Enchiridion 5: what disturbs us

The chapter

Epictetus taught philosophy at Nicopolis, in northwestern Greece, in the late first and early second centuries CE. The Enchiridion, or Handbook, is a short digest of his teaching made by his student Arrian. Here is chapter 5 complete, in George Long’s 1877 translation.

The chapter has two parts. The first sentence makes a claim and tests it on the hardest case available. The rest turns the claim into a rule for bad moments, and ends with a sketch of three kinds of people.

What it means, line by line

“Not by the things which happen.” Whenever you are upset, two things are present: something that happened, and what you think about it. Epictetus puts the disturbance in the second. Your flight is canceled at 9 p.m. The cancellation is the event. “My whole week is ruined” and “this always happens to me” are opinions about it. Two passengers in the same rebooking line hear the same announcement and have very different nights.

Long’s word choices are worth a note. His “men” stands for a Greek word meaning human beings in general. “Things” translates pragmata, the affairs and events of life, and “opinions” translates dogmata: settled judgments, what you take to be true about those events. English borrowed the singular as “dogma.”

“Death is nothing terrible.” Epictetus picks death on purpose: if the claim holds there, it holds for a canceled flight. His evidence is Socrates, condemned by an Athenian jury in 399 BCE. In Plato’s Apology (29a–b), Socrates tells that jury that fearing death means thinking you know what you don’t, since no one knows whether death might be the greatest of goods. The fear people feel is real enough. What Epictetus denies is that it is a perception of something terrible in death itself. The opinion “is the terrible thing.”

“Impeded, or disturbed, or grieved.” The rule covers being blocked, being upset and being sad. In each case the first move is to stop searching for a culprit outside and look at your own judgment. The words after the dash in “ourselves—that is, our opinions” matter. The blame Epictetus recommends is narrow. It is aimed at one judgment, not at your worth.

“Neither to blame another, nor himself.” You miss your train. The beginner says the trains in this city are a joke. The person who has started to learn says, “I’m hopeless, I always do this.” The person further along notices that “this ruins my morning” was an opinion, sends a message saying they’ll be twenty minutes late, and leaves ten minutes earlier tomorrow. The mistake is still seen and still fixed. Nobody is put on trial for it.

“It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it”

The line usually circulates as “It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters,” credited to Epictetus. That sentence is not in Epictetus. It is a modern rewording of this chapter’s first line, and it is right about one important thing: the event is not the whole story, and the part you can work on is on your side.

It also changes three things.

• It moves the work later. “React” pictures the event hitting you and you then choosing a response. In Epictetus the disturbance comes from the opinion, so the work comes earlier, at the judgment. Nor did the Stoics think you could prevent the first jolt: Seneca says that hair rising at bad news is involuntary and not yet a passion, and that what follows depends on whether the mind agrees (On Anger 2.2–2.4). The step that is yours sits between the jolt and the response, at the moment you agree that this is terrible. A slogan about reactions skips it.
• It sounds like a test of toughness. “What matters is how you react” invites the stiff upper lip: feel it, hide it, carry on. The chapter ends somewhere gentler, with blaming no one, yourself included.
• It drops the argument. No Socrates, no death, no blame. What is left is a slogan.

The verdict: a fair summary of half a sentence. When you want Epictetus himself, quote Long and cite Enchiridion 5. Other lines that travel under Stoic names are checked on fake Stoic quotes.

The idea has had a long modern life. The psychologist Albert Ellis (1913–2007) often cited this chapter and credited Epictetus as a forerunner of his own ideas about how beliefs shape emotions. That history, and what the Stoics meant by emotion, is on Stoicism and emotions.

In the Discourses: why opinions decide

Arrian’s longer record of Epictetus’s lectures, the Discourses, explains what the Handbook states in a line. Discourses 1.28 starts from assent: accepting an appearance as true. Try, while it is day, to persuade yourself that it is night, Epictetus says. You can’t. The mind goes along with whatever looks true, so a person who holds a false belief has been taken in by how it looked, not by a wish to be wrong.

Then he moves from belief to action: no one can think a thing is to his advantage and not choose it. That helps explain the end of Enchiridion 5. The person who wronged you was steered by an opinion, and “the falsity seemed to him to be true” (Discourses 1.28). Your own upset runs through an opinion too. Whoever remembers that every act follows how things appear, Epictetus says, “will not revile or blame any man.” The two texts arrive at the same place: blame no one, and examine the opinion.

Using it today

When something upsets you, write what happened in words a camera could confirm, then write the opinion you added; the second line is the one Epictetus tells you to examine. The free Anger exercise walks you through that split, and the practice now called the dichotomy of control explains why opinions are yours to work on: opinion is the first item on Epictetus’s list of things in our power (Enchiridion 1).

Before and after chapter 5

• Previous: chapter 4. Before you set out to do anything, picture what it usually involves. At a public bath, people splash, shove, insult each other and steal. If something goes wrong, remember that you came to keep your will in harmony with nature as well as to bathe.
• Next: chapter 6. Don’t take pride in a fine horse, because the horse’s excellence isn’t yours. What is yours is how you handle the way things appear to you, which is chapter 5 seen from the other side.