Eric The Blue

Twolves in possession, 3-pointer on its way, off again

After turning off the Timberwolves’ game last night I had the thought, not for the first time, that since my mom is gone there’s no one to tell me that it doesn’t matter who wins these games: it’s just those millionaires against these ones, and why should anyone care? She’d say my loved ones now are as crazy as I am. “You can’t touch Shai,” says my daughter as he steps to the foul line yet again. Actually, you don’t even have to touch him. Was Jaden McDaniels in the frame as Shai slipped to the floor while changing direction? Two shots!

I agree with my mom in my head but it seems the bottom of the spine has veto power. Other things are like that, too. Probably the fear of death, for example. You can see how it would be favored by natural selection, but really, why worry? No one regards with horror the time before they were born. It won’t be any different later. Just wish that in the interim my lizard brain would let me regard with equanimity the sight of Shai shooting free throws at one end while “our guys” dent the backboard at the other.

Autopsy

Republicans when they lose an election: WTF?! The libz stole it from us. Deceased Latin American commies put little genies in the machines that switched Trump votes to Biden. It’s obvious to all who can see! We must storm the Capitol, stop the steal, and kill the traitorous vice president. Or at least take a dump in the corner.

Democrats when they lose an election: Oh, my. This is perfectly terrible. I am disconsolate. Can it really be true that black- and brown-skinned men under the age of 30 do not love us anymore? Whatever are we to do, oh woe, woe, woe, &c.

NPR’s political guy said on the radio this morning that Democrats used to be the party of the working class but now they’re the party of the faculty lounge. Seems to me a slur on the faculty insofar as it does nothing to show that the professors are wrong on the merits.

A journalist who interviewed a lot of Trump voting Latinos reports that it was all versions of, “The economy sucked for me under Biden. Covid shutdowns, inflation, housing costs going up. Entonces—he’s fired. Time for something new.” Entonces must be Spanish for thus and therefore. I demur on the substance of the complaint. If Trump were smart, he’d do nothing but play golf, wait for the public’s perception of the economy to catch up with reality, and then declare that he’d fixed it. Instead, he’ll likely eff it up by keeping his promises—setting off a trade war with tariffs, rounding up low-wage workers (aka essential workers) and deporting them, tax breaks for the rich, all the Trumpean slop.

But what I really dislike is this idea that all a voter need consider is whether he’s better off financially than he was four years ago. It’s as if you could hear the guy in the famous Norman Rockwell painting and he’s saying, “Man, I can’t afford some of the crap I’d like to buy.” It seems  then that we have no chance of addressing, for example, the climate crisis. (Trump thinks it’s a “hoax” and Harris hardly mentioned it, unless you count reversing her former opposition to fracking, presumably in order to win Pennsylvania, which she lost.) The inability to address our most pressing problems is a persistent theme. Circa 1850 in the southern part of the U.S., white men perceived that the abolition of slavery would sink their economic boat. It doesn’t follow that abolishing slavery was a poor idea and they were right to seek its preservation and expansion.

In the faculty lounge, they’re familiar with the argument advanced against democracy in Plato’s Republic: the rabble, who care for nothing but their own ease, tomorrow and the day after that, will be easy marks for unvirtuous con men seeking power. What’s needed, therefore, is a statesman who’s devoted his life to the study of philosophy—a “philosopher king.” A self-serving argument for a philosopher to make, and anyway good luck with that in the real world. (Plato, it has been argued, cared so little for the real world that he substituted for it a fanciful one made up by himself.)  But the degree to which experience tends to bear out Plato’s criticism of democracy is one way to account for how a fourth-rate entertainer, third-rate businessman, and first-rate scoundrel could also be the twice-elected POTUS.

Eating less meat

The subject of animal consciousness—animals' experience of life—was never on my radar till I had a dog. So, on the big question, cats or dogs, there you have it: cats never forced the topic into my view, and I just can't feel about them the way I feel about dogs.

There's a mail delivery person who works on the other side of Nicollet Avenue, where I often walk our dog, a member of a species famously antagonistic toward people in her line of work. She makes friends by carrying treats and dispensing them liberally. We've gotten so well known to her, and our dog loves her so much, that if she sees us while driving along in her USPS van she'll pull over and get out for a little small talk in addition to the usual doggy biscuit. It seems that the goodwill thereby generated has, in the mind of our dog, been extended to all postal workers. Their vehicles aren't very different in size and shape from lots of others but only a passing USPS van causes Coopsie—that's his name—to strain at the leash and try to keep up. If the van stops, and his friend gets out, he's wildly happy; if as often happens it's someone else, he stands at expectant attention. It sure seems to me that he can distinguish between "sure thing" and "somewhat promising," though I have no idea what's going on in his head. I said "wildly happy" but it could be some other emotion. 

