Fourth installment:
Arrian, a student of Epictetus, wrote eight books, The Discourses of Epictetus, of which four survive. Selections from those eight books were also collected in the Enchiridion, or “Handbook.” The Discourses give us a quite vivid portrait of the man who inspired them, and also give us fascinating glimpses into his singular didactic style. We very quickly see how Epictetus ran his school, the nature of its curricula, and how he mentored his students. We see his earnestness, his zeal, and piety, but we also get a good dose of his sharp and often acerbic sense of humor. It is no wonder that Arrian felt he ‘had to get this down.’
It also can be quite a challenge to understand exactly what is being said in the chapters of the Discourses. The text is composed of lecture notes, we must recall.
So, with that genesis in mind, I’ve set out to read through the four books, a chapter at a time, while also breaking up the text with commentary, (essentially my best guesses as to how we might flesh out what can be very brief or truncated sketches of dialogue and argumentation), as it was no easy business for Arrian to get down what he had experienced in the lecture halls of Nicopolis!
Commentary is in italics! Also, please forgive some formatting issues (spacing between paragraphs) that stubbornly will not go away no matter what I do!
Book I Chapter 4
Of Progress
This chapter gives us a fascinating and amusing look into the Stoic school at Nicopolis, and we learn that there are good reasons for the existence of certain features of stereotypes that have always been associated with academics. Boiled down, we here have Epictetus’s portrait of the time-worn contrast between ‘book smarts’ and ‘street smarts’ as it were; Stoic theory and practice!
He who is making progress, having learned of the philosophers that desire is for things good and aversion is toward things evil, and having also learned that serenity and calm are not attained by a man save as he succeeds in securing the objects of desire and as he avoids encountering the objects of aversion – such a one has utterly excluded desire from himself, or else deferred it to another time, and feels aversion only the things which involve freedom of choice. For if he avoids anything that is not a matter of free choice, he knows that some time he will encounter something in spite of his aversion to it, and will come to grief. Now if it is virtue that holds out the promise thus to create happiness and calm and serenity, then assuredly progress toward virtue is progress toward each of these states of mind. For it is always true that whatsoever the goal toward which perfection in anything definitely leads, progress is an approach thereto.
This is not an altogether clear section because it is dense, and attempts to present quite a lot in little space. We can attempt to clarify it by rephrasing things and expanding upon it.
Suppose someone has a very clear understanding of the nature of desires and aversions, or, in other words, ‘emotions,’ or ‘urges.’ What does he understand these things to be? One of the things we can say about them is that they come in two basic varieties, depending upon what it is they set out to do, so to speak. The more acquisitive emotions or urges, those we can label ‘desires,’ are those that paint some thing or things as attractive and worth efforts that would end in possession of said things. The exclusionary emotions or urges, those that we label ‘aversions,’ are those that paint some thing or things as repulsive and worth efforts that will prevent them from affecting us.
A person who understands all this would also understand that there are typical follow-on states, (perhaps we can call these emotions as well) consequent to successes or failures viz the targets of desires and aversions; serenity or calm in the former case, vexation or anxiety in the latter. These states do tend to be temporary as the same desires and aversions may become active again at later times, or different ones may surface.
This person, if he also understands Epictetus’s admonitions as to how best to fine-tune our desires and aversions, would also see that training these two to be concerned only with things that are completely within our freedom to control will, by narrowing the target selection, eventuate in greater success and greater insulation from the inevitable contingencies in life. All contingencies are things about which we can say success in provision or avoidance ultimately depends on external powers; either others’ ‘faculty of choice’ or natural and random events.
In the end, this progressing student would see that personal virtue, that is, intention to behave morally, and with self-respect in mind, is the one target for desire that is immune from external contingencies, because it is the one thing totally dependent upon free choice, something we always have. And, as such, if doggedly and primarily pursued, is the one pursuit that carries with it the highest probability of bringing us to serenity and calm.
