On Possessions

I'm currently halfway through Book 2 of Epictetus' Discourses. The lack of posts about the book is not an indication that I don't like it. Epictetus continues to be one of my favorite philosophers, vying for the top spot with Seneca I suppose. I find the Discourses to be a bit more rambling and incoherent than the Enchiridion. A more thorough reading is required, but I don't mind that. The wisdom contained with in the words, especially in Book 2, is obvious.

At the risk of slighting some his more important arguments, I'd like to praise one in particular. We exercise great care in tending to our car, our house, and our body. We submit them only to people trained in their care - mechanics, artisans, and physicians. Where I grew up, at least, contractors and electricians and the like could live just as comfortably as doctors; their importance is obvious. But our greatest possession is necessarily the one that commands all the others, and evaluates and values them.

Is that greatest possession our soul, or our reason, or our intellect? Here I find Stoicism essentially in conflict with religion, if only trivially. The obvious theological answer would be the soul. Stoics, identifying reason as the gift of the divine unto us, would say our reason is our most precious possession. A trivial incongruity, perhaps, but with large ramifications for personal ethics. Should I place more care in finding a mentor for my soul, or for my reason?

I can choose to spend time devoting myself to religion, working on living virtuously and correctly. Or, I can choose to focus on developing my reason - reading philosophy, expanding my intellect, etc. At this point I feel the soul will be enriched necessarily by enriching the intellect - but not at the expense of neglecting piety. Hence, though I am becoming more active in my religious beliefs, I realize I should expand my activity. Though not at the expense of diminishing my intellectual pursuits. If only days were longer....

On Proper Preparation

From Epictetus' Discourses, Book 1, Chapter 17:

If you want to hear about moral improvement, well and good. But if you say to me, "I do not know whether you argue truly or falsely," and if I use an ambiguous word and you say to me "distinguish," I shall grow impatient and say to you, "this is the more pressing need." It is for this reason, I suppose, that men put the processes of logic in the forefront, just as we put the testing of the measure before the measuring of the corn. And if we do not determine first what is the bushel and what is the scale, how shall we be able to measure or weigh anything? So in the sphere of though if we have not fully grasped and trained to perfection the instrument by which we judge other things and understand other things, shall we ever be able to arrive at accurate knowledge? Of course, it is impossible.


Perhaps that will be a new resolution of mine. To pursue the study of logic to bolster my capacity to develop and understand arguments. This brings to mind a passage by Hobbes, from the Leviathan, Part 1, Chapter IV:

Seeing then that truth consisteth in the right ordering of names in our affirmations, a man that seeketh precise truth, had need to remember what every name he uses stands for; and to place it accordingly.


My girlfriend recently tipped me off to an iPod app that presents 4 or so English words a day. I had already had a word of the day, but rarely looked at it. This new app includes a few fancier features and also includes the words of the day in other languages that are part of my Google Reader feed. Perhaps that will satisfy Hobbes.

The Consolation of Philosophy V

Ending his work on a high note, Boethius had some wisdom left to impart in his fifth chapter. Far from what prompted the original discussion with a corporeal version of Philosophy, this chapter dealt with fate vs. free will and how free will can be reconciled with divine providence.

The first major argument was that chance is meaningless. Every occurrence in the present proceeds directly from the past. The future would be predictable if only we had divine intelligence. I personally think this is an extremely pressing issue in modern philosophy. With increasing scientific understanding of psychology and biology, often at the molecular level, more and more behavior can be causally explained. Are we trending towards a future of accurate prediction of human behavior? Or is chaos theory accurate in labeling some activity as inherently unpredictable, even to an infinite intellect? To some extent these are no longer philosophical questions, but mathematical. Regardless, I think Boethius was on the right track in exploring determinism. Notable in his argument's faults, however, he seems to define chance not only externally, but also from a personal viewpoint. From that latter standpoint, of course, chance does exist. A human intellect is of course faulty, and so we cannot predict future events from past experiences; the future inherently contains the unexpected for us, and hence chance is a part of the human condition.

The second major argument was that divine providence does not interfere with free will. God knows what will happen, transcendent of time, much the same way a statement is inherently true or false. A statement about the future may be true or false to our knowledge, not necessitating the future to follow any particular path. God, however, must always know the true statement about the future, still independent of the future actually ending up that way. And so the future is not constrained in any way, at least not by God, yet He still has knowledge of what happened, is happening, and will happen. It is much like human knowledge of the past - true, but without requiring it to have happened.

How divine providence can be reconciled with chaos theory, if it turns out that parts of the universe are truly unknowable, is certainly an interesting question for modern philosophy as well.

The Consolation of Philosophy IV

I don't think I found one iota of useful discourse in this chapter. The main argument is that while it may seem that good people sometimes experience hardship, and bad people sometimes profit, that really this doesn't happen. The good are also truly powerful, and the bad are truly powerless.

To make these conclusions Boethius has to carefully define many terms and concepts, sometimes redefining what he spoke of in previous chapters. Happiness is still the unity of independence, power, fame, glory, and pleasure. Pursuit of that happiness is divine and truly good. Good people, in making advances towards happiness, are powerful and bad people are powerless as they do not advance towards happiness. This is a conclusion of his - I don't follow. It also appears Boethius defines good and evil as a dichotomy; a person is either good, or bad. Nowhere does he mention how he separates people, and nowhere does he even pay lip service to the idea of a graduated scale of good and evil.

Most of the latter half of the chapter concerns how God administers the universe, and why we (incorrectly) perceive injustice. I found the argument to be shallow and poorly evidenced, even considering the early state of the Christian religion at the time. Descartes and Spinoza had much better theological arguments, and Seneca had a much clearer discussion of why good things happen to bad people.

