How We Shape Our Character: Epictetus on Reason, Reasons, and Prohairesis (part 1)

an invited presentation in the speaker series "Reasons, Causes, and Moral Agents", hosted by the Emmy Noether Research Group at Universität of Würzburg

Below is the first part of the transcript of my invited presentation to the Emmy Noether Research Group at the University of Würtzburg. If you would like to watch or listen to the presentation, here is the videorecording.

I'd like to thank you Gareth for bringing me in, reaching out to me. This is a set of topics in the series that I'm very interested in: how do we shape our our character through the interventions that we make? I'd also like to thank the University of Wurzburg, a place I've never been to, although I've been not far from there, as I was stationed in Germany many years ago when I was a soldier I was in Furth (which is a good ways from from Würzburg). I'm hoping someday after Covid is past to to get over there, and that would be quite quite fun.

So the the theme of the series is really quite a good one. I think it's a very rich and provocative topic that, as you can see by the other people who are in the series, can be looked at from a number of different perspectives or thinkers or schools of philosophy. I thought I would I would focus in on the Stoics, and in particular Epictetus, for a few reasons that I'll get to shortly.

But first I'd like to like bring up just one line from his his works. This is in the Discourses, book 1, chapter 15. He tells us that each person's own life, their bios, is the subject matter, the hulē, literally the the “stuff” that you work on, of the art of living. And that's that's really what we're looking at here. How do we how do we live well? Or you might say it in another way: how do we move from living in a crappy deficient way, to a way that's that's less so?

So when I proposed this, I thought it would be worthwhile to focus on the Stoic School, in part because the Stoics are all about reasons in a number of interconnected manners. I mean you could call the Stoics “rationalists” of a sort, if you want to. I'm not going to presume any great background on anybody's part with the Stoics, or Epictetus in particular. So there are a few things I'd like to say about them.

Another reason I wanted to bring them up is that ,after largely being ignored or misinterpreted in academic philosophy since roughly the early 19th century — we're talking about Hegel, and just a little bit before this. Hegel is a great misinterpreter of the Stoics as is Alasdair McIntyre, who gets criticized by Anthony long for precisely that. But there's been a lot of attention and interest devoted to the Stoics in the last half century in academic fora. And then in the last two decades I think you could say there has been a continually growing contemporary interest in Stoicism in a popular sense. So it's it's um worth figuring out what did they actually think

Why are we focusing on Epictetus in particular? Well, one reason is that he's my favorite Stoic philosopher, so if I'm giving the talk, why not? But the ways in which he reinterprets Stoicism also fit very nicely with the theme of this talk series. And he's also quite influential on later philosophers. So I think that's another good reason to talk about him.

My plan is to say a few general things about the Stoic school, some of the distinctive aspects of their viewpoints, and talk about the importance of the rational or ruling part in their anthropology, and then we'll turn to Epictetus.

I call him a “conservative stoic innovator” He's reinterpreting several key ideas that are going to be quite important for us, including that of prohairesis. The bulk of the talk, the idea that I originally pitched to Gareth, was Epictetus's views on how we structure prohairesis through practical reasoning, as well as through its own activity of volition, making some reasons matter more or less for ourselves. So there's reason itself and then there's reasons, and the prohairesis plays a really important role in that.

I think that we'll have plenty of time for Q&A, which can be as far ranging as as you like once we're done. But in order to not have our collective eyes all glaze over, I thought we would take a few breaks in the course of the talk, and do some you know Q&A and discussion at particular points, just to make sure everybody's on track, and also to break it up a little bit. So that by the end of the talk you're still all paying attention and engaged. I've been in many, many academic conferences. I know my own limits when it comes to endurance that way. So it's kind of good to set things up that way

So the Stoic school, right — who who are these people? It arises in Athens in roughly the third Century BCE. There's this guy Zeno of Citium, and you might know the story about him having a “fortunate shipwreck.” He loses all of his investment in royal purple, the dye. He literally sees his fortune ebbing away into the the Mediterranean Sea, and then he begins looking for something to do. He goes to a bookseller's stall. He reads a book about Socrates in Xenophon, and says: “Where can I find a guy like this?” And the bookseller says: “See that guy over there, Crates? Go talk to him.”

And so he begins studying with members of three Socratic schools: Crates the Cynic, Polemo the Academic, and Stillpo the Megarian. And he winds up producing a new synthesis of his own, something that is really going to catch on. Originally they're just called the Zenonians, but then they get called the people of the Stoa, because that's where they would gather. And he gathers an entire school to himself, and it's oriented around attaining happiness the way a lot of ancient virtue ethics is.

