“What conclusion do you draw? Am I not to harm him who harmed me?”
First consider what “harm” means and remember what you heard from the philosophers. For if good lies in the will and evil also lies in the will, look whether what you are saying does not come to this:
“What do you mean? As he harmed himself by doing me a wrong, am I not to harm myself by doing him a wrong?”
Why then do we not look at things in this light? When we suffer some loss in body or property, we count it hurt: is there no hurt, when we suffer loss in respect of our will?
Of course the man who is deceived or the man who does a wrong has no pain in his head or his eye or his hip, nor does he lose his estate; and these are the things we care for, nothing else.
But we take no concern whatever whether our will is going to be kept honorable and trustworthy or shameless and faithless, except only so far as we discuss it in the lecture room, and therefore so far as our wretched discussions go we make some progress, but beyond them not the least.
First consider what “harm” means and remember what you heard from the philosophers. For if good lies in the will and evil also lies in the will, look whether what you are saying does not come to this:
“What do you mean? As he harmed himself by doing me a wrong, am I not to harm myself by doing him a wrong?”
Why then do we not look at things in this light? When we suffer some loss in body or property, we count it hurt: is there no hurt, when we suffer loss in respect of our will?
Of course the man who is deceived or the man who does a wrong has no pain in his head or his eye or his hip, nor does he lose his estate; and these are the things we care for, nothing else.
But we take no concern whatever whether our will is going to be kept honorable and trustworthy or shameless and faithless, except only so far as we discuss it in the lecture room, and therefore so far as our wretched discussions go we make some progress, but beyond them not the least.
—from Epictetus, Discourses 2.10
A confusion about the true nature of benefit and harm will also lead me to some peculiar assumptions on how I should respond to a perceived injustice. Because they are so commonly held, I may not think twice about them, but once I give it some honest reflection, I realize why I am living a contradiction.
To start with, why do I even feel the need to injure an offender? Shouldn’t my intent be to improve him, just as I should hope to reform myself? While rage, as a variation of lust, makes for a powerful passion, it isn’t terribly reasonable to claim that one hurt somehow erases another hurt. I have seen enough of how our prison system works, and I have read enough Icelandic Sagas, to know better.
Furthermore, what the Stoics have taught me about the inner source of the human good has now led me to seek my blessings in my own will, not in the will of others, and in the content of my character, not in the confluence of circumstances.
Conversely, the only real wound, the only one that is critical, is the one that I inflict upon myself—how oddly fitting for the wicked man to be his own worst victim!
It takes me a moment to wrap my head around it, but yes, I can now laugh at how the reciprocity of my revenge therefore demands torturing myself as violently as the other fellow has tortured himself. There is no winning here.
The vividness of a pain to my flesh or to my pride tricks me into believing I am gravely afflicted; no, this is but an impression, for the crippling evil is the one to the judgments, to the essence of the man. Attend to this, first and foremost.
I cross paths with many people who rarely choose to reflect, and so they are immediately triggered to anger. They sadly don’t know any better. I also cross paths with a few people who brag about their learning, and yet they are just as prone to being petty and spiteful. They really ought to know better. If I claim to pursue wisdom, I had better rise to the occasion, to not treat my conscience as an abstraction.
I think of two paintings I studied in my past, both of which forced me to reconsider the problem of vengeance. One was an allegory of Britannia slaying a vicious tiger, which represented the Indian mutineers of 1857. The other was a depiction of Medea, as she is poised to murder her children. The ardent imperialist and the militant feminist will find their respective justice in these scenes, though I will no longer allow my compassion to lure me into retaliation.
A confusion about the true nature of benefit and harm will also lead me to some peculiar assumptions on how I should respond to a perceived injustice. Because they are so commonly held, I may not think twice about them, but once I give it some honest reflection, I realize why I am living a contradiction.
To start with, why do I even feel the need to injure an offender? Shouldn’t my intent be to improve him, just as I should hope to reform myself? While rage, as a variation of lust, makes for a powerful passion, it isn’t terribly reasonable to claim that one hurt somehow erases another hurt. I have seen enough of how our prison system works, and I have read enough Icelandic Sagas, to know better.
Furthermore, what the Stoics have taught me about the inner source of the human good has now led me to seek my blessings in my own will, not in the will of others, and in the content of my character, not in the confluence of circumstances.
Conversely, the only real wound, the only one that is critical, is the one that I inflict upon myself—how oddly fitting for the wicked man to be his own worst victim!
It takes me a moment to wrap my head around it, but yes, I can now laugh at how the reciprocity of my revenge therefore demands torturing myself as violently as the other fellow has tortured himself. There is no winning here.
The vividness of a pain to my flesh or to my pride tricks me into believing I am gravely afflicted; no, this is but an impression, for the crippling evil is the one to the judgments, to the essence of the man. Attend to this, first and foremost.
I cross paths with many people who rarely choose to reflect, and so they are immediately triggered to anger. They sadly don’t know any better. I also cross paths with a few people who brag about their learning, and yet they are just as prone to being petty and spiteful. They really ought to know better. If I claim to pursue wisdom, I had better rise to the occasion, to not treat my conscience as an abstraction.
I think of two paintings I studied in my past, both of which forced me to reconsider the problem of vengeance. One was an allegory of Britannia slaying a vicious tiger, which represented the Indian mutineers of 1857. The other was a depiction of Medea, as she is poised to murder her children. The ardent imperialist and the militant feminist will find their respective justice in these scenes, though I will no longer allow my compassion to lure me into retaliation.
—Reflection written in 8/2001
IMAGES:
Edward Armitage, Retribution (1858)
Eugene Delacroix, Medea Enraged (1862)
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