Epictetus, The Handbook 52: Disgrace and Neglect

If you try to act a part beyond your powers, you not only disgrace yourself in it, but you neglect the part that you could have filled with success.

—Epictetus, The Handbook, Chapter 37 (tr Matheson)

I once knew a business student who, with all good will, was certain he could have his cake and eat it too. “You’ll see, I’m going to make it big, and I’ll figure out all that enlightenment stuff along the way!”

It may simply seem to be a matter of having to work a bit harder to find success in many different aspects of life. There should be no reason, for example, that I can’t learn to play the bagpipes and also tend to my rosebushes, or cook the perfect pot of chili and also perform heart surgery.

But what Epictetus refers to here is not just about acquiring more particular skills. It is about choosing our universal purpose, and thereby deciding on the very values we will live by. The benefit of all the lower goods will only arise through their harmony with higher goods. To admit of any contradiction here is to go in many directions at once, each canceling out the other.

For Stoicism, the disgrace will be in deciding that I am determined by the things outside of my power, and the neglect will come from thereby abandoning the things within my power. Putting either one in first place necessarily means putting the other one in second place, and the measure of one must yield to the measure of the other.

This is why the Stoic will treat his circumstances conditionally, and always make use of them for the absolute sake of his virtue. This is also why the grasping man will treat his virtue conditionally, and will always modify it for the sake of his position. So much rests, of course, on how we understand the nature of success to begin with, a question that is so important, with an answer that is too easily taken for granted.

Over the years, I have tried to order my life around my own wisdom and virtue, and I have insisted upon this as my standard of success. There have been times, however, when I have been jealous and resentful of the way others have come to revel in wealth, honor, and power.

Now the blame hardly rests with others, because they have chosen their own measure of success, and their words and actions reflect that commitment. The responsibility is rather my own, because I have once again tried to have it both ways. Why would I bemoan the absence of something I don’t desire, and why would I desire something I really know not to be good?

I once described it to someone like sitting in a restaurant but wanting to eat both the dish I ordered, and also the dish my neighbor ordered. On a more serious level, it is like promising fidelity by committing to a wife, but somehow thinking I can still be faithful and take an interest in other men’s wives.

I only feel such a frustration when my own estimation of the good is conflicted and disordered. This demands that I fix myself, because as soon as I complain about what others have done to me, I have already betrayed the very basis of the Stoic principle. How funny, and how fitting, that even as I am so worried about all the externals, it already means that I have ignored all the internals.

Wealth, and honor, and power can surely come my way, and I can still turn them to my good, but what I can never turn to my good is the want of such things for their own sake. This is why the disgrace of loving the wrong things will always go hand in hand with the neglect of loving the right things.

Written in 5/2002

Image: Frans Francken the Younger, Mankind's Eternal Dilemma-The Choice Between Virtue and Vice (1633)