How We Shape Our Character: Epictetus on Reason, Reasons, and Prohairesis (part 3)
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 third 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. You can read the first part here and the second part here.
Let's talk a little bit about one theme that I wanted to bring up, and maybe we can come back to the habituation stuff later, if people are interested in that. It’s an example of practical reasoning — how we give ourselves reasons about things. If you've read a lot of Epictetus you know that he thinks that money doesn't really count for much. But he talks about it a lot money, prices, costs and exchange, and he does so in a number of ways that fit in nicely with us.
So I'm just going to read a bunch of of passages, and we can talk about them, and comment on them. In book 2 chapter 18, he says: Once you conceive a desire for money, if reason be applied to your own perception of the evil, the passion is stilled.” So our affect is changed. “And the ruling part is restored to its original authority. But if you don't apply a remedy, your governing principle doesn't return to its previous condition, but upon being aroused again by the corresponding appearances it goes right back into the desires even more quickly. And if this happens over and over again the next stage is that a callousness results, and the infirmity strengthens the avarice.”
So In this passage, we see virtue or vice applying reasons. The ruling part and the choice to do so all connect together in in a way that's pretty typical of Epictetus.
In book 1 chapter 7 he says: “What is the professed object of reasoning? To state the true, to eliminate the false, to suspend judgment in doubtful cases. Is it enough to learn this alone? And he says: “Well is it enough for the person who wants to make no mistake in the use of money to be told the reason why you don't accept genuine drachmas and reject the counterfeit? What do you need to add to this? A faculty that actually tests the genuine drachmas and the counterfeit, and distinguishes between them.”
So there's there's a similarity to handling currency and accepting it, to how we we reason about things. And in chapter 3 of book 2 he's talking about Diogenes. Some of you may be familiar with this this practice. You're asked to write a letter of recommendation for somebody, and Diogenes says I'm not going to do that. Diogenes is a Cynic so he doesn't do a lot of things. And he says: “It's just as though a coin were asking somebody to recommend them in order to be tested. If the person in question is a tester of silver, you're going to recommend yourself. We ought to have in everyday life the sort of thing we have in the case of silver, so that I may be able to say, as the assayer of silver does, ‘bring me any drachma you please and I will appraise it’”.
So again here, there's a correspondence between money and our appearances, or our reasonings, or our character. In book 3 chapter 3, he says: “Just as it is the nature of every soul to assent to the true, dissent from the false”. So you notice this this theme again, right? “So it is its nature to be moved with desire towards the good, with aversion towards the evil ,and to feel neutral towards what is neither evil nor good.”
So far so good. With what's going on in the intellect or reason it is the same thing that happens in terms of our orientation towards the good, and our choices, and then he says: “Just as neither the banker or the grocer may legally refuse the coinage of Caesar, but if you present it, whether he wants to or not, he must give you what you're purchasing with it, so it is with the soul. Different people have different pieces of coinage. A person offers the coin and gets what is bought by it.
He goes on as well and he says we have to think about the the purchases that we're making, the choices that we're making. He says: “Keep this thought ready at hand whenever you lose some external thing: What are you requiring in its place? If this is more valuable than the other, then don't say ‘I've suffered a loss’. You've lost nothing if you get a horse for an ass, an ox for a sheep, a noble action for a small piece of money. It's no small matter you're guarding but self-respect (aidos), fidelity (pistis), and constancy, a state of mind undisturbed by passion, pain, fear confusion, in a word freedom. “What are the things for which you were about to sell these things? Look how valuable they are.
So we've almost got like price tags on things and we have to decide. We have to be savvy consumers. We have to be good purchasers or exchangers. In book 1 chapter 2 talking about the famous chamber pot thing, he says: Hey you know yourself how much you're worth and at what price you sell yourself. “People sell themselves for different prices. Consider the price you'll you're willing to sell your prohairesis for. Or if you have to sell it then at least don't sell it cheap.”
I mean ideally, you don't sell it at all, but get a good bargain if you're going to do that. Make sure that you get something that's going to make you happy. Then I'll actually just skip to Enchiridion 25. He talks about “paying prices for things,” right? And he's talking about getting invited to dinner parties, and we can think about all sorts of other opportunities that are offered to us, and offered to other people.
He says: If you don't get invited to the dinner party, well that's because — and I'm going to translate very crudely here — you didn't kiss ass enough. But if you want to get invited to parties, you gotta sell yourself. You gotta go around to the people that are having the parties, and say nice things to them, and tell them things that are false about themselves. And then they'll invite you. And if somebody else got invited, it's because they did the butt-kissing that needed to be done. You didn't do it. It's ridiculous for you to expect that you're going to get something without paying the price.
