Lessons From Epictetus: On Mastering the Will

The teachings of a Stoic philosopher are relevant for the digital age

Born in the first century A.D., Epictetus remains one of Stoicism's greatest philosophers. Public domain

“Wish the things which happen to be as they are, and you will have a tranquil flow of life.”—Epictetus, Roman philosopher

It’s advice that’s alien to the modern mentality. Shouldn’t everyone want everything to be better? But when we consider various people’s definitions of “better” and how the logical conclusion of certain forms of progress is often worse than the imperfect status quo, we might reconsider this statement. Although we aren’t likely to become fatalists in the end, Epictetus might help us to curb overzealous idealism.

A Life of Slavery

Epictetus was born around A.D. 50 in Phrygia (present-day Turkey). Unlike his older contemporary Seneca, who was a member of the aristocracy, Epictetus was born into slavery. If Seneca was a thinker much like St. Paul—a comparison I made in last week’s article in this series—then Epictetus is more directly comparable with Jesus. While Seneca professed the value of seeing life from the position of the slave, Epictetus lived this outlook. This complete coherence of life and thought led to Epictetus being called the greatest of the Stoic philosophers.

His master was a man named Epaphroditus, a freedman who was a secretary to Emperor Nero. Being a former slave didn’t give Epaphroditus any sense of perspective, however, and it’s said that he tortured Epictetus. According to some sources, Epictetus became permanently disabled after his master broke his leg. This cruelty was slightly counterbalanced by two generous services Epaphroditus was known to have performed in his life: He allowed Epictetus to study Stoic philosophy, and he assisted the tyrant Nero in committing suicide. For this latter act, Emperor Domitian had Epaphroditus executed.

Epictetus was freed sometime after this. In A.D. 93, Domitian decided that philosophers were dangerous to the state and banished them from Italy. Epictetus fled to western Greece, founded a school, gathered students, and became famous. He continued to live a humble lifestyle and ended his days as the friend of Emperor Hadrian.

Developing Self-Control

Like Jesus and Socrates, Epictetus talked but wrote nothing. It was his pupil, the historian Arrian, who wrote down the teachings from his lectures. Two books have come down to us thanks to Arrian’s diligence: the “Discourses,” a longer work of which about half survives, and the shorter “Enchiridion,” or “Handbook”—a compilation of sayings that applied Epictetus’s teachings to everyday life.

In his book “Epictetus: A Stoic and Socratic Guide to Life,” scholar A.A. Long said that “the main focus of Epictetus’ teaching is not on perfection or ideal wisdom, but on shaping and improving the mindset of ordinary persons like ourselves.” While philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle tended to be read by scholarly types, Epictetus’s “Handbook” was popular among laypeople.

The “Handbook” begins with the famous line: “Of things some are in our power, and others are not.”

Epictetus elaborates that we can control our own opinions, movements, desires, and aversions, while everything outside of our own acts—body, property, reputation, and magisterial offices—is beyond our power.

Psychologist Julian Rotter modernized this insight with the term “locus of control.” Rotter showed how people with an “internal” locus are psychologically healthier, as they believe themselves to be in control of their own lives, while those with an “external” locus believe themselves to be buffeted by forces of society and suffer from depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem.

While Rotter’s theory accords with most Americans’ ideas about themselves, Epictetus’s views weren’t so simple. His fundamental point was that no one really has an internal locus of control—those who believe they do are deceiving themselves. Random disasters or the whims of the powerful can wreck your life at any moment. Those who realize this and come to terms with their external locus of control will, paradoxically, develop a healthier internal locus than those who believe that they’re in charge of their lives: “If you think the things ... which are in the power of others to be your own, you will be hindered, you will lament, you will be disturbed, you will blame both gods and men,” he said.

By training yourself to not desire or be concerned with things beyond your power, you'll minimize disappointment and “do nothing involuntarily.” Finding happiness within yourself allows you to endure any suffering—a lesson Epictetus no doubt learned from being beaten by his master.

Epictetus’s reflections make him one of the first thinkers to tackle the problem of the human will in depth. His lessons are well-suited to times like our own, when many people, hungering for status while despairing about a world falling into chaos, are suffering from unprecedented levels of mental illness.

Stoicism in the Internet Age

In his foreword to Regnery Publishing’s new edition of “Gateway to the Stoics,” classicist Spencer Klavan situated Stoicism in the context of the “disorienting atmosphere of digital technology.” He likened the internet to “an Epicurean chaos of people, images, and ideas hurtling at random through an endless void.” Within this milieu, the figures of Stoicism are experiencing a popular resurgence, providing order amid atomization. The subreddit r/Stoicism has almost half a million members, mostly male, who look to Epictetus and others for love advice and professional coaching.

But Klavan noted a curious tendency: These truth-seekers tend to jettison Stoicism’s theology and only focus on its ethical teachings. But consider what Epictetus said in chapter 31 of the “Handbook”: “As to piety towards the Gods you must know that this is the chief thing to have right opinions about them, to think that they exist, and that they administer the All well and justly.” We must practice duty and obedience, Epictetus said, “to yield to them in everything which happens, and voluntarily to follow it as being accomplished by the wisest intelligence.”

By changing “Gods” to the singular “God” here, the passage takes on parallels with Jesus’s lessons in the gospels about obedience to the Father. Epictetus’s sayings, in fact, are so similar to verses from the New Testament that the scholar Douglas Sharp once wrote a book entirely made up of side-by-side comparisons of these two sources.

The point, as Klavan noted, is that “without God, stoicism cannot save.” Lessons on obedience don’t make sense if there’s no one to be obedient to. Enduring suffering is meaningless without a higher reason, or “logos,” that provides cosmic purpose. If everything is just atoms and the void, why put so much effort into strengthening the will or developing an internal locus of control?

Rotter was a behaviorist who measured people’s loci of control in terms of rewards and punishments. All good scientific theories read like Ancient Wisdom 2.0, but in the emphasis on materialism, something gets lost. It’s the sort of progress in which one throws out the old vinyl record in favor of the digital recording—when the music gets compressed, the resonance and richness of the original sound quality vanish. In the end, as Epictetus understood, ethics needs to be grounded in metaphysics.