I.4. On What Progress Actually Looks Like
Everyone wants to make progress. Most people look for it in the wrong place, Epictetus argues, and so never find it. This lecture names the one place progress can be seen.
How shall we describe progress?
It is the state of the person who has learned from the wise that we will to get what is good and will to avoid what is evil. He has also learned that peace and calm come to us only when we do not fail to get what we will, and do not fall into what we will to avoid.
Such a person has put away the will to get anything entirely, and set it aside for the future. He wills to avoid only the things that depend on his will.
If he tries to avoid anything beyond his will, he knows that, for all his avoidance, he will one day come to grief and be unhappy.
If the promise of good character is happiness and peace and calm, then progress toward good character is progress toward each of these.
Wherever the perfection of a thing leads, the approach to it is progress.
How is it, then, that though we admit this is the nature of good character, we look for progress somewhere else, and we show off progress somewhere else?
What does good character produce? Peace of mind.
Who, then, makes progress? Is it the person who has read many of the writings of Chrysippus? Can this be good character, to have understood Chrysippus?
If so, we must admit that progress is nothing more than understanding a lot of sayings from Chrysippus. The fact is, we admit that good character tends toward one result, but then declare that progress, the approach to good character, tends toward another.
"That fellow," someone says, "can already read Chrysippus by himself."
Well done, by the gods, you are making progress, fellow. Progress indeed.
Why do you mock him? Why do you draw him away from a sense of his own shortcomings? Won't you show him what good character really means, so that he can learn where to look for progress?
Poor man, there is only one place to look for it: where your work lies.
Where does it lie? It lies in the region of the will, so you do not fail to get what you wish, and do not fall into what you wish to avoid. It lies in avoiding error in the region of impulse, the impulse to act and the impulse not to act. It lies in agreement and the refusing of agreement, so that in these you cannot be fooled.
The first of these is first in order and most needed.
If you merely tremble and mourn and try to escape hardship, no progress is possible.
Show me your progress, then, in this field.
You act as though, when I was talking to an athlete and said, "Show me your shoulders," he answered, "Look at my leaping-weights." Your leaping-weights are your concern. I want to see the final result of your training.
"Take the book on 'Impulse' and learn how I have read it."
Slave, that is not what I am looking for. I want to know what impulses you have, for action and against action. I want to know what you will to get and what you will to avoid. I want to know how you plan and prepare, whether in harmony with nature or out of it.
Show me that you are acting in harmony with nature, and I will tell you that you are making progress.
Act out of harmony with nature, and I tell you to go and write books on such matters, not merely explain them.
What good will they do you? Don't you know the whole book is worth five pence? Do you think, then, that the man who explains it is worth more?
Never look for your work in one place and your progress in another.
Where, then, is progress?
If any one of you, setting aside outside things, has brought his mind to bear on his own will, to develop it fully and bring it into perfect harmony with nature, so it is high and free, unhindered, untroubled, trustworthy, self-respecting;
if he has learned that the one who tries to get or avoid what is not in his power cannot be trustworthy or free, but has to change as those things change, tossed like the winds, and has to make himself a servant to others, who can give or take away such things;
and if, when he rises in the morning, he guards and keeps these principles, washes as one who is trustworthy, eats as one who is self-respecting, and on each occasion works to meet his main tasks, the way the runner makes running his one aim and the voice-trainer his training;
he is the man who is indeed on the path of progress, who has not traveled for nothing.
If all his effort is turned to the study of books, if he spends his labor on this, and has gone abroad for this, then I tell him to go straight home and not neglect what he finds there. He has gone abroad for nothing.
His true work is to train himself to remove mourning and lamentation from his life, the "ah me" and "alas for my misery," the talk of "bad fortune" and "misfortune," and to learn what death is, what exile is, what prison is, what the cup of hemlock is.
This is so he can say in prison, "My dear Crito, if it pleases the gods, so be it," and not say, "Miserable old man that I am, is it for this I kept my grey hairs?"
Whose words are they? Do you think I will name a mean man of no reputation for you? Are they not the words of Priam, and of Oedipus? Are they not the words of all kings?
What else are tragedies but the sufferings of men who have set their admiration on outside things, shaped into verse?
What, then, does Chrysippus offer us? "That you may know," he says, "that these truths from which calm and peace of mind come to us are not false, take my books, and you will find that what gives me peace of mind is true and in harmony with nature."
What great good fortune. What a great benefactor, who shows us the way.
Even though all men have raised temples and altars to Triptolemus for teaching us how to grow crops, which of you has ever set up an altar in honor of the man who found the truth and brought it to light and published it among all people?
Not the truth of mere living, but the truth that leads to right living.
Who ever dedicated a shrine or an image for this gift, or worships God for it?
I ask, shall we, who offer sacrifices because the gods gave us wheat or the vine, never give thanks to God that they produced this kind of fruit in the mind of a human being, through which they meant to show us the true way of happiness?