Is "emotion" the right word? Close enough for a layman.

Animal rights is currently a hot topic in academic philosophy. The dour Schopenhauer (1788-1860) remarked that the one good thing about the railroads is that they saved millions of draught-horses their miserable existence. Like many of her colleagues, the contemporary philosopher Martha Nussbaum (pictured above) goes quite a lot farther, as shown in this interview about her latest book. I have thought for a while that of the various arguments for not eating animals none was conclusive, even if most had at least some merit, and that taken together they probably made a compelling case, although evidently not compelling enough to make me turn up my nose at a hamburger. If my own case is representative, animal rights supporters should play up the similarities between the animals we slaughter for food and the ones we keep for pets. I'm pretty sure that, in their capacity to experience (for example) fear or contentment, cows and pigs aren't a lot different from dogs and cats. 

But I do like to eat cows and pigs, and chickens. It's like my brain and brain stem have to agree to disagree, and it works out in my version of the "incrementalism" Nussbaum recommends:  I eat less meat than formerly—smaller portions, more meatless meals, less beef and pork, more fish and shrimp (I doubt shrimp experience fear or contentment). Tonight I'm making a penne dish. In a little olive oil, I sauté whatever vegetables I have while cooking the penne. Then I run warm water over some frozen shrimp, tail-off, peeled and deveined, before adding them to the vegetables. When the pasta is almost done, I throw into the skillet a bunch of grape tomatoes and a small bottle of pesto—the contents, not the bottle itself. Then I drain the pasta, add it to the skillet with the other ingredients, and toss it all together. Daughters serve themselves first and, since they pick around the vegetables, I imagine it's quite the healthy meal for me. Two glasses of cheap red wine as it's easy to go overboard with healthy habits. 

Schopenhauer: essays and aphorisms

The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) published his most famous work, The World as Will and Representation, in 1819, when he was 31. It was not well enough received to land him a permanent academic position, so it's fortunate for him that he was what we'd call a trust fund beneficiary—his father, a successful businessman, had drowned in a canal, quite likely a suicide, when Arthur was 17, and his share of the inheritance, invested conservatively, yielded an annual income of approximately twice that of a university professor. He settled into a modest but comfortable life of study and leisure at Frankfurt. He did not lack confidence in his own merit; here is a passage, from a later book, in which he is no doubt backhandedly explaining why his "masterpiece" had been largely forgotten:

If you want to earn the gratitude of your own age you must keep in step with it. But if you do that you will produce nothing great. If you have something great in view you must address yourself to posterity: only then, to be sure, you will probably remain unknown to your contemporaries; you will be like a man compelled to spend his life on a desert island and there toiling to erect a memorial so that future seafarers shall know he once existed.

I can imagine him trying not to betray his gratification upon reading the Wikipedia article on himself, especially:

Though his work failed to garner substantial attention during his lifetime, Schopenhauer had a posthumous impact across various disciplines, including philosophy, literature, and science.

The article about him in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a trove. His name has become associated with "pessimism," which is a little simple without being unfair. Here is a characteristically straightforward expression of a dim view that also possesses, I think, at least a bit of uplift:

The conviction that the world, and therefore man too, is something which really ought not to exist is in fact calculated to instil in us indulgence towards one another: for what can be expected of beings placed in such a situation is we are? From this point of view one might indeed consider that the appropriate form of address between man and man ought to be, not monsieur, sir, but fellow sufferer, compagnon de misères. However strange this may sound it corresponds to the nature of the case, makes us see other men in a true light and reminds us of what are the most necessary of all things: tolerance, patience, forbearance and charity, which each of us needs and which each of us therefore owes.

It was perhaps hard to live up to this creed, for the same volume includes:

What the pathetic commonplace heads with which the world is crammed really lack are two closely related faculties: that of forming judgments and that of producing ideas of their own. But these are lacking to a degree which he who is not one of them cannot easily conceive, so that he cannot easily conceive the dolefulness of their existence.

