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I
n 2012, John M. Cooper published his Pursuits of Wisdom.1 Based on the
previous year’s John Locke lectures, Cooper’s opus examines ancient phi-
losophy as involving not one, but six “ways of life.” Each ancient school, up
to and including the (for him) liminal neoPlatonists, was moved by the conviction
that “philosophical thought . . . on its own, must on its own, and directly, provide
the motivation . . . on which one lives one’s life in just the way that one does.”2 Yet
Cooper’s plural subtitle Six Ways of Life in Ancient Philosophy serves not simply
to qualify this generic metaphilosophical claim about the ancient philosophies.
It also marks Cooper’s contribution off from the influential work of the French
historian of ideas, Pierre Hadot, whose studies on ancient philosophy comme
manière de vivre (in the singular) influenced Michel Foucault and many oth-
ers. Indeed, for all of Cooper’s proximity, and avowed debt, to several of Hadot’s
key claims—notably, Hadot’s claim that the restriction of philosophy to a solely
theoretical pursuit came with the medieval hegemony of Christianity3—one
leitmotif of Cooper’s important book is a strong criticism of Hadot’s conception
of ancient philosophy.4
Cooper makes two central claims against Hadot’s idea of ancient philosophy
as a way of life, in favour of his own interpretation. First, ancient philosophy—al-
though it was agreed from Socrates onwards to involve an existential commitment,
wherein one lived ‘from,’ or on the basis of, the philosophical truths one theoreti-
cally assented to5—did not essentially involve what Hadot calls exercises spirituels
or “spiritual exercises.”6 Cooper sees Hadot as equivocating on the meaning of this
term “spiritual exercises” between a narrower meaning of “voluntary, personal
practices, intended to bring about a transformation of the individual” and a
wider sense, embracing “any activity of living, for example activities of daily life
in which one infuses one’s actions with one’s knowledge of [e.g.] Stoic logic or
Stoic physical theory.”7 The latter sense Cooper finds consistent with his sense of
ancient philosophy as a way of life, but for just this reason as involving nothing
meaningfully “spiritual.” Indeed, it is this term, which Hadot recognised would be
controversial, that Cooper sees Hadot as drawing from Ignatius Loyola in the six-
teenth century, rather than from ancient Greek or Roman texts.8 Indeed, Cooper’s
second claim is that Hadot illegitimately projects backwards an understanding of
philosophy drawn from late antiquity (Hadot’s earliest, and an enduring, period
of historical research). This was a period which Cooper (citing Hadot’s “La Fin du
Paganisme”) however sees as one of decline of ancient philosophy. In these times,
with the ascent of syncretic forms of neoPlatonism, philosophy became infected
by a wider cultural malaise and sense of alienation from the natural world that
fed the rise of the mystery cults and Christianity.9 In this context alone, Cooper
claims, were Hadot’s “spiritual exercises” (in the narrower sense specified above)
adopted by philosophers: involving “meditation, self-exhortation, memorisation,
and recitation to oneself of bits of sacred texts, causing in oneself devoted prayer-
ful or prayer-like states of consciousness and mystical moments.”10 But such
forms of askesis for Cooper reflect a later antique “contamination of philosophy
by religion”11 rather than in any way constituting an essential part of the ancient
philosophies, properly conceived as ways of life somehow founded in “rigorous
analysis and reasoned argument” alone.12
This essay wants to challenge Cooper’s criticisms of Hadot, and his concep-
tion of ancient philosophy as a way of life involving spiritual exercises. Its method
is to take a single case from the Roman period, the Stoic philosopher Epictetus.
On Cooper, Hadot, Epictetus, and Stoicism as a Way of Life 369
The stakes of our argument should be made clear from the start. Stoicism is of
course, for Cooper, one of the six ways of life Pursuits of Wisdom examines. Nev-
ertheless, the difference between Cooper’s treatment of the Stoics and Hadot’s
is remarkable and itself instructive. Hadot, who began his academic work as a
philologist, begins from the “literary question,” when he examines ancient phi-
losophers’ writing.13 That is, he attends closely to the kinds of books we know the
Stoics wrote, and argues that these literary forms reflect their desired pedagogic
and ethical aims—indeed their entire metaphilosophy. It is in order to explain
the distance, for example, between Aurelius’s Meditations and The Critique of
Pure Reason that Hadot claims that such texts can only be meaningfully read
as involving injunctions to forms of askesis—otherwise, he notes, we must
dismiss them as repetitive, ill-formed, drafts, or wholly idiosyncratic.14 Cooper
by contrast, in Pursuits of Wisdom, begins by reconstructing the Stoic’s theoreti-
cal system in abstraction from any and all specific texts, drawing mainly on the
surviving claims of the Hellenistic Stoics, taken from the doxological tradition;
and reconstructing the “system” on their basis. He then makes clear how assent-
ing to such a theoretically coherent worldview was intended to legitimise and,
in ways Cooper arguably cannot detail, make possible actually living a Stoic way
of life on an ongoing basis.15 Cooper’s Stoicism as a way of life did not involve,
then, any practices to ensure that these theoretical truths did come to actually
motivate agents practically (Epicureanism alone of the Hellenistic schools did,
Cooper concedes—but Epicureanism scores lower on his scale for this reason.16)
In what follows, we will claim that Epictetus stands as a prime exemplar of
philosophy practiced as a way of life, in ways which exceed and challenge Cooper’s
model. There is in Epictetus an over-arching sense of philosophy as interested
in ethical formation or παιδεία. This interest is nevertheless grounded in, and
justifiable by, a set of reasoned, theoretical claims about human nature; and the
philosophical way of life thus conceived is to be sharply differentiated both from
the values of most ordinary folk, and “sophists” who make a show of learning
for the sake of personal fame or advancement. These are the points about an-
cient philosophy as a way of life on which Cooper agrees with Hadot, and will
occupy Part 1 of the essay, where we examine Epictetus’s philosophical persona
as presented by Arrian in the Discourses. Yet, beyond Cooper’s metaphilosophy
and as Hadot, Sellars, Long and others have argued, Epictetus also embraces
the explicitly therapeutic sense of philosophy as aiming to cure people’s desires,
following Socrates and the earlier Stoics in describing it as—like medicine—a
τέχνη, specifically an “art of living.”17 Epictetus’s sayings as recorded by Arrian
also clearly enjoin forms of writing and acting as means to actively reshape aspir-
ing philosophers’ motivations, on top of merely learning the theoretical system
of the earlier Stoics. Epictetus’s recommendation of such forms of askesis, which
we will argue shape the entirety of his Handbook, will be our concern in Part 2
370 Matthew Sharpe
below. Indeed, our argument here against Cooper’s sense of Stoicism as a way of
life is captured in two characteristic episodes recorded in the Discourses, where
Epictetus in effect pillories students who had the temerity to think that being a
Stoic could just involve theoretically comprehending the system of the great Stoic
master Chrisippus (no less), without spiritual practices.“If you could analyse syl-
logisms like Chrisippus, what is to prevent you from being wretched, sorrowful,
envious, and in a word, being distracted and miserable?,” Epictetus asks, then
answers: “Not a single thing.”18 And again:
[Epictetus] Who is in a state of progress then? He who has best studied
Chrisippus?
