Stoic Thoughts and Reflections: Reputation, Self-Examination & Correct Impressions
Musings from Epictetus’ Discourses — Week 8
February 22nd, 2024
Diogenes went scouting before you did and came back with a very different report. Death, he said, was not evil because it was not dishonourable. Reputation was the empty noise of fools. And he said other things that helped remove the element of fear from pain and poverty. In this manner of life he preferred the minimum of clothing to a purple gown, and the bare ground to a bed, however soft.
Reputation is defined as the opinions and beliefs other people hold about you. So, trying to sway other people’s opinions and beliefs is a waste of time. A foolish endeavour. Thus, being concerned about your reputation isn’t a worthwhile use of your limited time on this planet because other people can have the most irrational reasons behind their opinions about you.
Additionally, materialistic things can enslave us. You feel a sense of identity with the things you own so when those things go away or are taken away, it pains us because a part of us has been lost.
But you never owned those things to begin with. They were never yours, fully. The only thing you possess is your mind and body. Everything else is borrowed and you shouldn’t attach your sense of identity to them.
February 23rd, 2024
As it is, though, some people strain at a pamphlet, and still want to devour an entire treatise. Naturally, they can’t digest it, and get heartily sick of the whole business. They need to first figure out what their capacity is. In the realm of logic it is easy to refute someone ignorant of the subject. But in the affair of life, no one offers himself to be examined, and whoever presumes to examine us we resent.
Similar to reading, life is also something we can improve and get better at. The key to improvement is self-examination which requires logic and reason. If we have trouble reading and digesting information, we can apply logic and reason to simplify the learning process and improve our abilities.
With life, however, we assume it simply is what it is. This takes away rationale and we can get stuck in place. But if we unpack the reasons and the actions that caused our current life, we can then take steps towards improving our situation.
But self-examination can be ugly. It’s one thing to see a fault in your logic and correct that and another to see the mistakes that led to your current predicament. The latter is more painful. You have to admit that you lived incorrectly. That you used your time incorrectly. Something that you will never get back. However, without self-examination, there can be no change.
Self-examination is the key.
February 25th, 2024
Impressions come to us in four ways: Things are and appear to be; or they are not and do not appear to be; or they are, but do not appear to be; or they are not, and yet appear to be. The duty of the educated man in all these cases is to judge correctly.
Perception is a skill that needs to be mastered. It sounds simple to properly unpack what is happening right in front of your eyes. But sometimes it’s not so obvious. Our mind can play tricks. Over-emphasizing certain things and blowing them out of proportion. This can cause stress and anxiety.
While at other times minimizing the risk or negative effects of something which can then cause us further harm down the road.
Miscalculations. Poor use of our impressions.
Then how do we judge the situation correctly?
- Through experience. The more experience you have, the more situations you have faced, the more data you have to make the right decision.
- Pondering on alternatives. To think that what you see is correct. Try to view the situation at hand from various angles to make sure you are perceiving it correctly.
- Self-understanding. Many things come back to this. If you have a pattern of making poor decisions and following bad habits, then it’s key to understand yourself and know what kind of thoughts, emotions, and environmental situations start that snowball effect that leads to improper impressions.
Originally published at http://learnedlivingorg.wordpress.com on February 25, 2024.