It also includes a section titled "On Women" that I think we might all agree is bereft of ideas that were ahead of their time. An American reader, meanwhile, might be startled by the following, which follows the chauvinism by only a few pages:

Man is at bottom a dreadful wild animal. We know this wild animal only in the tamed state called civilization and we are therefore shocked by occasional outbreaks of its true nature: but if and when the bolts and bars of the legal order once fall apart and anarchy supervenes it reveals itself for what it is. For enlightenment on this matter, though, you have no need to wait until that happens: there exist hundreds of reports, recent and less recent, which will suffice to convince you that man is in no way inferior to the tiger or the hyena in pitilessness and cruelty. A weighty contemporary example is provided by the reply received by the British Anti-Slavery Society from the American Anti-Slavery Society in answer to its inquiries about the treatment of slaves in the slave-owning states of the North American Union: Slavery and the Internal Slave-Trade in the United States of North America. This book constitutes one of the heaviest of all indictments against mankind. No one can read it without horror, and few will not be reduced to tears: for whatever the reader of it may have heard or imagined or dreamed of the unhappy condition of the slaves, indeed of human harshness and cruelty in general, will fade into insignificance when he reads how these devils in human form, these bigoted, church-going, Sabbath-keeping scoundrels, especially the Anglican parsons among them, treat their innocent black brothers whom force and injustice have delivered into their devilish clutches. This book, which consists of dry but authentic and documented reports, rouses one's human feelings to such a degree of indignation that one could preach a crusade for the subjugation and punishment of the slave-owning states of North America. They are a blot on mankind.

This book, Essays and Aphorisms, is a roller coaster ride. I find myself reading passages over and over again—but not, as with other philosophers who have a place in the humanities curriculum, because I'm conscious of having failed to apprehend the meaning. 

Sober Greeks

I finished reading Plato's Symposium, and have concluded that my initial reaction was harsh. According to one view (my new one), the parts that bored me might be intentionally boring, and it gets interesting in the second half. The setting is a dinner party, and the guests, after deciding they won't participate in an alcoholic revel, as they had the night before, settle on an alternate entertainment: they will take turns speaking in honor of love, which, one of them says, has been insufficiently praised by poets. Really? But no one objects, or says that if it's between drinking and a contemporaneous speaking contest they want to change their vote, and the speeches commence.

This is the dull part. I won't say it's like reading your way through the Hallmark shop, but suffice it to say that the speakers in turn extoll the wonders of love. That was the contest, after all: to see who could praise it best. Fairly conventional stuff, excepting the homoeroticism. What might keep you going is the knowledge that Socrates is in attendance, listening. What is he thinking? What's going to happen when he gets his turn? This is how the dialog "works" as dramatic literature. It's going to be a bust if Socrates merely o'er-tops the others in praise, but if you have experience with these Platonic dialogs, you know to expect a contrarian view. 

And Socrates delivers, though not in the way anyone would have expected. One thing that can be tedious about these Platonic dialogs is the character of Socrates, a super-hero always leading his interlocuters to wisdom. But the interlocuters: such patsies! They may put you in mind of the Harlem Globetrotters' opponent, just out there to make the star look good. When they're being so agreeable—Why, yes, Socrates, what you say is indeed of necessity true—who hasn't wanted to put objections into their mouths? The Symposium offers a bit of relief from this annoyance, since Socrates, when he at last speaks, mainly just relates a conversation he had with a woman, Diotima, who in Socrates's telling had schooled him somewhat in the same manner that he more usually instructs his entourage. 

And Diotima seems to have been ahead of her time. We are familiar with the view that Darwin insulted humanity by assembling the evidence for our continuity with the other animals. But in the Symposium, which was written around 2400 years ago, Socrates relates how Diotima gently mocked him for failing to notice that what's often called "love" is just a procreative drive that we share with every beast, great and small. We claim as special to ourselves, and invest with elevated significance, the finest human feeling, something that's common to man, rat, and dog. It's not her main point, and she doesn't say it in quite those words (at least not in the Jowett translation), but it's what she means.

It is as if Diotima, in about 400 BCE, anticipates Darwin's dangerous idea, first published in 1859. The Symposium turns bracing soon as Socrates (or Plato) interjects her views. She even succeeds at making the dull parts retrospectively interesting. One of the earlier speakers, Aristophanes, had propounded a view that a contemporary American might recognize as a version of the "soul mate hypothesis": love drives people to complete themselves by finding and annexing their missing half.  Diotima's views, reported by Socrates, may be viewed as a retort. But is it possible, looking backwards, to detect in Aristophanes' speech an undercurrent of playful satire? That is, was he making fun of the view he purported to be advancing? If so, did Socrates fail to detect the satire, and so feel compelled to refute what he mistakenly took to be an earnest opinion? What did Plato intend? None of his extant dialogs seem as rich and layered as the Symposium. Socrates is off his pedestal and a woman is the star of the show. So far as I know it's the only dialog in which a female voice is heard, except as background murmur—which it arguably is here too, inasmuch as her views are heard only second hand through Socrates. 

