Epictetus · Philosophy
Epictetus’s first and hardest discipline - to want only what is in our power, and to will what actually happens, so that our desires can never be frustrated.
Epictetus organizes the philosophical life into three fields of training, or disciplines: the discipline of desire (wanting and not-wanting rightly), the discipline of action (acting toward others rightly), and the discipline of assent (judging rightly). The first, the discipline of desire, is where the beginner must start, because it is the most urgent: it concerns what we long for and what we dread, and these - our desires and aversions - are the source of our deepest disturbances. A person whose desires are disordered, who craves what they cannot have and dreads what they cannot avoid, is in perpetual turmoil. So the first task of philosophy is to put our wanting in order: to desire only what is genuinely within our power to obtain, and to be averse only to what is within our power to avoid.
Epictetus’s argument is simple and devastating. Desire, by its nature, aims at getting something; aversion aims at avoiding something. If you desire what is not in your power - wealth, success, another’s love, a long life - then whether you get it is up to fortune, and you have made your happiness depend on fortune’s favour: you will be anxious while you lack it and afraid of losing it once you have it. If you are averse to what is not in your power to avoid - poverty, illness, death, others’ disapproval - then you have set yourself against the inevitable and will inevitably be defeated. Misplaced desire and aversion are thus a recipe for guaranteed misery, because they bind your contentment to things outside your control. The only desires that can never be frustrated are desires for what is up to you.
Epictetus’s formula for the discipline of desire is one of the most famous sentences in philosophy: seek not that the things which happen should happen as you wish; but wish the things which happen to be as they are, and you will have a tranquil flow of life. The idea is to reverse the ordinary relation between will and world. Normally we set our will and then demand that the world conform; when it doesn’t, we suffer. Epictetus tells us to let the world set the terms and then bring our will into agreement with it. This is not indifference - the Stoic still acts to bring about good outcomes - but it concerns where we place our desire: we desire, ultimately, that things be as they are, since they are governed by a rational order greater than our private wishes. The reward is the ‘smoothly flowing life’ (in Greek, euroia), a life without the constant friction of wishing things were otherwise.
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 discipline of desire: wanting only what is up to us, and willing what happens. Centuries later Spinoza reached a strikingly similar conclusion through pure metaphysics - that freedom lies in understanding and accepting necessity. State Spinoza’s version.
Leads to Benedict de Spinoza.
Begin this lesson →epoché — a humanities education that remembers you.