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By Russell Schoch Tom Wolfe's latest novel, A Man in Full, features a character whose life is transformed when he reads the Stoic philosopher Epictetus. In early 1999, the novel got a lot of press, with headlines like: "The Stoics have a Stand on Everything, even on Dinner Parties and Sex" (New York Times) and "Epictetus the Stoic is Hot Again Thanks to Tom Wolfe" (Chicago Tribune). At the same time, Berkeley classics professor Tony Long was teaching a seminar on Epictetus. "My students were far more responsive to his Stoic discourses than I had dared to hope," he says, "and, by the end of the semester, I myself was thinking about little else." Earlier this year, the fruits of that seminar appeared in Long's new book, Epictetus: A Stoic and Socratic Guide to Life (Oxford University Press). Long says that Epictetus, whom he calls "one of the most memorable and influential figures of Greco-Roman antiquity," has never gone out of print, or completely out of style. Epictetus was absorbed into Christianity, read widely in the Renaissance, and enjoyed great popularity in 19th-century America. "His emphasis on autonomy and freedom resonated well with the nonconformist individualism of Emerson and Thoreau," Long says. Walt Whitman wrote, at the end of his life: "Epictetus is the one of all my old cronies who has lasted to this day," adding that when he first read the Roman Stoic, "It was like being born again." Epictetus ("epic-TEE-tus") was born a slave in the middle of the first century A.D., in what is today southwestern Turkey. Brought to Rome, he was set free and first studied and then taught philosophy; when philosophy was banned in Rome, he went to Nicopolis, near the Ionian Sea, where he taught until his death around 135 A.D. His writing moved an emperor, Marcus Aurelius, who ascended the imperial throne in 161 A.D. Although the two men never met, Epictetus's philosophy was "a profound influence on the emperor's Stoic Meditations," says Long. "That an ex-slave actually shaped a Roman emperor's deepest thoughts is one of the most remarkable testimonies to the power and applicability of Epictetus’s words." Long adds that "Epictetus scarcely needs updating as an analyst of the psyche's strengths or weaknesses, and as a spokesman for human dignity, autonomy, and integrity." The central Stoic thesis, says Long, is that our God-given reason and ability to self-reflect give us the power to shape our own lives. As Shakespeare put it: "Nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so." Tony Long's introduction to Greek and Roman life came at an early age. He was born just before World War II in Manchester, England, the son of two school teachers. He gained entry to the highly competitive Manchester Grammar School, where, "without consulting me," Long recalls, "my parents put me on what was called the 'classical side.'" This meant that he started learning Latin at the age of 11 and Greek at 13. But, by his own account, he wasn't much of a student in adolescence and didn't know what to do after high school.
For the past three decades, Long has been a leader in the scholarly revival of Stoicism. Although he declared in one of his books, "I am not a Stoic," he says at the end of his new book that Epictetus's take on Stoicism is by far the most interesting and attractive to him. "Epictetus is a thinker we cannot forget, once we have encountered him, because he gets under our skin." We talked to the pipe-smoking classics professor this summer about his favorite Stoic philosopher and about how Epictetus might be a guide to our lives in the 21st century. Have you heard of Jim Stockdale? Ross Perot's Vice-Presidential candidate in 1992? Yes. Before that he served in the Vietnam War, where he was shot down, badly injured, and then kept as a prisoner of war in solitary confinement for several years. I met him quite a number of years ago because I had heard that what kept him alive was his memory of reading Epictetus as an undergraduate at Stanford. He told me that what gave him some kind of hold on sanity was Epictetus's emphasis on your capacity to draw on your inner resources when the world outside could not be blacker. Stockdale was the inspiration for the main character in Tom Wolfe's novel A Man in Full. The thing I found most interesting was when Stockdale told me that, in such a horrible situation, what is most devastating is not the physical pain, but that you are inclined to think of yourself as utterly worthless. The question is: How do you retain any self-respect, any sense of your own dignity, under such circumstances? How did Epictetus help him? Because Epictetus typically uses similar situations as the context in which to say: Look, even when things outside look as dire as they could be, you are still capable of thinking of yourself as a real human being who has something to contribute, to yourself and to the world. That's tough. Yes, it's tough because he's saying that we can't change the external circumstances, the world. But he doesn't think that external circumstances ever have any necessary effect on us. It's always we who interpret our circumstances in a certain way, and who therefore make our own happiness or misfortune. Let