Hung over Greeks

I'm reading Plato's Symposium and am sorry to say that it looks as if the high point is going to occur near the very beginning. This is the dialog in which Socrates, out walking, stumbles upon an acquaintance, Aristodemus, who's on his way to a dinner party. Aristodemus invites Socrates to come along. As they approach the host's house, Socrates falls behind Aristodemus and, at the door, has gone altogether missing. Aristodemus reports to the host that he was just here! A servant, sent to reconnoiter, reports that Socrates has been located, "in a fit of abstraction," on the neighbor's portico. This is apparently fairly typical behavior and the decision is made to just leave him be: eventually he'll snap out of it and let himself in. Supper is served and Socrates indeed does appear when it's about half over. Then comes the passage I love:

Socrates took his place on the couch, and supped with the rest; and then libations were offered, and after a hymn had been sung to the god, and there had been the usual ceremonies, they were about to commence drinking, when Pausanius said, And now, my friends, how can we drink with least injury to ourselves? I can assure you that I feel severely the effect of yesterday's potations, and must have time to recover; and I suspect that most of you are in the same predicament, for you were of the party yesterday. Consider then: how can the drinking be made easiest?

I entirely agree, said Aristophanes, that we should, by all means, avoid hard drinking, for I was myself one of those who were yesterday drowned in drink.

I think that you are right, said Eryximachus, the son of Acumenus; but I should like to hear one other person speak: Is Agathon able to drink hard? 

I am not equal to it, said Agathon.

Then, said Eryximachus, the weak heads like myself, Aristodemus, Phaedrus, and others who never can drink, are fortunate in finding that the stronger ones are not in a drinking mood. (I do not include Socrates, who is able either to drink or abstain, and will not mind, whichever we do.) Well, as none of the company seem inclined to drink much, I may be forgiven for saying, as a physician, that drinking deep is a bad practice, which I never follow, and certainly do not recommend to another, least of all to any one who still feels the effects of yesterday's carouse.

I always do what you advise, and especially what you prescribe as a physician, rejoined Phaedrus the Myrrhinusian, and the rest of the company, if they are wise, will do the same. 

It was agreed that drinking was not to be the order of the day . . . .

I feel I've been in these conversations, like on the second day of out-of-town weekend softball tournaments, only the talk was not so elevated: similar subject matter, dissimilar word choice. ("I am not equal to it," confesses Agathon, who, we may conclude, "feels severely the effect of yesterday's potations.") Is it a stilted translation or is this the way the ancient Greeks talked about their hangovers?  Maybe they were trying to supply Monty Python with material 20-some centuries hence. It could just be a case of projection, but it seems to me the point of the otherwise pointlessly elaborated passage is to show that no one wants to drink and also that no one is eager to reveal to masculine friends that they are set against drinking.  I say "a case of projection" because I remember adopting a secret strategy of lying low on Night 1 so that I might then have a chance of keeping up on Night 2. Youth is wasted on the young.

Also like the parenthetic observation on Socrates's habitual willingness to go with the flow. If you want to know what Socrates was like, you come up against the problem that the source for  information is Plato's dialogs, and, especially on philosophical matter, it seems likely that there's a lot of Plato in Plato's characterization of Socrates. The incidental droppings might well be the more trustworthy biographical bits, so it's fun to see that, when the question at hand was whether or not to "drink deeply,"  Socrates's friends assumed he would if they would. 

Mom reads Plato

Being of their offspring the bigger poindexter, I've inherited my parents' books, and last night I spent some time with a hardback volume—paperbacks, unlike atomic bombs, belonging to the future—of some Platonic dialogues that had obviously been required for a college philosophy class my mom took in the mid-1950s. Maybe she would have been able to resell it if not for her copious underlining and highlighting. Jesus, mom, why not just paint the pages with a brush? Her marginalia is also interesting and put me in mind of the opening to chapter 6 of Vladimir Nabokov's Pnin (not his most notorious book but, I think, the most enjoyable one):

The 1954 Fall Term had begun. Again the marble neck of a homely Venus in the vestibule of Humanities Hall received the vermilion imprint, in applied lipstick, of a mimicked kiss. Again the Waindell Recorder discussed the Parking Problem. Again in the margins of library books earnest freshmen inscribed such helpful glosses as "Description of nature" or "Irony"; and in a pretty edition of Mallarme's poems an especially able scholiast had already underlined in violet ink the difficult word oiseaux and had scrawled above it "birds."

