Stoicism

The distinctions that do the work

The division between what is up to us and what is not. Epictetus opens his handbook with it, and it is regularly misread as a division between what we can and cannot influence, which is a weaker thing and gets mistaken for it. The division is between what is ours and what is given. Body, reputation, office, relationship, the judgement of others, the success or failure of a project: given. The choice, the assent, the attempt, the disposition: ours. Training that classification until the second list stops producing a reaction is the whole of the practice.

Assent, and the mechanism it explains. A disturbance does not arrive as a feeling that then needs managing. An impression presents itself; the mind says yes; the perturbation follows. What happened is not the injury. The assenting is the injury, and because assent is the part that is up to you, that is the part that can be withdrawn. This is why the Stoic analysis of emotion is not a claim that you can will yourself calm. It is a claim that a feeling you did not author is standing on a judgement you did.

Volition, prohairesis. Epictetus’s favourite term names a capacity rather than an act, and he holds it to be by nature unimpeded, which is why freedom is for him a characteristic of the human being rather than a reward for good behaviour. It is the real person, the true self. Our convictions, intentions and actions are ours in a way nothing else is, and the appearance and comfort of the body, the possessions, the relationships, the standing in the world are all contingent facts about a person rather than features of the self. Epictetus thinks it is beside the point whether the character a person was given has been assigned by something larger, because the reasoning faculty judges its own prior judgements and improves or deteriorates according to what it does with them. That is a more confident position about self-correction than almost anything in the material, and it is worth holding both in view.

Externals, and the instruction that comes with them. It would be a serious misreading to conclude that the Stoic therefore does nothing about externals. What comes instead is an instruction to use them with care, because the use is not an indifferent matter, and at the same time with composure, because the material being used is indifferent. The standing figure is the ball player who knows the ball is of no value in itself and still runs at full speed to catch it, because what he values is playing the game properly. Chrysippus supplies the complement: if the foot had a mind it would welcome being muddy for the sake of the whole. The virtue is in the fit, not in the coldness.

Freedom from passion, and what the word actually rules out. The Stoic bad passions are not strong feelings; they are judgements of a certain shape, false and ungovernable ones, and the result is a freedom the tradition calls apatheia, which means what it says. It is not numbness, and Epictetus rejects the picture explicitly, warning against the plan of being unfeeling like a statue, and adding that even the wisest may tremble or grow pale at a sudden danger while assenting to nothing false. Elation at good is fitting, as is the caution he names in considering a bad choice, and during training the pain of remorse is to be used as a stimulus rather than a symptom. Seneca makes the complementary point: the finished Stoic feels more, not less, and has learned not to be dragged. Neither the feeling nor the change of mind is ruled out. What is ruled out is the judgement underneath, that the thing that happened is a good or a bad in itself, which is the thing that cannot be taken from you and therefore does not need to be got over.

The three topics of the educational method. Epictetus sets out the programme in the Discourses as desire and aversion, the impulse to act and not to act, and assent. The first two are usually collapsed into the third by modern readers, and they should not be. A life is not fixed by getting your judgements straight, because the question of whether to act at all, and in what direction, is a further matter, and vigorous action may be entirely proper.

The nightly examination. What Epictetus recommends is to go back over the day before sleep, with the borrowed Pythagorean character the field notes, and find the errors before they become ingrained. There is no interpreter, no outside verdict, and no promise of improvement. The field is also careful that the process begins by deliberately slowing the assent down long enough to look at the impression before agreeing to it, and that the vigilance never stops, because one can never rely on habituation alone.

Justice toward the person who has done wrong. This is where a modern reader finds out what the philosophy costs, because Epictetus’s treatment of Medea is not the treatment a Stoic reputation predicts. Her killing of her children is a mistake of judgement, since she believes it advantageous; show her clearly that she is deceived and she would not do it, which is why the field holds that being deceived is the deepest fact about a human being and the most promising thing to work with. His answer is that her choice has ethical weight for her and for nobody else, so one should not be angry at her; pity is better, and the proper response, if the occasion offers, is to help her see the mistake. That is a long way from coldness and further still from a technique. It is also, notice, an account in which a person cannot be reduced to the sum of what they have done, which is a proposition the material would accept immediately and a proposition a great many other systems would not.

Kinship with the governing order, and the language of a portion. Epictetus places the human being inside a maximally rational order governed by Zeus, who is not separate from it, and argues that our minds are fragments of the divine mind, parts and offshoots, and that when we choose on our own account we exercise the very same power that governs the universe, so that the divine has ceded to us a share of its governance. Hold that next to the material’s account of the intelligent infinity investing itself in a many-ness in which each portion created a universe, and the resemblance is close enough to be worth the reader’s attention and structural enough to be worth naming as a difference rather than a match.