—Why, doesn’t virtue consist in having read Chrisippus? . . . This person, they
say, is already able to understand Chrisippus, by himself.
[Epictetus]: “Certainly, sir, you have made a vast improvement!”What improve-
ment? Why do you delude him? Why do you withdraw him from a sense of his
real needs? . . . That is not what I am looking for, slave, but how you exercise
your impulse to act, how you manage your desires and aversions, how you
approach things, how you apply yourself to them, and prepare for them, and
whether in harmony with Nature or out of harmony.19
Socratic elenchus. At other times, as in the sharper “discourses” like those cited
above wherein he rebukes students for their wrong-headed ideas, Epictetus is more
like Diogenes the Cynic. Always, Epictetus aims through adopting these personae
to bring students towards an appreciation of Stoic philosophical doctrine, so they
can begin to live according to the convictions promoted first by Zeno of Cition at
the end of the fourth century BCE.
Following Long, let us then consider these three components of Epictetus as
a philosopher in turn.
As is well known, Diogenes of Sinope was the Cynic philosopher, contempo-
rary of Plato, famous for living in a barrel, masturbating in public, and wandering
around Athens haranguing people with a lamp, saying: “I am looking for an honest
man.” His extraordinary behaviour did not end with these idiosyncrasies. The
later Diogenes, Diogenes Laertius, tells us in his Lives of the Philosophers that his
Cynic namesake would train himself in endurance by embracing snow-covered
statues; or in patience, by begging at statues’ feet with open hands, as if waiting
endlessly for them to throw him coins25—all, en passant, prize instances of what
Hadot calls “spiritual exercises,” which Cooper problematically tells us were un-
known to philosophers before the imperial period.26
The cynics, taking Socrates as their idol, were convinced that living fully
naturally involved actively cultivating ἀναίδεια, a complete absence of shame
before artificial (as they conceived them) social conventions.27 Epictetus and the
Stoics in general were not as extreme as the Cynics, although their founder Zeno
was a Cynic for a time (and one of the first Stoics, Aristo of Chios, jumped ship
back to the Cynical school). Epictetus’s admiration for Diogenes is nevertheless
very clear, as Long notes. No other figure is mentioned so often in the Discourses,
excepting Socrates. In an entire chapter devoted to praise for the Cynics in the
third book, Diogenes is lauded as a kind of advance scout (κατάσκοπος) of the
gods.28 He “scouts” out the true nature of good and evil, assuring us that death and
other perceived “evils” like loss of reputation, are not truly so.29 Notably, Epicte-
tus especially praises Diogenes as someone who proves these things in action,
not words: “he gives as proof of each claim his own courage, his tranquillity, his
freedom, and moreover his body, radiant and hardened.”30
As for Epictetus’s claim that Diogenes is “kingly,” the comparison of the
sage to the true king is a Stoic commonplace in their ongoing reflections on the
persona of the sage.31 Most people imagine kings to be the most self-sufficient
of men. Yet only the sage, by mastering his own fears and desires, can truly have
this αὐτάρχεια. Most of us imagine that kings must be the happiest of men,
since they have everything we could want: wine, women, wealth, etc. The Stoics
claimed that the wise man alone is lastingly happy, since he alone can adapt his
desires perfectly to whatever may come. As for Diogenes, his kingship (βασιλεία)
On Cooper, Hadot, Epictetus, and Stoicism as a Way of Life 373
for Epictetus lay in how he fearlessly reproved all and sundry—even, famously,
Alexander the Great—as if he were their rightful monarch:
able to lift up his voice . . . and say, like Socrates: “O mortals, whither are you
hurrying? What are you about? Why do you tumble up and down, O miserable
wretches, like blind men? . . . You seek prosperity and happiness in the wrong
place, where they are not; nor do you give credit to another, who shows you
where they are.”32
We have already seen Epictetus exercising such a kingly, reproving function for
himself, in response to hapless students who sought his approval in the wrong
place, by learning passages of Chrisippus by rote. This “protreptic” style of reprov-
ing others, Epictetus explains, consists
in being able to show, to one and all, the contradictions in which they are
involved; and that they care for everything rather than what they mean to
care for: for they mean the things conducive to happiness, but they seek them
where they are not to be found.33
Turning now to the Socratic component of Epictetus’s philosophising, commenta-
tors can at least agree on the centrality of the so-called elenchus—discussion by
question and answer—to Socrates’s way of doing philosophy. In a similar manner,
the Discourses show us Epictetus ceaselessly entering into dialogue with students
and visitors, and—in a way which blends always into protreptic reproval—even
undertaking rhetorical dialogues with imagined interlocutors. Consider the
opening “discourse” in the Discourses:
Of other faculties, you will find no one that contemplates, and consequently
approves or disapproves itself. How far does the proper sphere of grammar
extend?