In her defense, mom's glosses were not inscribed in the margins of library books—rather, in volumes purchased with grandpa's money and then, after a brief period of active duty, hermetically sealed for more than 60 years till scanned by me last night. 

It was fun to have a window cracked on my mom's mind about five years before I made her acquaintance. I'd have to read the words of Socrates, as set down by Plato and highlighted by her, to try and guess at the import she had discerned, or to make a connection between the text and her marginal notes. Before long I got at least as interested in the text as in mom's notes. The question of what students should study in school is part of the current culture war but I wonder whether the promoters of ancient Greek philosophy might be a little put off by the views of Socrates.

In the dialogue called Euthyphro, for example, the title character is one of these moral preeners who is sure the gods take his side of an ethical dispute. Socrates, occasionally exhibiting a touch of tart impatience, leads him to the question of whether the gods love things that are holy, or whether things are holy because they are loved by the gods. They agree that it must be the former. But in that case, says Socrates, you are supplying me with a mere attribute of piety (that it's loved by the gods) and not its essence (the reason the gods love it). By this point, Euthyphro has become less chatty and self-assured. He soon slinks off, and the dialogue ends without any neat resolution, but it seems an objection to the claim that morality depends upon religion has gone unanswered. For the implication is that "God commands X" doesn't answer the question "Why is X good?"

If the Platonic dialogues are accepted as a biography of Socrates, then it was within a couple of weeks of having advanced this argument that he was sentenced to death for corrupting the youth of Athens. That is the subject matter of the dialogue called Apology. Socrates has a reputation for something resembling modesty, as he famously admitted that he might be the wisest of all men only because at least he knew he knew nothing, but in the Apology, after he's been convicted and it's time to plead for his life, he says a just sentence would be, not death, not exile, but a state pension under the terms of which he would be maintained for life in the Prytaneum, "the public hall in which were entertained ambassadors, victorious generals, winners at the Olympic games, and other illustrious citizens." The picture above is of that page in the Apology from mom's book.  The information about the Prytaneum that I've quoted is from the footnote at the bottom of the page.

On suicide

Sitting here watching the Twins wail on the Indians and thinking about suicide—not in a personal way, as that would be the end of playing golf, following the Twins, and discussing with my roommates the probable current condition of our puppy's bladder and bowels. But why the hysteria on this topic? In particular, I don't get the fanatical opposition to assisted suicide from political conservatives who in every other instance are opposed to governmental encroachments on individual liberty. Whose life do they think it is? Here is an MPR article regarding a bill before the Minnesota state legislature in 2019. A woman terminally ill with ovarian cancer is quoted:

I'm a social worker so I've been trained to follow certain social work principles and one of them is self-determination. And this to me is the ultimate act of self determination.

For balance, Scott Fischbach, the executive director of Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life, is quoted as well:

There are a number of ways to deal with the struggles that come to all of us at the end of life. Assisting somebody to kill themselves is not the route to take. Here in Minnesota, we pride ourselves on having a very good health care system. We need to be sure that health care is available to all and assisted suicide is not. We can do better.

His solution for terminal illness is health care. If terminally ill people don't want it—well, he knows best. Is he saying something different from that? The dying woman makes an argument that is countered with word salad. To me, it's unseemly that a healthy person should mount their moral high horse and deliver opinions about what terminally ill people should want for themselves. Also, can't help but note that, while health care should indeed be available to all, Fischbach is the executive director of MCCL, so it's probably safe to say that he hasn't voted for anyone who's carried that ball down the field. 

Perhaps, since the question related to a bill pending in the state legislature, he was shy about making a religious argument, something along the line of "only God gives life and only God can take it away." I think he'd be right to be sheepish. A desperately ill person, in pain and with no hope of recovery, wants to end their life, and the objection is that they'd be "playing God." It seems acceptable in other contexts. Our judicial system may render the verdict that a person be killed and it is done. A doctor may prolong life beyond what nature would allow without being charged with "playing God." 

