What the Stoic Philosophers Knew About Being Free

The chief constraint on personal freedom in ancient Greece and Rome was what Epictetus knew at first hand, the social practice and indignity of slavery. It was slavery, the condition of being literally owned and made to serve at another’s behest that gave ancient freedom its intensely positive value and emotional charge. Slaves’ bodily movements during their waking lives were strictly constrained by their masters’ wishes and by the menial functions they were required to perform. But slaves, like everyone else, had minds, and minds as well as bodies are subject to freedom and constraint. You can be externally free and internally a slave, controlled by psychological masters in the form of disabling desires and passions and cravings. Conversely, you could be outwardly obstructed or even in literal bondage but internally free from frustration and disharmony, so free in fact that you found yourself in charge of your own well-being, lacking little or nothing that you could not provide for yourself. The latter, in essence, is the freedom that Epictetus, the ancient Stoic philosopher, made the central theme of his teaching.

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Stoic philosophy had originated in Greece at the end of the fourth century BC. Its founding fathers were eastern Mediterranean immigrants to Athens, which was no longer a vibrant democracy, as the city had been at the time of Socrates, but a client state of the kingdom of Macedonia. Loss of political autonomy was reflected in philosophy at Athens by an inward turn in the focus of ethics. Neither Stoicism nor Epicureanism, the other leading Hellenistic school, engaged strongly in political theory, as their predecessors Plato and Aristotle had done. The main focus of the younger philosophers’ societal attention was not politics and legislation but personal well-being and self-improvement. This inward turn is strikingly illustrated by the way Stoic thought from its beginning treated freedom and slavery as primarily ethical and psychological denominators rather than marks of social status. According to Zeno, the original head of the Stoic school, freedom is the exclusive prerogative of those who are wise, while inferior persons, who comprise the majority of people, are not only fools but also slaves.

A first reaction to this claim could include shock at its intellectual elitism and its insensitivity to the plight of persons unfortunate enough to be literally enslaved. But now consider how radically Zeno’s claim, in a slave-based economy, challenges the evaluation of persons in terms of the conventional servitude/freedom dichotomy. If wisdom is the true criterion of freedom, the principal burden of slavery shifts from the outer to the inner, from the physical to the mental, and philosophy not manumission becomes the source of liberty. You are enslaved, according to this uncompromising doctrine, if you set your heart on anything that is liable to impediment, whether because your body lets you down, or passions and emotions have you in their thrall, or you attach your well-being to things that depend on others—people, property, popularity, or simply luck.

In his celebrated essay “Two Concepts of Liberty,” Isaiah Berlin distinguished between the “negative” notion of freedom from coercion (not being interfered with by others) and the “positive” notion of freedom to be or to live as one chooses (self-mastery or self-determination). For Epictetus these two notions come together so closely that they entail one another, as we can see in the following passage [from Encheiridion]:

Our master is anyone who has the power to implement or prevent the things that we want or don’t want. Whoever wants to be free, therefore, should wish for nothing or avoid nothing that is up to other people. Failing that, one is bound to be a slave.

We could rewrite the second sentence along the lines: “Whoever wants to be free from coercion should restrict their wishes and aversions to things over which they have complete control.”

How can we be sure that such choice is good for us and good for those whose company we share? Why be self-reliant rather than follow the ten commandments or some other set of time-honored principles? How can we know what to choose? The answer to these questions brings us back to Zeno’s “wisdom” as the essence of freedom. His Greek word sophia, in its ordinary usage, can cover any kind of expertise, ranging from practical craftsmanship like carpentry to abstract knowledge such as geometry. In all cases, sophia signifies successful practice of a skill, and the skill that concerned Zeno and subsequent Stoic philosophers is the art of life. We can gloss this art as knowing how to live in harmony, harmony with our human nature and harmony with our social and physical environment. To achieve or try to achieve that understanding is the task of reason, and reason, according to Stoicism, is what makes human beings distinctive among animals.

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[Epictetus’s] contexts cover an enormous range of situations, ranging from mundane circumstances of family and professional life to challenging situations such as illness, poverty, and death. Epictetus does not distinguish sharply between morals and manners. Everything we are called on to do and think about is germane to his principal question: is this something that is up to me to decide and get started on, or should I accept it calmly and dispassionately as a situation that was brought about by things that are outside my control? A moment’s reflection will show that the either/or question covers just about every imaginable situation. Someone is rude to you: that happening is outside your control, but you have complete freedom in how you respond to it. Accidents happen, a loved one dies, you don’t get the job you applied for, you fall ill. None of this was your doing or responsibility, but in each case you are presented with something else that you can do, namely, treat the situation as an opportunity for exercising your own agency and assessment as distinct from taking yourself to be a victim of forces outside yourself, or as badly done to, or as singularly unfortunate.