He brings in an idea that's not unique to the Stoics, but the Stoics certainly do a lot with living in accordance with nature, virtue as being the only good, vice as being the only bad, and then other things being indifferent. One of the handouts that I've you provided is about that very topic “The Good The Bad and The Indifferent in Stoic Moral Theory,” which is kind of distinctive, as opposed to say Aristotelians or Platonists, or you know definitely Epicureans who would say that pleasure is a good.

The Stoics will say pleasure is nice, but it's not a good per se. It's an indifferent one that we prefer, but no amount of pleasure is actually going to make you happy, or good, or anything like that. Likewise no amount of pleasure is going to make you bad, so they're not anti-pleasure or anything like that.

As you see with certain of the Cynics and a lot of the ancient schools, Stoicism can be understood as what Pierre Hadot famously calls a “philosophy as a way of life.” There's other ways of talking about this. Michel Foucault talks about “technologies of the self”, Alasdair MacIntyre talks about “tradition-constituted rationalities”. And Stoicism is one of those.

It's something that's not only studied but but lived, and there's a dialectic between the theory and the practice. You can as Epictetus says read as many books of Chrysippus you'd like (now we can't of course, because they're all lost but back in his time you could), but that's not actually going to transform into action, and you're not fully understanding Chrysippus if you're not working through these ideas in your your ordinary life.

There's a continued development of the school. It becomes one of the major schools of antiquity, with a lot of cool developments that are happening because they're engaging with the other schools in argument, and debate, and discussion, and every once in a while taking an idea that they like from them, which is pretty par for the course in ancient philosophy

We typically distinguish it into an older Stoa, a middle Stoa, and then a late or Roman Stoa. The old Stoa, Zeno gets that started, and then there's a clear line of succession with Cleanthes, Chrysippus, Zeno of Tarsus, Diogenes of Babylon, Antipater of Tarsus, and they don't all get along with each other. Or they they do get along but they don't all agree with each othe. There's some famous debates that happen.

For example Diogenes and Antipater differ on the matter of whether you can effectively price gouge. Is that okay to do? Is that ethical? Diogenes says yes. Antipater says definitely not. There's a lot of interesting back and forth stuff going in the middle Stoa. Panaetius, the last of the scholarchs, who relocates to Rhodes. Posidonius among others. There tends to be a lot more engagement with the other schools

Now unfortunately, when it comes to what the old and the middle Stoas, we don't have any of their books. We have at best passages that are being cited, or things that are derived from them like Panaetius’ On Duties. It's taken by Cicero and becomes the core for Cicero's book On Duties, but we know that Cicero's book goes beyond Panaetius’ stuff, so it's really what the later or Roman Stoa that we have literature left from

And as happens with philosophical schools, over the course of centuries they're responding to new situations, like living in a Roman Empire run by an autocrat like Caesar, as Epictetus will say. They're they're rethinking the doctrines. There's a continual development that's going on. The key people that are associated with that that we have literature from would be Seneca, who we have the most of, and then Epictetus would be the second. Musonius Rufus, Epictetus's teacher, we have some of his stuff. We also have Marcus Aurelius the Roman Emperor, and we have Hierocles, some of his stuff as well, and bits and pieces of other things here and there

The stoic school is going to disappear as an independent school by the Middle Ages, but in part that's because it's quite successful in getting some of its ideas adopted by Christian thinkers. You'll see a lot of references to the Stoics in say Boethius or Augustine, even Thomas Aquinas who kind of gets them wrong. We'll talk about the Stoics at different points. Then in the in the early modern era, we see a recovery of texts, and we see a reawakening of interest in Stoicism. So there's quite a lot of influence in early modern philosophy and the Renaissance.

So what do the Stoics actually think about things. Unsurprisingly like most ancient schools of philosophy they looked at human beings as being the rational animal. So this fits in very well. We have reason. We are going to give reasons.And we're not the only rational beings for the ancient stoics, because there's also God with a capital G you could say, Zeus who is the whole of the cosmos, an idea that most modern Stoics kind of put aside. It's a bit implausible in the present.

There's also gods lowercase g, that we can think of as doing the role of angels in later Christian thought, or the daimones in neoplatonic thought. They're kind of responsible for getting things done within the cosmos but they're not they're not in charge and the Stoics hold out this prospect, because we're rational animals, we participate within what Epictetus and Seneca will call a commonwealth of human beings and the gods. That's our higher nature.

They're also materialists. There's inert matter. There's pneuma or this force that that connects things together and makes things happen, which can be more or less complexly articulated, and it can go through a number of different stages. If you're familiar with with neoplatonic ideas about degrees of being, the Stoics have basically the same thing going on. There's just bare being, plants who grow but they're not sentient, animals, and then there's rational beings like us and the gods. This may be something that we want to discuss a little bit later on.