[respondent] As far as the judging of language.
Of music?
[respondent] As far as the judging of melody.
Does either of them contemplate itself, then?
[respondent] By no means.
Thus, for instance, when you are to write to your friend, grammar will tell you
what to write; but whether you are to write to your friend at all, or no, grammar
will not tell you. . . . What will tell, then?
[respondent] That which contemplates both itself and all other things.
And what is that?
[respondent] The Reasoning Faculty
Yes; for that alone is found to consider both itself, its powers, its value, and
likewise all the rest. For what is it else that says, gold is beautiful; for the gold
374 Matthew Sharpe
itself does not speak? Evidently that faculty which judges of the appearances
of things. What else distinguishes music, grammar, the other faculties, proves
their uses, and shows their proper occasions?
[respondent] Nothing but this.34
The first advantage to teaching by way of this method, as any decent modern
academic tutor can avow, is that it represents the surest way to ensure that your
students are paying attention and thinking things through for themselves, even
if—as here, and very often with Socrates—the questions are pre-shaped to lead
towards a single destination. More, however, is involved in the elenchus, as Long
has reflected. Stoics like Epictetus, in practicing dialectic—and celebrating its
mastery as a distinct virtue35—were working with several Socratic assumptions
about human nature which are also basic to the idea of philosophy as a way of
life. The first of these is that people always, in their beliefs and opinions, will only
assent to what they take to be true or likely: “it is the very nature of the under-
standing to agree to truth, to be dissatisfied with falsehood, and to suspend its
belief, in doubtful cases.”36 “What is the proof of this?,” Epictetus asks rhetorically.
“Persuade yourself, if you can, that it is now night,” he challenges a student (we
presume it was daytime):
[respondent] It is impossible.
Dissuade yourself from the belief that it is day.
[respondent] Impossible.
Persuade yourself that the number of the stars is even or odd.
[respondent] It is impossible.
The same “intellectualist” assumption applies to the way the Stoics thought that
human beings are motivated to behave, including in situations where all our pas-
sions are involved. As rational creatures, Epictetus claims, we always only assent
to actually do anything if we are convinced at the decisive moment that it is right,
good, noble, pleasant or advantageous for us:
Well, then; have we, in actions, anything correspondent to this distinction
between true and false?
[respondent] Right and wrong; advantageous and disadvantageous; desirable
and undesirable; and the like.
A person then, cannot think a thing truly advantageous to him, and not
choose it?
[respondent] He cannot.
This is vitally important for understanding the elenchus, and Epictetus’s modus
operandi, because it follows from these premises that, if you can show a person
that what they thought was true is in fact false—or what they thought was good
On Cooper, Hadot, Epictetus, and Stoicism as a Way of Life 375
what might be called the Stoics’ ‘master argument,’ upon whose conclusions the
school’s entire ethical position is founded. The Euthydemus’s argument can be
summarised thus:
1. Everyone wishes to fare well (εὖ πράττειν).
2. Faring well involves the possession, enjoyment, or use of different good
things.
3. People everywhere agree that these good things include (i) things outside
our control like wealth, health, beauty, other bodily advantages, noble
birth, power, and honor; (ii) virtues like temperance, justice and courage,
(iii) wisdom (φρόνησις), and (iv) good fortune.
4. But wisdom, when we think about it, is the truest form of ‘good fortune,’
since it makes men fare as well as they can in all circumstances—so the
need for (iv) can straight away can be reduced to a need to cultivate (iii),
φρόνησις.
5. All good things make us fare well only because they benefit us in some
way (this is the very definition of something being a ‘good,’ for the Stoics).
6. But ‘good things’ truly benefit us by being used or enjoyed, not simply
possessed.
7. And it is only a kind of wisdom in guiding our choice and actions that
can ensure that we actually use or enjoy external goods like health, wealth,
and fame (i) for our benefit, thus exercising the virtues (iii) of courage,
temperance, and the like.
8. By contrast, without such wisdom, these goods can harm people, not
benefit them. So in truth they are only sometimes ‘good’ for us, and depend
for their ‘goodness’ on how we dispose of them.
9. Thus wisdom alone (φρόνησις) both provides us with good fortune (iv),
and ensures that we will choose and decide well how to use and enjoy all
external goods we come across (i, iii).
10. Hence, φρόνησις—a kind of knowledge (ἐπιστήμη) about how to use
and enjoy external things (7), and avoid harm in all circumstances (4,
7)— is the only true good thing for human beings.43
However troubling critics have continued to find this argument, what is impor-
tant here is that Epictetus, at least, clearly did believe these things, because he
stresses the decisive points (7 and 8) of the argument repeatedly to many who
cross his path:
On Cooper, Hadot, Epictetus, and Stoicism as a Way of Life 377
Why do you seek this possession [happiness] outside? It lies not in the body;
if you do not believe me, look at Myro, look at Ophellius [today, we might say,
look at Lindsay Lohan or many of the other ‘stars’ that light up our magazinal
firmament]. It is not in wealth; if you do not believe me, look upon Crœsus;
look upon the rich of the present age, how full of lamentation their life is. It
is not in power; for otherwise, they who have been twice and thrice consuls
must be happy; but they are not.”44
This extraordinary Stoic claim that ‘virtue’ (roughly, strength of character, con-
ceived as a kind of embodied knowledge of how to live well) is the only true
good is their typically striking way of saying that virtue alone never harms its
possessor. It has this feature in contrast to all of the other things we usually desire
as ‘goods.’ The equally paradoxical idea that this virtue is a form of wisdom or
knowledge—another Socratism—is the Stoic way of highlighting how, without
knowledge of how to use or enjoy the things nearly everyone values (money, for
example), these very ‘goods’ will do no ‘good’ to their possessor.
