What does he lose who is the victim of unnatural lust? He loses his manhood. And the agent of such lust, what does he lose? He loses his manhood like the other, and much besides. What does the adulterer lose? He loses the man of honor and self-control, the gentleman, the citizen, the neighbor. What does the angry man lose? Something else. The man who fears? Something else. No one is evil without destruction and loss.
If on the other hand you look for loss in paltry pence, all the men I have mentioned are without loss or damage, if it so chance, nay they actually receive gain and profit, when they get cash by any of these actions. But notice, that if you make money the standard in everything, you will not count even the man who loses his nose as having suffered injury.
“Yes, I do,” he says, “for his body is mutilated.”
Well, but does the man who has lost, not his nose but his sense of smell, lose nothing? Is there no faculty of the mind, which brings gain to him that gets it and hurt to him that loses it?
“What can possibly be the faculty you mean?”
Have we no natural sense of honor?
“We have.”
Does he that destroys this suffer no damage, no deprivation, no loss of what belongs to him? Have we not a natural faculty of trust, a natural gift of affection, of beneficence, of mutual toleration? Are we then to count the man who suffers himself to be injured in regard to these as free from loss and damage?
If on the other hand you look for loss in paltry pence, all the men I have mentioned are without loss or damage, if it so chance, nay they actually receive gain and profit, when they get cash by any of these actions. But notice, that if you make money the standard in everything, you will not count even the man who loses his nose as having suffered injury.
“Yes, I do,” he says, “for his body is mutilated.”
Well, but does the man who has lost, not his nose but his sense of smell, lose nothing? Is there no faculty of the mind, which brings gain to him that gets it and hurt to him that loses it?
“What can possibly be the faculty you mean?”
Have we no natural sense of honor?
“We have.”
Does he that destroys this suffer no damage, no deprivation, no loss of what belongs to him? Have we not a natural faculty of trust, a natural gift of affection, of beneficence, of mutual toleration? Are we then to count the man who suffers himself to be injured in regard to these as free from loss and damage?
—from Epictetus, Discourses 2.10
I am often told, as if it were a self-evident truth of life, that any deed is fair game, “as long as no one gets hurt.” In one sense, this is quite right, because an evil always does harm, yet we are often quick to overlook the deeper nature of that harm, and we will speak of an act as innocuous, even when it does great offense to our moral dignity. Perhaps there has been no damage to the body, or to our property, but the damage to the soul is of the worst sort.
Like so many young men, I was always drawn to the fairer sex, though I was disgusted by the way my peers treated one another as mere objects of gratification. While the college lifestyle of promiscuity claims to just be good fun, there can be nothing good in twisting a self-giving love into a self-serving lust; people were most certainly hurt, a sort of inner rot that disguised itself as a false freedom.
In my darkest times, I would convince myself that crawling into a bottle didn’t do any harm either, and that there might even be something romantic about drinking myself into an early grave. That I was lying to myself did not remove the gravity of the injury, both to myself and to others, just as an arrogant toughness will not erase the looming presence of a wasting disease.
Whatever the vice, something is always lost, with the grave risk of it becoming too late for any virtue to be regained. A disordered passion, whether it be in the form of a grief, fear, gratification, or lust, eats away at the core of my nature, causing far greater affront than a tarnished image or a crippled limb. I am realizing why I should much rather lose the nose on my face than abandon my conscience.
To put it another way, I think I could learn to bear the absence of comfort before I could face the absence of integrity. Convenience is relative, and character is absolute. What good am I, quite literally, without the presence of basic decency and respect, which must stand behind all other qualities?
I have never been able to find a shortcut to taming my passions, and it most certainly can’t be achieved by simply replacing one excess with another. Without exception, I have had to think it through, to deliberately modify my judgements, to the point where I can discern the true measures of loss and gain, so the appetite is in tune with the understanding. I claim this is necessary, yet I will never claim it is easy. My ability to strike a balance of being gentle and firm is still being fine-tuned.
I am often told, as if it were a self-evident truth of life, that any deed is fair game, “as long as no one gets hurt.” In one sense, this is quite right, because an evil always does harm, yet we are often quick to overlook the deeper nature of that harm, and we will speak of an act as innocuous, even when it does great offense to our moral dignity. Perhaps there has been no damage to the body, or to our property, but the damage to the soul is of the worst sort.
Like so many young men, I was always drawn to the fairer sex, though I was disgusted by the way my peers treated one another as mere objects of gratification. While the college lifestyle of promiscuity claims to just be good fun, there can be nothing good in twisting a self-giving love into a self-serving lust; people were most certainly hurt, a sort of inner rot that disguised itself as a false freedom.
In my darkest times, I would convince myself that crawling into a bottle didn’t do any harm either, and that there might even be something romantic about drinking myself into an early grave. That I was lying to myself did not remove the gravity of the injury, both to myself and to others, just as an arrogant toughness will not erase the looming presence of a wasting disease.
Whatever the vice, something is always lost, with the grave risk of it becoming too late for any virtue to be regained. A disordered passion, whether it be in the form of a grief, fear, gratification, or lust, eats away at the core of my nature, causing far greater affront than a tarnished image or a crippled limb. I am realizing why I should much rather lose the nose on my face than abandon my conscience.
To put it another way, I think I could learn to bear the absence of comfort before I could face the absence of integrity. Convenience is relative, and character is absolute. What good am I, quite literally, without the presence of basic decency and respect, which must stand behind all other qualities?
I have never been able to find a shortcut to taming my passions, and it most certainly can’t be achieved by simply replacing one excess with another. Without exception, I have had to think it through, to deliberately modify my judgements, to the point where I can discern the true measures of loss and gain, so the appetite is in tune with the understanding. I claim this is necessary, yet I will never claim it is easy. My ability to strike a balance of being gentle and firm is still being fine-tuned.
—Reflection written in 8/2001
IMAGE: Herbert James Draper, Ulysses and the Sirens (c. 1909)
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