Epictetus, Discourses 1.11.7

What reason had you then? Was there nothing which moved and impelled you to abandon the child? How is that possible? It must have been the same sort of motive, which once made a man in Rome cover his eyes when the horse he had backed was running, and then again when the horse unexpectedly won made him faint so that he needed sponges to recover him. 

 

What is the motive? This perhaps is not the moment to define it; but it is enough that we should be convinced of this —if what philosophers say is sound—that we must not look for it somewhere outside us, but that it is always one and the same motive which causes us to do or not to do a thing, to speak or not to speak, to be elated or depressed, to fly or to pursue—the very motive which has moved you and me at this moment, you to come and sit and listen to me, and me to say what I do. 

 

What is the motive? Surely it is nothing but this—that we are so minded?

 

“Nothing else.”

 

There are the times when I feel like I can’t keep my eyes off something, and then there are the times when I feel like I have to look away. I may believe that my gaze is being forced this way or that, as if the object itself is exerting a force over me, and yet I know full well that the decision to stare or turn my head is really coming from my own inner workings. 

 

There is an attic window in an old Victorian house near where I grew up, and I glance up at it whenever I walk or ride by, since I still have fond memories of a group of friends who spent hours and hours right there, solving all the world’s problems. There is a street near where I went to college, and I take circuitous routes to avoid seeing it, since I still have painful memories of someone I miss dreadfully. 

 

The house and the street aren’t doing that to me, and not even those ghosts from my past are doing that to me. I am doing that to myself, on account of what I have chosen to value. If I did not first deeply care about something attached to those locations, they would have no effect on me at all.

 

The Roman didn’t faint at the sight of a race in which he didn’t have a stake, and I never laugh or cry at anything I have not determined to give a meaning for myself. It matters to me for no other reason than that I put it in my mind to matter.

 

Yes, it may hurt, and so I assume that the hurt is making me run away. Yes, it may gratify, and so I assume that the gratification is drawing me in. Let me be careful. 

 

First, I am in charge of whether I pick a pleasure over a pain, as anyone who has ever made the conscious choice to bear a suffering for a greater good can understand. Second, I am further in charge of something far more fundamental, my very estimation of what constitutes the good and the bad to begin with. 

 

We are often inclined, perhaps because it seems easier, perhaps because it saves us the weight of responsibility, to claim that the circumstances make us do things. The Stoic knows, rather, that the circumstances give us the conditions under which we do such things, while they never coerce us into anything at all. It may have come from a flawed judgment, or from a healthy judgment, but it nonetheless came from a judgment. 

 

To channel a bit of Aristotle here, I should not confuse a material cause with an efficient cause, the opportunity with the agent. Look inside to make sense of what is going on outside. My thoughts, words, and deeds come back to the same source—how was I minded about these things? 

Written in 12/2000