It is not that, in contrast to all other Greek philosophers, Stoics like Epictetus
somehow wanted to deny that a virtuous life must involve grim unhappiness and
world-denial. Their claim, on the contrary, is that the key to true happiness, an
inner tranquility (variously εὐμάρεια, εὐθυμία, ἀταραξία, ἀπάθεια, or the
Latin tranquilitas), comes from being fully satisfied with the world as it is each
moment—a happy inner state which can only come from taking care of one’s
own psyche over pursuing externals. Again, the point is just what we read Socrates
enjoining of the Athenians in the Apology.45 The sage, as Epictetus and the others
Stoics imagine her—and as Arrian wants us to see in Epictetus himself—con-
stantly enjoys εὐπάθεια (i.e. ‘good affects’), hailing from a deep conviction that
we have everything we need to be happy, and that this happiness does not depend
on possessing or avoiding things that are at the discretion of fortune, or of anyone
else.46 “The goal of the philosopher’s principles is to enable us, whatever happens,
to have our ἡγεμονικόν [the ‘leading faculty’ which governs our thoughts and
impulses] in harmony with nature and to keep it so,” Epictetus tells us.47 The
Stoic definition of the virtue of “great souledness” or μεγαλοψυχία puts the
same thought this way. The Stoic sage “is above the things [namely, the ‘indiffer-
ent’ external things] which befall good and bad men alike.”48 The achievement of
such an extraordinary inner strength alone, Epictetus tells us, will allow a person
to declaim, as Diogenes did to his contemporaries, come what may: “See, people,
that I [may] have nothing, [but] I need nothing; see how without a house, without
a city . . . I live more tranquilly and serenely than all the nobly born and rich.’”49
The question we need to address now, having given this depiction of the
figure of Epictetus, is the decisive issue of how Epictetus, and the Stoics, thought
the achievement of such virtue could be attained or at least approached.
378 Matthew Sharpe
Part 2:
From the Discourses to the Handbook:
Spiritual Exercises in Epictetus
If we disregard Cooper’s neglect of the literary question of why the Stoics wrote
texts like the Discourses, rather than treatises of theoretical philosophy alone,
none of what we have presented so far, I take it, stands in conflict with Cooper’s
presentation of Stoicism as a way of life in Pursuits of Wisdom. Cooper has little
to say concerning Epictetus or the Discourses, but we might even grant that his
position could accept our idea that this text is best read as primarily a depiction
of a philosopher, and only mediately of a philosophy.
The decisive issue between Cooper’s understanding of ancient philosophy
as a way of life and Hadot’s, I take it, concerns how it is we are to conceive that
the Stoics and others thought that the unflappable philosophical serenity they
valorised in figures like Epictetus could, in practical life, be achieved. For to
achieve this wisdom, as we have by now repeated, Epictetus certainly thinks that
merely rehashing, or even truly understanding, Chrisippus’s theoretical system
alone (to which Cooper devotes most of his chapter on the Stoics in Pursuits50),
is not enough. The kind of knowledge or ἐπιστήμη Epictetus does mean seems
instead, very clearly, to involve cultivating in one’s self what Olympiodorus tells
us that the founding Stoic Zeno, significantly, argued characterised any τέχνη:
namely, “a system of apprehensions unified by practice” (our italics).51 The ob-
servation that seems to have moved the Stoics is simply that, then as now, many
people who learn much recondite theory do not become ethical paragons thereby.
It is just not that easy to achieve an unmovable, sage-like serenity of mind. If we
are to be serious about making philosophy active in shaping our ways of life, the
Stoics for such reasons always maintained that we evidently will need to cultivate
a kind of τέχνη τοῦ βίου or “art of living.”52 And this “art of living” (a novel
notion for which they were pilloried in the ancient world by the sceptics53) must
involve, beyond theoretical learning, what they variously called the habituation
(ἐθίζομαι) of the soul; its “digestion” (πέψις) of philosophical teachings; or even,
in Epictetus’s most august pupil, Marcus Aurelius, the “dyeing” (βαπτίζων) of a
person’s character.54 This process is in one sense much easier, and more popularly
available, than learning recondite theory—which may be one reason why many
academic philosophers are highly dismissive of the idea of philosophy as a way
of life.55 However, Epictetus also reminds us that, practically or ethically speak-
ing, such existential change is much harder: “The philosophers first exercise us
in theory where . . . there is nothing which holds us back from following what we
are taught, but in the affairs of life there are many things which draw us away.”56
What we want to establish in what follows, contra Cooper, is that Epictetus
clearly advocated, for just these reasons—and not any alleged lapse into anything
On Cooper, Hadot, Epictetus, and Stoicism as a Way of Life 379
Stoicism seriously as a way of life will need to master. Certainly, if we read the
text in this way, as Hadot, Sellars, and others would prompt us, it takes on a new
coherence and rationality which would otherwise elude us, and render the text
incoherent or inconsequential. Little is too mundane to elude its attention, as
we see in Epictetus’s detailed, sometimes austere, prescriptions about speaking,
laughing, clothes, sexual relations, bawdy conversations, gossip, and meeting new
people.63 We are to take on a new rule of life, Epictetus enjoins; and abide by it as
if it were a law or νόμος.64 Epictetus’s protreptic manner is here again front and
centre: indeed, it is much more all-pervasive than in the more theoretical, less
directly practical Discourses. The Handbook is chock-full of second person verbs
(“you . . .”) and imperatives like μεμνήσω (remember!65), and ὑπομίμνῃσκε
σεαυτόν (remind yourself!66). The matter is urgent. It is never too late to start to
pay attention to ourselves. And the sooner we begin, the better.67
Pierre Hadot, in several pieces, has suggested an important key we can use to
distinguish the different prescriptions and existential practices Epictetus enjoins
in the Encheiridion, once we have acceded to the idea that this is the purpose of
the book.68 Hadot contends that Epictetus divides his prescriptive, practical phi-
losophy into three ‘topics’ or topoi. These correspond to what the Stoics thought
were three functions of our psyche: first, our desires and aversions; second, our
impulses and actions; and third, our judgments and what we ‘assent to’ as true,
good, beneficial, pleasant, etc. In favor of his idea, Hadot points readers’ attention to
the start of Discourses book III chapter 2, where Epictetus nearly exactly says this:
There are three topics in philosophy, in which he who would be wise and good
must exercise:
— That of the desires and aversions, that he may not be disappointed of the
one, nor incur the other.
