7 ms·

Review of Epictetus: The Complete Works

68 points by diodorus 3y ago

seizethecheese 3y ago
Reading Epictetus’ Discourses has had a profoundly positive impact on my life. One note, the authors claims Arrian wrote The Discourses over four books, but in reality it was eight and only four survive. This calls into question the scholarship here.
- readthenotes1 3y ago
  Epictetus has a lot of good things to pass on.
- cocacola1 3y ago
  > One note, the authors claims Arrian wrote The Discourses over four books, but in reality it was eight and only four survive. This calls into question the scholarship here. So four books? Seems to be a bit of a distinction without a difference.
- acabal 3y ago
  That, and her characterization of Marcus Aurelius as a "misanthropic, warmongering emperor" and his Meditations as having been written "for his own edification" as if it were some kind of selfish or self-aggrandizing work worthy of dismissal. As far as I was aware, Marcus Aurelius had a reputation as a wise and temperate philosopher king in his lifetime, and was later considered the last of the "five good emperors". If he was a warmonger then let us remind ourselves that even in the modern day our leaders have spent the last hundred years waging war somewhere or another in order to maintain a sphere of power too. And Meditations was in reality his private diary - like any regular person would routinely keep - and was not intended to ever be published. Characterizing it like she did is uncharitable at best and misleading at worst. (Meditations is also an excellent read for those interested in Stoic philosophy.)
  - nverno 3y ago
    That line stuck in my craw as well. I can't reconcile her characterization of the man or what I've read from Meditations- it seems almost polar opposite to how I would describe it. In my mind he was about as ideal a leader one could hope for (judging from his writings alone).
  - Viliam1234 3y ago
    > the last of the "five good emperors" This is less of a compliment than it may sound like, because it is his own fault that he was the last. The previous good emperors each selected their own equally good successors (by adopting them, so that they technically became their "heirs"). Marcus ignored this tradition and left the empire to his crazy biological son, who immediately ruined it.
    - vondur 3y ago
      I don't think Marcus Aurelius had much of a choice in the matter. If he didn't leave his son as heir, a civil war would have broken out. He probably looked at the example of the year of the four emperors and decided that was a worse choice...
- ycombinete 3y ago
  The great thing about the lrb is that their authors are usually subject matter experts, but so are many of their readers! Both can be quite opinionated. You can look forward to some acerbic letters about this article in the next edition (and maybe even a response from Willis too).
seneca 3y ago
> This is the kind of problem that Epictetus’ version of Stoicism is designed to address: a privileged man is disturbed by the idea that he does not have complete control over every element of his existence. The gall of a modern academic to downplay the teachings of one of the greatest philosophers in history, himself a former slave, in these childish terms really shouldn't surprise me, but it still does. One of the most privileged and spoiled classes of people in history, and they just can't seem to help themselves but to attack those that actually accomplished things.
- aloneindecember 3y ago
  I agree, and your username is hilarious and appropriate given this subject matter.
- syntheweave 3y ago
  It's a certain axe to grind that the post-Enlightenment academy has had from the beginning with virtue ethics: if we are to be utilitarian, or act according to the Categorical Imperative, then our duty is to attain omniscient knowledge for our own good. Acting within norms to attain virtue, as Epictetus would have it, is out. The way in which it's out changes according to which norms we want to critique, but the rhetoric of the article follows from there, and it's easy to turn that against the article itself by criticizing the norms it prefers(broadly, post-structural feminism) as a virtue signal. Wilson has also translated and critiqued Seneca, according to her wiki article. So I would see this writing as the next entry in a career-making exercise.
- marcusverus 3y ago
  Yeah a lot of her commentary seemed… off. Marcus Aurelius (who constantly urges the reader not to turn away from his fellow man, nor even to hold a man’s foibles against him!) is a misanthrope. Epictetus (who instructs the reader not to shed a tear in the event of a child’s death) is oh-so-kind!
- emmelaich 3y ago
  Did you misread that? She's not saying Epictetus is privileged. As a lauded translator of the Odyssey, (and soon the Iliad) I'm inclined towards a very good faith reading of her article.
bikingbismuth 3y ago
I’m not a professionally trained philosopher, but I have read and taken a lot of value from ancient stoic writers (Seneca in particular). I remember reading Seneca’s letters and feeling frustrated that he almost seems to get close to a denouncement of slavery, but the argument turns into more of a cosmopolitan one (in the stoic sense of the word). Having grown up poor (but checking some privilege boxes), when I first discovered stoicism it really helped me comes to grips with an unjust world. As I have climbed the social ladder, I find that the more things/privileges I have the harder it is to be stoic. I suppose this is why I like Seneca so much. He feels like a rich dude (I’m not rich but comparatively well off) who is working on not being a bad person. A lot of what I have taken from stoicism and Buddhism are lessons on how to develop a compassionate and just mindset. I’m fairly skeptical of reading ancient philosophy through a modern lens. This critique had a weird tone and it seems the author might be have an issue with modern proponents of pop-stoicism and a lack of impetus for collective action. I have seen a couple similar arguments going on in Buddhism around the idea of “big-tent” Buddhism and the question of whether or not Buddhism advocates for activism.
mitchbob 3y ago
https://archive.ph/zqs7z https://archive.ph/zqs7z
JenrHywy 3y ago
Although this article definitely some weird "modern academic" aspects, overall I feel like many of the commenters here are being uncharitable towards the author. Epictetus is by far my favourite of the Stoics I've read. The Enchiridion is short, acerbic, enlightening and funny. You don't get that much in philosophy, and I think that author clearly appreciates that. That said, in the end I think Nietzsche is right in his criticism: Stoicism works, but it limits one's capacity for joy because to tools you use to combat negative emotion unintentionally, but necessarily, limit positive emotion. I practiced Stoicism pretty seriously for a few years and it definitely improved my life, but once you've used it to build a solid emotional foundation, the Stoic tactics (which essentially involve always watching yourself for deviations from the Stoic path) limit your ability to experience extremes of joy. There are elements of Stoicism (like negative visualisation) that are easy to integrate into life and are pretty much only positive, but for me, full-blown Stoicism is something I only bring out when I need to re-establish that solid baseline.
