Epictetus: Discourses — Re-Begun 2009.11.30

I began reading Epictetus at the beginning of the year, on the web.

I looked him up because Mark Kingwell mentioned him in his book Better Living: In Pursuit of Happiness from Plato to Prozac. Since then I have been looking in the used book stores for my own hard copy of Epictetus. Rather difficult to find! I here give great thanks to Peter Gribble, the proprietor of my large local used bookstore, Booktown, for pointing out to me that Epictetus's Discourses are included in the Encyclopaedia Brittanica's Great Book series, Volume 12. And it so happened that he even had one on hand, and that by lucky(?) happenstance this volume also includes Marcus Aurelius and Lucretius — whom I will now be reading in the near future, I imagine. Especially M.A. because with his inclusion in this volume arises one of the oddest little fushigis I can imagine — about 4 years ago one of my co-workers was been given, by me, the nickname Marcus Aurelius!

However, the reason I'm writing this out is because of a nice little fushigi that I came across in the writings of Epictetus. It applies to my place of work and the recent discussions I've had with a couple of my work co-podders. Our recent discussions, over morning coffee the last few days before knuckling down work, have been about the power (or lack of power) we individuals have to change that annoying other person, be it kith, kin or co-worker.

And to extend the fushigi just a wee bit, Epictetus comments on dreaming and dreamers. And dreams have also recently started to become a morning coffee topic of discussion with my pod-mates. (For example, the other night I dreamt I was in New York with Regis Philbin taking in the sites and looking for real-estate while NR dreamt he was walking across an upper floor of a small hotel that was covered in mangled, dead and dying baby ducks. He was unconcerned about them as he wended his way through them to get to the stairwell and to the main floor which was having some kind of reception or event.)

And as a great bit of philosophical dessert, and that I find particularly fascinating, is how Epictetus's dream comment contrasts with that of my favourite ancient eastern philosopher, Chuang-Tzu (莊子).

Anyway, here's Epictetus on the nature of personal obstinacy and what can be done to change it (in others):

Book I Chapter V.

Concerning the Academics.

It is said that there are those who will oppose very evident truths, and yet it is not easy to find a reason which may persuade such an one to alter his opinion. This may arise neither from his own strength, nor from the weakness of his teacher; but when a man becomes obstinate in error, reason cannot always reach him.

Now there are two sorts of obstinacy: the one, of the intellect; the other, of the will. A man may obstinately set himself not to assent to evident truths, nor to quit the defence of contradictions. We all dread a bodily paralysis; and would make use of every contrivance to avoid it: but none of us is troubled about a paralysis of the soul. And yet, indeed, even with regard to the soul, when a person is so affected as not to apprehend or understand anything, we think him in a sad condition; but where the emotions of shame and modesty are under an absolute paralysis, we go so far as even to call this strength of mind!

[Epictetus then takes his 'obstinancy' argument into a strange direction, that of dreams. He continued the above with:]

Are you certain that you are awake? — “I am not,” replies such a person, “for neither am I certain when in dreaming I appear to myself to be awake.” Is there no difference, then, between these appearances? — “None.” Shall I argue with this man any longer? For what steel or what caustic can I apply, to make him sensible of his paralysis? If he is sensible of it, and pretends not to be so, he is even worse than dead. He sees not his inconsistency, or, seeing it, holds to the wrong. He moves not, makes no progress; he rather falls back. His sense of shame is gone; his reasoning faculty is not gone, but brutalized. Shall I call this strength of mind? By no means: unless we allow it to be such in the vilest debauchees, publicly to speak and act out their worst impulses.

I included the last bit for a couple of reasons. In part because, as I mentioned, we have been talking about dreams, lately, but also because of how the existence of 'lucid dreaming' perhaps refutes Epictetus's argument! But that is not the only, nor even the main, reason I included it. I included it because Chuang-Tzu, the Chinese philosopher of about 300 B.C. or so (Epictetus died in 135 A.D.), also comments on the problem of dreams:

Once upon a time Chuang dreamed that he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting about happily enjoying himself. He didn't know that he was Chou. Suddenly he awoke and was palpably Chou. He did not know whether he was Chou who had dreamed of being a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming that he was Chou. Now, there must be a difference between Chou and the butterfly. This is called the transformation of things.

Chuang Tzu. Wandering on the Way: Early Taoist Tales and Parables of Chuang Tzu. Toronto: Bantam Books, 1994. Translated by Victor H. Mair, p. 24.