me ask about a difficult situation all people will find themselves in at some point: the loss of a loved one. What would Epictetus say about that? Epictetus would not try to rationalize the external situation. He would accept the fact that this is a grievous and shocking loss. But that loss is something you have to interpret yourself. The typical way to respond to such a situation is to say: Something terrible has happened to me. I've lost my wife or husband or child. Therefore, I am devastated. But that is precisely the inference Epictetus would say is illegitimate. Why? It's only legitimate if one allows it to be. What can you say--I'm just going to mourn? I’m going to feel terribly sorry for myself? I'm simply going to dwell on having lost a loved one? Or--I have a limited life span; something I would desperately prefer not to have happened has happened. How can I, in these circumstances, continue to go on with my life--not just my personal life, but my community's life--in the most fruitful way? That's what he would say. Let me use a more everyday problem: Let’s say your boss is a jerk. What would Epictetus counsel? He would say something like: "That's the way he is, and there's nothing you are necessarily going to be able to do about it. Let him be an unattractive human being. There's no reason at all why that should have any effect on how you see yourself." I used the word "reason." This is a philosophy that appeals to reason and asks us all the time to look at our reactions to the world in terms of what it's reasonable to think or do. And it's this appeal to reason that is the kind of strength Epictetus is asking us to harness. What's the "reason" nvolved if the boss mistreats his employees? What's "rational" about just letting him be? It's a matter of acknowledging the fact that the world is full of unreasonable people. Why on earth should you expect your boss to be a reasonable person? Your boss is not you. All your responsibility is to make the best of your life, not to try to make the best of somebody else's life. What you--the employee--can do is to try to maintain your own dignity, your own self-respect, not simply give way to anger, which is actually going to be more damaging to you. In fact, you write that "Epictetus believes we never have sound reason for being angry or censorious." Do you believe that? I think most of the situations where we give way to very strong emotion, to passion, we regret later. I'm certainly someone who is quite capable of getting angry, and I usually regret it later. You say in your book that Epictetus believes every moment of one's life is important, is a challenge. I think he wants to say that every moment of one's life is equally important. That seems to me a very interesting thought. Because we surely live an enormous amount on expectation, on the future--"It's going to be great next year because maybe I'll get a raise in salary" or "My son is coming home, and it's going to be wonderful." And, of course, things often don't work out the way we planned or hoped. And also the ordinary tedium of life can be radically changed if you think that your necessary, even boring, business is something that can be done with a certain grace, a certain élan. That's how he wants us to look at the world. Epictetus thinks of being human as a profession. A profession? We think of professionals as having technical skills, and Epictetus uses the word in exactly that kind of way. So what is the profession of being a human being? It's acknowledging your irreducible social identity--that you are positioned in the world with a certain set of relationships--family, work, community, all kinds of relationships. And therefore your profession, as a human being, is to fulfill those relationships in the best possible way. This seems to me an extraordinarily different way of thinking about our identity from our usual idea of the "real me." So we're invited to look at our human identity, our human roles, as a profession, which can be performed well, with skill, or not. Under that description, I think most of us fall short in his judgment because we don’t think of our human identity as a precious gift, which is inviting us and challenging us to perform at the optimum. The notion of being a "professional human being" is, I think, very much the idea of needing to take charge of our own lives, rather than simply treating the world as that which is going to determine who we are. We are to determine who we are. Can you give an example of performing a role well? There's a lovely example of this where Epictetus mentions a mistake he himself made in logic when he was a student. He defended himself by saying: "Well, it's not as if I had killed my father! So what have I done?" And his teacher replied: "You've made the one mistake you could have made in this case." In other words, every situation in life is a kind of performance--to be done well or poorly. The Stoic outlook is not going to say: Some things are important and others less so. It's going to say: Everything you do is important. It's just as important how you greet your wife in the morning as how you teach your students, or take care of your business, or how you vote. Every one of those things can be done well, with