★★★☆☆
Speech delivered at the Great Hall, King’s College, London, Monday, November 15, 1993.
“Exactly three years after we drove up to our new home near San Diego, I was shot down and captured in North Vietnam.”
“So what Epictetus was telling his students was that there can be no such thing as being the “victim” of another. You can only be a “victim” of yourself. It’s all in how you discipline your mind. Who is your master? “He who has authority over any of the things on which you have set your heart.” “What is the result at which all virtue aims? Serenity.” “Show me a man who though sick is happy, who though in danger is happy, who though in prison is happy, and I’ll show you a Stoic.”
“Do what you will, reputation is at least as fickle as your station in life. Others decide what your reputation is. Try to make it as good as possible, but don’t get hooked on it.
“You can’t just walk around saying, “I don’t give a damn about health or wealth or whether I’m sent to prison or not.” Epictetus took time to explain better what he meant. He says everybody should play the game of life—that the best play it with “skill, form, speed, and grace.” But, like most games, you play it with a ball. Your team devotes all its energies to getting the ball across the line. But after the game, what do you do with the ball? Nobody much cares. It’s not worth anything.”
“What is the fruit of your doctrines?” someone asked Epictetus. “Tranquility, fearlessness, and freedom,” he answered. You can have these only if you are honest and take responsibility for your own actions. You’ve got to get it straight! You are in charge of you.”
Kindle Highlights
I came to the philosophic life as a thirty-eight-year-old naval pilot in grad school at Stanford University. I had been in the navy for twenty years and scarcely ever out of a cockpit.
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Enchiridion means “ready at hand.”
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Rhinelander explained that its author, Epictetus, was a very unusual man of intelligence and sensitivity, who gleaned wisdom rather than bitterness from his early firsthand exposure to extreme cruelty and firsthand observations of the abuse of power and self-indulgent debauchery.
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Epictetus was born a slave in about A.D. 50 and grew up in Asia Minor speaking the Greek language of his slave mother.
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At the age of fifteen or so, he was loaded off to Rome in chains in a slave caravan. He was treated savagely for months while en route.
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He was taken to live at the Nero White House at a time when the emperor was neglecting the empire as he frequently toured Greece as actor, musician, and chariot race driver.
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Epictetus eventually became apprenticed to the very best Stoic teacher in the empire, Musonius Rufus, and, after ten or more years of study, achieved the status of philosopher in his own right.
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The Stoics held that all human beings were equal in the eyes of God: male/female, black/white, slave and free.
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I read every one of Epictetus’s extant writings twice, through two translators.
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Although pagan, the Stoics had a monotheistic, natural religion and were great contributors to Christian thought.
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Epictetus drew the same sort of audience Socrates had drawn five hundred years earlier—young aristocrats destined for careers in finance, the arts, public service.
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he held that it is unthinkable that one man’s error could cause another’s suffering. Suffering, like everything else in Stoicism, was all down here—remorse at destroying yourself.
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So what Epictetus was telling his students was that there can be no such thing as being the “victim” of another. You can only be a “victim” of yourself. It’s all in how you discipline your mind. Who is your master? “He who has authority over any of the things on which you have set your heart.” “What is the result at which all virtue aims? Serenity.” “Show me a man who though sick is happy, who though in danger is happy, who though in prison is happy, and I’ll show you a Stoic.”
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But on my bedside table, no matter what carrier I was aboard, were my Epictetus books: Enchiridion, Discourses, Xenophon’s Memorabilia of Socrates, and The Iliad and The Odyssey.
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After ejection I had about thirty seconds to make my last statement in freedom before I landed in the main street of a little village right ahead. And so help me, I whispered to myself: “Five years down there, at least. I’m leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus.”
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a Stoic always kept separate files in his mind for (A) those things that are “up to him” and (B) those things that are “not up to him.”
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All in category B are “external,” beyond my control, ultimately dooming me to fear and anxiety if I covet them.
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All in category A are up to me, within my power, within my will, and properly subjects for my total concern and involvement. They include my opinions, my aims, my aversions, my own grief, my own joy, my judgments, my attitude about what is going on, my own good, and my own evil.
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Solzhenitsyn learned, as I and others have learned, that good and evil are not just abstractions you kick around and give lectures about and attribute to this person and that. The only good and evil that means anything is right in your own heart, within your will, within your power, where it’s up to you.
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In short, what the Stoics say is “Work with what you have control of and you’ll have your hands full.”
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your own fragility—that you can be reduced by wind and rain and ice and seawater or men to a helpless, sobbing wreck—unable to control even your own bowels—in a matter of minutes.
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So make sure in your heart of hearts, in your inner self, that you treat your station in life with indifference, not with contempt, only with indifference.
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Do what you will, reputation is at least as fickle as your station in life. Others decide what your reputation is. Try to make it as good as possible, but don’t get hooked on it.
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You can’t just walk around saying, “I don’t give a damn about health or wealth or whether I’m sent to prison or not.” Epictetus took time to explain better what he meant. He says everybody should play the game of life—that the best play it with “skill, form, speed, and grace.” But, like most games, you play it with a ball. Your team devotes all its energies to getting the ball across the line. But after the game, what do you do with the ball? Nobody much cares. It’s not worth anything.
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“Lameness is an impediment to the leg, but not to the Will; and say this to yourself with regard to everything that happens. For you will find such things to be an impediment to something else, but not truly to yourself.”
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behind bars. As an insider, I knew the whole setup—that the North Vietnamese already held about twenty-five prisoners, probably in Hanoi, that I was the only wing commander to survive an ejection, and that I would be their senior, their commanding officer,
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Epictetus: “Look not for any greater harm than this: destroying the trust worthy, self-respecting well-behaved man within you.”
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For Epictetus, emotions were acts of will. Fear was not something that came out of the shadows of the night and enveloped you; he charged you with the total responsibility of starting it, stopping it, controlling it.
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I’m talking about having looked over the brink and seen the bottom of the pit and realized the truth of that linchpin of Stoic thought: that the thing that brings down a man is not pain but shame!
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“What is the fruit of your doctrines?” someone asked Epictetus. “Tranquility, fearlessness, and freedom,” he answered. You can have these only if you are honest and take responsibility for your own actions. You’ve got to get it straight! You are in charge of you.