How We Shape Our Character: Epictetus on Reason, Reasons, and Prohairesis (part 4)

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 fourth and final part of the transcript of my invited presentation to the Emmy Noether Research Group at the University of Würtzburg, consisting of the last questions and my answers for the talk. If you would like to watch or listen to the presentation, here is the videorecording. You can read the first part here, the second part here, and the third part here.

I'm happy to entertain any questions or comments. That's a great question about habit, and actions, and choices, and how we modify our our prohairesis. You could think of the prohairesis. He doesn't actually say this as such, but I think it's something that you could legitimately draw out of his ideas. The prohairesis is kind of a bundle of habits, among other things, and those habits are generated in kind of an Aristotelian way, by doing the same thing in similar circumstances.

He says exactly that in in a few parts of the Discourses. He also gives us a lot of advice about, if you want to break a habit, well you've got to push over to the other extreme. He uses the metaphor of a ship that's kind of tilted to the side, and if you want it to tilt over, you’ve got to push it further over to the other side. Interestingly, although the only things he says about Aristotelians is that they're basically like not as bad as Epicureans but pretty close, Epictetus certainly says a lot of things that sound pretty consistent with the Aristotelian conception of virtue ethics. By doing the same thing over and over again, we generate habits.

We have got to be really careful too. Once we've got a bad habit — this may gross people out a little bit — he talks about like with anger, the habit that you've generated is sort of like having scar tissue from being whipped, and then he says if you're giving into it once, you know that you've already got a habit, that's sort of like that goes beyond just welts and becomes wounds in your body. But imagine in your soul. It's more and more damaging as time goes on, coming close to what we nowadays call trauma, which I think is a big challenge for virtue ethics. So we we have to be quite cognizant of the habits that we have.

And there's another really important feature of what he has to say about habits. So at any moment when we're tempted to do something on the basis of a bad habit, of a vicious habit, we usually have a line of reasoning that goes like this. It will say: “Oh it's not a big deal because I'm only doing it in this one instance, you know. Normally I wouldn't have a midnight snack, but I just gave a good presentation, so I get to indulge myself” Or: “Normally I wouldn't have lost my temper, but that person was a complete jackass, and they they had it coming”

And what we don't realize is that at every moment we have this little tiny bit of freedom to improve ourselves or to to backslide, and abandoning this habit, this sort of meta-habit of excusing ourselves when it comes to bad habits, that's an important part of moral Improvement. Paying attention to each situation that we're getting ourselves in, and and not making excuses for ourselves, as we're tempted to do, which is an affective thing. We already have a habit, a tendency of making excuses, and there may be all sorts of other people giving us bad advice: “Oh it's okay for you to do this.”

So yeah, this dimension of habit is absolutely important for moral development for for Epictetus, and I would say for the Stoics in general. I mean how do you get to be a good person, a virtuous person? You think about their their four cardinal virtues, wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice. Sometimes they're portrayed as if you either have one or you don't, and there's no in between. But I think that that's certainly not there in Epictetus. Seneca sometimes says stuff like that, but then he contradicts himself later on about the importance of changing things gradually.

So I see another question from Sonia. That's a great question about how we become aware of our own vices, things that we need to fix about ourselves. So sometimes, she asked, is it because of our the bad consequences? Yeah sometimes it is. I get angry and then I get fired from a job, or somebody doesn't fire me, but human resources sends me to mandatory anger-management classes, and now I'm aware that I have a problem that I need to work on.

And actually when I go into the anger management class, I'm probably resistant the way most people are in the first couple sessions. They're like: “All these other people, they've got a problem, not me!” But you know, after a while you come to see that, nah you're not that different than everybody else. So so now we're already moving from consequences that you don't like to seeing that you aren't that exceptional. And I think he just does talk about this. You complain, he says at one point (I don't remember exactly where this is), about other people and their own screwed up behavior, but what about you buddy? Aren't you like that yourself?