The Consolation of Philosophy III

Book 3, to my knowledge for the first time in The Consolation of Philosophy, makes extensive use of the Socratic method. By that, I mean a series of rhetorical questions, simply answered affirmatively or negatively, which push the argument towards a desired conclusion. I rather like this style of argument, if done correctly and without missing connections. Boethius doesn't err in his style, but rather in substance. The meat of this chapter is essentially that happiness comprises 5 things: independence, power, renown, glory, and bodily pleasure. Towards the end of the chapter he changes somewhat to adoration of God and a heavily simplified proof of why God must exist. Descartes and Spinoza offered much more in-depth arguments along the same lines for why God must exist and what He is - both arguments, by the way, I disagree with, not on the basis of their conclusion, but on the means.

What perplexes me is the inclusion of glory and renown within happiness. Power is also a strange choice, although perhaps less strange. It was not even yesterday that I was reading Boethius denounce glory as an insignificant, transient condition. Indeed, at the beginning of Book 3 he restates [Philosophy's] objections to desiring glory and fame. Yet, they are included in the definition of happiness. How can fame and glory, which are temporal and at the whim of popular opinion, constitute happiness? For happiness must be independent of others, at least it was before modern psychology. Boethius had seemed to be a budding Stoic; now I must revise that appellation. Power is also anathema to the Stoic's definition of happiness.

At the end of Book 3, I am quite in doubt of Boethius' ability to turn this book around, into a complete and coherent presentation.

The Consolation of Philosophy II

Book 2 of The Consolation of Philosophy refines many of the arguments Philosophy hinted she would make in Book 1. Much of it is more or less the Stoic party line, or close enough, but two arguments were unique enough to stand out.

The first is that happiness is truly relative. What one person thinks will bring them happiness is the accustomed possession of another. For example, while one may be dismayed to be sent into exile, that new location is of course home for many others. A poor man seeks money, a rich man seeks purpose, an important man seeks leisure, etc. For a long time I considered the theory that the extent to which things make us deviate from a state of happiness is relative. For a starving child, missing a meal is customary, and hence its sting has been neutralized by experience; whereas if a rich man missed a meal it might well be the greatest hardship he experiences in a year. The extent to which each event saddens us or enrages us is proportionate to the amount of hardship we are accustomed to. To an extent, Boethius' writing elaborates on this. Though it would be interesting to see his reaction to more modern studies on happiness, which attempt to quantitatively evaluate happiness as a function of wealth or other variables.

Perhaps the more important argument Philosophy makes is that there is no reason to pursue an important position in civil affairs. This has long been a criticism of Stoicism, that it leaves no room for the Stoic sage to pursue positions in government which could help others. I have not read enough of Stoic personal ethics to judge this criticism, but I think it is fairly accurate, at least when describing the teachings of Zeno and Chrysippus. Philosophy (the mortal, not the discipline) tells Boethius that seeking an important position is tantamount to seeking glory and fame, which of course are worthless and insignificant. The second part of that argument I agree with, but I would not say that seeking a position is identical to seeking glory. Boethius attempts to argue this and is deftly silenced. I do not see why a man may not, for example, try to win high political office for the sole purpose of exercising his virtue to aid others. After all, Stoicism is not solipsism. Indeed, helping others is a good example of the virtue of magnanimity and charity. Perhaps this question will be answered in later Books.

Ancient Geology

The last of Seneca's Dialogues and Essays was On Earthquakes, Book 6 of his Natural Questions. I will add that I am interested in reading the remainder of this large work on the natural sciences. It is true that most of his actual scientific theory is sadly outdated. I am sure that with the information available to him the book was once a valuable resource, but it is now interesting only as a relic of ancient thinking. His causes of earthquakes include large underground caverns of water, fire, and (his personal belief) the agitation of air trapped within the Earth; how the air becomes agitated, I do not know. It is somewhat disheartening to realize just how stunted natural science was in those days, but I suppose that means little to Seneca's other successes. This work, even, is sprinkled with valuable philosophical afterthoughts that tie the science into knowledge useful for all educated people.

One of the more curious things I found in the reading was this: "The reward will be to know Nature, and no prize is greater than this. The subject has numerous features which will prove useful, but the perusal of this material contains nothing more beautiful in itself than that by means of its own splendor it engages the minds of men and is cultivated, not for the sake of profit, but for the wonder it excites."


I wish I more clearly understood Seneca's meaning here. It seems to me he is saying that knowledge of this subject is valuable only in itself, not for the purpose which the knowledge serves. On the surface, this begs the question: is knowledge valuable for itself? I certainly believe it is. Knowledge is good because it is knowledge, not as a means to an end. Much like virtue is desirable only for itself. Though this does raise another issue - knowledge itself is not a virtue, and as a Stoic I recognize that virtue is the highest and most desirable possession. What place, then, does knowledge have? Is it only a means to an end, a means to achieve virtue? Delving more deeply into Seneca's statement, why is knowledge not valuable as a means to an end? Greater understanding of earthquakes has allowed modern man to minimize the danger to human life, better design buildings and possessions to withstand damage, and alter human development to avoid threat to the previous two categories. However, Seneca's particularly ambivalent attitude towards human life and possessions would make him disdainful of effort spent protecting ourselves from earthquakes. Is Seneca truly that prescient that he realized pursuit of natural science would not benefit a true Stoic? Or does he just fail to realize how incorrect he was pinpointing the causes of earthquakes? A more thorough reading of the rest of Natural Questions might resolve this series of questions.