The Life of the Mind (46 page)

 

Epictetus' discovery was that the mind, because it could retain outward "impressions" (
phantasiai
), was able to deal with all "outside things" as mere "data of consciousness," as we would say. The
dynamis logike
examines both itself and the "impressions" imprinted on the mind. Philosophy teaches us how to "deal with impressions aright"; it tests them and "distinguishes them and makes use of none which is untested." Looking at a table does not enable us to decide whether the table is good or bad; vision does not tell us, nor do any of our other senses. Only the mind, which deals not with real tables but with impressions of tables, can tell us. ("What tells us that gold is a goodly thing? For the gold does not tell us. Clearly it is the faculty that deals with impressions."
³⁹
) The point is that you don't have to go outside yourself if your concern is wholly for that self. Only insofar as the mind can draw things into itself are they of any value.

Once the mind has withdrawn from outside things into the inwardness of its own impressions, it discovers that in one respect it is entirely independent of all outside influences: "Can anyone prevent you from agreeing to what is true? No one. Can anyone compel you to accept the false? No one. Do you see that in this sphere your faculty is free from let and hindrance and constraint and compulsion?"
⁴⁰
That it is in the nature of truth to "necessitate" the mind is an old insight: "
hēsper hyp' antes tes alētheias anagkasthentes,
" "necessitated as it were by truth itself," as Aristotle says when talking of self-evident theories standing in need of no special reasoning.
⁴¹
But in Epictetus this truth and its
dynamis logike
have nothing at all to do with knowledge or cognition, for which "the processes of logic are unfruitful"
⁴²
—literally good for nothing
(akarpa).
Knowledge and cognition concern "outside things," independent of man and beyond his power; hence, they are not, or should not be, of concern to him.

The beginning of philosophy is "an awareness
[synaisthē-sis]
of one's own weakness in regard to necessary things." We have no "innate conception" of things we ought to know, such as "a right-angled triangle," but we can be taught by people who know, and those who do not yet know
know
that they don't know. It is quite different with things which actually concern us and on which the kind of life we lead depends. In this sphere everybody is born with an it-seems-to-me,
dokei moi,
an opinion, and there our difficulty begins: "in the discovery of conflict in men's minds with one another" and the "attempt to discover a standard, just as we discover the balance to deal with weights and the rale to deal with things straight and crooked. This is the beginning of philosophy."
⁴³

Philosophy, then, sets the standards and norms and teaches man how to
use
his sensory faculties, how "to deal with impressions aright," and how "to test them and calculate the value of each." The criterion of every philosophy is therefore its usefulness in the business of leading a life free from pain. More specifically, it teaches certain lines of thought that can defeat the innate impotence of men. In this general philosophical framework it ought to be reason, argumentative reasoning, that is given primacy over all the mental faculties; but this is not the case. In his violent denunciation of men who were "philosophers only with their hps," Epictetus points to the appalling gap between a man's teachings and his actual conduct, and by implication hints at the old insight that reason by itself neither moves nor achieves anything. The great achiever is not reason but the Will. "Consider who you are" is an exhortation addressed to reason, it seems, but what is then discovered is that "man ... has nothing more sovereign
[kyridteros]
than will
[proairesis]
...all else [is] subject to this, and will itself is free from slavery and subjection." Reason
(logos),
it is true, distinguishes man from the animals, which therefore are "marked for service," while man is "fitted for command";
⁴⁴
yet the organ capable of command is not reason but Will. If philosophy deals with the "art of living your own life" and if its supreme criterion is usefulness in these terms, then "philosophy means very little else but this—to search how it is practicable to exercise the will to get and the will to avoid without hindrance."
⁴⁵

