Thus, from the point of view of nature, and therefore also of whoever is familiar with nature, there is no distinction t.o he made between hath-water and the rest of ercntion : cvcrythinl{ iN
"nnt ur11I . "
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We can hardly hope to deduce Marcus' psychological states from any of the preceding. Was he an optimist or a pessimist? Did he suffer from a stomach ulcer? The Meditations do not allow us to respond to these questions.
All we can learn from them is about spiritual exercises, as they were traditionally practiced by the Stoics.
2 Epictetus
In Marcus Aurelius' day, the greatest authority in questions of Stoicism was Epictetus. As the slave of Epaphroditus, one of Nero's freedmen, Epictetus had attended the classes of the Stoic Musonius Rufus. When Epictetus in turn was subsequently freed by Epaphroditus, he opened a philosophy school at Rome. In AD 93-4, Epictetus fell victim to the edict by which the emperor Domitian banished philosophers from Rome and Italy, and he set himself up in Nicopolis in Epirus. There he opened another school, where one of his regular students was the future civil servant and historian Arrian of Nicomedia. It was Arrian who was responsible for transmitting what we know about Epictetus' teaching; for Epictetus, like many philosophers in antiquity, never wrote anything down.
What Arrian thus preserved for us was not the technical part of Epictetus'
philosophical instruction - his commentaries on Stoic authors such as Chrysippus, for example, or his more general explanations of doctrine.
Rather, what Arrian copied down was the discussions which, as was usual in ancient philosophical schools, took place after the technical part of the class.
In these discussions, the master would reply to questions from his audience, or enlarge upon particular points which were of importance for leading a philosophical life.75 It is important to emphasize this point, for it means that we must not expect to find technical, systematic expositions of every aspect of Stoic doctrines in Epictetus' Discourses. Instead, they deal with a rather limited number of problems, for the most part restricted to ethical matters.
This does not prove, of course, that Epictetus did not take up the whole of the Stoic system in the course of his theoretical teaching. Besides, only the first four books of Arrian's work have survived. We know from a passage in Aulus Gellius,76 who cites an extract from the fifth book of Epictetus'
Discourses, that a part of the work has been lost. For these two reasons, then, we must be wary of concluding, on the basis of these collections of Arrian's notes, that theoretical philosophical teaching gradually became impoverished in the course of later Stoicism.
What we can say is that Epictetus did insist very strongly upon a concept that was traditional in Stoicism:n the difference between discourse about philosophy and the practice of philosophy itself.
h is 11omc1 ime11 claimed that the Stoics recognized two parts of philosophy: on the cmc h111ul , t h�y di11tinguished :i t heoretical discursive part, comprising
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physics and logic; that is, the study of nature and of the rules of discourse.
On the other, there was the practical part of philosophy, corresponding to ethics. This is incorrect. Rather, both theoretical philosophical discourse and philosophy itself as it was lived and experienced were made up of three constituent parts.
In theoretical philosophical discourse, the three parts of philosophy were necessarily distinguished. They were made the object of separate explanations, developed according to a logical principle of succession, and they laid the foundations for and developed the basic principles of Stoic doctrine. On the level of theoretical discourse, then, the parts of philosophy were in a sense external to one another, in accordance with the requirements of didactic exposition. Philosophy itself, however, is the exercise of wisdom; it is a unique act, renewed at each instant, and it may be just as well described as the exercise of logic, physics, or ethics, according to the subject-matter on which it is exercised, without its unity being in any way diminished. On this level, we are no longer concerned with theoretical logical - that is, the theory of correct reasoning - rather, we are concerned not to let ourselves be deceived in our everyday lives by false representations. We arc no longer concerned with theoretical physics - the theory of the origin and evolution of the cosmos
- we are concerned with being aware at every instant that we are parts of the cosmos, and that we must make our desires conform to this situation . We no longer do ethical theory - the definition and classification of virtues and duties - we simply act in an ethical way.
Concrete philosophical praxis requires that we always bear in mind the Stoics' fundamental dogmas. These dogmas were intended to constitute the basis for our rectitude of judgment, our attitude toward the cosmos, and the conduct we should adopt towards our fellow citizens within the city. Philosophy as it was lived and experienced thus implied continuous exercises of meditation and constant vigilance, in order to keep alive in one's mind the principles taught by theoretical discourse.
If we want to understand why Epictetus attaches so much importance to what he terms "the three areas of exercises," we shall have to bear in mind this distinction between theoretical philosophical discourse and concrete philosophy as it is lived and experienced. In the Discourses as reported by Arrian, these three areas are presented with such systematic rigor that we are justified in suspecting that this doctrine had an important role to play in Epictetus' theoretical teaching.
Epictetus bases his doctrine on the traditional Stoic distinction between things which depend on us and things which do not: "What depends on us is value-judgments, inclinations to act, desires, aversions, and, in a word, everything that is our doing. What does not depend on us is the body, wealth, glory, high political positions, and, in a word, everything that is not our own doing." 78 What depends u1,on us is t he nets of our own soul, hcc11u11c we 11rc
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able freely to choose them. What does not depend on us is those things that depend on the general course of nature and of fate. Among the acts of the soul which do depend on us, some correspond to the area of judgment and assent, others to the area of desire, and, finally, still others correspond to the area of inclinations to action.
For Epictetus, then, it is these three areas, acts of the soul, or aspects of
"that which depends on us" which define the three forms of philosophical exercises. By comparing the relevant passages in Epictetus' Discourses,19 we can present the theory of the three forms or areas of philosophical exercises as follows.
The first area is that of desire and aversion. People are unhappy because they desire things they may either lose or fail to obtain, and because they try to avoid misfortunes which are often inevitable. This happens because such desiderata as wealth and health, for example, do not depend on us. The discipline of desire consequently consists in accustoming ourselves to the gradual renunciation of such desires and aversions, so that, in the end, we shall desire only that which does depend on us - moral virtue - and shall also avoid only that which depends on us - moral evil. We are to regard everything which does not depend on us as indifferent; that is to say, we must not make any difference between such things. Rather, we must accept them all, willed as they are by universal nature. The discipline of desire concerns the passions or emotions ( pathe) which we feel as a result of what happens to us.