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January 29 - February 16, 2019
Reach out your hand and take some politely. It passes by: do not hold it back. It has not yet come to you: do not stretch to reach it, but wait till it comes to you.
The Stoics advocate, first, a life led according to nature. The meaning and sense of this instruction has been a matter of debate.
What it has made necessary for man, nature has not made difficult.
Stoics regard the mind as the site and the source of true happiness.
Perhaps there were those who got carried away and forgot about the time.
On hearing of the interesting events which have happened in the course of a man’s experience, many people will wish that similar things had happened in their lives too, completely forgetting that they should be envious rather of the mental aptitude which lent those events the significance they possess when he describes them….
The approval may be the immediate kind that we call praise or the collective type known as fame; the criticism may be insult or infamy.
contempt for conformity, for the opinion of the majority,
They start by asking why we care what others say and think about us, especially when the others are people we probably do not hold in notably high esteem.
Stoicism tries instead to substitute a greater respect for one’s own opinions,
The other side of our topic is criticism and insult. Of course the Stoic urges indifference to these things.
Stoics usually can accept insults in good humor by reflecting that any such criticism probably understates their true faults;
If we are criticized unjustly, the critics are mistaken and entitled to compassion.
And at any rate we all will be gone soon enough.
We practice things that will win praise; we should practice the art of not needing it.
Who does not willingly exchange health, tranquility, and life itself for reputation and glory – the most useless, worthless, and counterfeit coin that circulates among us?
Epictetus suggested, as we just saw, that the orator who is nervous has been taught how to give a speech but not how to manage the appetite for praise.
Why do you take pleasure in praise from those you cannot praise yourself ?
The Stoic therefore regards widespread approval of something as a bad sign.
Soon you will have forgotten everything;
soon everything will have forgotten you.
Look at the speed with which everything is forgotten;
the vast gulf of boundless time on either side of us;
They are reluctant to praise men who live at the same time they do; yet they think it is important to be praised by future generations – by those they have never seen and never will.
Those who try to achieve fame that will outlive them fail to reflect that the people of the future will be just like the ones they cannot bear now, and mortal as well.
the Stoics would do more than learn contempt for public opinion. They would replace it with greater respect for opinions of their own.
No longer be concerned with what the world says about you, but with how you talk to yourself.
“I devoted myself to the liberal arts. Although my poverty urged me to do otherwise and tempted my talents towards a field where there is an immediate profit from study, I turned aside to unremunerative poetry and dedicated myself to the wholesome study of philosophy….”
They reverse the natural order – regarding the opinions of others as real existence and their own consciousness as something shadowy;
An effective insult requires a kind of cooperation from the victim – a judgment, for example, that the insult matters. The judgment can be dropped or withheld.
Remember that you are insulted not by the person who strikes or abuses you but by your
opinion that these things are insulting.
Stand by a stone and insult it; what will you gain? And if you listen like a stone, what will be gained by one who insults you?
dismiss the opinion within you that is responsible for it.
Someone will disdain me? That is his concern. My concern is that I not be found doing or saying anything worthy of disdain.
that you entrust your mind to whoever you happen to meet, so that if he insults you, your mind is disturbed and confounded – aren’t you ashamed of that?
“Evidently he didn’t know about my other faults, or he wouldn’t have spoken only of the ones he did.”
How is it an insult to be told what is obvious?
But suppose an insult is unjust. In that case the Stoic regards whoever delivered it not as a bad person but as mistaken,
last perspective: if you receive an insult that is wrongful, you may consider it to have been directed at someone else – the person you were thought to be. It was a case of mistaken identity.
but he did not dump the water on me,” the king replied, “but on the man he thought I was.”
The cry of “Fire!” in the neighborhood has often broken up a fight; the arrival of a wild beast has separated a bandit from a traveler.
Why do we concern ourselves with conflict and plotting? That man you are angry with – can you wish for him anything worse than death? He is going to die without your doing a thing.
But the topics all involve mistakes of the mind that, unlike most of the errors the Stoics talk about in this book, do not involve desire or fear or pleasure or pain.
They also regard us as unconscious of the value of time generally. We give it away lightly, and waste it with less alarm than we waste money, though time is more valuable
We overrate money and undervalue time, just as we overrate material goods and the approval of others while undervaluing the gains we get by forgoing them.
We overlook faults in ourselves but find them easily in those around us.
We worry and plan in the same spirit that we crave the next acquisition; whatever we look forward to, whether it be the future or some new object, looks more appealing than it ever quite turns out to be once it arrives.
“What is there about this that is unendurable and unbearable?” You will be embarrassed to answer.
We are never home; we are always elsewhere.