grace and reason, or not. Now, he would also say: There's no obligation to live your life well. If you want to be just ordinary, fine; there are plenty of ways of being ordinary. But don't come near me! That sounds elitist. It can sound elitist, but it's a moral elitism, not one of wealth or status. It's the elitism of being able to say: I've tried to live my life as a professional human being. Far from being elitist, I think the message is maximally democratic, or at least egalitarian. It's meant to be accessible to anybody. Another point Epictetus emphasizes is that we need "to make correct use of our impressions." How can we do that? Well, an impression is almost anything that enters our minds, whether it's something we see or hear or that's just flowing in from our imagination or memory. Let's call it a thought. Thoughts are coming to us all the time, and we can't control that process. But what Epictetus wants us to do is to not merely take these impressions as they come--to "follow our first impressions," as we say in English. Which is not to say that that might not be the right course at times, but that we should think about it. One suggestion of his which I find very, very fruitful is: Use your imagination. In a situation of stress or conflict or temptation, he suggests we conjure up new impressions, other impressions. Just as you can switch channels on the television--you don’t have to focus on the one that happens to be on the screen at that moment. That's quite a useful strategy because it will give you time to reflect a bit and perhaps make some kind of comparative assessment of what's going on in your life. Let's say a man is attracted to a woman--but she's married to someone else. How would Epictetus have him manage that impression? He actually uses an example very similar to that. "When such a situation presents itself," he says, "I don't imagine what she would look like undressed; I don't imagine myself snuggling up in bed with her. I just don't follow those impressions." He would suggest instead picturing the consequences of such an action that might, at first and superficially, seem so attractive. So, there are many ways of managing one's impressions. And if we fail? Part of what's engaging about Epictetus is his notion that of course we're going to fail, but that still we must try. You might have one particular temptation, I another; but he sees overcoming weaknesses in one's own nature as engaging in a kind of contest--an Olympic Games. As he says on many occasions, there's nothing to stop you from entering the Olympics every time they come up. But you must go into serious training in order to do so. He thinks we can overcome our weaknesses. Yes, very much so. He uses the paradigm of Socrates, the philosopher who faced an unjust death with courage and without complaint; Socrates as the perfectibility of human nature. Epictetus says: Even if you’re not Socrates, you should try to live as one who wants to be Socrates. He suggests that human beings can, by exertion and total commitment, achieve a wonderful degree of excellence and goodness and happiness. Not "Be like Mike" but "Be like Socrates"? Yes. Few of us have the physical attributes to truly try to be like Michael Jordan. But Epictetus would say that we all have God-given reason and the power of reflection and therefore the opportunity to be as much like Socrates as we possibly can. Let's talk about using Epictetus as a guide to a happy life. What is happiness for him? He has the notion of happiness not as one's momentary, elated mood, but the kind of happiness we would talk about in saying of somebody: "He had a happy life," or "She lived well." Epictetus believes that happiness, really feeling good about yourself, simply cannot be grounded in a life that does not have real moral worth. He's talking not only about mental health but about moral health--or about both: mental-moral health. This, he believes, is the central ingredient in your flourishing, in your happiness. The idea of being happy by having mental-moral health means that you are not going to be pulled one way by, say, self-interest, and another by "duty." Because, if you properly understand your self-interest, you will see that it is not inconsistent with the ethically appropriate thing to do, but quite the opposite. They actually coincide. Now, if you think that putting down your brother or cheating your neighbor is in your self-interest, there's an end to morality. But if self-interest actually involves behaving decently to your brother and not cheating your neighbor, then self-interest and morality are preserved. You don't give up self-interest; the self-interest itself absorbs the moral. This may seem counter-intuitive at first. But that is his way of trying to get us to see that the mental-moral health he's recommending we strive for is a really wonderful, beautiful thing. If we could only grasp this, we would see that it's actually profitable to us; it's not just a case of doing our duty for duty's sake, but a way of actually making us flourish as human beings. Our society today seems to understand "self-interest" as having more to do with me getting mine, forget about the others. Every society has to ask itself: What kind of practices, belief