— That of the pursuits and avoidances, and, in general, the appropriate actions
of life; that he may act with order and consideration, and not carelessly.
— The third includes integrity of mind and prudence, and, in general, what-
ever belongs to the judgment.69
The more recondite part of Hadot’s claim is his further idea that these three practi-
cal topoi correspond to the three parts of Stoic theoretical discourse we mentioned
above: logic, physics, ethics. So what we think and believe corresponds, in practical
life, to the field theoretical logic analyses. What we do clearly corresponds to what
ethicists study. But what we desire and despise, Hadot suggests, corresponds in
our practical lives to what physics (the understanding of nature) studies in theory.
On Cooper, Hadot, Epictetus, and Stoicism as a Way of Life 381
Putting any perplexity about ‘practical physics’ aside momentarily, we can clearly
see the distinction between three different concerns operating from the Enchei-
ridion’s bracing opening lines. “Of things, some depend upon us [ἐφ᾽ ἡμῖν],”
Epictetus begins,
and others do not. In our power are opinion [υπόληψις, topic 3, logic], move-
ment toward a thing [impulse, topic 2], desire, aversion, [topic 1,‘physics’], and
in a word, whatever are our own acts. Not in our power are the body, property,
reputation, offices, and in a word, whatever are not our own acts.70
This first section of the Handbook then gives Epictetus’s variation on what we
called above the Stoic ‘master argument’ from Plato’s Euthydemus, aiming to show
that wisdom or self-mastery alone, not external goods, is the key to happiness.
Epictetus’s version runs as follows:
1. Happiness or tranquility is the fulfilment of all our desires, not wishing
for anything we don’t have or can’t achieve; and not despising anything
we do have or can’t avoid.
2. But external goods, including political power, wealth, even bodily health,
are never fully or lastingly within our control.
3. Thus, if we take these externals to be necessary to our happiness, this most
prized of our goals is ceded to fortune. With time, indeed, it certainly will
be lost: “you will be hindered, you will lament, you will be disturbed, you
will blame both gods and men”;71 “perhaps you will not gain even these
very things (power and wealth) . . . : certainly you will fail in those things
through which alone happiness and freedom are secured.”72
The end of this opening section of the Encheiridion thus gives us a leading ex-
ample of what Hadot intends when he talks about Stoic “practical logic,” and the
kinds of exercises it involves. If we agree with the argument that external goods
are not the key to our happiness, Epictetus reasons, we will need to actively train
ourselves every morning and night73 to distinguish everything we encounter ac-
cording to whether or not it depends upon us, so we can avoid all unnecessary
inner tumults. “Straightway then practice saying to every harsh appearance, You
are an appearance, and in no manner what you appear to be,” Epictetus exhorts:
Then examine it by the rules which you possess, and by this first and chiefly,
whether it relates to the things which are in our power [ἐφ᾽ ἡμῖν] or to the
382 Matthew Sharpe
things which are not in our power: and if it relates to anything which is not
in our power, be ready to say, that it does not concern you.74
So this is a different kind of ‘logic’ than what students learn in logic classes today.
What this practical or lived logic has in common with the theoretical examination
of formal arguments is a scrupulous attention to every idea or proposition that
presents itself to us. To ‘learn’ it, as to learn theoretical logic, will thus involve long
practice: but unlike theoretical logic, we cannot put it aside when we leave the
classroom. We must apply it to each opinion we find ourselves inclined to form,
so eventually this process of inner examination becomes almost automatic, a new
internal modus vivendi. Epictetus in the Discourses thus describes this practical
logic, as ever, by aligning it with Socrates’s call for us to live examined lives:
Just as Socrates used to say we should not live an unexamined life, so we should
not accept any unexamined impression [ἀνεξέταστον φαντασίαν], but
should say [to each]: ‘Wait, let me see who you are and where you are coming
from. . . . Do you have your guarantee from nature, which every impression
that is to be accepted should have?’”75
The governing idea is that, too often, we assent to ideas we have not examined,
and that, in this way, we soon commit ourselves to opinions that aren’t just false,
but pernicious. A nice example of this is section 44 of the Encheiridion:
These reasons do not cohere: I am richer than you, therefore I am better than
you; I am more eloquent than you, therefore I am better than you. On the
contrary these rather cohere, I am richer than you, therefore my possessions
are greater than yours: I am more eloquent than you, therefore my speech is
superior to yours. But ‘you’ are neither possession nor speech.76
Now, according to the Stoics’ understanding of the mind, all our perceptions of
external objects and of other people involve φαντασίαι or ‘appearances,’ to which
we are capable of giving or withholding our assent. For this reason, there is a clear
sense in which practical logic as we have described it—the business of testing
each of these appearances for its Stoic ‘identity papers,’ as it were—has a kind of
priority over the other disciplines Epictetus recommends.“Men are not disturbed
by things which happen [τὰ πράγματα], but by the opinions [δόγματα] about
the things,” Epictetus underscores.77 So the path to either reforming our desires,
or treating others more ethically, passes through the logical reform of our opin-
ions. This thought makes it somewhat difficult to neatly divide the Encheiridion’s
sections according to the idea that each must deal with one and one only of the
topoi of ethics, logic or physics. Nevertheless, in contrast to Hadot’s and Sellar’s
attempts, we propose the following division of the Encheiridion between the
three disciplines:
On Cooper, Hadot, Epictetus, and Stoicism as a Way of Life 383
Table 2: The Encheiridion divided into the different practical topics or disciplines
Discipline of
Discipline of logic Other advice for
Discipline of desire impulse & action
(judgment/ those training to be
& aversion (duties & other
Assent) a philosopher
people)
#1.2–1.5, #1.1 (general, the three
#1 end
#2 topoi)
#3 #3–6
#7 (on philosophy as
#8–11 #10
guide to life)
#12–13: advice for
#13, cf. #22 #13 #12
students, as students
#14–15; #17; #19 #17 (end) #16, cf. #5 (start); 18
#20, concerning insults #20 (representation of #22–23: more advice
#21; #23
(cf. 33, 42, 22) insults) for προκόπτoντα
#26–27 #24; #25; #28 #29
#30–31; 32; 33; 35–36;
#31;#34; #38–39; 41 #31; #32; #44; 45. #33;#37
40;42–43;45
#50.3 #46–51/52.
