“If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid with regard to externals.”

What does it mean?

The mainstream reading is that progress will look like incompetence to people who score life by status and property, and the student should tolerate that appearance. A competing reading notes the risk: being thought foolish is not evidence that you are right, only a price you may have to pay. The line is Enchiridion 13. 'Externals' is his technical word for body, property, reputation, and office, the things not fully up to us.

Did Epictetus really say this?

The library’s label is Paraphrase or translation. Close translation. 'Externals' is a technical Stoic word: body, property, reputation, things not fully up to us.

Where it comes from

Enchiridion 13

Approximate date: c. 108 CE.

How to use it

If the opinion you are managing is that you must look successful at the work drinks, notice which practice you will refuse in order to keep it: leaving early, declining a boast, asking a basic question. He thinks that refusal is the block. Looking odd is sometimes the cost of the training, and it is not a certificate that the training was wise.

A mindset reading

Being misunderstood does not prove the standard you are using. It is sometimes the price of a standard other people are not using. The habit is to check the standard first, and only then decide whether the reputation is worth the training you would have to drop.

Understand the philosophy

Epictetus is training people who still care too much about how they appear. Externals are the things outside the will. Improvement, prokopē, means progress toward virtue, and it often looks like a loss on the ordinary scoreboard. The exercise is to let the wrong scoreboard go quiet so a better one can be heard.

Related

• “Some things are up to us and some are not. Up to us are judgement, impulse, desire, aversion — in a word, whatever is our own doing. Not up to us are our body, our property, reputation, office — in a word, whatever is not our own doing.”

  Paraphrase or translation

• “Sickness is a hindrance to the body, but not to the will, unless the will itself consents.”

  Paraphrase or translation

• “Remember that you are an actor in a play, of the kind the playwright wants it to be.”

  Paraphrase or translation

Related bias. Confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, remember, and accept what supports a view you already like, and to skim past what would hurt it. It is not a claim that every belief is stubborn. It is a pattern in how attention is spent.

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