No one is against palliative care if that's what the patient wants. That's not what every patient wants. My own theory of the case, which of course may be wrong, is that religious conservatives are in denial about how miserable life can get. It violates their "picture preference," which includes a kindly God, enthroned and engaged, even to the point of intervening in ball games and elections. It's embarrassing to them that choosing not to live might be a rational choice. At least this would account for the hysteria. Here is Minn Stat Sec 609.215, Subd 1:

Aiding suicide. Whoever intentionally advises, encourages, or assists another in taking the other's own life may be sentenced to imprisonment for not more than 15 years or to a payment of a fine of not more than $30,000, or both.

Note the verbs "advise" and "encourage." These issues are not even to be discussed. This is what I mean by hysteria. Suicide is approved by many philosophers whose works are regarded as part of the Western canon—by Epictetus, for instance, who refers to it as "the open door": you can face life with equanimity in part because you know that, if things get bad enough, you can walk through the open door. The Penguin classic paperback of his Discourses might well be in violation of this statute but for the fact that, when it was challenged by a criminal defendant, the Minnesota Supreme Court held that "advise" and "encourage" violated the First Amendment's guaranty of freedom of expression. Now it's only illegal to assist. Of course it often happens, for example toward the end stage of ALS disease, that the patient would need help if she wanted to commit suicide. The law in Minnesota therefore encourages her to kill herself while she still can, which might be before she wants to. 

Authors: Epictetus

Epictetus was born a slave about 55 A.D. in Asia Minor, present-day Turkey but back then part of the Roman Empire. His owner, Epaphroditus, was a prominent advisor to Nero, and Epictetus therefore spent his youth at Rome, eventually becoming a free man, though when and at what age is unknown. While the details of his education are likewise skimpy, we know that he did for a time study with the Roman senator and Stoic philosopher Musonius Rufus. Epictetus was lame as an adult, and there is a tradition that this was the result of an injury incurred while being abused as a slave. Yet his education, which may have helped him gain his freedom, appears to have been tolerated or even encouraged. Another ancient writer attributes the lameness to what we know as arthritis. In the years leading up to 90 A.D. he was lecturing in philosophy at Rome, but he then moved to Nicopolis, on the Adriatic coast of northwest Greece. The presumed reason for the move was an edict of the Emperor Domitian, issued in 89, banning philosophers from the Italian peninsula. He taught and lectured at Nicopolis for many years before withdrawing, at an advanced age, to raise an abandoned child he had adopted.  He died at Nicopolis in about 135, when he would have been approximately 80.

It is arguably a misnomer to speak of Epictetus as an “author" since, in the widely held scholarly view, the works that have come down to us under his name are the notes of probably his most assiduous Nicopolitan student, Arrian, who was in his own right a prominent essayist and historian of the period—he wrote a biography of Alexander the Great. Notably, Arrian's works are in a language and style completely unlike that of his "class notes," which has led to the conclusion that these notes are really more like a stenographer's transcript of Epictetus's lectures and that Arrian was indeed a devoted student. That these works represent the philosophy of Epictetus, not Arrian, isn't disputed. There are four books, together known as the Discourses, a distillation of the Discourses known as the Enchiridion (Greek for "Handbook"), and some fragments from which it is clear that there are lost books in addition to the four we have. To speak of four books may give a false impression—the Discourses, fragments, and the Enchiridion are collected in a Penguin classic paperback, edited by Robert Dobbin, that's 300 pages long, including an Introduction, Endnotes, and a name glossary. 

Epictetus is interested almost exclusively in ethics. Within the field of ethics, he isn't much concerned with our duties toward others. The question he addresses is "How should one live to be content and happy?"—self-help for eggheads. Dobbin, in his introduction, summarizes:

According to [Epictetus] the faculty of choice distinguishes humans from irrational animals. We can make considered choices among "impressions" or "appearances," meaning anything that comes within range of our senses, together with whatever thoughts and feelings these sensations evoke. . . .

Human impressions have "propositional content," that is, our minds automatically frame them as a statement, such as "that is a good thing to have" or "this is the right thing to do." They also involve an intermediate step: the impression requires our assent before it generates the impulse to act on it. Drawing on this orthodox Stoic account of human psychology, Epictetus makes two points with an emphasis distinctly his own: (1) that rational animals can hold off acting on impressions until they are scrutinized and assessed; and (2) if they are judged unreasonable—i.e. irrational or merely impractical—we can and should withhold our assent from them. 