This person should also be able to see that pursuing other things, all of which are necessarily externals in the precise sense, is something that should be treated, if not as targets of aversion, as things that should take second place in priority. And again, it must be emphasized, says Epictetus, that this placement is indeed something within our complete power to accomplish.
At any rate, this is the ideal case. But Epictetus, as teacher, mentor, and self-aware human being is also quite well conscious that people tend to admit all this in an academic sense, but when it comes down to day-to-day life, they act otherwise. Why is that? We’ve seen one possible explanation; our mixed nature. Fear for life is a primary example of how this mixed nature affects choice. There are additional reasons we may act otherwise. Some have to do more with ego than with the necessities of material life:
Epictetus has one explanation in mind that references predictably amusing phenomena he ran into every day in his professional life. He gives us a picture of the life of the typical philosophy faculty and students in typical school of the day. They were not all that different from the faculty and students of today. His own peers and students tended to get sidetracked, and forgot what Stoic progress is. Not only that, they did so, even when it is true that the philosophers they studied and read had made it clear what Stoic progress was by their lights. Instead, faculty and students in Nicopolis as is typical in academic settings, became focused on textual exegesis of the school’s founders, and consequently measured progress in a rather predictable way, one that is off the mark from the Stoic perspective. Here comes another of Epictetus’s funny little dialogues:
“How comes it, then, that we acknowledge virtue to be a thing of this sort, and yet seek progress and make a display of it in other things? What is the work of virtue?”
“Serenity.”
“Who, then, is making progress? The man who has read many treatises of Chrysippus? What, is virtue no more than this—to have gained a knowledge of Chrysippus? For if it is this, progress is confessedly nothing else than a knowledge of many of the works of Chrysippus.”
Epictetus is having fun here, good-naturedly poking himself, his faculty peers and his students. He is pointing out a natural tendency in the learned, which becomes comical as it develops.
Taking great pains to help readers understand the conceptual underpinning of Stoicism, terminological apparatus is introduced by writers of standard texts, such as Chrysippus. Terminology is intended to help readers understand the phenomena in question, and the various disciplines in the school, and is quite technical. Invariably, when coupled with the less than clarifying writing style typical of academics, this leads to great, and nearly exclusive, focus on the texts through which the writers make this attempt. This being the case, textual interpretation, and arguments surrounding it, become the primary object of the faculty and students, to the near exclusion of the stated practical goals of the school. There is a forgetting that the primary object is to, as put here, ‘live with virtue.’ Then, in light of this forgetfulness, and the attendant focus on textual exegesis and citation (chapter and verse), faculty and students tend to measure their progress in terms of how well they know the texts studied, and how well they can argue for interpretations of same. They forget to evaluate themselves, and each other, in terms of how well they have personally tailored their desires and aversions toward virtue and how far along they are in the goal; attainment of serenity and calm, etc.
[Of note here: Chrysippus was a major figure in the founding of Stoicism, and wrote thorough systematic and quite technical treatises expounding the tenets of the school, of which only fragments survive. We’ll see reference to several of his works as we progress through the Discourses. Accounts of his writing style testify to its density and opacity.]
But now, while acknowledging that virtue produces one thing, we are declaring that the approach to virtue, which is progress, produces something else.
That something else would seem to be pedantic erudition.
“So-and-so,” says someone, “is already able to read Chrysippus all by himself.”
It is fine headway, by the gods, that you are making, man! Great progress this!”
This sarcastic barb is seemingly aimed both at the teacher, (presumably this is the “someone.” He is on faculty in Nicopolis), who has lost the forest for the trees himself, and the student who is, quite naturally, following his lead. The teacher has gone around the bend, focusing his students on textual interpretation and analysis, at the cost of actual practice in attaining virtue. Epictetus can’t stand it, so he mocks both. This seems too harsh to his imaginary interlocutor, the teacher:
“Why do you mock him?’
