Epictetus Quote

 

Epictetus: "Men are disturbed, not by things, but by the principles and notions which they form concerning things." Could you give me the Latin here and maybe comment on anything we lose in translation?

Interestingly, there is no original Latin from Epictetus. He wrote (or rather, his student Arrian recorded) in Greek.

The Greek of Enchiridion 5 is:

Ταράσσει τοὺς ἀνθρώπους οὐ τὰ πράγματα, ἀλλὰ τὰ περὶ τῶν πραγμάτων δόγματα.

A very literal rendering would be:

"It is not things that disturb human beings, but the judgments/opinions about things."

The key word is δόγματα (dogmata). Today "dogma" suggests a rigid doctrine, but in classical Greek it more often means an opinion, judgment, belief, or settled conviction. So the older English translation:

"Men are disturbed, not by things, but by the principles and notions which they form concerning things"

is actually rather expansive. It is trying to unpack dogmata into something more philosophical.

A Renaissance or later Latin translator might render the sentence something like:

Non res ipsae homines perturbant, sed de rebus opiniones.

or

Homines non rebus, sed de rebus iudiciis perturbantur.

The second version is especially close to Stoic thought because iudicia ("judgments") captures the idea that our mental assessments, rather than the events themselves, generate disturbance.

What is lost in the traditional English translation is a certain Stoic sharpness. "Principles and notions which they form concerning things" sounds abstract and intellectual. The Greek is more immediate. Epictetus is not talking primarily about philosophical theories. He is talking about the judgments we make moment by moment:

• "This is terrible."

• "This is unfair."

• "I cannot bear this."

• "This is a catastrophe."

For Epictetus, the event and the judgment are distinct. Death, poverty, insult, illness—those are pragmata ("things," "events," "facts"). The disturbance arises when we add the dogma: "death is terrible," "poverty is intolerable," and so on. He immediately illustrates the point with death and Socrates.

Since you know some Latin, I suspect you'd appreciate how close this is to the later Stoic and Christian emphasis on iudicium. One could almost paraphrase Epictetus:

Non res, sed iudicia de rebus nos perturbant.

That is not an ancient text, but it has the concise, epigrammatic feel that many Latinists have preferred ever since.

Yes, and that phrasing may actually get closer to everyday experience than some of the grand philosophical formulations.

We often take a small amount of information and build an entire story around it. A friend fails to return a call, and suddenly we have a theory about what they think of us. A doctor frowns while reading a chart, and we imagine a diagnosis. A noise in the night becomes an intruder, a ghost, or a disaster waiting to happen.

The original event is often quite modest. What grows large is the structure of interpretation we erect upon it.

Epictetus would probably say that the mind is constantly tempted to move from "This happened" to "This means..." and then to "Therefore..." without noticing the steps in between. His discipline is to keep returning to the thing itself and asking what is actually known.

In that sense, his advice is not "feel nothing" or "believe nothing." It is more like: don't add unnecessary embroidery.

A vase breaks.

A vase breaks.

Not:

• A vase breaks, therefore the house is haunted.

• A vase breaks, therefore someone hates me.

• A vase breaks, therefore everything is going wrong.

Just a broken vase, until evidence requires a larger conclusion.

This is one reason I think Epictetus remains readable. He is not merely addressing great tragedies. He is addressing the ordinary human habit of turning facts into narratives and narratives into certainties.

Your version—"we often make of things more than is really there"—has a kind of plain wisdom to it. It would not be a bad paraphrase of a great deal of Stoic teaching. The Stoics would add that sometimes we make things worse than they are, sometimes better than they are, but in either case we are no longer seeing the thing itself clearly. The aim is not pessimism or optimism, but accuracy.

I've thought about that wai business and suspect my motives are not quite so pure. Respect for sure, but the act also gives others pleasure to see me do it and as a result gives me face.

That strikes me as a very plausible piece of self-observation, and perhaps not as compromising as it first sounds.

Human motives are rarely pure in the sense of having only one ingredient. You can genuinely feel respect and enjoy the social effects of expressing that respect. The two are not necessarily in competition.

In fact, if you think about the wai as a social ritual, one of its functions is precisely to create and reinforce goodwill. If local people see a foreigner making the gesture appropriately, they may feel recognized and respected. If seeing that reaction gives you pleasure, that seems almost built into the system. Social customs are partly designed to generate those pleasant mutual feelings.

The interesting question, perhaps a very Stoic one, is what would happen if the face disappeared.

Suppose nobody noticed. Suppose nobody approved. Suppose everyone found it quaint or even silly. Would you still do it?

From what you've said in the past, I suspect the answer is yes. You described it as almost a reflexive gesture of respect, rather like crossing oneself upon hearing of a death. That suggests there is something deeper than the social reward.

But I also think your observation about face is important. We often tell ourselves stories about our motives that are too simple. "I do this purely out of respect." Maybe. Or maybe, "I do this out of respect, because it pleases others, because it pleases me to please them, because I like belonging, and because I like being seen as someone who behaves respectfully."

That fuller account is usually closer to the truth.

Epictetus might even approve of noticing this. The danger is not that you gain face. The danger is if you become dependent on it—if the real object of the exercise quietly shifts from showing respect to harvesting approval.

Merely recognizing that possibility is already a step toward seeing the situation more clearly. In the spirit of our discussion, it is another attempt to distinguish the thing itself from the story we tell about it. Not "I am purely respectful" and not "I am secretly selfish," but simply, "Several motives are present here." That is often how human beings actually work.

There was a hotel in Bangkok with a Theravada Buddha statue at a corner of the stairs leading to my room, and sure enough I wai'd it every time I went by, alone or not.

That’s a lovely little vignette—very human, very “habit-and-place doing its work on you.”

There’s something interesting going on there that sits right between respect, conditioning, and social awareness. You didn’t decide once to wai the Buddha statue; you stepped into a space where a certain grammar of behaviour is already active, and your body just keeps speaking it each time you pass.

And notice what happens in your example: alone or not. That detail matters. Even when the social audience is absent, the behaviour continues. That suggests it’s no longer just face-management in the narrow sense. It’s become something closer to what anthropologists would call an embodied norm—something your nervous system treats as “what one does here.”

In Buddhist contexts, especially Theravada settings in Thailand and Cambodia, a statue of the Buddha is not just décor; it is a focal point of reverence, a kind of moral “presence-marker” in the environment. So your wai is doing several things at once:

You’re acknowledging respect. You’re participating in the local code. You’re smoothing social friction (even if no one is watching). And yes—you’re also enjoying the fact that you are the kind of person who does that appropriately. That last part is where “face” lives, but it doesn’t cancel the others. It sits alongside them.

If Epictetus were observing this from the stairwell, I suspect he’d do his usual move: strip it down to the bare acts. Not “Was your motive pure?” but “Did you act in accordance with your judgment of what is fitting in that place?”

From his perspective, the wai is neither morally elevated nor morally tainted by the pleasure of being seen to do it. The only real question would be whether your judgment about what is appropriate in that setting is coherent and deliberate—or whether you’re being dragged entirely by habit and approval-seeking without awareness.

What I find interesting in your telling is that you’re aware of the layers. That already changes the psychological structure of it. It’s no longer unconscious performance; it’s observed performance. And once something is observed, it becomes a little less compulsive and a little more flexible.

So it’s not so much “impure motive revealed” as “multiple motives noticed at once.” Which, unromantically, is what most human action actually looks like.