Marcus also says that to himself as well, and then I think we talked about this a little bit earlier in a passage that I brought up. Contradictions or conflicts, most of us are are not completely consistent right? Epictetus himself cops to that. Do we get bothered by our inconsistencies? So sometimes this could be outside people coming in and saying: “You know, you criticize these people over here but you yourself do this”, or “I don't like when you behave this way, you need to look at this.” And sometimes it's ourselves realizing the contradictions that we've got ourselves. We're like: “Holy crap! My life is a mess. I need to start fixing.”

But this is a kind of an interesting side note, and this gets away from Epictetus into thinking about moral development more generally. You see that with a lot of people, and I can say this from my own experience, and also a lot of theorists throughout history, particularly the monastic writers, that the first problem that we identify usually isn't the main problem. We see something, and we're like: “Oh, this is messed up. I need to work on this.” And then we start digging into it, and then we're like: “Oh there's even bigger things down below.”

It's sort of like walking into somebody's house, where you're supposed to do a little bit of light carpentry to help them with their window. Actually when I was a kid, we worked on a place like this. My uncle and I were supposed to paint a house, and as we're painting the house, we realized that there were boards that were rotting because they're coming apart as we're painting it. And we're like we're gonna have to replace these boards. And then he actually taught me how to glaze windows, because some of the windows had to be replaced, and it turned into this gigantic project.

That's usually the way it works for us when we're engaged in moral development. You get sent to anger management, and you're like: “Yeah, I'm gonna learn how to be cool for a while,” and then you're like: Oh, I'm angry because everybody in my family yells at each other all the time. I need to like work on this stuff.”

So maybe to go back to your your original question, how are we motivated to to improve ourselves, maybe the motivation can't happen all at once for most of us, because we're more screwed up than we than we realize we are. I mean, I know that's certainly the case for me. I suspect that's probably the case for most people. It's not as if we can like do a scientific study of this.

Any other questions or things you want to talk more about? Here we go: I heard there are different reasonings. It's up to you depending on how you choose. But how does the remedy of reasoning come in how, knowing the other person's reasoning process can somehow change or correct mine?

So there's a lot of ways. There could be the mirroring thing that we were talking about. You see somebody else making really foolish arguments and you're like: “Holy crap! I'm glad I'm not like those dummies over there!” And then you realize: “Oh wait a second. I am like those dummies over there.” And so seeing other people's bad reasonings could somehow provoke you to realize your own mistaken reasonings.

Sometimes we we start paying attention to our reasonings, because somebody whose opinion we value tells us we need to stop screwing up like we're screwing up. And this this could be, like in my case, I'm very fortunate in that I have a a great wife who is very smart, smarter than me, quite perceptive, and is pretty willing to call me out on stuff. But it could be a good friend. It could be a teacher or a mentor. It could be, if you're lucky enough to get a good psychologist, or life coach, or somebody else who digs into these sorts of things, it might be that. So that's a second way.

They they actually say you need to start thinking about this in the course of psychotherapy. People, depending on what kind of modality they're pursuing, they often lexplore their own processes of reasoning, and try to look for different biases or blank spots where they're missing something, or mistaken lines of reasoning, or stuff like that

What else? Epictetus actually is a great model for this. Every point in his works where he says “have this ready at hand” or “in a situation like this be ready to say to yourself”, those are lines of reasoning that he's offering to us, right? I mean this is a bit of a digression, but originally there were eight books of the Discourses, and we've lost four of those apparently. But that was just Arrian studying with Epictetus for a space of like two to three years, and then writing stuff down.

Imagine if we had video recordings and they were of course translated from ancient Koine Greek into to our languages, of Epictetus actually teaching. How many conversations he would have had. How many places where he would have said “when you're in a situation like this, try this out”, “when you're doing this, try this out”. That's, I think part of the effect of his own teaching.

We have similar things with Seneca. Seneca writes these letters to Lucius, and he writes some letters of consolation ,and he writes some treatises, and he often says similar things, where he's like “when you get into a situation like this, try to look at things this way”, or “try to think about these these ideas”. So those are remedies of reasoning.

