environments.

As both material and then as an intellectual location of the individual, the bellybutton allows us to pinpoint our position within the cluster of relationships and gridlines that crisscross the map of our Life; it helps us to determine where exactly our-Self is with respect both to the earth (physis), and to the world fashioned by our understanding (kosmos). On this very special interior map, however, there is no true and unmoving North Star. There is only us standing alone at a very odd omphalos-shaped corner where Earth and World intersect. This is the intersection of History’s Lost & Found, where sometimes we find the Self we seek, and sometimes we lose it; but the truth is that all the possibilities of our life meet and crisscross at that wayward Corner.

           

Omphalos

The omphalic bellybutton is the fulcrum of the individual’s personal mooring, the starting point at the innermost of our circles from which one is able to see one’s world, and then to create it by making sense of it. The bellybutton therefore is as interesting as it is important. It is interesting because of the onion-skinned nature of our reality, which means that according to our Will and Whim we can flip or invert the various layers of interpretation and meaning. This is one reason why Art, in all of its forms and manifestations, intrigues us so. Because both conceptually and materially, Art asks of us that we should apprehend truly, that we should actually see both with our body’s eyes as well as with our mind’s eye, the world as transformed, as turned on its head. Human perception of the material world is essentially a bellybutton type of experience, because it is centered upon and framed around the mind’s activity of reality-construction.

We live in a rather curious moment of human history, a moment when the world has become small. The big, wide ‘World’ has been transformed into global village, which in turn demands from us that from the Self outwards we very deliberately invert, both philosophically and psychologically, the normative and natural order of embracing our world. This World-Moment seems to be inviting us to rethink the Self, not as an entirely separate reality, but rather as an integral piece of the surrounding world. We are asked to consider a dissolution of the Self into the interests of the whole. Welcome to the Lost & Found.

(Reprised from an original essay posted 051212).

References:

·      William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), The Second Coming.

·      http://www.dilekkutzli.com/omphalos.html; cf. Joseph R. Shafer, Literary Identity in the Omphalos Periplus (DE: LAP Lambert Academic Publishing, 2011)

Further Phrontisterion reading:

·      http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.com/2012/09/on-masks.html

·      http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.com/2012/10/piggyback-worlds.html