Epictetus and the wand of Hermes

Did you know that Stoicism confers a special kind of magical power?

Hermes holding his magic wand, the caduceus. Image from deviantart.com, CC license.

Stoicism is a powerful practical philosophy aiming not only at personal self-improvement, but at the betterment of the entire cosmopolis, the ideal universal city of human beings. And Epictetus of Hierapolis is, in my mind, the foremost exponent of such philosophy, the one that literally changed my life once I started reading his Discourses and began to digest his Enchiridion.

But did you know that Stoicism, especially in the version of Epictetus, actually gives you superpowers? To find out how, let’s take a deep dive into a short section of the Discourses, 3.20, tantalizingly entitled “That it is possible to turn every external circumstance to good account.”

As it often the case in the Discourses—a collection put together by his most famous pupil, Arrian of Nicomedia—Epictetus is talking to a group of students in his school in Nicopolis, in northwestern Greece, where he moved after being exiled by the emperor Domitian for being a member of the informal “Stoic opposition.” Epictetus begins the discussion by reminding his audience of a fundamental distinction:

“At a theoretical level, hardly anyone disputes the fact that ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are in us, not in external things. No one describes the proposition ‘It is day’ as good and ‘It is night’ as bad, or says that the acme of evil is the assertion ‘Three equals four.’” (3.20.1-2)

[Odeon theater at Nicopolis. Epictetus likely attended some performances here. Photo by the Author.]

This is an absolutely central concept in Stoicism: there is a sharp distinction between facts and value judgments. Facts are out there in the world and are not affected by the human mind, though of course our actions can affect some of them. Value judgments, by contrast, are always and only generated by human minds through our crucial faculty of prohairesis, or what Marcus Aurelius calls the ruling faculty.

Facts, as Epictetus reminds his students of with a couple of examples, do not come with the labels “good” or “bad” attached to them, they just are. We attach such labels, sometimes appropriately and at other times not. And a lot of our troubles can be traced to our tendency to use the words “good” and “bad” too liberally, even where they don’t belong.

It’s hard to argue with the specific examples Epictetus brings up: nobody in his right mind would say that it is good that it’s day, or that it is bad that it’s night, and certainly not that 3=4 is evil. But what about more personal cases? Should I lose my job tomorrow, isn’t that bad? Not necessarily. There is a fact, that I lost my job. Whether it is good, bad, or indifferent depends on what I do in response: do I go to the bar around the corner and start drinking in self-commiseration? Bad. Do I collect myself, take a break, and then earnestly start looking for a new job? Good. And so forth.

If this distinction between facts and value judgments is correct, Epictetus says we should then apply it consistently in all cases:

“And so it should be in life as well. Is health good and illness bad? No, man. What, then? Health managed well is good, but when badly managed it’s bad.” (3.20.4)

He proceeds to tell a couple of stories from Greek lore to make the point as sharp as possible. The first one concerns Menoeceus, who played a role in the famous episodes of the Seven against Thebes, a story told by Aeschylus in a play by that title. The Seven laid siege to the city of Thebes with their army, and the Oracle at Delphi said that the Thebans would be able to repel the attack only if one of the defenders spontaneously sacrificed himself to the god Ares. Menoeceus, the son of Creon, the king of Thebes, decided to commit suicide by throwing himself over the walls. As predicted by the Oracle, Thebes was ultimately victorious against the assault of the Seven.