Epictetus, Discourses 1.9.5

And so your teacher and instructor, if he were a true teacher, should engage in this conflict of argument:

 

You come saying, “Epictetus, we can bear no longer to be bound with the fetters of this wretched body, giving it meat and drink and rest and purgation, and by reason of the body having to adapt ourselves to this or that set of circumstances. 

 

“Are not these things indifferent and as nothing to us, and death no evil thing? Are we not kinsmen of the gods, from whom we have come hither? Suffer us to depart to the place whence we have come, suffer us to be released from these bonds that are fastened to us and weigh us down. 

 

“Here are robbers and thieves and law-courts and so-called kings, who by reason of our poor body and its possessions are accounted to have authority over us. Suffer us to show them that they have authority over nothing.”

 

I immediately think of certain kinds of religious zealots, who somehow manage to make God so great in their own eyes that they must draw an imaginary line between the spirit and the flesh, praising the one and despising the other. It doesn’t matter which tradition of faith they happen to be impersonating; they cannot grasp that if they truly loved the Creator, they would also love the creatures.

 

Some people tell me that we don’t have this problem anymore, since we are now supposedly a post-religious society. Nonsense. It is intrinsically human to seek higher meaning, and so there will always be religious expression, whatever the form. The real problem is when a devotion to the whole is perverted into an elevation of one part at the expense of another part, regardless of the ideology. 

 

You’ve heard it all before, in many different guises: Free us from the sinners! Liberate us from the oppressors! Kill the rich! Deport the poor! Why can’t those liberals shut up? Why won’t those conservatives stop breeding? Deliver us from this world, we demand to have a different one! 

 

The Stoic is hardly immune to such fracturing. I can only wonder if the current revival of interest in Stoicism will have legs, though I cannot help but notice the same old weaknesses already creeping in. I have, for example, now repeatedly seen the term “indifference” used by self-styled Stoics to mean dismissal, rejection, or reducing something to irrelevance. 

 

As someone wrote to me recently, “I am indifferent to your views, so they don’t matter to me.” Even if you’re not listening, I would dare to suggest that being indifferent, in the Stoic sense, is not about denying that things matter, but rather about coming to understand how they matter. Instead of throwing it away, learn that the good in it will be in what you make of it. 

 

Apparently, Epictetus had students who also got caught up in this error. I am glad he chose to help them along over casting them out. I’m seeing more and more how the old man had it right. 

Written in 11/2000