systems, ideologies, and institutions are going to both hold us together as a society and enable the members of our society to live fulfilling lives? If you ask whether we in America today have the kind of institutions, ideologies, and practices that enable us to do that, many people would say that we don't. I think many people feel that organized religion is not delivering the goods, either. And now market capitalism is the primary ideology the whole world is being asked to embrace. It's very hard to see how the ethical, moral health that Epictetus is interested in can match up with an ethos that says competition and individual material success are the dominant values. I'd say Epictetus doesn't stand a chance! Right! [laughs] Maybe he doesn't, but if not, what do we do? We talk about integrity and decency. But what premium do we actually place on these values? Epictetus at least thinks that integrity and decency are actually going to do you good. It's not that you'll do less well by following those guidelines; actually, you will do better. Perhaps the strongest and most distinctive proposal of the ancient philosophical tradition--Plato, Aristotle, the Epicureans, and the Stoics--is the one I've tried to characterize as marrying happiness and self-interest, on the one hand, with the ethical and one's obligation to the community, on the other--and not seeing these in conflict, but realizing that the one cannot properly function without the other. Usually, when someone is said to be "stoic," they are thought of as impervious to physical or emotional pain-stony, perhaps even grim. Is that an accurate conception? It's a total distortion of ancient Stoicism. I think this modern conception came about because Stoicism put an enormous emphasis on how to deal with your emotions, your feelings. That seems very modern. Indeed, yes. But Stoicism doesn't claim that we would be better off with no feelings. It does think that we would be much better off without certain kinds of passions: strong anger, lust, grievous anxiety. The Stoics think those kinds of passions are incompatible with mental and moral health. But kindliness, caution, and friendliness are certainly feelings which Stoics think should be strongly cultivated. What's the difference between these feelings and passions? The main difference is that the Stoic thinks that the passions are always based on a faulty assessment of a situation. You gave me the example of a terrible boss. When you get home at night, you're mad as hell and want to beat him up! Well, the Stoic is going to say: Look, haven’t you misjudged the situation? Haven’t you overestimated the importance of this situation? You’re putting yourself in the power of something or someone else. Instead, you should be saying: Let it go. Let it go because there's something better for you to be doing. What should I be doing instead? Getting on with your life. Turning your attention to something else, something you can do something about. You can't do something about your boss; but you can do something about your passion--you can try to detach from it and think of it as a judgment that's completely exceeded the real importance of the situation for your status as a professional human being. Such passions are seen by the Stoics as being like illnesses. Here again, we're a long way from our modern world. Think of our movies, our media, and also perhaps our counseling sessions. We somehow like people to fly off the handle. We think: "They're alive! They’re real!" But a Stoic, I think, is going to say: These kinds of passions--strong anger, for example--are really illnesses of the soul. Whereas the other kinds of feelings--kindness, say--are well grounded in reason, well grounded in being sensitive about your life and about the lives of those around us. Indeed, without those feelings our lives would be impoverished. Epictetus calls happiness "unimpededness." He loves that word. There's one very vivid example where he imagines the tyrant saying: "I can prevent you from walking." Epictetus responds: "Of course you can chain my legs; but you cannot chain my will. You can't control my intention." And so the unimpededness is entirely focused on an internal disposition-the will, the character, the intentions. It's as if that's what you really are. In fact, that is what you really are, in Epictetus's world. Should people sample Epictetus's world? I think it would be eye-opening for them to do so. My book is not written in a way that says you have to go along with all of this. But Epictetus does offer a radically different value system from one, like ours, which is premised on status and material well-being. And I don't think one can fail to be challenged and stimulated by these ideas--also perhaps provoked, even maddened by some of them. And that surely is a useful thing. That's what philosophy should do. Is that the value of philosophy, as you see it? I’d say that the value of philosophy is to get people to twist their minds in strange directions, to think of the world in a rather different way than they’re accustomed to, and to see if that gives them more options. Epictetus offers all of those opportunities. |
 Photos by Robert Holmgren
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