Where it touches this material

The fit is unusually good, and the reason is worth naming rather than celebrating: both accounts make the operations of the mind the primary object of work, and both decline to confuse a life with its circumstances. Its own instruction, at 5.2, is one thing: silence at a steady state and the examination of the self, and its diagnosis of where a being is stuck is stated in its own vocabulary at 4.17, where the mind must be known to itself and that is named the most demanding part of the work. It goes further than Stoicism does in one respect. At 4.19 it says that to reach an undistorted understanding of the Law, it is not necessary to heal or to show any manifestation at all, but only to exercise the disciplines of understanding. That is very nearly a Stoic sentence, and it is in the material rather than imported into it by this library.

Two further correspondences are real. The Stoic prohairesis has a close cousin in the material’s faculty of the will, and the contact treats that faculty as the actual mechanism of change rather than as a synonym for wanting: at 66.14 the will, the seeking and the desire of the entity are named as the thing that causes the indigo body to use a new configuration and reform the body that exists in space and time. And the Stoic insistence that the individual is a portion of a larger whole is the material’s own account of creation, given at 13.13, where each portion created a universe and the so-called natural laws of any particular universe are what that channeling of love into intelligent energy produced.

There is also a place where the two are close enough that a reader should be warned. The material is not interested in a life lived by a rule, and at 76.9 it makes the objection that a Stoic reader is most likely to walk into. It is well to investigate each discipline, it says, not as a dilettante but as one who seeks the touchstone. A reader with a maxims notebook hears a manual; a reader of the material hears an objection to collecting maps. The instinct to write down a set of sayings and consult them in difficulty is the characteristic misreading of Stoicism, and the material is unusually well placed to catch it, because it refuses the same consolation in a different key.

One correspondence deserves its own paragraph, because it is the closest the two come and it is not a popular one. Both accounts treat the individual as a portion of something larger that is not a hierarchy. The Stoic version runs through kinship: shared rationality is what makes a person a citizen of the one city, and the fraction of governance ceded to your choice is what makes the choice real rather than a performance; a second runs through creation, at 13.12 and 13.13, where the one intelligent infinity invests itself in an exploration of many-ness, each portion creates a universe, and the laws of that universe are what the channelling of love into intelligent energy produced. Hold the two together and the shared intuition is clear: you are local, and locality is not a reduction of what you are. The difference is what the portion is for, and neither account is willing to say.

And one genuine agreement about the object of attention. The Stoic disciplines the mind so that it can act well in a world, and it never proposes that the discipline improves the mind’s own condition. On the harvest the material is the same, and differs about what the condition is for. Hold the two apart and each becomes clearer: the Stoic is doing ethics with a technique, and the material is doing development with a discipline that happens to look like an ethics.

Where the material parts company, and where this library takes a side

The disagreement is not about tone. It is about whether there is a wall, and the material refuses the wall on the record, in the first session. Asked at 1.10 whether a person can accelerate understanding in another, or whether all effort acts only on the one who makes it, the answer does not split the difference. The distinction between yourself and others is not one the material sees, it says, and it follows from that that to learn is the same as to teach, unless what is being taught is not what is being learned, in which case you and they have both been done little or no good. That is a direct rejection of the premise on which the Stoic edifice rests, that there is a category of things outside you which can be nothing but given.

The material’s counter is not that the world is a mirror. It is that the individual complex carries the work of the whole, and that the work reaches outside itself by the mechanism of catalyst. At 17.2 the statement is flat and it is the load-bearing sentence in this page: it is impossible to help another being directly, and the only thing possible is to make catalyst available. A Stoic and a reader of the material can agree on everything internal and still part company here, because the Stoic’s good is by definition confined to the private act, while the material’s whole point is that the private act is a transaction.

Give the Stoic position its full strength before answering it, because it is stronger than it looks. The reply to 17.2 is that making catalyst available is itself a choice and therefore still in the category of what is up to you, and that a Stoic who fails to make anything available has misunderstood his own discipline. That reply is correct, and it is also a retreat, and the retreat is the tell. Because it means the Stoic can never be wrong about how much was in his power. A discipline whose only good cannot be falsified by any outcome has stopped being a test of a person, and this library’s judgment is its own: a practice that cannot fail is not a discipline, it is a temperament.

The second conflict is the fixed judgement. Stoic apatheia presumes a settled order. The assent can be trained into a stable disposition, and once it is, the perturbation does not recur, and the man is finished in a way that is meant to be an achievement. That settledness the material refuses outright. At 19.18 a questioner proposes that the further along an entity is, the harder it becomes to change path, and the answer says the opposite: the further polarized, the more easily the polarity may be changed, because more power and more awareness are available to a being that has them. And it names the true helplessness outright. The helpless are those who have not consciously chosen and who go on repeating patterns without knowing that they are repeating them or what the pattern means. There is no counterpart to that in Stoicism. Its nearest figure is the person who has not yet examined herself, and that is a stage, not a condition. In the material it is the definition of what cannot be worked on at all, and it is the reason the material’s ethics is not really an ethics.