#52/3 (1st & 2nd #52/3 (last of three
#52/53
quotes) quotes)
What Hadot calls practical or lived (veçu) physics is the hardest idea in Stoic
practical philosophy to get a sense of. There seems no manifest link between
the disciplining of our desires and aversions and any kind of study of the nature
of physical things, which looks to be wholly and only theoretical. The operative
Stoic idea is simply that such ‘externals’ are the things we typically desire, together
with the further psychological observation that often our desires for them paint
them in illusory lights. Indeed, the Stoics claim, when we desire something—
particularly if the desire is strong—the desire presents it for us as what in fact
it can never be: namely, necessary or sufficient all on its own (or his or her own)
to secure our happiness. The whole urgency of our emotions, whether of desire
or fear, consists in this sense of an unconditional need for some external thing
or event to occur—or to last—or not. The key to practical physics in Epictetus’s
Encheiridion, then, is the famous opening injunction of #8:
Seek not that the things which happen should happen as you wish; but wish
the things which do happen to be as they are, and you will have a tranquil
flow of life.78
This injunction reflects the fundamental rule for practical logic, dividing what is and is
not in our control. But it also points to how the exercises in practical physics are at bot-
tom exercises in attempting to see things for what they are, as independently as possible
of how we wish or fear them to be. The Encheiridion’s third section hence directs us:
384 Matthew Sharpe
Concluding Remarks
In this paper, we have examined firstly Epictetus’s presentation by Arrian in the
Discourses, arguing that this text aims to illustrate for its reader the persona of
Epictetus as a philosopher, depicting him as a sage figure whom we are invited to
admire and emulate. Epictetus’s Stoicism, in deep consistency with his Hellenistic
forebears, was deeply Socratic in its key ethical doctrines and theoretical assump-
tions about human action and motivation. But Epictetus brings to his pedagogy a
protreptic element explicitly indebted to the wandering cynic Diogenes of Sinope: a
philosopher whom Epictetus admires primarily for his way of living, rather than his
(rather minimal) theoretical commitments. In Part 2, we highlighted what seems
to us to be the key ‘deciding instance’ between Hadot and Cooper’s conceptions
On Cooper, Hadot, Epictetus, and Stoicism as a Way of Life 385
the process of atrophy.84 The classical Roman period itself, and its philosophy, it
has to be said, has in Cooper’s Pursuits of Wisdom a liminal or ambiguous status,
in terms of his attempt to delineate the ancient philosophies from philosophy’s
“contamination” at the end of antiquity by “religious” claims to truth and goodness
founded in ritual, faith, or revelation. Stoicism at this time did involve Hadot’s
kind of “spiritual” practices, as we have seen Cooper concede.85 Nevertheless, as
we saw in the Introduction, Cooper’s more sustained claim elsewhere in Pursuits
is that such “spiritual exercises” were only necessitated in later antiquity, when
the idea was prevalent that a person’s “bare consciousness—the ‘I’ at its centre
. . . itself no part of the natural world”86 had become hegemonic, leading to the
end of pagan philosophy and the beginning of the age of faith. Cooper, we repeat,
thinks that what Hadot calls “spiritual exercises” only make sense in terms of a
post-philosophical,“religious” concern with the salvation of such a de-worlded “I.”
The problem with these claims, if we want to apply them to the great Roman
Stoics of the Imperial period like Epictetus, is simply that Stoicism, as Cooper com-
ments, never held to such a conception of the “I”: “in fact, a self might, for the Stoics,
be a mind and nothing but—but such a mind was conceived unproblematically as
part of the natural world.”87 Likewise, even though there is plenty of ‘God-talk’ in both
Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius: this ‘God’ or ‘Zeus’ is transparently the divine logos
of the Stoics, immanent to and shaping the natural whole, in which the individual’s
mind is held to participate—rather than a transcendent God promising salvation
from the natural world. None of these descriptions ‘fit’ the kind of transcendent
philosophy or “religion” Cooper wants to argue alone should have promoted the
very kinds of askeseis we have seen Epictetus’s Encheiridion dourly recommends.
