15For thus said the Lord Yahweh, the Holy One of Israel, “You will be saved in returning and rest. Your strength will be in quietness and in confidence.” You refused, 16but you said, “No, for we will flee on horses”; therefore you will flee; and, “We will ride on the swift”; therefore those who pursue you will be swift. 17One thousand will flee at the threat of one. At the threat of five, you will flee until you are left like a beacon on the top of a mountain, and like a banner on a hill. 18Therefore Yahweh will wait, that he may be gracious to you; and therefore he will be exalted, that he may have mercy on you, for Yahweh is a God of justice. Blessed are all those who wait for him. 19For the people will dwell in Zion at Jerusalem. You will weep no more. He will surely be gracious to you at the voice of your cry. When he hears you, he will answer you. 20Though the Lord may give you the bread of adversity and the water of affliction, yet your teachers won’t be hidden any more, but your eyes will see your teachers; 21and when you turn to the right hand, and when you turn to the left, your ears will hear a voice behind you, saying, “This is the way. Walk in it.”
The prophet describes a people who wanted to solve their problems by rushing, running, and trusting in their own plans. The invitation offered instead is to slow down, return, and rest in a trust that doesn't need to be loud. There is also a gentle promise of guidance: when you reach a fork and can't tell which way to go, direction often comes one step at a time. Today might be a good day to pause before the next decision and listen before moving.
I neither wrote these Discourses of Epictetus in the way in which a man might write such things; nor did I make them public myself, inasmuch as I declare that I did not even write them. But whatever I heard him say, the same I attempted to write down in his own words as nearly as possible, for the purpose of preserving them as memorials to myself afterwards of the thoughts and the freedom of speech of Epictetus.
But it concerns me little if I shall be considered incompetent to write; and it concerns Epictetus not at all if any man shall despise his words; for at the time when he uttered them, it was plain that he had no other purpose than to move the minds of his hearers to the best things.
George Long, 1877
Epictetus, a former slave turned teacher in Nicopolis, wrote nothing himself. His pupil Arrian, later a Roman official and the historian of Alexander, took down his lectures and explained in this letter how they came to circulate. Of the eight books ancient sources mention, only four survive, along with some fragments, through Byzantine manuscripts.
Arrian says outright that the book he gave us is a record and not a polished performance. The point is easy to miss. Epictetus cared whether his words changed the people who heard them, not whether they were admired. Most of us judge what we read and say by how it sounds. Arrian's letter suggests a harder test: whether anyone is moved toward something better.
PracticeToday, in one conversation that matters, say something plain and useful instead of something clever. That evening, ask whether it moved anyone, you included, toward something better.
A 1980 puzzle about a cat's loose hairs asks how many cats are sitting in front of you, and the answers on offer include none and almost one.
Tibbles is sitting on the mat, and you would say there is exactly one cat there. Now ask where Tibbles stops. Some hairs are about to fall out. Others are half-attached. Others have just come loose and are still resting against the fur. Nothing in nature draws a sharp line around the cat.
In 1980 the philosophers Peter Unger and Peter Geach published versions of the same problem. Geach's version goes like this. Say Tibbles has at least a thousand hairs. For each hair, consider the mass of cat-tissue that includes everything except that one hair. Each of those masses is almost exactly like Tibbles. It is also cat-shaped, alive and purring, so it is hard to say why it isn't a cat. If it is a cat, there are a thousand or more cats on the mat, and they overlap almost completely. Unger used clouds as his example, since a cloud's edge is just thinning mist. Which of the countless slightly different droplet-collections is the cloud?
The proposed answers are all costly. Unger himself concluded that there are no clouds, and no cats, tables or people either, because ordinary object-words rest on inconsistent assumptions. Most philosophers found that too much to accept. David Lewis, in a 1993 paper, proposed that the many candidates really are many cats, but they are so nearly identical that we can count them as one. He called this counting by "almost identity". Others say that only one candidate is the real cat and nothing explains which one, or that the word "cat" is simply vague about which candidate it refers to.
No answer has won out. The puzzle matters because it is not really about cats. It shows that we count objects without any agreed rule for what counts as one object, and nearly everything has fuzzy edges.
RememberNothing has perfectly sharp edges, so "how many cats are on the mat?" has no clean answer, and every proposed fix gives up something we usually take for granted.
Read nextDavid Lewis, "Many, but Almost One" (1993)
Source: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "The Problem of the Many"