They're also determinists of a sort. I mean we would strictly say that they're compatibilists, but their compatibilism is often quite difficult to understand how it's supposed to work. We're again a bit handicapped by not having Chrysippus to read because he talked quite a bit about this. Epictetus clearly thinks that we have freedom.Because he talks about it all the time, so there is a causal determinism and yet at the same time we can modify that. We can we have a little bit of Freedom that we can use to to change the conditions of things. Or another way you can think about it is we can be self-causing in certain respects, or if you like an older terminology we can be self-moved movers, but only to a certain degree.

A perhaps more distinctive commitment that's really important here, so if you know Plato, if you know Aristotle, they have a psychology that we call a faculty psychology, where Plato for example has the rational part of the soul, the appetites, and then this middle part, thumos (and it's difficult to translate effectively, the spirited, the passionate, the incandescent part of the soul). But each of these is like a bit that does its own thing right? And the appetites are totally irrational. The thumotic part can listen to reason but it's not truly rational. The rational part is rational.

The Stoic see things differently. So the Stoics think that we have basically eight faculties. Five of them are the senses, so we can put them aside because all they do is like register information and maybe seek out information. And then there's the faculty of reproduction, not particularly important for what we're looking at, the faculty of speech, and then there's this eighth faculty that they call the hegemonikon, the ruling part. This is what we would call the mind proper. When Seneca is talking about it he'll call it the animus in Latin. Epictetus is going to, you might say, widen its scope a little bit, and this is where we find reason or rationality in our other intellectual functions. So it's definitely the rational part of the soul.

The Stoics in general say that this is the part that uses and understands what they call appearances or impressions, phantasiai, which we could also translate as imagination. Also this is where it's different than, say, the Aristotelian or the Platonic view it's also where we feel or think emotions, passions, and affects. So it's all happening in this one place within us and these include not just the emotions, but also desire and aversion, choice and rejection.

And this part of the soul is also concerned with assent, sunkatathesis in Greek, and with all the other things that are connected with it. so really everything that's important for our own responses our our ways of engaging with the world, besides the senses, and having sex, and saying things, it's all happening in this rational, ruling part of the soul for the Stoics.So that is a significant difference.

I do need to say a little bit about Stoic ethics and the philosophy of action that they have. Like most ancient virtue ethics there is an overarching end, a telos of goods, and they describe it as happiness or eudaimonia. There's also some other cool formulations like “a smooth flow of life”, which I guess you could think of as like things going your way and everything coming together well. They use words like tranquility, ataraxia or apatheia. Living in accordance with nature is also a really key idea for them, a very complicated idea.

And the good for them is essentially virtue and whatever participates in in virtue. So the virtues and then good actions, good relationships, those sorts of things. And then the bad is going to be what's opposed to that, vices. And everything else is basically an indifferent. Everything else falls into this giant sphere. Some things are totally indifferent, like the number of hairs on your head, whether it's odd or even.

One that I always like to bring up with the Stoics that they also thought was indifferent, the color of your skin. They thought that didn't matter for anything. Very different than what we see in many parts of the world and our long history right. But there's also a lot of things that are not strictly speaking good. They're indifferents, but they're (I'm gonna play a little bit on words) they're good indifferents. They're preferred indifferents. They have value, axia, and then there's those that have disvalue. So it's not like being rich is in itself a good thing, and it doesn't make you virtuous, and it probably won't make you happy by itself. But wealth is a preferred and different and poverty is just a preferred indifferent.

So Epictetus is inheriting this whole schema, you could say. And I do want to say one other thing, and then we'll take a little short short Q&A break. By the time that we want to study philosophy, or even just think about the good life, we are typically screwed up. We've already been damaged, corrupted, gotten things wrong. We've got bad habits not only of action but also of mind. We've had all sorts of bad examples provided to us. Our culture has has imposed all sorts of mistaken notions upon us. So we need some straightening out. We need some moral development

Epictetus says, and this is in book 1 chapter 26 of his Discourses: “This is a starting point in philosophy: perception (aisthesis) of the state of one's own governing principle.” So realizing how screwed up you are, and of course you can't realize how how screwed up you are completely. You get to see surface level things. You're like: Oh, I get angry too easily. What's going on there? You know I've been to anger management classes ,and did some cognitive behavior therapy, and I'm still getting angry at people.”

Well that's your governing principle that you got to take a look at ,and see if, to use oneof the metaphors that we have here in the States, you gotta look under the hood of the car and see what's what's wrong. Is it out of oil? Is there something burning? Pick whatever you like. Now obviously we can't work on very modern cars anymore. You've got to take it into the shop, because they're far too complicated. But assuming that you could actually do it, it would be what Epictetus is telling us we need to do.

So before we jump into Epictetus himself, any questions so far? Things that we need to get clear about? Go ahead. Anyone can go on mike if you want to, and just ask what you want, or you can put it in the chat too.