Epictetus’s message of freedom, when reduced to succinct modern terms, might seem to fit such homely advice as “Get real,” “Grow up,” “Show what you are made of,” “Let it go,” “Mind your own business.” You can find more or less exact equivalents to these slogans in some of this book’s translated materials. Their familiarity has much to do with the way ancient Stoicism has influenced Western thought and education since the time when Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius were first assimilated into European and American culture. It was these authors who gave rise to the modern sense of “philosophy” and “philosophical” as an outlook of serenity, calm, or resignation in the face of difficulties. These attitudes are not in vogue today because they don’t fit the fashion for authenticity, expectation, display of feeling, and self-assertion. But in practice, as modern Stoic practitioners have found, they are timelessly relevant, and particularly applicable to our hectic world of social media, sound bites, validation, outrage, attention-seeking, and self- imposed anxiety.

“Get real” and so forth, as we use these watchwords today, have lost touch with their ancient Stoic underpinnings. As employed by Epictetus, they are advice on how persons can best organize their lives according to the Stoic understanding of nature, psychology, and human values. Although Epictetus’s voice is homely and informal, he was not himself a sloganeer. He was a popularizing presenter of an elaborate philosophical system, which relied, as any genuine philosophy must rely, on rigorous argument, internal coherence, and empirical justification.

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The Stoics’ theory of goodness and badness puts them in the camp of philosophers who think that the proper objects of moral judgment are a person’s will and intention as distinct from their actions’ consequences. Yet the principal aim of the theory, as Epictetus presents it in the Encheiridion, appears to be the agent’s own happiness and tranquility rather than that of other people. Such self-centeredness seems at odds with any deep interest in the needs of other human beings. In which case, do the Encheiridion and Discourses offer us a guide to the moral life, taking that notion to include the good of others as well as oneself, or acting entirely for their sake?

This is a question to which Epictetus has a remarkably effective response if you agree with him that “It is every creature’s nature . . . to shun things that look harmful or cause harm, and to like the look of things that are beneficial or bring benefit . . . and that wherever people’s interest lies, that’s also the site of their reverence.” Ethics according to this Stoic viewpoint starts from and must accommodate our basic human interest in our own individual benefit or good. We do not start from instincts of altruism. To make room, then, for the good of others, Epictetus needs to show that his message of mental freedom is not a solipsistic benefit but socially advantageous and consonant with living in harmony with human nature construed quite broadly.

As individuals, we benefit hugely from not being troubled by emotions like envy, jealousy, fear, and anger, and by having the corresponding virtues of patience and self-control. Tranquility is an obvious good to the tranquil, but its benefits redound no less to our families, friends, and associates because negative emotions often motivate aggressive and hurtful behavior. In contemporary life “ethics” typically enters conversation in contexts where norms of conduct are violated, whether in business or sexual behavior or disturbances of the peace. Epictetus’s freedom regimen satisfies the moral imperative to do no harm.

How is it with positive moral imperatives, not just refraining from harm but deliberately treating others with care and consideration? Can our interest in freedom and tranquility motivate us to be friendly and philanthropic? Stoic philosophers had traditionally argued that our instincts for self-preservation are combined with powerful social instincts, starting with family life and extending to local community and beyond. Epictetus does not address this doctrine explicitly in this book’s material, but his endorsement of it is evident in numerous passages. He presupposes interest in supporting friends and country on condition that one maintains an honorable character in so acting. He has much to say about appropriate “role-play” in family relationships, with emphasis on what is incumbent on oneself as distinct from what one can expect in return. Here too his focus on freedom from disabling emotions comes forcefully into play, with the deadly quarrel between the sons of Oedipus, competing for the throne, being one of his most telling counter-examples.

His memento mori warnings concerning wife and children touch a bleak note—until we reflect on the prevalence of infant mortality and premature death in his time. Rather than insensitivity, they betoken the strongest possible recommendation to care for loved ones as long as we are permitted to have them. The emotional freedom at the heart of his message has enormous ethical import in the space it provides for us and what we can do. Seneca, writing at the time of Nero, had said it memorably: “Freedom is the prize we are working for: not being a slave to anything—not to compulsion, not to chance events—making fortune meet us on a level playing field.”

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Excerpted from How to Be Free: An Ancient Guide to the Stoic Life, Encheiridion and Selections from Discourses by Epictetus, translated and with an introduction by A.A. Long. Copyright © 2018 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission.