Discourses, Fragments, Manual

One of the Stoic greats, Epictetus teaches you how to confront pain in life. The predecessor of Marcus Aurelius that I had read earlier, Epictetus was the former-slave-turned-philosopher who forever influenced imperial Rome, and is one of the key contributors to Stoicism’s dominance in late Rome. At its core, Epictetus’ Stoicism deals with being in control of one’s will, and submitting to Nature (the Stoic pantheistic god) as means to deal with the undesirables and pains in life. The main work I read was Discourses, a long and somewhat repetitive collection of lecture notes compiled by Epictetus’ student Arrian. The abridged form is called Manual (or Enchiridion), and if you don’t have time to read 400 pages in Discourses, it’s a good summary of key ideas. Although Discourses is often repetitive, it is a good way to get ideas solidified in memory and I found that it was helpful in that regard.

In the book, I ingrained two fundamental ideas of Stoicism in my mind. The first of which is that the will is the only possession that one has and it’s the most important. The consequence of this is that as Epictetus notes, that no external facts cause distress in our mind; our judgments on those external facts do. So, in training the mind to be disciplined, we can be free to pursue external things but not be so engrossed as to lose our freedom of mind over them. The second point can be summed up by a line in a poem of Cleanthes (another great Stoic): “Lead me, O Zeus, and lead me, Destiny”. In self-surrendering and aligning our will with what naturally happens, we avoid the disappointment that comes from failing in what we want. However, the danger of this thought is that it can lead to defeatism, as in saying “everything is natural, I can stop trying at life”. Epictetus doesn’t support defeatism though, as he teaches for us to be passionate about the process of trying at something but be detached in reacting to the results, a best of both worlds. Putting these two ideas in practice takes great mental discipline, and I’ll have to see what I can do to practice some of this discipline regularly.