- elliotwagner 3y ago
  could you share some of the books that helped you?
  - RamblingCTO 3y ago
    Not the commenter, but you can read Epictetus directly, very easy. Otherwise How to Be a Stoic by Massimo Pigliucci. Don't read any of that garbage from Ryan Holiday.
    - marginalia_nu 3y ago
      Yeah. I too recommend it. Discourses is a very pleasant read. Epictetus comes off a bit as the "Dr House" of philosophy. He has a very unique tone.
  - JenrHywy 3y ago
    If you're interested in Stoicism, one of the benefits is that you can read (translations of) the actual Roman Stoics. I think the main thing is to find an author the meshes with you. A lot of people love Seneca, but I found him too long-winded and self-important (a bit like Polonious in Hamlet; where the advice may be solid by the delivery distracts from it). My favourite by far is Epictetus. This site[0] has many translations of The Enchiridion side-by-side. I'd read a few of the options, find the one you like and just read that (personally I like Carter, and sometimes Long). It's short - 53 sections which are mostly a paragraph or two. You can knock it over in a few hours. I don't know if this is "optimal", but the approach I took was to read it all through fairly quickly, then re-read one section a day (or so) trying to really understand it. Marcus Aurelius' Meditations is also quite readable if you find a translation you like. It's interesting to read the diary of an emperor as he tried to apply Stoicism to his life, but it didn't teach me anything that I didn't get from The Enchiridion. If you want to ease in with a modern take, I think William Irvine's A Guide to the Good Life is decent, though he makes the mistake of adding his own more complex, and unnecessary concepts on top. 0: https://enchiridion.tasuki.org/ https://enchiridion.tasuki.org/
watwut 3y ago
The comparison of actual article and comments from apparently insulted HN commenter is weird. It is as if they read different article. Or as if HN really took offense on even praising articles if they are not literally fawning in every single sentence.
dash2 3y ago
I want to put some other commenters' discomfort with this article in a clearer form. It's an interesting piece, it tells you a lot, and clearly Emily Wilson has a warm appreciation for Epictetus. But the overall framing seems to be guilty of the condescension of posterity. Specifically, the tone is: "isn't it a shame that Epictetus, despite his wisdom, wrote for other male slave-owners?" There is probably a ton to say about the exact nature of slavery in Ancient Rome, how bad it was, etc. I'm not an expert but for sure everyone can agree that by modern standards slavery was not an acceptable employment institution. Set that to one side. Essentially nobody in Rome believed slavery could be abolished. And everybody in Rome wrote for privileged men. (Maybe because being able to read was, like owning a private jet today, a very expensive privilege.) So if you criticize someone for that, you have to explain why everyone else had the same blinkers. One answer is "of course that's because they were all privileged themselves!" Except Epictetus wasn't! And Romans did challenge slavery, but in different ways. St Paul doesn't say "let us have a revolution to abolish slavery" but he does say that in Christ there is neither slave nor free. It seems pretty likely that a Roman analogue of the Communist Manifesto - a call for the political reorganization of society - simply could not have been written. Perhaps Roman society was not centralized in the way that 19th century capitalism was, and so simply wasn't amenable to top-down regime change in the way modern societies may be. Or perhaps the intellectual resources of modern social science simply weren't available that would enable people to think in this register. If so, complaining that Romans didn't write the Communist Manifesto seems ahistorical, and kind of silly.
amelius 3y ago
I wonder what our emotions would be like from an evolutionary perspective if all our ancestors practiced stoicism from an early age. Would we be reasonable people?
- Viliam1234 3y ago
  From evolutionary perspective, merely "doing things for generations" has no direct impact on genes. (Otherwise, Jewish boys would be born without the foreskin.) However, it can have an indirect impact, if doing things is also associated with rewarding the people who do the things, and/or punishing the people who don't. For example, people living in a civilization have "domesticated" themselves by killing the criminals, i.e. the people who were least capable/willing to follow the rules of the society. So the answer depends on whether our hypothetical stoic ancestors in the alternative universe also rewarded each other for being stoic, and or punished those who failed to be sufficiently stoic. Because there would always be a few exceptions to the rule, for example people with new mutations. If the stoic ancestors consistently rewarded the people who demonstrated stoic virtues, for example by considering the virtues necessary for holding an important office or inheriting family property -- so that their more stoic kids would on average have better jobs, higher status, more money, and more kids that survived to adulthood (regardless of how much they would proclaim that things such as jobs, status, money, and kids don't really matter), and their less stoic kids on average ended up poor and childless -- then today, most of us would be genetically selected to be highly stoical. (Or perhaps, highly stoical until we safely get to the positions of power, and then corrupted by it.) However, being more stoic wouldn't necessarily make us reasonable -- perhaps the stoic civilization would develop their own unreasonable behaviors. For example, I could imagine a stoic society that opposed science and progress because "meh, we don't need all that fancy new stuff; the true philosophers are content with whatever they have". Or they wouldn't develop medicine and cure diseases because "the only important thing is whether in your mind you are free"; etc. On the other hand, if the stoic ancestors were like "eh, I don't care if that guy wants to be a king; I am okay with being a slave as long as my mind is free", then the stoics would be quickly outcompeted by... whoever showed up for the race.
  - amelius 3y ago

