Epictetus - the philosophy of choice

Monday, 4 September 2006 by Marcus Aquinas.

Many years ago, my parents gave me some old books that had been laying around the house and no one had read in years. For the most part, they were books containing important pieces by various philosophers from the ancient Greeks to the 20th century and were not the sort of thing that a young buck would find terribly interesting. But I’d dig into them from time to time just to give the synapses a workout. Among these philosophical writings was “The Manual” by Epictetus, sometimes called the “spokesman” of the Stoic philosophers. At the beginning of “The Manual,” Epictetus first introduced me to the concept of binary thinking.

For the non-geeks out there, binary only contains two states: 1 and 0. Something is either on or off, true or false, black or white, greater than or not greater than, etc. There isn’t any middle ground because the number system doesn’t permit anything other than one thing or its opposite. Here, then, is the introduction to “The Manual”:

Of all existing things some are in our power, and other are not in our power. In our power are thought, impulse, will to get and will to avoid, and, in a word, everyhing which is our own doing. Things not in our power include the body, property, reputation, office, and, in a word, eveyrhing whcih is not our own doing. Thing in our power are by nature free, unhindered, untrammelled; things not in our power are weak, servile, subject to hinderance, dependent on others. Remember then that if you imatching that what is naturally slavis is free, and what is naturally another’s is your own, you will be hampered, you will mourn, you will be put to confusion, you will blame gods and men; but if you thing that only your own belongs to you, and that what is another’s is indeed another’s, no one will ever put compulsion or hinderance on you, you will blame none, you will accuse none, you will do nothing against your will, no one will harm you, you will have no enemy, for no harm can touch you.

Essentially, everything that happens falls into one of two categories: it’s either something you can control or it’s something that you can’t control. In many ways, it’s the serenity prayer: “grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

To put it in modern terms, Epictetus is essentially saying that everything comes down to what you choose it to be. Think about it — if there’s a meteor hurtling toward your home at this very red-hot moment, there isn’t anything you can do to change that. The meteor will do what it will do and all you can control is whether you and your stuff are going to be there when it hits. If the company is looking at downsizing, you can’t control the decision on whether you’ll have a job tomorrow or not. All you can do is influence the choices of the person making that decision: is keeping you on the payroll more beneficial than not keeping you on the payroll? But in the final analysis, that decision is completely out of your control. “Mandatory” meetings? Same thing. You don’t have to go. But is the bit of extra free time you gain worth the job you may lose? “Do these jeans make my butt look fat?” (Personally, I think you’re hosed either way.)

This is something that my students have a hard time getting their heads around: “Mister, do we have to do the assignment?” Answer: “No, of course not. The only thing you have to do is be born and die; everything else is optional and comes down to choosing the consequence that you prefer.”

So, all of this begs the question. If we are what we choose to be, where does this leave non-protected speech? If I choose to phrase something in a particular way and you choose to take offense, is that my problem or is it yours? Granted, if my words are calculated to get a rise out of you and I get a punch in the nose for my efforts, then I suppose that I got what I wanted. But if I tell a joke that you find offensive, is it not your choice to be offended rather than to see the humor that was intended? Why am I, then, responsible for your choice?

 So rather than, “You have insulted me,” should you not be saying, “I choose to give you power over how I feel”? Or, perhaps more precisely, “I choose to be insulted/offended because in this way I do not have to expend any effort to control myself or understand why I feel as I do.” It is a heady feeling to know that I, a simple techno-geek, can have such power over others. But it must also be true that I have that power because someone gave it to me.

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