Discourses III by Epictetus

Discourses III is a record of Epictetus teaching in his own school, arguing that a person's good and evil lie entirely in the will and nowhere else. Nothing external, not the body, not a son, not a verdict from Caesar, can touch what is truly yours. The book opens with grooming and ends with poverty, but the argument underneath is the same from first chapter to last: examine the opinion behind the reaction, not the event itself.

The book opens on an unlikely subject: personal appearance. A young man visits Epictetus concerned with how he looks, and Epictetus turns the conversation toward what actually makes a person beautiful. He points to Socrates's advice to Alcibiades, the most admired young man in Athens: "adorn your will, take away bad opinions" (Discourses III 1). The body, Epictetus says, should be left as nature made it, because you are not flesh and hair, but will, and a beautiful will makes a beautiful person (Discourses III 1). This is not a chapter about vanity. It is Epictetus's first move in a book that will keep locating the human being in the wrong place, then correcting the location.

From there Epictetus lays out a curriculum. There are three topics for the person who wants to become wise and good: training desire and aversion so as not to fail to get what you want or fall into what you avoid, performing your actions and duties correctly, and avoiding deception and rashness in assent (Discourses III 2). He is explicit that the first of these matters most, since disturbance, envy, and misfortune all come from failing or falling in desire and aversion (Discourses III 2). This structure is not decoration. Nearly every later chapter in the book is an exercise in one of these three topics.

The most famous exercise comes in chapter 3, a drill Epictetus recommends doing every morning: examine what you see and hear, and ask of each thing, is this dependent on the will or not. A beautiful person, a mourner weeping over a child, all get the same test, and if the thing is not within the will's power, you set it aside (Discourses III 3). Epictetus pushes this to its root: "what is weeping and lamenting? Opinion. What is bad fortune? Opinion" (Discourses III 3). He is not claiming that nothing bad ever happens. He is claiming that the badness people feel comes from an opinion laid over the event, not from the event as such, and that opinion can be examined and changed. He illustrates this with an image: the soul is like a dish of water, and impressions are like a ray of light falling on it. When the water is disturbed, the light seems to move, but it does not (Discourses III 3). What moves is the judgment, not the fact.

A common misreading treats this as detachment for its own sake, as though Epictetus wants a man indifferent to his own son's death. He does not soften the doctrine to avoid this charge. He states plainly that the good is preferred to every intimate relationship, even to a father, because there is no natural bond between him and his father that outranks the bond between him and the good (Discourses III 3). This is a hard claim, and Epictetus does not apologize for it. The same logic runs through the drill in chapter 8, where a son's death, a father's disinheritance, and a condemnation by Caesar are each ruled not evil, because none is within the power of the will, while affliction at these things, being within the will, can be judged good or bad depending on how it is borne (Discourses III 8). "But that herein he has fared badly, every man adds from his own opinion," Epictetus says of the man led to prison (Discourses III 8). The fact is neutral. The suffering is added.

This same standard measures invincibility, progress, and wealth. The good man is invincible because he never enters a contest outside his will's power: take his land, his slaves, his body, and his desire still lands where he aimed it (Discourses III 6). Progress is not cleverness in argument but whether the ruling faculty stays in agreement with nature (Discourses III 9). And a man with firm opinions calls himself richer than a man with silver and gold, because his discourse and desires are his own, not borrowed from another's opinion of him (Discourses III 9). Read as a whole, Discourses III gives the reader a method more than a mood: interrogate the impression before you react to it, and you will find that most of what disturbs you was never yours to lose.