68 points by diodorus 3y ago

Reading Epictetus’ Discourses has had a profoundly positive impact on my life. One note, the authors claims Arrian wrote The Discourses over four books, but in reality it was eight and only four survive. This calls into question the scholarship here.

readthenotes1 3y ago
Epictetus has a lot of good things to pass on.
cocacola1 3y ago
> One note, the authors claims Arrian wrote The Discourses over four books, but in reality it was eight and only four survive. This calls into question the scholarship here. So four books? Seems to be a bit of a distinction without a difference.
acabal 3y ago
That, and her characterization of Marcus Aurelius as a "misanthropic, warmongering emperor" and his Meditations as having been written "for his own edification" as if it were some kind of selfish or self-aggrandizing work worthy of dismissal. As far as I was aware, Marcus Aurelius had a reputation as a wise and temperate philosopher king in his lifetime, and was later considered the last of the "five good emperors". If he was a warmonger then let us remind ourselves that even in the modern day our leaders have spent the last hundred years waging war somewhere or another in order to maintain a sphere of power too. And Meditations was in reality his private diary - like any regular person would routinely keep - and was not intended to ever be published. Characterizing it like she did is uncharitable at best and misleading at worst. (Meditations is also an excellent read for those interested in Stoic philosophy.)
- nverno 3y ago
  That line stuck in my craw as well. I can't reconcile her characterization of the man or what I've read from Meditations- it seems almost polar opposite to how I would describe it. In my mind he was about as ideal a leader one could hope for (judging from his writings alone).
- Viliam1234 3y ago
  > the last of the "five good emperors" This is less of a compliment than it may sound like, because it is his own fault that he was the last. The previous good emperors each selected their own equally good successors (by adopting them, so that they technically became their "heirs"). Marcus ignored this tradition and left the empire to his crazy biological son, who immediately ruined it.
  - vondur 3y ago
    I don't think Marcus Aurelius had much of a choice in the matter. If he didn't leave his son as heir, a civil war would have broken out. He probably looked at the example of the year of the four emperors and decided that was a worse choice...
ycombinete 3y ago
The great thing about the lrb is that their authors are usually subject matter experts, but so are many of their readers! Both can be quite opinionated. You can look forward to some acerbic letters about this article in the next edition (and maybe even a response from Willis too).

