Fifth 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 any formatting issues (spacing between paragraphs) that you see. They stubbornly will not go away no matter what I do!
Book I Chapter 5
Against the Academics
This chapter is another where Epictetus is having some fun at the expense of rival philosophical schools. He is here addressing himself to what, in that day, was a long-standing vein of philosophical argumentation inside Plato’s Academy and among some Stoics. In the approximately 300 years it had been open, and like any institution, the Academy had gone through phases and fads. These had developed aspects of its founder’s thought in various ways. (Philosophy is prey to vogue, just like everything else out there.) Here we see Epictetus poking fun at a skeptical strain of argumentation that was influential from the time of Arcesilaus. It’s a line of argumentation that ultimately was most famously developed by Rene’ Descartes in the 17th Century as part of his ‘method of hyperbolic doubt’, in what has come to be labeled ‘the dream argument’:
If a man, says Epictetus, resists truths that are all too evident, in opposing him it is not easy to find an argument by which one may cause him to change his opinion. The reason for this is neither the man’s ability nor the teacher’s weakness; nay, when a man who has been trapped in an argument hardens to stone, how shall one any longer deal with him by argument?
In fact, if the man lands himself in this strait because of the strength of his argumentative abilities, then it may well be impossible to budge him. He’ll find a way out of all your attempts to free him from his ‘trap.’
Still, what ‘evident truths’ are being referenced here? What is the nature of the ‘trapping’? We’ll soon see he has one example of a truth in mind, one targeted by the skeptics. But, before we do, Epictetus wants to expand a bit on this notion of someone ‘turning to stone’ and being trapped by an argument. [Cue the Electric Light Orchestra.] What causes men to “petrify”? Epictetus explains:
Now there are two kinds of petrifaction: one is the petrifaction of the intellect, the other of the sense of shame, when a man stands in array, prepared neither to assent to manifest truths nor to leave the fighting line.
Not the most clearly stated beginning but, petrification is, in every case, a situation where the person petrified stands fast to an opinion that is certainly, or almost certainly, false or to a course of action, again persisting in that choice come what may. If he is victim to the former sort of petrification, he is so committed to his opinion that he will find a way to explain away any pieces of evidence with which he is confronted which are both manifestly true (or probable) and contrary to his opinion.
If he is a victim to the second sort of petrification he will defend his opinion or chosen course of action against all comers, again without any evident concern for the possibility that he may be in error.
The first sort of petrification is ‘of the intellect.’ The second sort of ‘turning to stone’ is in fact a debilitation of one’s sense of shame, according to Epictetus. In either case, it appears that such a one adopts an attitude not unlike that most famously described by Karl Popper when describing certain belief systems like Marxism. It is sometimes called the ‘true believer’ complex. One under the sway of such belief systems can always accommodate any fact presented, even ones purportedly falsifying the system. One can always explain away allegedly defeating evidence in terms of the concepts and presuppositions of the adopted system. This can happen in the fields of history or scientific explanation, and it can happen in political, religious, philosophical, and moral arenas. As Popper and those inspired by his observations (Kuhn for example) note, the human mind can become quite creative in weaving such webs of defensive justification and rationalization. This is, indeed as these men also note, a risk open to almost every hypothesis, world view or interpretation of reality.
In any case, when we run into such true believers, we are probably not going to get them to budge. Clearly, Epictetus saw committed skeptics of his day as being such petrified persons. What is more, he cautions us against falling into such straits ourselves. He also seems to indicate that there is a connection between intellectual petrification and petrification or debilitation of the capacity to feel shame. One often leads to the other. Indeed, it may be splitting hairs to draw too hard and fast a distinction between them:
Under the sway of such petrification of the intellect one can, often by imperceptible steps, land in such a state of mind that one becomes incapable of being both aware of the tortured argumentative contortions and epicycles one introduces to save one’s pet system, and thereby quite incapable of being ashamed at, what from an outsider’s point of view, should appear as either patent silliness or pitiable arrogance and dogmatism of a closed mind. Alas, all-to-often, though, people admire this sort of behavior:
Most of us dread the deadening of the body and would resort to all means so as to avoid falling into such a state, but about the deadening of the soul we care not at all. Indeed, by Zeus, even in the case of the soul itself, if a man be in such a state that he cannot follow an argument step by step, or even understand one, we regard him too as being in a bad way; but if a man’s sense of shame and self-respect be deadened, this we go so far as to call strength of character!
Again, we should have more than a distinct impression that Epictetus has in mind some of his academic rivals here. Some of them were so far in the tank for their pet theories that they were quite blissfully in the territory of the silly or the non-falsifiable dogmatist, and they were even sometimes praised for this adamantine stance, and performances they undertook from that position. These men were exceptional reasoners, but petrified nevertheless; not capable of shame.
Epictetus next gives us a bit of dialogue the likes of which he no-doubt had undertaken on several occasions. His interlocutor: One of these unnamed progenitors of Cartesian skepticism.
Do your senses tell you that you are awake?
“No,” he answers, “any more than they do when, in dreams, I have the impression that I am awake.”
Is there, then, no difference between these two impressions?
“None.”
Can I argue with this man any longer?
Epictetus’s point in asking this question? We could attempt to argue with this man, pointing out some clear difference between typical waking experience and typical dream experience, with which he would, no doubt, be familiar, and in light of which he could reasonably conclude that his senses do indeed tell him when he is awake.