The first thing reason can teach the will is the distinction between things that depend on man, those that are in his power (the Aristotelian
eph' hemin),
and those that are not. The power of the will rests on its sovereign decision to concern itself only with things within man's power, and these reside exclusively in human inwardness.
⁴⁶
Hence, the will's first decision is not-to-will what it cannot get and to cease nilling what it cannot avoid—in short, not to concern itself with anything over which it has no power. ("What matters it whether the world is composed of atoms or of infinite parts or of fire and earth? Is it not enough to know ... the limits of the will to get and the will to avoid ... and to dismiss those things that are beyond us?"
⁴⁷
) And since "it is impossible that what happens should be other than it is,"
⁴⁸
since man, in other words, is entirely powerless in the real world, he has been given the miraculous faculties of reason and will that permit him to reproduce the outside—complete but deprived of its reality—inside his mind, where he is undisputed lord and master. There he rules over himself and over the objects of his concern, for the will can be hindered only by itself. Everything that seems to be real, the world of appearances, actually needs my consent in order to be real
for me.
And this consent cannot be forced on me: if I withhold it, then the reality of the world disappears as though it were a mere apparition.

This faculty of turning away from the outside toward an invincible inside obviously needs "training"
(gymnazein)
and constant arguing, for not only does man live his ordinary life in the world as it is; but his inside itself, so long as he is alive, is located within some outside, a body that is not in his power but belongs to the "outside things." The constant question is whether your will is strong enough not merely to distract your attention from external, threatening things but to fasten your imagination on different "impressions" in the actual presence of pain and misfortune. To withhold consent, or bracket out reality, is by no means an exercise in sheer thinking; it has to prove itself in actual fact. "I must die. I must be imprisoned. I must suffer exile. But: must I die groaning? Must I whine as well? Can anyone hinder me from going into exile with a smile?" The master threatens to chain me: "What say you? Chain me? My leg you will chain—yes, but not my will—no, not even Zeus can conquer that."
⁴⁹

Epictetus gives many examples, which we do not need to enumerate here; they make tedious reading, like exercises in a schoolbook. The upshot is always the same. What bothers men is not what actually happens to them but their own "judgment"
(dogma,
in the sense of belief or opinion): "You will be harmed only when you think you are harmed. No one can harm you without your consent."
⁵⁰
"For instance, what does it mean to be slandered? Stand by a stone and slander it: what effect will you produce?"
⁵¹
Be stonelike and you will be invulnerable.
Ataraxia,
invulnerability, is all you need in order to
feel
free once you have discovered that reality itself depends on your consent to recognize it as such.

Like almost all Stoics, Epictetus recognized that the body's vulnerability puts certain limits on this inner freedom. Unable to deny that it is not mere wishes or desires that make us unfree, but the "fetters attached to us in the shape of the body,"
⁵²
they therefore had to prove that these fetters are not unbreakable. An answer to the question What restrains us from suicide? becomes a necessary topic of these writings. Epictetus, at any rate, seems to have quite clearly realized that this kind of unlimited inner freedom actually presupposes that "one must remember and hold fast to this, that
the door is open."
⁵³
For a philosophy of total world-alienation, there is much truth in the remarkable sentence with which Camus began his first book: "
Il n'y a qu'un problème philosophique vraiment'sérieux: c'est le suicide."
⁵⁴

At first glance, this doctrine of invulnerability and apathy
(apatheia)
—how to shield yourself against reality, how to lose your ability to be affected by it, for better or worse, in joy or in sorrow—seems so obviously open to refutation that the enormous argumentative as well as emotional influence of Stoicism on some of the best minds of Western mankind seems well-nigh incomprehensible. In Augustine, we find such a refutation in its shortest and most plausible form. The Stoics, he says, have found the trick of how to pretend to be happy: "Since a man cannot get what he wants, he wants what he can get" ("
Ideo igitur id vult quod potest, quoniam quod vult non potest").
⁵⁵
Moreover, he goes on, the Stoics assume that "all men by nature wish to be happy" but they do not believe in immortality, at least not in bodily resurrection, that is, not in a future deathless
life,
and this is a contradiction in terms. For "if all men really will to be happy they must necessarily also will to be immortal....In order to
live
happily you must first be alive" ("Cum
ergo beati esse omnes homines velint, si vere volunt, profecto et esse immortales volunt.... Ut enim homo beate vivat, oportet ut vivat").
⁵⁶
In other words, mortal men cannot be happy, and the Stoics' insistence on the fear of death as the main source of unhappiness testifies to this; the most they can achieve is to become "apathetic," to be unaffected by either life or death.