This is accurate, but the experience of reading Epictetus is frequently more bracing  than the summary suggests. For it turns out that, upon performing the recommended deliberations, virtually all "impressions" are "unreasonable," "irrational," "merely impractical": fame, wealth, status, high reputation, all the usual baubles fail the test. Thus one reads, for example, the following crystalline description of what laborers in today's counseling industry refer to as the hedonic treadmill:

[W]hat philosophers say may be contrary to expectation, but not to reason. For you will learn by experience that it's true: the things that men admire and work so hard to get prove useless to them once they're theirs. Meanwhile people to whom such things are still denied come to imagine that everything good will be theirs if only they could acquire them. Then they get them: and their longing is unchanged, their disgust is no less, and they still long for whatever is lacking. Freedom is not achieved by satisfying desire, but by eliminating it.

This was written almost 2000 years ago. It's roughly contemporaneous with the New Testament, which, besides being written in the same language (Koine Greek), is a product of the same culture and geographic locale. But only one reads like it's from a distant land long ago, an unfamiliar country with a hidden code. The other is more like an unusually incisive diagnosis of human ills whose long history is obscured somewhat by their current prevalence. Epictetus’s diagnosis feels “modern.”

I admit, though, to being hazy about the proposed remedy. The above quoted passage continues:

Assure yourself of this by expending as much effort on these new ambitions as you did on those illusive goals: work day and night to attain a liberated frame of mind. Instead of a rich old man, cultivate the company of a philosopher, be seen hanging around his door for a change. There’s no shame in the association, and you won’t go away unedified or empty-handed, provided you go with the right attitude. Try at least; there is no shame in making an honest effort.

You can see here the brusque, colloquial style that contributes to the bracing quality I mentioned. Some of the things that aren’t explicitly stated add to the force—like, here, the dismissal, at once casual and emphatic, of the student’s apparent assumption that a rich man should certainly be listened to. But the diagnosis of the problem is more concrete than the description of the recommended treatment. We are to hang out with philosophers? Attain a liberated frame of mind? Maybe it’s not for nothing that Epictetus appears doubtful anyone will succeed. “At least give it a shot,” he says, like a coach exhorting his overmatched team to play hard.

We are to strive to attain a “liberated mind.” Liberated from what? Desire. But that would include the desire to be happy and thrive, which was the purpose of the inquiry. Is the whole endeavor then self-cancelling? It certainly may appear that the ideal of Epictetus is so austere as to be life-denying. Here’s the entirety of Chapter 3 of Enchiridion:

In the case of particular things that delight you, or benefit you, or to which you have grown attached, remind yourself of what they are. Start with things of little value. If it is china you like, for instance, say, ‘I am fond of a piece of china.’ When it breaks, then you won’t be as disconcerted. When giving your wife or child a kiss, repeat to yourself, ‘I am kissing a mortal.’ Then you won’t be so distraught if they are taken from you.

Yikes! Not sure about this continuous spectrum running from broken china to dead children. Seems almost laughable, in a way: your loved ones could think you’re being affectionate when actually you’re just practicing for bereavement. I’ll trade in five pounds of my humanity in order to feel less pain. Deal!

Notwithstanding my reservations, Epictetus is enjoying a vogue. His criticism of the way people live invigorates, and the indistinctness of the cure allows enthusiasts considerable latitude in fashioning an interpretation amenable to themselves. This seems always to have been the case. For example, early fathers of the Christian church detected in Epictetus’s detachment from the world’s “impressions” an endorsement of the monastic ideal—perhaps overlooking that Stoic detachment is aimed toward self-mastery, a concept that doesn’t mix well with, say, Original Sin. More recently (1993), James Stockdale—Ross Perot’s running mate in 1992!—published a book detailing how the Enchiridion had helped him endure seven years of captivity at the Hanoi Hilton, four of them in solitary confinement. YouTube searches like “Stockdale on Epictetus” yield lots of returns, most interesting and some quite affecting. That his philosophy has been a balm to people bearing awful burdens, or extreme states of mind, is undeniable. In this desperate poem, John Berryman writes that Epictetus is “in some ways” his favorite philosopher.

The Discourses of Epictetus also made a deep impression on Marcus Aurelius, whose Meditations are another of the principal works of Stoic philosophy, and it’s poignant to reflect that this line of influence runs from a man born a slave in the Empire to one who became its Emperor.

