Aphorisms, sayings, & such #7
Might there be something valuable in writings from 1000s of years ago?
As regular readers surely have surmized (and those who have managed to survive knowing me IRL also well know), I champion behaviorist views.1 As a part of those views, I eschew assigning hidden meanings to behavior. As a young adult, for example, I wrote a poem about avoiding over-analyzing things, recommending instead just taking them as simple events and objects.
I find that I sometimes listen to what people say and think (to myself), “Oh, yikes! She’s not really upset by what she’s observed. She’s upset by her interpretation of it” or “Oh, golly, he’s more incensed because of what he thinks they’re saying then by what they’re actually saying.”
At those times, I often recall a version of a line from Epictetus:
People are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of things.
I often engage is such recall when I think that people are interpreting other’s motives, intentions, and such. Now, I recognize that that’s my thinking, my interpretation. I must be cautious about applying it.
However, I find the thought especially useful when I apply it to myself. When I’m “feeling” some particular way (“disappointed,” “frustrated,” etc.), I can ask myself if my feeling legitimately inheres in the event that I am associating with the feeling…or might I simply have to own that I’m generating that feeling. It’s not someone or something else, it’s not the world…it’s mine. I’m doing this to myself. I think asking myself such questions helps me to step back, be more objective, and not respond on the fly.
All of this goes really well with the book that I’m currently reading. It’s Robert Sapolsky’s Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will.2 I’m likely to mention this again, but I’ve only gotten to chapter 3. Anyway, enough moralizing for one post.
Epictetus Epictetus wrote in the first or second century before the common era in Greece. According to Wikipedia, Epictetus wrote philosophical musing and is considered a stoic. One can learn more about his ideas from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which includes an extensive entry about them.
Here’s the full quote (without my editing):
Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of things. Thus death is nothing terrible, else it would have appeared so to Socrates. But the terror consists in our notion of death, that it is terrible. When, therefore, we are hindered, or disturbed, or grieved, let us never impute it to others, but to ourselves; that is, to our own views. It is the action of an uninstructed person to reproach others for his own misfortunes; of one entering upon instruction, to reproach himself; and of one perfectly instructed, to reproach neither others nor himself.
I drew this quotation from Good Reads. It’s a source to which I turn often. According to Good Reads, it comes from The Enchiridion of Epictetus.
Footonte
I must tread carefully here in my choice of words. Sometimes, they can turn about and nip one on the bottom. With the phrase I’ve used here, I do not mean to suggest that I identify as a certain “type” or person. Also, I don’t want to make the word “view” carry too much strength here, for reasons that will become clearer as one reads the remainder of this post.
If diving into a book with a title like Professor Sapolsky wrote (and he’s written many) seems daunting, you could get a starter by listening to a story from NPR’s TED Radio Hour from 2017: “Robert Sapolsky: How much agency do we have over our behavior? Alternatively, you could watch the brief YouTube copy of the TED Talk on which it’s based.