2. He advocates the pursuit of pleasure. Does this mean they suggest you should go to lots of wild parties?
Though he advocates the pursuit of pleasure, he also talks about not feeling too sad if you break your jug or if someone dies. It seems like any feeling in excess is undesirable because you should be able to extricate yourself from feeling particularly strongly toward worldly pleasures or tragedies. This reminds me of learning in church that we should not become materialistic because if we place too much focus or emphasis on things on Earth we would be wrongly prioritizing them over the kingdom of God. Also, he advises us to be careful about our reputations and not laugh loudly or use foul language; as long as you are aware of these things and your reputation while going to wild parties, it's fine - plus, the party's only wild if you think it is wild :)
3. What rationale can Epictetus have for saying that one should not be upset if members of your family die? / Application: What can Epictetus teach you that can help you deal with a terrorist attack on someplace close that kills a friend or family member?
Epictetus says what's important and relevant to us is what we can control, not what we can't control. Someone dying is not in your control, so the death (the actual 'dying') is not in relation to you. You may feel sad because of your relationship and memories with the person - which is in relation to you - but the person's death wasn't something you had power over so you should not find some way to blame yourself. Between pages 18 and 19, Epictetus says that when bad things happen to other people (their cup breaking, their family dying), we react with a more detached, "it's the lot of a human being" feeling, whereas when it happens to ourselves we pity ourselves because we are personally attached. I feel that the moral of this is not that we should apply that same empty and robotic thought to our own tragedies, but that we should understand the way nature works even when someone close to you dies, and we should be understanding of other people's tragedies because it happened to someone close to them.
I think that it is accurate of you to say that Epictetus discourages being upset when a tragedy such as death befalls those around you on the grounds that such tragedies are outside of your control. However, I disagree that the emotional investment people have--that Epictetus discourages--in occurrences determined either by nature or by people acting in what they believe to be appropriate manners is tied to blaming yourself for the way a tragedy plays out. Survivor's guilt certainly is one of the many ways in which people may deal with grief. Still, I feel that focusing on the survivor's personal involvement in the situation may give an incomplete representation of Epictetus' argument on the matter of loss. As an extension of his thoughts concerning control or lack thereof in different aspects of our lives, Epictetus talks about the notion of possession. Section 11's discussion of loss indicates that death is just one manifestation of nature taking back what it gave to you. This idea that humans are similar to material objects may allow survivors to recognize that their ties were to the intangible parts of the deceased that were only ever accessible through the proxy of the human body, so this nature-given proxy's removal does nothing to kill the relationships and memories the survivor holds. People have agency over their opinions (section 1), so it may be that relationships between one mind and another are outside of the control of nature up until one mind loses its means of connection, i.e. its physical form. This separation furthers the notion that death is a universal part of life that should allow people to be understanding toward others, as you concluded, as there is little differentiating one body's death from another aside from the nonphysical associations--one's attachment to the associated mind--tied to that body.
ReplyDelete