Epictetus replies:
And why do you try to divert him from the consciousness of his own shortcomings? Are you not willing to show him the work of virtue, that he may learn where to look for his progress?”
Epictetus now turns his attention to “so-and-so” the student, and doesn’t let up:
Look for it there, wretch, where your work lies. And where is your work? In desire and aversion, that you may not miss what you desire and encounter what you would avoid; in choice and in refusal, that you may commit no fault therein; in giving and withholding assent of judgement, that you may not be deceived. But, first come the first and most necessary points. Yet if you are in a state of fear and grief when you seek to be proof against encountering what you would avoid, how, pray, are you making progress?
In other words, Epictetus is saying to this student, something like this: ‘Your prowess in textual interpretation and analysis is not an end in itself, but a way-station in the training for life that you sought when you came on board here. If you find yourself just as vexed at things outside your control as you were when you started here, then how much progress have you, in fact, made as one of our students?’
Do you yourself not show me, therefore, your own progress in matters like the following man does? Suppose, for example, that in talking to an athlete I said, ” Show me your shoulders,” and then he answered, “Look at my jumping-weights.” Go to hell, you and your jumping-weights! What I want to see is the effect of the jumping-weights.
This athlete’s case is similar to the that of our learned student. He is also, in effect saying something like this. His jumping weights are his books and his written assignments:
“Take the Treatise Upon Choice (one of those dense works of Chrysippus) and see how I have mastered it.”
Wrong move kid! Now, his obtuseness is really trying Epictetus’s patience:
It is not that I am looking into, you slave, but how you act in your choices and refusals, your desires and aversions, how you go at things, and apply yourself to them, and prepare yourself, whether you are acting in harmony with nature therein, or out of harmony with it. For if you are acting in harmony, show me that, and I will tell you that you are making progress; but if out of harmony, begone, and do not confine yourself to expounding your books, but go and write some of the same kind yourself. And what will you gain thereby? Do you not know that the whole book costs only five denarii? Is the expounder of it then, think you, worth more than five denarii? And so never look for your work in one place and your progress in another.
Epictetus is really laying the wood here. Note carefully the choice words. At first, they do appear harsh, but their use is advised, actually carefully considered. They are intended to drive home the point that this student is no closer to attaining his purported goals than he was upon entering the school. He is called a “wretch,” and a “slave.” He has, in no way, moved toward freeing himself from tying his well-being to externals, but instead has tied his self-image to how well he’s stocked his library, and how well he’s cited texts and performed during written exams and such. He’s also asked if he would measure his progress by book sales. This is a dig at faculty it seems! That too is hanging your hat on externals. In any case, this student is bragging about his dumbbells. (So is his prof.)
What should he be doing instead? At this point, we are given a densely packed summary of the Stoic educational project, it’s aims and methods, things that are unpacked in the Discourses:
Where, then, is progress? If any man among you, withdrawing from external things, has turned his attention to the question of his own Moral Purpose, cultivating and perfecting it so as to make it finally harmonious with nature, elevated, free, unhindered, untrammeled, faithful, and honorable; and if he has learned that he who craves or shuns the things that are not under his control can be neither faithful nor free, but must himself of necessity be changed and tossed to-and-fro with them, and must end by subordinating himself to others, those, namely, who are able to procure or prevent these things that he craves or shuns ; and if, finally, when he rises in the morning he proceeds to keep and observe all this that he has learned; if he bathes as a faithful man, eats as a self-respecting man,—similarly, whatever the subject matter may be with which he has to deal, putting into practice his guiding principles, as the runner does when he applies the principles of running, and the voice trainer when he applies the principles of voice training,—this is the man who in all truth is making progress, and the man who has not travelled at random is this one.
The ideal Stoic is being portrayed here. These are lofty expectations, difficult to attain, and requiring great effort, over the span of a lifetime. No wonder that Epictetus admonishes this young man, for he has a difficult road to travel, and is, in effect, wasting his time reading magazines at a rest stop instead of getting on with the trek.
