Enchiridion

Overview

The Enchiridion is not a book Epictetus wrote. He wrote nothing. He taught, in a school at Nicopolis, and his student Arrian took down the lectures and later boiled them into a handbook, which is what the Greek title means: something you keep to hand, the way a soldier keeps a dagger.

Fifty-three short chapters, some a paragraph, some a sentence. There is no argument in the ordinary sense and no attempt to prove the Stoic system. It assumes the physics and the logic and gives you only the practice, which is why it can be read in an hour and takes considerably longer to absorb.

Epictetus was born a slave in Phrygia, was lamed in some way that ancient sources disagree about, was freed, taught in Rome until Domitian expelled the philosophers, and set up in Greece. None of that is in the text, and all of it is behind the text. When he says your leg can be chained but your will cannot, he is not producing a hypothetical.

The argument

Chapter 1 contains everything else in compressed form. Some things are up to us, some are not. Up to us: judgement, impulse, desire, aversion, in a word our own doings. Not up to us: body, property, reputation, office, in a word everything not our own doing. What is up to us is by nature free, unhindered, unimpeded. What is not is weak, slavish, subject to interference, and belongs to others. Confuse the two and you will be obstructed, grieved and troubled. Keep them straight and no one can compel or hinder you.

Everything after that is application. Chapters 2 to 14 work on desire and aversion, which are the first things a beginner must get under control: do not desire what is not yours to have, because you will fail; do not be averse to what you cannot avoid, because you will suffer. Chapter 5 states the mechanism that the whole tradition rests on. It is not the thing that disturbs you but your opinion about the thing, so when you are thwarted, blame your own judgement and nothing else.

The middle chapters are social. How to behave at a dinner, how to take an insult, how to hold office, how to respond when someone tells you that a man is speaking ill of you. Chapter 11 handles bereavement with a bluntness that either lands or repels: nothing is lost, only returned, because nothing was ever yours. Chapter 17 gives the image of the actor and the role.

The later chapters turn to consistency and self-command: do not talk about philosophy, do it; when someone says you know nothing and you are not stung, you have begun; a philosopher’s progress shows not in his conversation but in whether he blames anyone. The book closes with three quotations, from Cleanthes, from Euripides and from Plato’s Crito, all on accepting what is given.

How to read it

Read it twice. The first pass takes an hour and gives you the shape. The second is slower, because the book is written to be argued with, and the honest response to half of it is resistance.

Do not read it as consolation. It is a training manual with a hard doctrine underneath: that external goods, including the people you love, are not goods at all. Chapter 3 tells you to remind yourself, while kissing your child, that you are kissing a mortal, so that you will not be disturbed when the child dies. Sit with how that lands before deciding whether you accept it. The tradition’s critics, from Augustine onward, have argued that this buys tranquillity by hollowing out love. The Stoic reply is that you can love fully what you have not confused with something you own. Decide which you find convincing.

Read Dobbin’s Penguin, which prints the Handbook with a substantial selection from the Discourses. The Handbook alone gives you conclusions without the reasoning and the voice; the Discourses are where Epictetus is funny, impatient and recognisably a teacher handling real students.

Watch for the two halves of the doctrine coming apart. Some things are not up to us, and Epictetus says: therefore do not want them. A different conclusion is available, that you should want them and act for them while accepting you may fail. Where the text closes that door, notice how.

Questions it raises

• Is the division into what is and is not up to us as clean as Epictetus needs it to be? Where does your health sit, or your character, or your habits?
• If externals are indifferent, why should a Stoic bother with politics, family or friendship at all? Epictetus plainly thinks they should. On what grounds?
• Chapter 5 says events do not disturb us, judgements do. Is that true of grief and torture, or only of insults and inconveniences?
• The actor accepts the part he is given. Does that make Stoicism a philosophy of resignation to unjust arrangements, and did it function that way in a slave-owning empire?
• Epictetus says progress shows in whether you blame others. Is that a good test, or one that rewards suppressing a complaint rather than not having it?
• The handbook works without its physics and theology. Does the practice still hold if you drop the providential universe it was built on?