Putting all this together, what seems decisive to us is that Cooper is simply
unable to conceive the way that, in Hadot’s conception and more widely, there is
no just need to associate the “spiritual exercises” we see on such ample display
in Epictetus’s recommendations in the Encheiridion—and also in Aurelius’s
Meditations, as well as the Epicurean fragments, etc.—with any kind of extra-
philosophical longing for other-worldly redemption. We note in this connection, as
Cooper neglects to do, that Hadot himself baulks at the term “spiritual” in describ-
ing the philosophical exercises, fearing that it will produce exactly the kinds of
allergic reaction it seems to have produced in Cooper and in many contemporary
readers. He therefore specifies from the start that, aiming to capture the meaning
of the Greek terms askesis or μελέτη, the term “spiritual exercises” implies no
strong metaphysics: indeed, it fits very well with Epicurean philosophy. It aims
only at capturing the sense in which
these exercises in fact correspond to a transformation of our vision of the
world, and to a metamorphosis of our personality. The word ‘spiritual’ is quite
apt to make us understand that these exercises are the result, not merely of
thought, but of the individual’s entire psychism. Above all, the word ‘spiritual’
On Cooper, Hadot, Epictetus, and Stoicism as a Way of Life 387
reveals the true dimensions of these exercises. By means of them, the individual
raises himself up to the life of the objective Spirit; that is to say, he re-places
himself within the perspective of the Whole.88
As per Simplicius’s description of the aim of Epictetus’s Encheiridion above,
then—and in complete opposition to Cooper’s thought here—it is exactly the
interconnection between our theoretical and philosophical capacities and our
bodily, all-too-human passions that best explains the need for such exercises. Just
as the body, to become fit or trim, needs regular exercise, so the Stoics, certainly
including Epictetus, thought that regular philosophical exercises—exercises in
self-analysis, in monitoring one’s ideas and checking one’s impulses—were neces-
sary if we were to attune our thoughts, impulses, and desires to the greater whole
of which we are irrevocably a part, despite the fond suggestions of our passions.89
This thought also, I think, allows us to allay an anxiety the reader can feel in Cooper
about how such non-cognitive, or both cognitive and somatic, exercises can sit
with philosophy’s theoretical interest in discovering the truth through analysis
and argument. The connection here is no more mysterious than in Aristotle’s
acknowledgment of the key role that habituation, and imitation of examples,
plays in shaping individuals’ practical reason (φρόνησις) in the Nicomachean
Ethics.90 The philosophical exercises in the Hellenistic and Roman schools were
the prescribed means of a philosophically directed rehabituation of individuals’
actions, desires, and judgments, founded in the conviction that, however difficult
it may be, even adults can come, albeit only after much practice, to change their
deepest set habits of acting and thinking.91
Certainly, holding to this broadly Hadotian opinion in the contest between Coo-
per’s and Hadot’s conceptions of ancient philosophies allows us readily, without any
ambivalence, to welcome Epictetus as a paradigmatically philosophical Stoic, just as
his ancient contemporaries regarded him. It also, I think, has another salutary effect,
which is amongst the greater services reading and teaching ancient philosophy
can still offer us today. It challenges us to consider whether our own conception
of philosophy as solely a business of argumentation and theory-construction is
the only or the best metaphilosophy the long history of the West has furnished us.
Deakin University
Notes
1. John M. Cooper, Pursuits of Wisdom: Six Ways of Life in Ancient Philosophy from
Socrates to Plotinus (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012).
2. Ibid., 13.
388 Matthew Sharpe
3. Ibid., 8–10; Pierre Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy?, trans. Michael Chase (Cam-
bridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 229–38.
4. Cooper, Pursuits, x.
5. Ibid., 27.
6. The qualification “essentially” is necessary, given that Cooper equivocates, giving the
exercises a“secondary”role (at Pursuits, p. 22) and a“preliminary”role (at Pursuits, p. 166).
See also the qualification concerning a need to train our prerational “feelings” at Pursuits,
p. 165; and below, concerning Cooper and the ambivalent (for him) Roman Stoics.
7. Cooper Pursuits, 402n4.
8. Ibid., 20. Hadot knew that many critics would be uneasy with this term, which he in addi-
tion recognises comes from Ignatius.Yet, Hadot claims in this passage, as elsewhere, that
Christian monasticism inherited the exercises from the pagan philosophical schools.
Hadot, “Spiritual Exercises,” in Philosophy as a Way of Life, ed. Arnold I. Davidson,
trans. Michael Chase (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996), 82. The Christian inheritance
of ancient philosophical practices is the theme of Hadot, “Ancient Spiritual Exercises
and ‘Christian Philosophy,’” in Philosophy as a Way of Life, 126–44. Cooper does not
engage with this claim, although his closing passages suggest (controversially) that he
can see nothing ‘philosophical’ in Christianity en bloc (see Cooper, Pursuits, 387).
9. Cooper, Pursuits, 21.
10. Ibid., 22.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid., x.
13. On Hadot’s philological beginnings, see Pierre Hadot, Present Alone is Our Happiness:
Conversations with Jeannie Carlier and Arnold L. Davidson, trans. Marc Djaballah
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 30–32, 59.
14. On this point, see especially Pierre Hadot, “Forms of Life and Forms of Discourse in
Ancient Philosophy,” in Philosophy as a Way of Life, 61–65.
15. Cf. Cooper, Pursuits, 165, and Cooper’s observation concerning the high ethical de-
mands the Stoics place on would-be adherents: “the ‘cure’ for these impressions, and
for the prerational feelings that engender them, requires a lot of further work on our
tendencies to respond prerationally to things which happen to us.” It is not clear that
a clear theory alone, however prescriptive, can do such work.
16. Cooper Pursuits, 402n4: the not being “mainline” passage comes at page 18, note 26, a
distinction which recurs at pp. 226–27, and 248–49.We note that this distinction is Coo-
per’s and that while the Stoics (e.g.) criticised the Epicureans for subordinating pleasure
to virtue, they do not appear to have questioned their credentials as philosophers per se.
17. See John Sellars, Art of Living: The Stoics on the Nature and Function of Philosophy
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 47–50, 55–58, for the relevant texts.
18. Epictetus, Discourses, trans. W. A. Oldfather, in two volumes (Books I–II, Books
III–IV, with Encheiridion and Fragments) (London: Loeb Classical Library, Reprint
Series, 1925), book II, chapter 23, line 44 (hereafter abbreviated as II.23.44, etc.); cf.
III.5.2–9. Here and throughout I have used the Loeb edition, basing my translations
around those of W. A. Oldfather and amending them where this seems called for.
19. Epictetus, Discourses I.4.4–14; cf. Disc. III.21; Epictetus, Encheiridion, in Discourses,
vol. 2, section 49 (hereafter Encheiridion sections abbreviated as #49 etc.).
On Cooper, Hadot, Epictetus, and Stoicism as a Way of Life 389
20. On the makeup of Epictetus’s auditors, see Michel Foucault, Hermeneutics of the
Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France 1981–1982, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham
Burchell (New York: Picador, 2006), 138–43.
21. Not the classes themselves, it seems, which he refers to from time to time as includ-
ing courses on Stoic logic and even (ironically enough) on reading Chrisippus; cf.
Epictetus, Discourses I.7.31; I.8; I.10.10; I.17; II.13.21; II.19; etc. See on this point A. A.
Long, Epictetus: A Stoic and Socratic Guide to Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2002), 44.
