Just as a target is not set up to be missed, so the nature of evil does not arise in the universe. [ Encheiridion 27 ]
Let me take a stab at intrepretting this passage in the Encheiridion that fully deserves its reputation for obscurity. I shall pretend that we have no textual problems and that the English translation given above if a fair rendering of what Arrian wrote.
Here's my conjecture. The archer does not create or set up a target without a purpose. His purpose is to hit what he has established as his target. So God does not create anything in the universe without a purpose. But if he were to anything evil, what would be his purpose? What thing would ever aim at realizing something evil & harmful to itself?
Arrian's "excerpts" from the Discourses have a marked tendency to omit any reference to the diety or his agency, and I think part of the problem here comes from that source. Arrian has deleted all reference to agency, both on the part of the archer and on the part of the Creator. We know Epictetus has good reasons for rejecting anything that is evil by nature. Only vice is evil, he has claimed or argued at many points. Now vice, deriving from a misuse of our faculties of reason & assent, is anything but natural or inevitable. We are born with the capacity to make good judgments and choices, and we fail to do so for want of education and understanding and discipline. There is nothing necessary or inevitable about the errors we make.
Let me take a stab at intrepretting this passage in the Encheiridion that fully deserves its reputation for obscurity. I shall pretend that we have no textual problems and that the English translation given above if a fair rendering of what Arrian wrote.
Here's my conjecture. The archer does not create or set up a target without a purpose. His purpose is to hit what he has established as his target. So God does not create anything in the universe without a purpose. But if he were to anything evil, what would be his purpose? What thing would ever aim at realizing something evil & harmful to itself?
Arrian's "excerpts" from the Discourses have a marked tendency to omit any reference to the diety or his agency, and I think part of the problem here comes from that source. Arrian has deleted all reference to agency, both on the part of the archer and on the part of the Creator. We know Epictetus has good reasons for rejecting anything that is evil by nature. Only vice is evil, he has claimed or argued at many points. Now vice, deriving from a misuse of our faculties of reason & assent, is anything but natural or inevitable. We are born with the capacity to make good judgments and choices, and we fail to do so for want of education and understanding and discipline. There is nothing necessary or inevitable about the errors we make.
posted by Macuquinas d' Oro at 6:12 PM
4 Comments:
I probably should read more of your blog to get a better feel for where you are coming from, but ... I'll comment first and maybe regret later ;-)
You wrote: "God does not create anything in the universe without a purpose. But if he were to anything evil by nature, what would be or have been its purpose?"
Assuming your perpective is from a someone who believes in God, furthermore believes in a good God, and lastly believes that there is evil (aka a devil of some sort):
I do not view God as having created evil. I believe God created a perfect free-willed entity. Since the entity was free-willed and perfect (an image of God - to borrow from the Judeo-Christian), it had both choice and power.
For me, evil is not a creation of God, but a creation of man through the exercise of his divine heritage and his free will.
(again, apologies, if this is not where you are coming from).
Dear Richard,
Thank you for your thoughtful comment. Please excuse the typos.
It was not not my intention to express any personal religious views in this posting. I was trying only to make sense of a notorious obscure passge from Arrian's precis of Epictetus' philsosphy.
I speculated the obscurity arose because Arrian had deleted a crucial reference to God in his excerpt ( as he does elsewhere ). I think Epictetus was engaged in what the philosophers call theodicy, trying to justify the existence of evil in a universe created/maintained by an omnipotent and benevolent being. Epictetus' answer was that evil is an accidental, not an intented part of the universe. Evil arises only because men miss their targets sometimes in aiming at the good. They wish to do good but end up doing/creating evil, because their judgments are flawed and sometimed badly wrong.
I think this is very close to the view you are expressing.
As an afterthought--and please don't be offended by this--may I tell you the best theodicy I ever heard? Evil in our world is not a problem because we are already in Hell, suffering condign punishment for the sins of our past life. We are already damned and deserve to experience evil!
Thank you for clarifying where you were coming from.
I thought I should have lurked longer in order to get a better feel for your blog (I do this for forums, but somehow, I throw caution into the wind and jump right into commenting on peoples blogs)
I am very hard to offend. While the classics are wonderful (although I am limited to reading only translations - since I cannot read the original tongues), I borrow one of my aphorisms from Star Trek: "There is no offense where none is taken." Something I could easily imagine Marcus Aurelius having written in his Meditations.
By the way, I came here by way of Laudator Temporis Acti.
Dear Henry,
Thank you for your interesting post.
First of all, I must confess that I’m not acquainted with Prof Seddon’s book ( or much of the recent secondary literature on Epictetus) . I find nothing in the passage you report to disagree with, but I don’t see how it explains the problem(s) of Encheiridion 27.
Encheiridion 27 sees a connection between a ( purposeless, non-existent) activity and the non-existence in the universe of what is “evil by nature”—whatever that is. The purposeless activity is setting up a target just to miss it. I assume it that if the sentence is to make sense the second clause must also be alluding ( tacitly) to some other kind of purposeless activity. My only conjecture as to what that activity could be is God’s creation of what is evil or harmful by nature. Arrian has for some reason, as he does elsewhere, deleted a critical reference to the divine.
Everything aims by nature at what is good & beneficial for itself ( happiness or flourishing, if you wish ). Nothing aims at what is evil or harmful to it ( suffering & unhappiness ). Evil & unhappiness arise for Epictetus when we misjudge the good and mistakenly desire/choose/pursue what is not in our interest. There is nothing necessary or “natural” about that kind of error, so Epictetus can deny that there is anything necessarily or by nature evil. That's what I think the point is.
I don’t think it would be very useful to dig into the notion of what is "evil by nature”. What I’ve been challenging Epictetus on is the idea that things like disease and disabilty and dire poverty aren’t evils. Evils are things that harm us greviously, and it seems to me that these “misfortunes, as Epictetus calls them, are capable of maiming & detroying the kind of human inner and outer life he recommends. If they can, they are evils, and Epictetus is wrong.
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