The Hardest and the Best

Professor

Philosophy 105

21 Feb 2015

    The Hardest and the Best

Luck and uncertainty are always factors in any human activities. No matter how precise one’s plan is, there is always room for unexpected surprises. As my favorite phonologist, Li-Ju Chen writes in her novel The Flowers in the Mirror, “To do everything one ought to do, to do all that is humanly possible, but to submit to the will of Heaven and one’s fate.” Although I have used this admonition countless times to comfort myself whenever I failed my Math exams, there is a deeper philosophic meaning of this maxim. Indeed, I cannot fully control the outcome of my Math exams, and the only things I can control is how hard I prepare for the exams and how well I react the disappointing results. This realization of human incapability can be traced back to 2300 years ago. The philosophy of stoicism is a practice of patience, acceptance, and tolerance. It is one of the oldest doctrines that was originated in Athens by Zeno of Citium in the early 3rd century BC. Philosophers who follow the practice stoicism such as Epictetus emphasize that happiness or eudaimonia, is rarely, if not never, determined by materialistic or external forces. Rather, happiness is attained by one’s morality.

First of all, I must confess that I favor the ideology of stoicism because it greatly reminds me of the Buddhism practice. As a partial Buddhist, I recognize many similarities between Buddism and stoicism. One of which is the recognition of human inability and the humble relationship between the human race to its surroundings. The Buddism practice is heavily focused on knowing one’s self and controlling one’s desire through learning how to be humble. A monk at my local temple always says, “the sunlight and the grasses give me life; they are who I am, and they are what I will be.” The profound sentiment reflects an ideology that is very similar to Stoicism because both schools of philosophies realized that human beings are powerless. Just like any other living beings on earth, they are merely the production of the sunlight and the grasses. Therefore, both ideologies emphasize the humbleness of human beings. By recognizing the inabilities of human beings, the practice of Stoicism enables the human race to think in a larger context. While Stoic philosophers recognize that there are inevitable things that human beings cannot and never will be able to control, they assert that virtue and morality are sufficient enough for them to attain happiness.

To discuss the notion of stoicism, one has to understand what it means and its further implications. In the Epictetus Handbook by Keith Seddon, the author of the introduction defines, “[Stoicism] identify the eudaimonia (happiness) life as one that is motivated by virtue...To progress towards excellence as a human being, for Epictetus, means understanding the true nature of one’s beings and keeping one’s prohairesis (moral character) in the right condition” (Seddon 10). However, there are still many questions remain unclarified regarding stoicism. Among which, there are two most important questions that require more explanations. What does the author mean when he writes “happiness is motivated by virtue”, and what does he mean “to keep one’s moral characters in the right condition”? Epictetus urges people to acknowledge that what makes us happy are our wisedom, our minds, and our abilities to reason.

It is almost common ethics for people to know that virtuous actions are good, and evil actions are bad. Philosophers who believe in Stoicism would make a further assertion. For example, Epictetus would argue that the reason people are suffering is because that they want the wrong things, and wanting something that is out of our control can cause unnecessary pain. For illustration, Epictetus says, “we must understand what is eph’humin (in our power). If we do not do this, our moral character will remain in a faculty condition, for we will remain convinced that things such as wealth and status are good when they are really indifferent.” (Seddon 11) According to Epictetus, we cannot control how much money we have because its is simply a measurement physical and materialistic things, and those things would eventually disappear, making them irrelevant to our spiritual happiness. If we are falsely attracted by money or physical wealth, we are exposing ourselves to inevitable pain because those physical existences cannot last forever, making us “troubled by frustrations and anxieties, subject to disturbing emotions we do not want and cannot control.” (Seddon 11) Therefore, Epictetus asserts that the proper goal of a happy life is to practice how to removed one’s false attraction of the uncontrollable elements of life and focused on the controllable ones.

In the Tradition Ecological Knowledge and Environmental Futures by Winona LaDuke, the author writes about the living ways of the Native American people in the Anishinabeg Akiing. LaDuke depicts the native American’s idea of hunting:

A hunter always speaks as if the animals are in control of the hun. The success of the hunt depends on the animals: the hunter is successful if the animal decides to make himself available. The hunters have no power over the game; animals have the last say as to whether they will be caught. (LaDuke 129)

LaDuke describes this way of thinking as the harmonic relationship between human beings and the surrounding environment. Nonetheless, one may also interpret this as a practice of stoicism. The hunters recognize that they can only control the process of tracing the animal, setting up traps, and firing the arrows. They know that despite everything they have trained and prepared, the success of the hunting is not entirely decided by their efforts. It is decided by the preys and fate. By acknowledging that they “have no power over the game,”, their level happiness is no longer determined by the outcome of the hunting, which is exactly what Epictetus is trying to preach.

Then, one may ask if wealth and status people cannot control, what are the elements that are in control? According to Epictetus, the rights things to want are the things that are in our power, and the only things that in our power is our minds. He says, “What is in our power, then, is the ‘authority over ourselves’ that we have regarding our capacity to judge what is good and what is evil. Outside our power are ‘external things’, which are ‘indifferent’ with respect to being good and evil.” (Seddon 11) Here, he suggests that people’s emotions should be governed by their moral status; it should be determined by our ethical values of knowing what is right and what is wrong. Consequently, money wealth and other physical existences are merely subjects that have no ethical values. On the other hand, the ways people endure hunger, poverty and anger are the characteristics that define the happiness. By eliminating any materialistic factors out of the happiness equation, Epictetus can argue that a beggar living on the street may be a hundred times happier than a millionaire in his mansion because money and mansions are not controllable. The millionaire may be very unhappy because he needs to worry about how to protect his wealth from inflation, while the beggar is fully satisfied from a McDonald hamburger. Epictetus may suggest that suffering that the millionaire endures in not necessary because it is not even something he needs to worry about in the first place. He wants the wrong things. He wants to protect something that cannot withstand time and is out of his control. What he can control is how he reacts when he experience bankruptcy. Epictetus may further argue that if the millionaire wants the “right things”, he would not be concerned about money and wealth and he wound not feel unhappy when he goes out of money. Physical wealth will eventually disappear, and what in the ends really matters is people’s mentalities and actions.