seneca 3y ago

> This is the kind of problem that Epictetus’ version of Stoicism is designed to address: a privileged man is disturbed by the idea that he does not have complete control over every element of his existence. The gall of a modern academic to downplay the teachings of one of the greatest philosophers in history, himself a former slave, in these childish terms really shouldn't surprise me, but it still does. One of the most privileged and spoiled classes of people in history, and they just can't seem to help themselves but to attack those that actually accomplished things.

aloneindecember 3y ago
I agree, and your username is hilarious and appropriate given this subject matter.
syntheweave 3y ago
It's a certain axe to grind that the post-Enlightenment academy has had from the beginning with virtue ethics: if we are to be utilitarian, or act according to the Categorical Imperative, then our duty is to attain omniscient knowledge for our own good. Acting within norms to attain virtue, as Epictetus would have it, is out. The way in which it's out changes according to which norms we want to critique, but the rhetoric of the article follows from there, and it's easy to turn that against the article itself by criticizing the norms it prefers(broadly, post-structural feminism) as a virtue signal. Wilson has also translated and critiqued Seneca, according to her wiki article. So I would see this writing as the next entry in a career-making exercise.
marcusverus 3y ago
Yeah a lot of her commentary seemed… off. Marcus Aurelius (who constantly urges the reader not to turn away from his fellow man, nor even to hold a man’s foibles against him!) is a misanthrope. Epictetus (who instructs the reader not to shed a tear in the event of a child’s death) is oh-so-kind!
emmelaich 3y ago
Did you misread that? She's not saying Epictetus is privileged. As a lauded translator of the Odyssey, (and soon the Iliad) I'm inclined towards a very good faith reading of her article.

bikingbismuth 3y ago

I’m not a professionally trained philosopher, but I have read and taken a lot of value from ancient stoic writers (Seneca in particular). I remember reading Seneca’s letters and feeling frustrated that he almost seems to get close to a denouncement of slavery, but the argument turns into more of a cosmopolitan one (in the stoic sense of the word). Having grown up poor (but checking some privilege boxes), when I first discovered stoicism it really helped me comes to grips with an unjust world. As I have climbed the social ladder, I find that the more things/privileges I have the harder it is to be stoic. I suppose this is why I like Seneca so much. He feels like a rich dude (I’m not rich but comparatively well off) who is working on not being a bad person. A lot of what I have taken from stoicism and Buddhism are lessons on how to develop a compassionate and just mindset. I’m fairly skeptical of reading ancient philosophy through a modern lens. This critique had a weird tone and it seems the author might be have an issue with modern proponents of pop-stoicism and a lack of impetus for collective action. I have seen a couple similar arguments going on in Buddhism around the idea of “big-tent” Buddhism and the question of whether or not Buddhism advocates for activism.

mitchbob 3y ago

https://archive.ph/zqs7z https://archive.ph/zqs7z

JenrHywy 3y ago

Although this article definitely some weird "modern academic" aspects, overall I feel like many of the commenters here are being uncharitable towards the author. Epictetus is by far my favourite of the Stoics I've read. The Enchiridion is short, acerbic, enlightening and funny. You don't get that much in philosophy, and I think that author clearly appreciates that. That said, in the end I think Nietzsche is right in his criticism: Stoicism works, but it limits one's capacity for joy because to tools you use to combat negative emotion unintentionally, but necessarily, limit positive emotion. I practiced Stoicism pretty seriously for a few years and it definitely improved my life, but once you've used it to build a solid emotional foundation, the Stoic tactics (which essentially involve always watching yourself for deviations from the Stoic path) limit your ability to experience extremes of joy. There are elements of Stoicism (like negative visualisation) that are easy to integrate into life and are pretty much only positive, but for me, full-blown Stoicism is something I only bring out when I need to re-establish that solid baseline.