Learning to emulate erudition is not the goal of the Stoic school, but perhaps can be a sign that one has attained that goal. Make sure, he admonishes us, that you are of this latter variety of student or faculty. If you must, write your books, he says, but make sure you are not simply imitating predecessors’ verbosity. If you must be verbose, make sure it’s coming from the right place, the place of accomplishment and experience, and the place of the mentor, one that is concerned to help the next generation of students:
But if he has striven merely to attain the state [of erudition] which he finds in his books and works only at that, and has made that the goal of his travels, I bid him go home at once and not neglect his concerns there, since the goal to which he has travelled is nothing!
But, not so that other goal—to study how a man may rid his life of sorrows and lamentations, and of such cries as “Woe is me!” and ” Wretch that I am !” and of misfortune and failure, and to learn the meaning of death, exile, prison, hemlock; that he may be able to say in prison, ” Dear Crito, if so it pleases the gods, so be it,” rather than, ” Alas, poor me, an old man, it is for this that I have kept my grey hairs!”
Again, this is an explicit reference to Socrates’s attitudes and actions after he had been sentenced to death. He is being contrasted with those who, when faced with adversities of the sorts listed, fall into the ‘woe is me’ lamentation, and who become greatly vexed. He notes that not a few such vexed individuals are quite famous or powerful:
Who says such things? Do you think that I will name you some man held in small esteem and of low degree? Does not Priam say it? Does not Oedipus? Nay more, all kings say it! For what are tragedies but the portrayal in tragic verse of the sufferings of men who have admired things external?
We’ll run into further discussions of these tragic examples as we move through the Discourses.
Next, Epictetus says something quite interesting. The below might be Arrian’s record of a part of yet another exchange with a student. From what we read in this brief paragraph, it might be the case that the student asked Epictetus if use of deceit or lying of some sort would be justifiable if it ended up leading someone into taking the proper Stoic attitude toward externals:
If indeed one had to be deceived into learning that among things external and independent of our free choice none concerns us, I, for my part, should consent to a deception which would result in my living thereafter serenely and without turmoil; but as for you, you will yourselves see to your own preference.
Epictetus would assent to being manipulated by this nobly motivated lie. He realizes others may not be so sanguine. In any case, he wants to leave off this chapter by making it clear to us that he is not discouraging careful study of the texts of Chrysippus, so much as the misdirected study of these texts as an end in itself. Pedantry is not the end state for which Stoics study. So, how is this study properly undertaken? Again, he explains, using the texts of Chrysippus:
What, then, does Chrysippus furnish us?
“That you may know,” he says, ” that these things are not false from which serenity arises and tranquility comes to us, take my books and you shall know how conformable and harmonious with nature are the things which render me tranquil.”
Oh, the great good fortune! Oh, the great benefactor who points the way! To Triptolemus, indeed, all men have established shrines and altars, because he gave us as food the fruits of cultivation, but to him who has discovered, and brought to light, and imparted to all men the truth which deals, not with mere life, but with a good life,—who among you has for that set up an altar in his honor, or dedicated a temple or a statue, or bows down to God in gratitude for him? But because the gods have given us the vine or wheat, for that do we make sacrifice, and yet because they have brought forth such a fruit in a human mind, whereby they purposed to show us the truth touching happiness, shall we fail to render thanks unto God for this?
So, understanding the import of Chrysippus’s work is indeed just as important, in the sphere of Moral Purpose, moral health, as was the introduction of agriculture for physical health and food production.
Twice in this chapter he has referenced the connection that exists between ‘those things that produce tranquility’ and doing certain things in a way that conforms to, and is harmonious with, ‘nature.’ This is important, and is tied to Stoic metaphysics and theology. We’ll read more about this concept of harmony with nature as things unfold.