Epictetus, Discourses 1.20.1

Chapter 20: How reason has the faculty of taking cognizance of itself.

 

Every art and faculty has certain principal things of which it is to take cognizance. 

 

When therefore the faculty itself is of like kind with the objects of which it takes cognizance, it must of necessity have power to take cognizance of itself: when it is of unlike kind, it cannot take cognizance of itself. 

 

For instance, the shoemaker's art is concerned with hides, but itself is absolutely different from the material of hides: for this reason it does not take cognizance of itself. 

 

Grammar again is concerned with written speech: is it then written speech itself? Certainly not: therefore it cannot take cognizance of itself. 

 

For what purpose then have we received reason from Nature? That we may deal with impressions aright.

 

What then is reason itself?

 

A system framed from impressions of a certain kind. Thus it naturally has the power to take cognizance of itself. 

—from Epictetus, Discourses 1.20

 

Ethical questions first sparked my interest in philosophy, but before too long I realized why standards of right and wrong required a foundation in nature, and this, in turn, could only become clearer by asking what it even meant to “know” with any certainty. 

 

While I had never intended it, by the time I chose philosophy as a vocation, most of my efforts were expended on being baffled by the workings of the mind. 

 

Simply put, if I wish to live well, I will have to make sense of who I am, and how to define myself as a creature endowed with the power of reason. That pesky maxim from the Temple at Delphi, “Know Thyself”, ends up being a necessity instead of a luxury. 

 

Part of the difficulty in epistemology, the theory of knowledge, is how the consideration is reflective, where thought is not only presented with other objects, but is also presented with itself, and thus capable of grasping its own activity. 

 

This can seem as confounding as a hand shaking itself, or an eye gazing within itself, and yet the very fact that we are constantly aware of our own awareness already indicates how the mind behaves very differently from sensible matter. 

 

Back in the first chapter of the Discourses, Epictetus had observed how the reason within us is unique in its capacity to comprehend itself. On a principle of like knows like, the intellect, in receiving the formal identity of things, can thereby apprehend its own formal identity. 

 

It rises above, so to speak, the limitations of the sensible, and in managing its impressions it accordingly contains and masters its own motions. That this happens is self-evident from asking about it, though precisely how this happens offers something of a deeper mystery. 

 

A cobbler makes shoes out of leather, and yet his skills are not made of leather.

 

The writer composes passages out of words, and yet the rules he employs are different from mere words. 

 

The art of reasoning, however, is about anything and everything that might pass before it, but its consciousness is ultimately centered around a self-consciousness. As it includes itself within the range of its authority, it is no accident that reason automatically entails freedom and responsibility. 

 

In thinking about this or that thing, I cannot help but also think about myself. My judgments demand my attention, and through those judgments I deliberately choose to shape my values. 

 

Perhaps I’d like to claim that all of this is inexplicable, though I suspect I’m confusing a frustration with an impossibility. To face this is unavoidable, as it is the very task of being fully human. 

—Reflection written in 2/2001 

IMAGE: David Ryckaert the Younger, A Shoemaker's Workshop (c. 1650)