But, predictably, he will always have a response ready to hand, to the effect that he could be always asleep and dreaming. He will tell us that he may be dreaming of having such phenomenological differences in his experiences as we point out to him, differences that obtain merely between those portions of the ongoing dream where he dreams he is awake, and those portions where he is dreaming that he is asleep. On this basis, he could still claim that our senses never can tell us, with certainty, whether we are awake or not.
We could try again at providing our man with other sorts of evidence we all have, and will cite with regard to our belief that we are sometimes awake, and sometimes not, but, knowing the moves this commited skeptic will make, one can see the futility in the effort, for he will always have such replies ready to hand.
And, I suspect Epictetus would ask after the upshot of this man’s honed ability to cleverly shoe-horn every conceivable piece of evidence into such ripostes. What is the value or point in such exercises, other than displaying one’s argumentative abilities? Aren’t there some more vital areas of work he has, as a human being, as a Moral Purpose? This is Epictetus’s question to the man.
Furthermore, in regard to our collective pursuit of truth, this man, in taking the position of the global skeptic, takes the position that no certain truths are attainable, save perhaps the Cartesian cogito. While this may, strictly speaking, be true, it does not follow that there is not practical or theoretical value in acting as if truths are attainable, and in the use of the various criteria we use in distinguishing truth or reality from falsehood or mere appearance. There is value to be had from making efforts in that direction, even if his ready-to-hand skeptical arguments are technically correct. For, we can realistically shoot for plausibility, and sift the probable from the improbable in judging hypotheses and beliefs. Much of value can be gained by so acting. Surely, even the committed and clever skeptic can see that? Not so the hardest of the hard-core though. Those men, though relatively rare, are the petrified sort. Epictetus had experience of such strange men, and found them to be incurable:
And what cautery or lancet shall I apply to him, to make him realize that he is deadened? He does realize it, but pretends that he does not; he is even worse than a corpse.
I think we can add this: This skeptic Epictetus is interacting with, a man who is committed to expending all his efforts in providing us with skeptic’s ripostes must, as a man of that day, have been versed in the traditions of Greek philosophy, and the Stoics in particular. He would have been familiar with the majority view regarding the import of developing his full person, his virtue and those aspects of himself that would be of substantial service to humanity. Yet, this petrified man chooses to almost exclusively exercise his intellect in this one narrow way. So, he renders himself of as little value as a corpse. That’s a harsh judgment. Epictetus is really laying the wood!
The man who expends a majority of his efforts in this one way comes off as silly. Even when operating in the field of the more strictly theoretical or abstract, Epictetus contends this man affects a pretense of ignoring relevant evidence, and is proud that he can always flex his intellectual muscle by explaining it away. Though our man is correct in pointing out logical gaps between evidence and conclusions, correct technically, this is still a quite truncated way to live, and in a way, pitiable.
To get this point across, Epictetus reviews the possible cases of deadening again, but with emphasis upon its respect to self-awareness: The first is a case of someone that does not realize he’s dead, or living this very narrow and silly life, the second is a case of a man who is fully aware of what he is doing:
One man does not notice the contradiction. He is in a bad way;
The contradiction Epictetus refers to is that between how the deadened narrowed man ought to live, (i.e., how he is, for all intents and purposes, best suited or intended to live, whether by chance or design), and how he actually lives. This first case is of a deadened man that does not realize that he lives so contrarily to his nature, contrarily to his intended roles in human life. The man is indeed pitiable, and indeed, in a ‘bad way.’
What about the second sort of ‘deadened’ man, the man who is deadened, narrow, but also fully cognizant of this contradiction, and yet freely and knowingly engaged in it?
Another man notices it, indeed, but is not moved and does not improve. He is in a still worse state. His self-respect and sense of shame have been lopped off, and his reasoning faculty has been – I will not say cut away, but brutalized. Am I to call this strength of character? Far from it, unless I am so to describe the strength that lewd fellows have, which enables them to say and do in public anything that comes into their heads.
Again, quite a harsh judgment on this second sort of man, one with which Epictetus was familiar, being in the thick of the intellectual life of the Greco-Roman world. For him, this breed of preening skeptic is akin to the mentally ill and shameless exhibitionist perverts that were often the street-people of the day!
In our next chapter, (the lengthiest in the Discourses, to this point), we have opportunity to see what Epictetus is driving at when he makes this claim about such truncated lives being wasteful, and what he is on about in emphasizing the human capacity for shame. In short, he holds that we human beings are unique in our status as rational moral agents. We are designed to be of service to the good of humanity. We experience ourselves as being required so to act, both in the persons of those that constitute our immediate circle, and those at further remove. We are also apparently designed to be aware of it when we are, in effect, shirking that duty. That is the purpose of shame, and other similar morally grounded emotions, such as guilt. They are course corrective.
At the same time, we are given the tools necessary for us to individually navigate the hurly-burly of that world, morally and psychologically intact, given that so much of what we contend with is recognized as being outside our complete control. (As moral and concerned agents this lack of direct control does distress us.) This guidance is provided for by way of our possession of that faculty of reason he discussed in the first chapter, and certain other capacities, which together constitute human fortitude. The next chapter explicitly addresses Stoic religion and metaphysics, and further develops this notion of an in-built guidance mechanism, something only implicit in this, and earlier, chapters. Chapter 6 invokes a design argument: