Epictetus, Discourses 1.17.3

“Yes,” they say, “but the bushel is a mere thing of wood and bears no fruit.”

 

True, but it can measure corn.

 

“The processes of logic, too, are unfruitful.”

 

This we will consider presently: but even if one should concede this, it is enough that logic has the power to analyze and distinguish other things and in fact, as one might say, has the power to weigh and measure. 

 

Who asserts this? Is it only Chrysippus and Zeno and Cleanthes? Does not Antisthenes agree? Why, who is it that has written, “The beginning of education is the analysis of terms?” Does not Socrates too say the same? Does not Xenophon write of him that he began with the analysis of terms, to discover what each means?

—from Epictetus, Discourses 1.17 

 

Though I do my best to be a loyal follower of philosophy, I must shamefully admit to some occasions when I have proclaimed logic to be boring, or accused it of being cold and lifeless, or condemned it as useless for daily living. At least I can be more forgiving of such frustrations in my students when I have grappled with them myself. 

 

And it is precisely my own confusion about a situation that causes me to become so arrogant and dismissive. 

 

I may say that working through the problem does not interest me, yet my absence of interest is only a reflection of a stubborn refusal to open up my mind.

 

I may feel impatient with the difficulty of analyzing a proof, and then I fail to grasp that the fault is in the weakness of my will, not in the inherent order of truth.

 

I may be in a passionate and poetical mood, so caught up in expressing something profound that I forget how it is my very capacity of reason that even makes it possible for me to distinguish meaning and value. 

 

Like anything else in life, logic reveals its purpose when it is considered within the context of the whole. If I just think of mathematics, for example, as a pointless collection of numbers, I will never recognize how it celebrates the beauty of Nature. If I just think of logic as a series of squiggly symbols, I will never see how this tool of comprehension stands behind the appreciation of everything worthwhile in this world. 

 

Where I cannot apprehend an identity, there will be nothing to admire. Where I cannot untangle truth from falsehood, I will be unable to commit. Where I cannot proceed to a conclusion, there will be no moving forward. 

 

Logic is actually quite exciting, if I do not take it for granted, and if I can remember what it provides for me. My attitude will make all the difference. 

 

Don’t underestimate a humble measure like a bushel, and don’t look down on the power of dialectic. Each of these gives form to the content. 

—Reflection written in 1/2001