The claim about acceptance deserves to be set out on its own, because it is the one most often made about the material and most often got wrong. Readers sometimes take it to mean that the material holds acceptance to be a limitation. Its own record does not say that. What it says, at 82.3, is that the term efficiency has misleading connotations in this context, and that to be fully efficient at the central work of accepting the self, it is first quite necessary to know the distortions of the self which is being accepted, so that each reaction can be examined for the precise foundation of those distortions; and the answer closes by saying the architrave has to be in place before the structure is built. That is not a defence of acceptance. It is a correction of an acceptance taken blind, and the correction is the whole of the difference. What the material refuses is not the acceptance of what cannot be changed, which it recommends repeatedly and by name, and not the acceptance of limitations as a way of meeting a body that is ill. It refuses the acceptance of something the seeker has not yet looked at. A Stoic will recognise the requirement, since knowing the distortions of the self is precisely what the nightly examination is for, and will notice that the material attaches a consequence to it that the Stoic does not.

The third conflict is the timetable, and it is where the register matters most. Stoicism has no harvest: the seasons of a life are to be lived well and the account closes. A date runs through the material instead. At 14.14 the statement is that the harvest is now, that there is no reason at this time to include efforts along these distortions towards longevity, but rather to encourage distortions towards seeking the heart of self, since what resides clearly in the violet-ray energy field will determine the harvesting of each complex. A Stoic reading that translates that into live well now has dropped the part that is not Stoic at all. The material is not asking for equanimity. It is asking for a decision, and it attaches consequences to the decision, and that is the exact point at which the two can no longer share a sentence.

So this library holds three judgments here, and names them as its own. First, the material is right that acceptance is not a virtue by itself, and that the Stoic discipline of the judgement is incomplete until something is decided with it. Second, the material is right that the individual complex is not a closed container, and the Stoic wall is the single place where a serious philosophy goes soft, and a reader who agrees that the wall is soft is agreeing that somebody else’s initiative is required. Third, and this one costs something: the material’s insistence on consequence is a different kind of claim from Stoicism’s, and a reader who wants a life with no audit, no harvest and no possibility of a bad row, should stay with the Stoics and read this page as the objection they are. This library has an audit, and would rather say that plainly than pretend two philosophies can be blended into one comfortable discipline.

What it is not

It is not the absence of feeling, and its own tradition will not support that reading. The man who is unfeeling like a statue is named as the plan being rejected, and Epictetus lets the wisest tremble. What is excluded is a class of bad judgement, not a class of experience, and the finished Stoic is described as feeling more than the beginner with a better handle on it.

It is not self-sufficiency either, which is the version most readers meet. A Stoic who could not need anyone is not the Stoic who does not need; the second is the whole of the position. The tradition’s insistence on the universal city and on what is owed across it is the corrective, and Epictetus’s version is specific rather than sentimental: the best service available to another is helping her find her own rationality, which means that controlling somebody in the name of her good is the failure of the discipline rather than its use.

It is not a technique for endurance, which is the popular and slightly debased employment. Endurance is not what the Stoics are interested in; a correct response is. And a correct response to a genuinely terminal situation may be to grieve without reservation, to change the plan, to leave, or to say out loud that you cannot do this. What they rule out is the judgement underneath, not the motion.

And a boundary for the reader arriving from this material. Stoicism is a complete discipline for a life, and it will not ask you for the one thing this library holds the material asks for, which is a decision about the orientation of your attention rather than a regulation of your reactions. You can take it as a floor and you will not regret the floor. Nor can you take it as the whole of the work. A reader who has made the inner life immaculate and the choices unmade has reproduced, in a cleaner costume, the failure the material names at 19.18 as the repetition of a pattern nobody has looked at.

It is also not a secular self-help, which is where most of its modern life has gone. The handbook was translated into Latin in 1497 and was exceptionally popular in Europe for the following two centuries, and the field records its use in monasteries in a superficialised Christian form, as well as the readiness of seventeenth-century thinkers to find Epictetus entirely compatible with Christianity. Having been thoroughly Christianised in use, it also drew one famous reaction against that reading of it, from a great reader who called it sheer arrogance to believe that the human psyche is part of the divine and can be perfected by one’s own efforts. That reaction is worth holding next to this page’s own argument, because the objection is not only about theology. It is the objection this library makes about the Stoic wall, arriving from a direction no Stoic would have predicted.