Utility

The philosopher Peter Singer (pictured above), writing in Project Syndicate, describes the strange case of Dr. Hasan Gokol, the physician overseeing COVID response, including vaccination protocols, in Harris County, Texas, a big job as that's the home county to Houston. The local DA has charged Gokol with theft and violating the very protocols he was charged with enforcing. Here is what, in Singer's account, happened (the second above link is to his article):

The Moderna vaccine is delivered in vials holding 11 doses. Once a vial is opened, the vaccine remains good for six hours. After that, any remaining doses have to be discarded. Last December, at a site vaccinating medical workers, the last dose from an open vial was administered shortly before closing time. Then one more patient showed up for a shot. That left 10 unused doses in a freshly opened vial. Gokol began looking for people to vaccinate—a handful of medical workers and a couple of cops still on site, all of whom had either already been vaccinated or turned down the opportunity. He spread the net wider by calling phone contacts and asking if they knew anyone who qualified for a vaccination. He went so far as driving to the homes of people he knew qualified and, with their consent, vaccinated them himself. Back at his own house, he continued making calls, and three people agreed to come to his home for a shot. They would have received his three remaining doses, but one cancelled about a half hour before the six hours were up. Fifteen minutes after that, Gokol administered the last dose to his wife, who, on account of a medical condition, qualified for a vaccine. Next day, he reported what had happened and supplied the names of the ten people who had been vaccinated with doses that would otherwise have been wasted. Soon thereafter, he was fired and charged with theft by the Harris County DA. Singer is a little vague about the specifics of the charge, although an article he links to indicates the DA thinks Gokol used his authority to help acquaintances of his "jump the line." A judge dismissed the case when no written document stating the protocol that had been violated could be produced, but, according to Singer, the DA hasn't given up on prosecuting Gokol.

I feel almost everyone thinks something's wrong here, but what they choose to say about it varies. In this respect, the incident resembles a Rorschach test. I read Singer's article after the novelist Joyce Carol Oates tweeted about it, and her take is that the case illustrates the problem of "prosecutorial discretion." There are of course homicides and other serious crimes, but also every day in a county of several million inhabitants some merely sketchy things occur that the authorities decide whether or not to prosecute. They have wide latitude and, though I may be amplifying Oates's complaint, the calculus might involve the likelihood of winning a conviction, an aspect of which could be the status of the alleged offender and their capacity to defend against a charge. Everyone loves to compile a winning record! It's not clear what the prosecutor's motive would be in the case of Dr. Gokol, but Oates would probably say that's just her point. The DA decides. The DA's latitude is wide and rarely is subjected to scrutiny. If this case is prosecuted, and not that one, the public whose interest the DA purports to serve remains in the dark about the reasons, which may be bad, stupid, benighted, personal, corrupt—no one can judge. The justice system recognizes that this is a problem, which explains why, for the most serious crimes, the prosecutor cannot go forward with a case before securing a grand jury indictment. But no one thinks it's much of a protection—thus the saying about how any half-assed prosecutor can "indict a ham sandwich." But it isn't even a theoretical protection for lower level crimes to which the grand jury system does not apply. 

Singer is an ethicist who is generally sympathetic to—perhaps it would be accurate to say he subscribes to—the utilitarian theories of philosophers such as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, both of whom he refers to in his article. According to a shorthand description of utilitarianism, the moral status of actions is determined by whether they result in "the greatest good for the greatest number." If the question involves, say, the allocation of scarce resources, one calculates, for each possible course of action, the benefits to these people and the costs to those people and then selects the option with the highest benefit surplus. According to this school, the case of Dr Gokol is an easy one, since it's easy to detect the benefits (these 10 people got vaccinated) and impossible to detect any cost (because it's not the case that those 10 people didn't get vaccinated—the alternative was that 10 doses are wasted).

Perhaps Singer is attracted to this case because it tends to make a persuasive advertisement for his favored moral theory. He proceeds to criticize the Catholic church for condemning a certain medical procedure that, in past obstetric emergencies, rescued the mother from grave peril by crushing the skull of an infant that couldn't be born. By the lights of a utilitarian, you are allowed, even required, to take measures resulting in one death rather than two. My impulses are all with Singer on these questions. Suppose, however, that by killing me and mining my corpse for organs the lives of four people, all desperately ill, all younger than I am, could be saved. I assume Singer and I agree this would be wrong, and I understand my reasons, but what are his? Utilitarianism seems inadequate for any number of moral questions. Slavery wasn't wrong in America because the misery of the slaves filled a bigger bucket than the one holding the ease, pleasure, and prosperity of their owners. The morality CPAs can perform their calculations but it doesn't matter what the results are. 

Well, the Harris County DA should leave Dr Gokol alone, like Peter Singer says, even if the reasons Singer supplies seem a little suspect.