Epictetus · Philosophy
Epictetus’s foundational distinction between what is up to us and what is not - the single rule from which his entire philosophy of freedom unfolds.
Epictetus opens his handbook, the Enchiridion, with the sentence that contains the whole of his philosophy: some things are up to us, and some things are not. Up to us are our own judgments, choices, desires, and aversions - in a word, the workings of our own mind and will. Not up to us are our bodies, our possessions, our reputations, our positions, the actions of other people, and the turns of fortune. The first category is, by nature, free and unobstructed; the second is weak, dependent, and belongs to others or to chance. Everything in Epictetus follows from getting this division right. Confuse the two - treat what is not up to you as if it were, or surrender what is up to you as if it weren’t - and you guarantee yourself a life of frustration, anxiety, and bondage.
From the dichotomy follows Epictetus’s most famous and most liberating claim: that we are disturbed not by things themselves, but by our opinions about things. The event - losing a job, being insulted, falling ill, even death - does not in itself contain our distress. The distress comes from the judgment we add: that this is a catastrophe, that it should not have happened, that we cannot bear it. Death is not terrible, Epictetus says, or Socrates would have thought so; what is terrible is the opinion that death is terrible. This is why two people can meet the same misfortune and one is destroyed while the other is unshaken: the difference lies not in the event, which is the same, but in the judgments they bring to it. And judgments are up to us.
Epictetus gives a concrete test of whether someone has absorbed the dichotomy: watch how they assign blame. The uninstructed person, when things go wrong, blames others - fate, the gods, circumstances, anyone but themselves. The person beginning to learn philosophy blames themselves. But the person who has truly learned it blames no one, because they no longer experience externals as harms to be blamed for in the first place; they have stopped demanding that the world conform to their wishes, and so have nothing to rage against. This progression - from blaming others, to blaming oneself, to blaming no one - is Epictetus’s map of moral growth. Its endpoint is not a person who has gained control over the world, but one who has stopped needing to, and is therefore serene whatever the world does.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned Epictetus’s rule that freedom comes from caring only about what is up to us. Marcus Aurelius, an emperor, lived the same doctrine from the opposite end of fortune. State how Marcus applied it.
Leads to Marcus Aurelius.
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