So that's that's a good question. You could frame it in terms of, is the capacity for communication part of the way in which we structure our thoughts, and emotions, and things like that? I think from the present perspective where we have centuries and centuries of of realizing that communication is connected up with our our rationality, and our emotions, and all these things, we would probably say there's probably a much closer connection.

The ancient Stoics, I think what they, and we don't really we don't have any treatises on this but I think what they mean by the faculty of speech is just the capacity to articulate. So you could also say: What about reproduction? We're sexual beings. Shouldn't this be part of it? I mean we have a desire for it, and and the Stoics, I don't know exactly why. I mean the senses, it makes sense why they would put them aside, but why would they consider those two things, speech and reproduction to be their own separate faculties?

I don't think we have really good explanations for that. I mean it doesn't play a huge role for Epictetus. As we're going to see, he's mostly interested in what we're doing with any of our faculties, and it's all centered on this this rational ruling part. So that's a very important question, though I think, if we're going to try to adapt this to modern times.

Any other questions? So the question is whether there's a connection between this Stoic ideal of living in accordance with nature and their epistemology, their theory of knowledge. There are connection, but again unfortunately we're kind of handicapped by mostly learning about this through critics of the Stoics like Cicero in his On Academics, and Plutarch in certain respects, and then Sextus Empiricus in particular, because he he goes after everybody. And the Stoics, they they were committed to this idea that we could have what they called kataleptica phantasia, that is impressions that we can't possibly be wrong about. You could say when that's the case, you're grasping reality as it truly is before you. They seem to think that this was quite important.

You don't see Epictetus particularly worried about this, and even Seneca isn't particularly so. By the time of the Roman Stoa they're they're less concerned with this. But you get the idea that for the early and the middle Stoa this is really central. The other thing I will say is that this idea of living in accordance with nature, it's a great slogan. Lawrence Becker in A New Stoicism, one of the very important books in the academic revival, actually says this is a terrible phrase. We should get rid of it. It's only done harm.

And it's it's in part because when you look at what the Stoics say about living in accordance with nature, it turns out to be quite complex, and people always want to reduce it down to that just means living rationally, or just means living virtuously. But it's something that was controversial within the Stoics. For example, Chrysippus said listen it's not just living in accordance with nature as the totality of what is and not being in contradiction with it. It's also living in accordance with human nature.

And then you say: Well, people do awful things, right? Human nature seems pretty bad. He's saying: No we mean a fully developed human nature. Then you're like: What is that? And that's where it starts to get more and more complex, and the Stoics every once in a while will come out of left field, so to speak, with some remark about what's in accordance with nature. You know, Mussonius Rufus will tell us that being a farmer is the job that's most in accordance with nature, and you're like: Well where is this coming from, and how does this help us?

So you've got to piece together this incredibly complex composite picture I think in order to get at a lot of what they they mean by it. But knowledge does play an important role. I don't know that we necessarily need to be absolutely certain about things in order to be able to run our lives well. That's that's the impression I get from Epictetus, that we're not going to get to the point of having these absolutely foundational perceptions about things. We're continually refining our our understanding of things. So it's more of an approximative thing, than like a on-off switch.

I see another question from Sonia. A lot of good questions about the emotions. The Stoic idea about the emotions is that every one of them does have a cognitive content, which is not unique in in ancient virtue ethics. I mean Aristotle says that about the emotions too, right, in Rhetoric book two. But the Stoics consider every emotion to include not just the affective state, but also some sort of judgment, that's being made typically wrong.

There's this this caricature of the Stoics as being anti-emotional you know. Oh emotions are bad, stuff them down. That's not quite true, but you can say that they do think a lot of our emotions are intrinsically bad for us. So there's no right amount of anger for the Stoics, but anger is a complex thing that does include judgments, like the judgment that we've been wrong, the judgment or the inference that it was it was unjust that we were wronged in this way. We should get revenge, retaliation. There's a whole bunch of moving parts.

Now about he thing that you asked about: Are there some that we we just can't do anything with. So Seneca interestingly thinks that once you start feeling a strong passion and you have assented to it, you basically are stuck and you can no longer resist. You you're stuck acting on the basis of that emotion, like anger for example. Now Epictetus doesn't really agree with him. Epictetus says you can reason with somebody who is angry. It's just very difficult to do. So how much?

Think of the ruling part as like being a container. Seneca is saying once you've allowed that container to get filled up with anger, anger's running the show until you're no longer angry, and there might be reason still left in there, but it doesn't matter because whatever is in charge is in charge. Epictetus is a little bit more optimistic on the capacity for us to reason with ourselves, or others to reason with us, when we're angry or sad or I mean what else, unduly fearful or ashamed or things like that. Well there will be plenty of time for more questions.

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Gregory Sadler is the president of ReasonIO, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.