The Stoic View of the Self #156

Being in someone else’s shoes

Dear friends of Daily Philosophy,

here we are back again with our exploration of the Stoic philosophy of happiness and how we can apply it to our own lives. In case you didn’t read last week’s article on Stoic control and assent, it would be good to do so now, because with that background the following article will make much more sense :)

In other news, yesterday I finally published the long-delayed book on Aristotle’s philosophy of happiness and what we can learn from it for our own, everyday lives. As members of this email list, you can get your very own copy for free by clicking here before the 30th of November:

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And now, let’s go back to our topic: The Stoics.

First person and third person

(This article is part of a series on Stoic philosophy. Find all the articles in this series here.)

The Stoic philosopher Epictetus (~50-135 AD) writes in his famous Handbook:

(16) When you see anyone weeping in grief because his son has gone abroad, or is dead, or because he has suffered in his affairs, be careful that the appearance may not misdirect you. Instead, distinguish within your own mind, and be prepared to say, “It’s not the accident that distresses this person, because it doesn’t distress another person; it is the judgment which he makes about it.” As far as words go, however, don’t reduce yourself to his level, and certainly do not moan with him. Do not moan inwardly either.

We talked previously about how Stoics distinguish between what one can control and what is out of one’s control. An important point is to realise, the Stoics think, that the only thing we can effectively control is our own mind and how it perceives the world. The world itself, on the other hand, is entirely out of our control.

This is what Epictetus means when he says: “It’s not the accident that distresses this person …; it is the judgment which he makes about it.”

But how do we know that this is true? How do we know that Epictetus is right? It’s here that the little sentence which I just left out comes into play: “…because it doesn’t distress another person.”

So the idea is that we have an accident. Let’s say, my favourite cup breaks. Naturally, we would say, I’m upset about this. But Epictetus disagrees. Look, he says. Let’s take the exact same situation of the cup breaking, but instead of you we put a random other person in your shoes; let’s say, the guy who stood beside you in the supermarket check-out line this afternoon. Are you now upset that his cup was broken? – No, you say, not at all.

But then, Epictetus would conclude, the upsetting element cannot be the breaking of the cup, because we assumed that this happened in the same way in both cases. Nothing about the cup itself was different, and yet your reaction is different. So the only thing that is different is our judgement that we make about the broken cup. In the case that it’s my cup, I’m are upset. If it’s the other guy’s cup, I’m not (but he presumably is).

In the same way, we can see that everything that happens to us seems to have a special significance that the same event wouldn’t have if it happened to someone else. When I miss the bus, I’m upset. When the dude in the blue suit over there misses the same bus, I’m not.

But now let’s try to see the events objectively; and this is one of the cornerstones of the Stoic view of the world. The Stoics always emphasise that our personal view is distorted, an illusion. What is real is the fact that we are all more or less the same, equal in value, have the same rights and obligations, were made in the same way by nature, share the same history and most of our genes, as well as most of our preferences, aspirations and dreams for the future. There is really not much of a difference between any two humans, and you can verify this by looking at two random people on the street. Most likely, they would appear to you to be pretty much interchangeable.