In class Thursday, the statement was made that the will to do something—in other words, having a goal towards which to act—is not the same as succumbing to something (like an emotion). In Epictetus’s philosophy of stoicism, allowing emotions to “happen” to oneself is an immoral thing to do, while allowing fate to “happen” to oneself is a virtuous good. Do these two ideas, however, contradict one another? How can one rationalize them (since reason is an intricate part of a stoic’s attitude towards life)?
Perhaps a stoic would say that emotions are something you can control while fate is not. But let’s revisit an old example of a moral dilemma from one of the first days of class. If a train is heading towards five children, and you have the ability to pull a lever and send the train heading towards two adults instead, a stoic would say you should do nothing and allow fate to take its course (consequentially the train would kill the five children). It would be an important part of stoicism, too, that you do not worry over the children because fate is outside of your own control. But it is clear in this example that fate, even if just to some extent, is within your control. In the example, you have the definite physical capacity to pull a lever, thereby changing what would have happened naturally (if by naturally we mean without you in the equation).
Stoicism revolves around nature: whatever is “in accordance with” nature is deemed “good. But why is employing one’s ability to control fate so against nature while controlling one’s emotions is in accordance with it? Does it even make sense to argue that emotions are not in accordance with nature? Everyone knows that baby’s cry. Though they have not exactly learned how to feel or express emotions, they cry because of some emotion (desire, sadness, discomfort, fear, etc.). So how did Epictetus come to the conclusion that happenings outside of our bodies are natural without our proactivity to change them while our emotions inside our bodies must be scrupulously and constantly controlled with so much proactivity? And if emotions are then accepted as natural, and if we are all equal cogs in the same machine of nature, then why would it be more important to control one’s own emotions (through close monitoring) be any more natural than controlling other people’s emotions (through acting in such a way that makes others feel better)?
To me, the two ideas of accepting cosmic determinism (fate, nature, whatever) and using human freedom (ability to control only oneself) are at odds with one another. It seems to me that if one has the obvious ability to control some part of fate, that is just as "good" an action as controlling one’s own emotional state. Am I right in my logic?
From a Stoic point of view, I think the main problem with your argument is the rarity of a situation where you have any real power over fate. In the trolley example, you can choose to kill five children passively or two actively, but you cannot choose whether or not to kill children. As a class, we all wanted to warp the senario so that we could save all the children, and the fact that we could not stressed us all out. And that is how Stoics "solve" the problem. It does not matter to the Stoic if you pull the lever or not, because regardless of your actions, children will die. Either way, you are not responsible for their deaths in the cosmic scheme of things. So instead of worrying about killing children (since you have no control over that), you should instead focus on how you interpret the situation. If you realize you could not escape killing children, and do not assign yourself guilt, you will be much more at peace with yourself than if you question your fate. Thus, the Stoics stress monitoring emotion so that you do not allow your emotions to consume you when there is nothing you can do to remedy a situation.
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