Now how effective are they? I mean it depends on the person. It depends on their willingness to actually listen to it. It's not as if you just throw the right reasoning in front of somebody, and they accept the coinage and they're like a vending machine, where you put in the money and you push the button and then the soda, or candy, or chips comes out. We're more complicated than that. And you can kind of work on people over a while.

Gareth it looks like you've got a question as well. So there's a couple interesting things there in your question. Let me try to split them apart from each other, and let's talk about the Ship of Theseus thing first. So the Ship of Theseus, everyone's familiar with that, right? Theseus starts sailing. He's got to replace things along the way. At the end, every single piece of the ship has been replaced. Is it the same ship? Well that's the way that the Stoics basically look at the human psyche. If reason is just a system of appearances, then you can swap things out in and out all the time.

I guess you could say, it kind of matters what kind of appearances they are maybe. And similarly with changing habits, what you're doing in the prohairesis in modifying it by the choices that you're making is you're you're swapping some bits out, and swapping some other bits out, right? And there may be some that are harder to move. If you have some, we I mentioned the word trauma a little bit earlier. I think that one of the big challenges for virtue ethics in general is taking adequate account of the traumas that, by the time that we're adults were we’re stuck with, and often prove much more intractable to modification or fixing than the other parts of ourselves. But even those, you can gradually replace those those reactions, and reframe memories and things like that.

The hypothesis thing is quite interesting, as far as the indifferents. So there's two things to say. One is one is in direct response to your question: are there actions that are indifferent? Yes, and the Stoics actually give examples of them, like is your finger bent, or is it straight? Straightening your finger, bending your finger, who cares? It doesn't matter. Now if I take my glasses off, and I my fingers bent and then it's straight, and I poke myself in the eye, suddenly it assumes some importance, right? So there could be a lot of things that, I guess you could say, in themselves are indifferent actions, but when we put them into a framework.

A prime example: giving somebody the middle finger. Maybe you're just counting, but it could also turn into a gesture, that's showing defiance. When I was a kid, I actually had this finger crushed in a door, and I didn't know what the middle finger meant, and so the older kids were all like “Hey, show us that injured finger!” And then I'm like: “Here it is.” And then I got in trouble with the the teachers. It was in third grade. So some things that in themselves are indifferent within certain contexts could have value.

If you think about what we count as money, now that's not about actions but that's more about other stuff. grew up in a time when cash was important, and people would write checks, and then credit cards were a rarity. And now there's a lot of places where you can't even use cash. And there's all sorts of other things that we never dreamed of like Apple pay, or Google pay, or things like that. What counts as money is kind of an indifferent in itself, but when you want to buy a hamburger, it's no longer quite so indifferent to you. It doesn't have the value that makes you virtuous or vicious but it's important.

The third thing to say about the indifferents is the Stoics don't think that we should be indifferent to all of the indifferents, but that using them well or dealing with them well is important. In fact, as Epictetus says, something could be indifferent but our use of it is not indifferent, and it is within our control, and it is a matter of the prohairesis. So how I use my money — money itself is an indifferent — but how I use my money is not. I can use it virtuously or viciously. And there's all sorts of other things like that as well within that that realm.

We could say that about bad things too, like how do I use my sickness. I'm still suffering from some effects of covid. Do I use it rather cynically as an excuse to get out of doing work? That's vicious. Do I need to pay attention to certain things, so I don't over exert myself, then wind up being too tired to fulfill my obligations. That's more of a virtuous way of dealing with indifferents of of the body, and illness, and stuff like that

I see another question from Sonia. So the you're asking about, what the stoics would call virtuous or vicious actions, and then appropriate or inappropriate actions, or duties and what's contrary to duty. The stoics thought they have a very robustly developed virtue ethics, and there's these four cardinal virtues, and each of the virtues has subdivisions. And so you you can say that there are some things that are the right thing to do within almost all circumstances.

You take for example Seneca in On Anger, he says: Do you need to get angry in order to prevent your father from being murdered? And he says: No, you don't. You can do that being motivated by courage, or just by right practical reasoning, because you should keep your father from being murdered. And then you can say: Well yeah, but what if your father's Hitler? Or what if your father's Nero? You know, a person who needs killing. Okay, well that's a little bit different. But in most circumstances it's pretty easy to identify protecting life as as the right thing to do, as the just thing to do, a courageous thing to do.

