II.1. On Courage and Caution
This lecture is the most demanding in the volume. Epictetus argues that confidence and caution are not opposites. They are partners, as long as each is pointed at the right kind of thing. Be confident about what you cannot control. Be careful about what you can. The opening is abstract. Stay with it. The lecture turns to fear, death, and pain, and ends with one of the most stirring passages in the whole Discourses.
It may seem a contradiction when the wise say that in everything we do, confidence can be combined with caution.
We must do our best to consider whether it is true.
In one sense, caution seems to be the opposite of confidence, and opposites cannot live together. What looks like a contradiction here, though, comes from a mix-up. If we were truly calling on a person to use caution and confidence about the same things, they could fairly blame us for joining qualities that cannot be joined.
There is nothing strange in the statement.
If it is true, as has often been said and shown, that the true nature of good and of evil depends on how we deal with impressions, and if things outside the will's control cannot be called good or bad, then it is not a paradox that the wise say:
"Be confident in all that lies beyond the will's control, be cautious in all that is dependent on the will."
If evil depends on evil choice, then caution is only right in matters of the will. If things outside the will's control, which do not depend on us, do not really concern us, we should use confidence about those.
In that way we will be at once cautious and confident. We will be confident because of our caution.
Because we are cautious about things that are really evil, we will gain confidence to face things that are not.
As things stand, we behave like deer.
Roman hunters scared deer toward waiting nets by stringing colored feathers on ropes the deer would not cross.
When the deer fear the feathers and fly from them, where do they turn? Where do they take refuge for safety? They turn to the nets, and so they die, because they confuse the object of fear with the object of confidence.
So it is with us.
Where do we show fear? About things outside our will's control.
When do we behave with confidence, as though there were nothing to fear? In matters within the will's control.
If we are only successful in things beyond our will's control, we think it does not matter to us if we are fooled, or act rashly, or do a shameless deed, or hold a shameful desire.
Where death or exile or pain or disgrace faces us, we show the spirit of retreat and wild alarm.
So, as you would expect from people mistaken about the greatest matters, we turn our natural confidence into something bold, desperate, reckless, shameless, and we change our natural caution and modesty into a cowardly and low quality, full of fears and anxieties.
If a person moves his caution to the region of the will and the works of the will, he will find that, along with the wish to be cautious, the will to avoid lies in his control.
If he turns his caution toward what is beyond the control of our will, then, since his will to avoid will be pointed at what depends on others, he will be subject to fear, unsteadiness, and anxiety.
What is fearful is not death or pain.
It is the fear of pain or death.
That is why people praise the one who said, "Not death, but shameful death, is to be feared."
We ought, then, to turn our confidence toward death, and our caution toward the fear of death.
What we really do is just the opposite. We run from death, but we pay no attention to forming judgments about it. We are reckless and careless.
Socrates called such fears bogies, and rightly so. Just as masks seem fearful and terrible to children, from lack of experience, we are affected by events for much the same reason children are affected by bogies.
What makes a child? Lack of knowledge. What makes a child? Lack of instruction.
As far as a child knows those things, he is no worse off than we are.
What is death? A bogy.
Turn it around and see what it is. You will see that it does not bite.
The stuff of the body was bound to be parted from the fire element, either now or later, since it existed apart from it before. Why, then, are you upset if they are parted now? If not parted now, they will be later.
Why? So the turning of the universe can be completed. It needs things present, things future, and things past and done.
What is pain? A bogy.
Turn it around and see what it is. The poor flesh is subject to rough movement, then again to smooth.
If it does not benefit you, the door stands open. If it does, bear it.
In every event, the door must stand open, and then we have no trouble.
What, then, is the fruit of these judgments?
A fruit that must be the most noble and the most fitting for those who are truly being educated: a mind that is calm and fearless and free.
On these matters, you must not trust the crowd, who say, "Only the free may be educated." Trust rather the wise, who say, "Only the educated are free."
"What do you mean by that?"
I mean this. What else is freedom but the power to live our life as we want?
"True."
Tell me, friends, do you wish to live doing wrong?
"We do not."
Then no one who does wrong is free?
"No one."
Do you wish to live in fear, in pain, in distress of mind?
"By no means."
Well, no one who suffers fear or pain or distress of mind is free. Whoever is rid of fears and pains and distresses is rid of slavery by the same road.
How, then, shall we go on believing you, dearest lawgivers, when you say that none but the free may be educated?
The wise say that we do not allow anyone to be free except those whose education is complete. That is, God does not allow it.
So I say many times over. What you must practice and have at your command is to know what you ought to approach with confidence and what with caution.
All that is beyond the control of the will, approach with confidence. What is dependent on the will, approach with caution.
"Haven't I been reciting to you?" says my student. "Don't you know what I'm doing?"
What are you busy with? Small phrases. Away with your small phrases.
Show me how you stand when it comes to the will to get and the will to avoid. Show me that you do not fail to get what you will, or fall into what you will to avoid.
As for those small phrases, if you have any sense, you will take them away somewhere and be done with them.
"What do you mean? Didn't Socrates write?"
Yes, who wrote as much as he did? Under what conditions, though?
He could not always have someone at hand examining his judgments or being examined by him in turn. So he examined and questioned himself. He was always putting some first notion on trial in a practical way.
That is what a student of wisdom writes.
Small phrases he leaves to others, to the foolish, or to the blessed, those whose peace of mind gives them leisure for study.
Today, when the crisis calls you, will you go off and display your recitation, and harp on, "How cleverly I compose dialogues"?
Friend, make this your object:
"Look how I do not fail to get what I will. Look how I escape what I will to avoid. Let death come and you will see. Bring me pains, prison, dishonor, condemnation."
This is the true field of display for a young person come from school.
Leave those other small things to other people. Let no one ever hear you say a word about them. Do not accept any compliments on them. Carry yourself as if you were no one, and knew nothing.
Show that you know this one thing: how not to fail, and how not to fall.
Let others practice lawsuits, logical puzzles, and arguments.
Let your study be how to bear death, bondage, the rack, and exile.
Do all this with confidence and trust in the one who has called you to face them, and has judged you worthy of the place you hold.
At your appointed post, you will show what reason, the ruling part of the mind, can do when set against forces that lie outside the will.
If you do this, that paradox will no longer seem impossible or strange.
The paradox is that we must show caution and confidence at the same time, confidence about things beyond the will, caution in things that depend on the will.