This refutation, however, so plausible on this level of argument, misses a number of rather important points. There is first the question of why a will should be necessary in order
not
to will, why it should not be possible simply to lose the faculty under the sway of the superior insights of right reasoning. After all, don't we all know how relatively easy it has always been to lose at least the habit, if not the faculty, of thinking? Nothing more is needed than to live in constant distraction and never leave the company of others. It may be argued that it is harder to break men of the habit of wanting what is beyond their power than of the habit of thinking, but for a sufficiently "trained" man, it ought not to be necessary to repeat the not-willing over and over—since the
me thele,
the "do not will" where you cannot prevent, is at least as important to this schooling as the mere appeal to will power.

Closely connected with the foregoing, and even more puzzling, is the fact that Epictetus is by no means content with the will's power noi-to-will. He does not just preach indifference to everything that is not within our power; he insistently demands that man will what happens anyhow. I have already cited the game parable in which the man whose sole concern is with the feeling-well of the self is admonished to wish "only that to happen which does happen, and only him to win who does win." In a different context Epictetus goes much farther and praises (unnamed) "philosophers" who said "that 'if the good man knew coming events beforehand he would help on nature, even if it meant working with disease, and death and maiming.' "
⁵⁷
To be sure, in his argument he falls back on the old Stoic notion of
heimarmenē,
the doctrine of fate which holds that everything happens in harmony with the nature of the universe and that every particular thing, man or animal, plant or stone, has its task allotted to it by the whole and is justified by it. But not only is Epictetus very explicitly uninterested in any question relating to nature or the universe; but also nothing in the old doctrine indicates that man's will, totally ineffectual by definition, would be of avail in the "ordering of the universe." Epictetus is interested in what happens to him: "I will a thing and it does not happen; what is there more wretched than I? I will it not and it happens; what is more wretched than I?"
⁵⁸
In short, in order "to live well" it is not enough to "ask
not
that events should happen as you will"; you must "let your will be that events should happen as they do."
⁵⁹

 

It is only when will power has reached this climactic point, where it can will what
is
and thus never be "at odds with outward things," that it can be said to be omnipotent. Underlying all the arguments for such omnipotence is the matter-ofcourse assumption that reality
for me
gets its realness from my consent; and underlying that assumption, guaranteeing its practical effectiveness, is the simple fact that I can commit suicide when I truly find life unbearable—"the door is always open." And here this solution does not imply, as it does, for instance, in Camus, a kind of cosmic rebellion against the human condition; to Epictetus, such a rebellion would be entirely pointless, since "it is impossible that what happens should be other than it is."
⁶⁰
It is unthinkable because even an absolute negation depends on the sheer inexplicable thereness of all that is, including myself, and Epictetus nowhere demands an explanation or justification of the inexplicable. Hence, as Augustine will later argue,
⁶¹
those who believe they choose non-being when they commit suicide are in error; they choose a form of being that will come about one day anyhow and they choose peace, which of course is only a form of being.

The sole force that can hinder this basic, active consent given by the will is the will itself. Hence the criterion for right conduct is: "Will to be pleased, you with yourself' ("
thelēson aresai autos seautó").
And Epictetus adds: "Will to appear noble to the god" ("
thelēson kalos phanēnai tó theó
"),
⁶²
but the addendum is actually redundant, for Epictetus does not believe in a transcendent God but holds that the soul is godlike and that the god is "within you, you are a fragment of him."
⁶³
The willing ego, it turns out, is no less split in two than the Socratic two-in-one of Plato's dialogue of thought. But, as we saw with Paul, the two in the willing ego are far from enjoying a friendly, harmonious intercourse with each other, although in Epictetus their frankly antagonistic relationship does not subject the self to the extremes of despair that we hear so much of in Paul's lamentation. Epictetus characterizes their relation as an ongoing "struggle"
(agón),
an Olympic contest demanding an ever-attentive suspicion of myself by myself: "In one word, [the philosopher, who always looks to himself for benefit and harm] keeps watch and guard on himself
as his own
enemy
[hós echthron heautou
], lying in wait for him."
⁶⁴
We need only remind ourselves of Aristotle's insight ("all friendly feelings toward others are an extension of the friendly feelings a person has for himself") to gauge ** distance the human mind has traveled since antiquity.