So he uses the example of an obol and a head of lettuce. He says: If don't want to buy the lettuce don't buy the lettuce, but don't complain that you don't have the lettuce if you've got the obol in your hand ,and you could sell it, or you could purchase it. You're the one who decides whether you exchange this or not. And so this entire metaphor, which there's many other passages where he he talks about things in terms of prices, and purchasing ,and all that we've all got, these things that can appeal to us.
He talks about some people, they're driven by lust. The price for them is beautiful bodies. Some people want honor. The price for them is getting fame and all of that. Some people just want money by itself. Some people want pleasure. These are all things that if we value them too much, if we value them to the extent that we're willing to sell ourselves out, and do the wrong thing for them, we're going to give things power over us. We're going to be determined by them.
And all of this is by reasoning processes, whether explicit or implicit. And they can be fixed by reasoning processes. But we have to choose to do so, right? So if if I see my friend — I mean, think about Epictetus being like our friend, and he just happens to be contained unlike a regular body in these books here, and we have to read our way through them — then we can start to apply those reasons within our life, to be a little bit more clear about what we're doing, to prioritize better, to make better choices, to not sell ourselves out for things. That's that's a possibility for us.
And so we give ourselves reasons. I think that Epictetus uses lots of metaphors and analogies. I think that's a great way to do it. It brings home to us these very abstract ideas that otherwise might might trip us up. The idea of not selling ourselves out for something, I think that's quite valuable. That everything has a certain kind of price, but that we get to decide whether we're willing to pay it or not, if we're being conscious of what we're doing, I think that can be quite quite helpful.
There are a number of other examples of leading people through better practical reasoning, some of which are in the handouts that I provided, like holding the chamber pot. Do you hold the chamber pot, or do you not do it? If that's up to you, Epictetus is saying, if you're the kind of person who's willing to sell yourself out for that, then hold the chamber pot and don't feel bad about it. Just go ahead and do it. If you think that that's beneath you, well then act a different way.
He's got another great example about familial affection. There's this father who shows up, and he's talking with him, and Epictetus asks: How's married life going? And he's like: Oh it's really rough! You know my daughter got sick, and I was so filled with familial affection that I had to leave the room, and I couldn't stay with her. And Epictetus is like: Buddy! That's not familial affection. And there's a whole reasoning process that he leads them through that youcan check out there.
He he's got another one in the handouts about leaving school due to illness where Epictetus's point is: Hey, you can be sick anywhere, buddy. Why not be sick here at school, rather than than go home.
There's another one that I'm really fond of, where he has a conversation with a local official who's all ticked off, because he went to the theater and he got into an argument with all the rest of the people in the audience about who should be awarded a prize. And they started shouting at him, and he started shouting at them. He comes to Epictetus, and he is just basically looking for some validation Epictetus tells him: You know you're the example. You're the official. You're the person in charge. You should think through these things better. If you want the audience to behave like decent people, how about you act like a decent person, when it comes to these these sorts of things?
Now what's going on in all of these cases? Epictetus is applying the remedy of reason, providing reasons — plural — for how people ought to use their own prohairesis to change that prohairesis to become a little bit better. What was his track record? I'll close with this, and then let's do some more Q & A. He tells us that Socrates was successful maybe in one case out of a thousand, and that's a good track record.
So it's not as if these are like automatic on-off switches. You just point out to somebody: Oh, you screwed up”, and then they automatically are receptive to you, and they're like: “Thank you so much for helping me fix my my damaged prohairesis.” Instead it's going to be a very tough ongoing process that may involve some arguing back and forth, and conflict, and they might abuse you, or tell you you're wrong, or stuff like that.
But he thinks that it does work. And that's a good portion of what he does in his teachings, and what he does in his conversations with people that are preserved in the the books that we have of the Discourses, the four books of the originally eight that his his student Arrian wrote down. So there's a lot yet to that's probably murky about this, and I'm happy to do you know sort of a general Q & A about any of this stuff, but those are my thoughts on what Epictetus is doing.
You notice that most of it is just bringing up what Epictetus actually says in kind of a digested form. I don't know I don't know that what I'm saying here is particularly new as far as interpretation of Epictetus. But I think it's worth thinking about. How do we make sense of our own screwed up lives. and then make them better by by bringing in reasoning, and other people's reasoning?
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.