22. Arrian,“Arrian to Lucius Gellius, Wishing all Happiness,” in Epictetus, Discourses, vol. 1.
23. Compare Cooper, Pursuits, 17: “I have been assuming that for the ancients with whom
I am concerned, exactly as with us, the essential core of philosophy is a certain, specifi-
cally and recognisably philosophical, style of logical, reasoned argument and analysis.
Anyone who has read any philosophy at all is familiar with this style, whether it takes the
form we find in the question-and-answer dialectic of the character Socrates in Plato’s
Socratic dialogues . . . or, again, in the writings of a contemporary analytic philosopher.”
24. Epictetus, Discourses III.21.18–19 (henceforth Disc.); Long, Epictetus, 54–59.
25. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, VI.2.22, http://www.perseus
.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0258%3Abook%3D6%3
Achapter%3D2, last accessed September 2013.
26. Cooper departs from the ancients’ understandings by asserting that the Cynics should
not be considered as philosophers at all: “I think it is better to treat the long-lasting
and fascinating movement of Cynicism in ancient Greece and the Roman Empire as
aspects of social history, rather than as part of the history of philosophy.” Here, as
elsewhere, he departs from ancient opinion. Cooper, Pursuits, 62n54; cf. pp. 21–22.
27. Aristotle described them this way: “the dog is a shameless animal, and they make a
cult of shamelessness [ἀνάιδεια], not as being beneath modesty, but as superior to
it.” Aristotle, Rhetoric, “Scholium”; quotes found in Luis Navia, Classical Cynicism: A
Critical Study (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1996), 94.
28. Epictetus, Disc. III.22.69.
29. Ibid., I.24.6
30. Ibid., 1.24.7–8; III.22.56; IV.11.23.
31. See especially Stobaeus, Anthology, 2.5–12 (which is “Text 102” in The Stoics Reader:
Selected Writings and Testimonia, ed. Lloyd P. Gerson and Brad Inwood [London:
Hackett Publishing, 2008], 124–51; the relevant sections on the surpassing virtues
of the sage are numbered by the editors 5b10–12 (pp. 128–29), 11d (pp. 140–41),
11g (pp. 142–43), 11j–k (pp. 144–46). For modern commentaries, see Pierre Hadot,
“La Figure du Sage dans L’Antiquité Gréco-Latine,” in Pierre Hadot, Études de Phi-
losophie Antique (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1998), 233–58; also Julia Annas,“The Sage
in Ancient Philosophy,” in Anthropine Sophia, ed. F. Alesse et al. (Naples: Bibliopolis
2008), 11–27.
32. Epictetus, Disc. III.22.26; cf. 81–82; Plato, Cleitophon 407a–b; Apology 30a–b.
33. Characteristically, Epictetus then passes straight into the genuine article: “But tell me
who, when he hears you reading or speaking, is solicitous about himself? Or turns his
attention upon himself? Or says, when he is gone away from you: ‘The philosopher
moved me. I mustn’t act this way in future.’” Epictetus, Disc. III.23.34–37.
390 Matthew Sharpe
Stoicism: A Guide for the Perplexed: “In opting for almost exclusively Roman Stoic
literature he bypasses the rich collection of variegated, and sometimes obfuscated,
contributions from the Hellenistic Stoics, thereby taking the simpler, easier route to
support the focus of his own brand of ethics-centred Stoicism. . . . Regardless of Ho-
lowchak’s focus, there are certainly some merits in using the book as an introductory
piece for beginners—or the stymied.” Nigel Gully, The Stoics: A Guide for the Perplexed,
reviewed by Nigel T. Gully, University of Liverpool,” in Praxis 2(2) (Summer 2010)
(italics ours), at http://www.castela.net/praxis/vol2issue2/2.2Gully.pdf, last accessed
September 2013.
56. Epictetus, Disc. Book I.26.3.
57. See our Introductory remarks above, and Cooper, Pursuits, 20–22.
58. Epictetus, Disc. book I.1.21–25.
59. πρὸς τὸ παρόν, then ἐπὶ τοῦ παρόντο, at Epictetus Encheiridion, #1.4, then #2.
60. Epictetus, Ench. #22 start. The desiring verb here is, in the second person, ἐπιθυμεῖς.
61. Ibid., #12–13, 22–25, 29, 46–52.
62. Simplicius, “Preface” to Commentary on Encheiridion, 18–20; at I. and P. Hadot, Ap-
prendre à Philosopher dans l’Antiquité: L’enseignement du Manuel d’Epictète et son
commentaire néoplatonicien (Poche: Paris, 2004), 53. Cf. Sellars, Art of Living 129–31.
63. Epictetus, Ench. #33, 50.
64. Ibid., #50.
65. Ibid., #2, 3]
66. Ibid., #4.
67. Ibid., #50.
68. Pierre Hadot, “Marcus Aurelius,” in Philosophy as a Way of Life; also Inner Citadel, trans.
Michael Chase (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), chap. 5, pp. 82–98,
and several untranslated pieces in French, notably Hadot, “La Physique Comme Exercise
Spirituel ou Pessimisme et Optimisme chez Marc Aurèle”(pp. 145–64), and “Une Clé des
Pensées de Marc Aurèle: Les Trois Topoi Philosophiques selon Épictète”(pp.165–92), both in
Pierre Hadot, Exercises Spirituels et Philosophie Antique, Préface d’Arnold Davidson (Paris:
Éditions Albin Michel, 2002).
69. Epictetus, Disc. III.2 start.
70. Epictetus, Ench. #1.1.
71. Ibid., #1.3.
72. Ibid., #1.4.
73. Epictetus, Disc. III.3.16: (πρὸς τοῦτο ἠσκούμεθα καθ᾽ ἡμέραν ἐξ ὄρθρου μέχρι
νυκτός).
74. Epictetus, Ench. 1.5.
75. Epictetus, Disc. III.12.15.
76. Epictetus, Ench. #44; cf. #18, #32.
77. Ibid., #5 start.
78. Ibid., #8 start.
79. Ibid., #3.
80. Ibid., #14.
81. Ibid., #29.
82. Cooper, Pursuits, 17.
392 Matthew Sharpe