elliotwagner 3y ago
could you share some of the books that helped you?
- RamblingCTO 3y ago
  Not the commenter, but you can read Epictetus directly, very easy. Otherwise How to Be a Stoic by Massimo Pigliucci. Don't read any of that garbage from Ryan Holiday.
  - marginalia_nu 3y ago
    Yeah. I too recommend it. Discourses is a very pleasant read. Epictetus comes off a bit as the "Dr House" of philosophy. He has a very unique tone.
- JenrHywy 3y ago
  If you're interested in Stoicism, one of the benefits is that you can read (translations of) the actual Roman Stoics. I think the main thing is to find an author the meshes with you. A lot of people love Seneca, but I found him too long-winded and self-important (a bit like Polonious in Hamlet; where the advice may be solid by the delivery distracts from it). My favourite by far is Epictetus. This site[0] has many translations of The Enchiridion side-by-side. I'd read a few of the options, find the one you like and just read that (personally I like Carter, and sometimes Long). It's short - 53 sections which are mostly a paragraph or two. You can knock it over in a few hours. I don't know if this is "optimal", but the approach I took was to read it all through fairly quickly, then re-read one section a day (or so) trying to really understand it. Marcus Aurelius' Meditations is also quite readable if you find a translation you like. It's interesting to read the diary of an emperor as he tried to apply Stoicism to his life, but it didn't teach me anything that I didn't get from The Enchiridion. If you want to ease in with a modern take, I think William Irvine's A Guide to the Good Life is decent, though he makes the mistake of adding his own more complex, and unnecessary concepts on top. 0: https://enchiridion.tasuki.org/ https://enchiridion.tasuki.org/

watwut 3y ago

The comparison of actual article and comments from apparently insulted HN commenter is weird. It is as if they read different article. Or as if HN really took offense on even praising articles if they are not literally fawning in every single sentence.

dash2 3y ago

I want to put some other commenters' discomfort with this article in a clearer form. It's an interesting piece, it tells you a lot, and clearly Emily Wilson has a warm appreciation for Epictetus. But the overall framing seems to be guilty of the condescension of posterity. Specifically, the tone is: "isn't it a shame that Epictetus, despite his wisdom, wrote for other male slave-owners?" There is probably a ton to say about the exact nature of slavery in Ancient Rome, how bad it was, etc. I'm not an expert but for sure everyone can agree that by modern standards slavery was not an acceptable employment institution. Set that to one side. Essentially nobody in Rome believed slavery could be abolished. And everybody in Rome wrote for privileged men. (Maybe because being able to read was, like owning a private jet today, a very expensive privilege.) So if you criticize someone for that, you have to explain why everyone else had the same blinkers. One answer is "of course that's because they were all privileged themselves!" Except Epictetus wasn't! And Romans did challenge slavery, but in different ways. St Paul doesn't say "let us have a revolution to abolish slavery" but he does say that in Christ there is neither slave nor free. It seems pretty likely that a Roman analogue of the Communist Manifesto - a call for the political reorganization of society - simply could not have been written. Perhaps Roman society was not centralized in the way that 19th century capitalism was, and so simply wasn't amenable to top-down regime change in the way modern societies may be. Or perhaps the intellectual resources of modern social science simply weren't available that would enable people to think in this register. If so, complaining that Romans didn't write the Communist Manifesto seems ahistorical, and kind of silly.

amelius 3y ago

I wonder what our emotions would be like from an evolutionary perspective if all our ancestors practiced stoicism from an early age. Would we be reasonable people?

Viliam1234 3y ago
From evolutionary perspective, merely "doing things for generations" has no direct impact on genes. (Otherwise, Jewish boys would be born without the foreskin.) However, it can have an indirect impact, if doing things is also associated with rewarding the people who do the things, and/or punishing the people who don't. For example, people living in a civilization have "domesticated" themselves by killing the criminals, i.e. the people who were least capable/willing to follow the rules of the society. So the answer depends on whether our hypothetical stoic ancestors in the alternative universe also rewarded each other for being stoic, and or punished those who failed to be sufficiently stoic. Because there would always be a few exceptions to the rule, for example people with new mutations. If the stoic ancestors consistently rewarded the people who demonstrated stoic virtues, for example by considering the virtues necessary for holding an important office or inheriting family property -- so that their more stoic kids would on average have better jobs, higher status, more money, and more kids that survived to adulthood (regardless of how much they would proclaim that things such as jobs, status, money, and kids don't really matter), and their less stoic kids on average ended up poor and childless -- then today, most of us would be genetically selected to be highly stoical. (Or perhaps, highly stoical until we safely get to the positions of power, and then corrupted by it.) However, being more stoic wouldn't necessarily make us reasonable -- perhaps the stoic civilization would develop their own unreasonable behaviors. For example, I could imagine a stoic society that opposed science and progress because "meh, we don't need all that fancy new stuff; the true philosophers are content with whatever they have". Or they wouldn't develop medicine and cure diseases because "the only important thing is whether in your mind you are free"; etc. On the other hand, if the stoic ancestors were like "eh, I don't care if that guy wants to be a king; I am okay with being a slave as long as my mind is free", then the stoics would be quickly outcompeted by... whoever showed up for the race.
- amelius 3y ago