What is most interesting about this, in comparison to Epictetus, is that Chuang-Tzu does not dismiss as irrational the person who couldn't tell whether or not he was dreaming. How Chuang-Tzu puts it is very interesting, because he says that there must be difference – even if it is impossible to distinguish the two. Basic western philosophy, of which Epictetus here is clearly enunciating, is so fixated on the power of the mind that he cannot conceive of two ostensibly disparate things so alike that the mind cannot distinguish between the two. He has failed to observe that the heart/soul knows truths the mind cannot grasp, despite his use of 'soul' here and elsewhere. Curious.

Dreams: Crucial Texts on the Meaning of Dreams: Begun 2009.04.27

C.G. Jung.
Dreams: Crucial Texts on the Meaning of Dreams by One of the Greatest Minds of our Time.
New York: MJF Books,
Two Lincoln Square
60 West 66th Street
New York, NY 10023.
ISBN: 1567311350.

Began April 27th, 2009

[YtbF]

Serendipitous find! Again, from Renaissance Books.

When I got it home and looked at it more closely, it looks like I have previously read all of these extracts from Jung's complete works.

But this is still a great find because I did not 'til now have all of them in my own library.

And, of course, re-reading Jung is always a good thing.

Curious that I seem to be on a bit of a Jung binge, right now.

Not sure why, but it is prompting me to attend my dreaming world. Again.

And, as always with Jung, lots of stuff to think about:

... understanding is not an exclusively intellectual process for, as experience shows, a man may be influenced, and indeed convinced in the most effective way, by innumerable things of which he has no intellectual understanding (p30; CW8 par468).

And:

... as to the classification of dreams, I would not put too high a value either on the practical or on the theoretical importance of this question. I investigate yearly some fifteen hundred to two thousand dreams, an on the basis of this experience I can assert that typical dreams do actually exist. But they are not very frequent, and from the final point of view they lose much of the importance which the causal standpoint attaches to them on account of the fixed significance of symbols. It seems to me that the typical motifs in dreams are of much greater importance since they permit a comparison with the motifs of mythology. Many of those mythological motifs . .. are also found in dreams, often with precisely the same significance. Though I cannot enter into this question more fully here, I would like to emphasize that the comparison of typical dream-motifs with those of mythology suggests the idea — already put forward by Nietzsche — that dream-thinking should be regarded as a phylogenetically older mode of thought....

Just as the body bears the traces of its phylogenetic development, so also does the human mind. Hence there is nothing surprising about the possibility that the figurative language of dreams is a survival from an archaic mode of thought.

...

Dreams, then, convey to us in figurative language — that is, in sensuous, concrete imagery — thoughts, judgments, views, directives, tendencies, which were unconscious either because of repression or though mere lack of realization. Precisely because they are contents of the unconscious, and the dream is a derivative of the unconscious processes, it contains a reflection of the unconscious contents. It is not a reflection of contents in general but only of certain contents, which are linked together associatively and are selected by the conscious situation of the moment. I regard this observation as a very important one in practice. If we want to interpret a dream correctly, we need a thorough knowledge of the conscious situation at that moment, because the dream contains its unconscious complement, that material which the conscious situation has constellated in the unconscious. Without this knowledge it is impossible to interpret a dream correctly, except by a lucky fluke ...(p33-35; CW8 par474-77).

And:

I believe it is true that all dreams are compensatory to the content of consciousness, but certainly not in all dreams is the compensatory function so clear as in this example. Though dreams contribute to the self-regulation of the psyche by automatically bringing up everything that is repressed or neglected or unknown, their compensatory significance is often not immediately apparent because we still have only a very incomplete knowledge of the nature and the needs of the human psyche. There are psychological compensations that seem to be very remote from the problem on hand. In these cases one must always remember that every man, in a sense, represents the whole of humanity and its history. What was possible in the history of mankind at large is also possible on a small scale in every individual. What mankind has needed may eventually be needed by the individual too. It is therefore not surprising that religious compensations play a great role in dreams. That this is increasingly so in our time is a natural consequence of the prevailing materialism of our outlook (p36; CW8 par483).

This paragraph has at least two very provocative,

to me, thoughts.

First:

The idea that the religious nature of compensatory dreams is because of materialism has a correspondence in that that compensation is also being made manifest in the non-dream world through the ideological 'dream' world of religious fundamentalism. While this is not proof of Jung's argument, of course, it is curious that there has been a huge growth in religious fundamentalism at much the same rate as the ideology of material consumerism has grown globally.

Second:

Jung's comment that what is possible for the history of mankind is to a smaller scale possible for the individual is an incredibly bold statement because there can be no empirical proof of this!

This does not mean I believe this is untrue, because I haven't thought of this in the manner presented here. I have chosen to not dismiss this thought, though, simply because of a failure of empirical proof because such a failure is not a proof of something's nonexistence. But I need to think about this.