There are going to be some tricky cases, and then we want to use prudence as much as we can. Prudence as the Stoics define it is the capacity or the knowledge of what is good for us, what is bad for us, being able to work through processes of weighing these things, and all of that. So we might need some adjuncts. It's not just responding immediately in the circumstances, but I think that's where we we look at the other things that they have to say.

Not that they're going to provide us with perfect guidance about every single circumstance. They also do think the motivation matters. If you're doing something that would generally be seen as a virtuous action, but you're doing it motivated because you want to have everybody look at you and say “wow what a great person!”, as we call it over here being a “big shot”, that changes the action. It's virtuous and it's good in some respects, but it's bad in other respects. But Aristotle says that too, and Plato says that too.

Plato in the Phaedo distinguishes what most people think of as courage from philosophical courage. You run into the burning building because you're afraid of looking like you're scared of the fire? That's not courage according to Plato. You're just transferring one fear to another. So I think this is kind of a common thing in virtue ethics. Aristotle has this this great discussion of acting from virtue because you've actually got the virtue, and then just acting in accordance with virtue being self-controlled, and he says they're both good. One's way better than the other. We could say similar things with vicious behavior

The Stoics will define this primarily in terms of — I mean here's one place where I totally disagree with the Stoics — they've got this whole notion of the sage, the perfect person, and only the perfect person can do perfectly good actions. They call those katorthomata as opposed to kathēkonta. The kathēkonta is often translated as actions in accordance with duty or appropriate actions. They're the right thing to do, but they don't have a perfect motivation behind them, whereas the sage, this legendary person who we don't even know if they ever existed — and Epictetus says, “I'm not a sage,” by the way — with them the motivational structure is completely perfect

I think this is not a very helpful thing. It often discourages people, because they're like: “I can never be completely good”. But we could probably set that aside, the sage conception. I mean, if Epictetus thought anybody was a sage, it was Socrates, Diogenes, and Zeno, and when you look at all three of them and the stories that we have about them, they don't seem perfect people. Socrates, sure he was a great philosopher, but he is also a terrible father. Diogenes seems more like a jerk than a perfect “herald of God”, as the cynics like to call themselves all the time. And Xeno actually was afraid to carry a pot of lentils across the marketplace. So they all had flaws, but each of them had their their roles. As Epictetus says, each of them did their their work. I think that's the best we can probably aim for.

I'll say one other thing too in response to your question. We probably need other people to be involved with us, to call us out on our BS, when we think that we're doing perfectly good stuff, and we've advanced, and we're at the pinnacle of goodness. We probably need other people in the background to say: “Oh no, you're not quite so good. You still have some work to do on yourself.”

So she says “I want to ask about coherence". I think that was mentioned at the very beginning in the title”.

I don't have coherence in the title. Character is the the c-word in the title. But you can say that that for the Stoics, and again not uniquely, coherence — our ideas, and our actions, and our character being coherent as opposed to being contradictory, or in conflict with each other — that's really important. I think that's that's a place where you could say that virtue ethics intersects with with psychotherapy, and with other things as well, because we do want to be generally coherent in the things that we desire and commit to, and and prioritize and choose to do.

And we want that coherence to be, you could say, one that's oriented towards the good, because I suppose you could be more or less coherently evil in some respect. I mean you would be incoherent on other levels for the Stoics, but there are some examples of people who seem to be very well developed in doing evil. So coherence, that's something that Epictetus talks about with just a single term, but you could say that that is something in the background for Stoic ethics in general. The whole idea of living in accordance. “In accordance” is translating several different Greek terms, one of which is harmonia which is definitely like concordance or or coherence. So yeah I think that's that's a good thing to highlight.

Well again thanks so much for for having me here! I very much enjoyed spending this time with you and I hope that I hope the handouts are are helpful for you. I'll maybe see some of you again in the ether and maybe someday I'll be there in Wurzburg.

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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.