What Can You Control? 什麼是你能控制的？

🔊Notice what is on the second list. The body is there. A man can train and eat well and still fall ill. Reputation is there, since it lives in other people’s minds. Even one’s own life is there. What remains on the first list is small and of a single kind: our judgments, and the wants and choices that follow from them.

請留意第二份清單上有什麼。身體在上面。一個人可以鍛鍊、可以吃得好，仍然會生病。名聲在上面，因為它活在別人的心裡。甚至自己的性命也在上面。留在第一份清單上的東西很少，而且只有一種：我們的判斷，以及隨之而來的欲求與抉擇。

🔊The second step is a claim about where suffering comes from. “Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of things.” Death is not terrible in itself, Epictetus argues, or it would have seemed so to Socrates. The terror lies in our opinion that it is terrible. When someone insults you, what hurts is your own view that you have been harmed. Between the event and the distress there is always a judgment, and the judgment is ours to make. Stoic training consists in catching that judgment before it has been made. An impression arrives: I have been wronged. The student learns to say to it, You are only an appearance, and to examine it before agreeing.

第二步，是一個關於「苦從哪裡來」的主張。「擾亂人的不是事物，而是人對事物所抱的看法。」愛比克泰德論證：死亡本身並不可怕，否則蘇格拉底也會覺得它可怕。可怕的，是我們認為它可怕的那個意見。有人侮辱你的時候，傷人的是你自己「我受到了傷害」的那個看法。在事件與苦惱之間，永遠有一個判斷；而那個判斷是由我們來下的。斯多噶的訓練，就在於趁那個判斷還沒有下的時候把它攔住。一個印象到來：我被冤枉了。學生學著對它說「你只是一個表象」，並且在同意它之前先檢視它。

🔊The emperor Marcus Aurelius, who read Epictetus and kept a notebook of exercises for his own use, put it this way: “If thou art pained by any external thing, it is not this thing that disturbs thee, but thy own judgement about it. And it is in thy power to wipe out this judgement now.” He began his days by reminding himself that he would meet with ingratitude, arrogance, and deceit, so that none of it would come as a surprise.

皇帝馬可・奧理略讀過愛比克泰德，並且為自己留了一本操練用的筆記；他是這樣說的：「如果你因為任何外在的事物而痛苦，擾亂你的並不是那件事物，而是你自己對它的判斷。而你有能力現在就把這個判斷抹去。」他每天一開始，就提醒自己今天會遇到忘恩負義、傲慢與欺詐的人，這樣就沒有一樣會讓他意外。

🔊What should one want, then? Epictetus answers with an instruction that sounds like surrender: “Demand not that events should happen as you wish; but wish them to happen as they do happen, and you will go on well.” His image is the theater. “Remember that you are an actor in a drama of such sort as the Author chooses. If it be his pleasure that you should enact a poor man, or a cripple, or a ruler, or a private citizen, see that you act it well. For this is your business—to act well the given part, but to choose it belongs to another.” He was himself lame, and had been a slave. The Stoics believed that the universe is governed by a rational providence, so that whatever happens is part of a good order. To want things otherwise is to quarrel with the nature of things. The teaching is not passivity. The actor works hard at the part. An archer does everything to aim well and then lets the arrow go, and whether it hits is no longer his affair.

那麼，人應該想要什麼？愛比克泰德用一個聽起來像投降的指示來回答：「不要要求事情照你希望的那樣發生；要希望它們照實際發生的那樣發生，你就會過得順遂。」他用的意象是劇場。「記住：你是一齣戲裡的演員，這齣戲是什麼樣子，由作者決定。如果他樂意讓你演一個窮人、一個跛子、一位統治者或一個平民，你就要把它演好。因為這才是你的事：把分派給你的角色演好；至於選角色，那是另一位的事。」他自己就是跛的，並且當過奴隸。斯多噶學派相信，宇宙是由一個理性的天意治理的；所以，凡是發生的事，都是一個良好秩序的一部分。希望事情是別的樣子，就是跟事物的本性爭吵。這個教導並不是消極。演員會在角色上下苦功。弓箭手盡一切力量瞄準，然後放箭；至於中不中，就不再是他的事了。

🔊Mencius drew the same line four centuries before Epictetus, in two sentences. “‘Seek and you will get it, let go and you will lose it’: here seeking helps the getting, because what is sought lies within myself. ‘There is a way to seek it, and getting it depends on fate’: here seeking does not help the getting, because what is sought lies outside.” What lies within, for Mencius, is the cultivation of one’s own character, and what lies outside is wealth, rank, and length of life. Confucius described his own attitude in six characters: “I do not resent Heaven, and I do not blame men.” The Confucians gave the outside a name, mìng, what is decreed, and they taught that a person does everything that is his to do and then awaits the decree.

孟子比愛比克泰德早四個世紀，用兩句話劃出了同一條線。「『求則得之，舍則失之』，是求有益於得也，求在我者也。『求之有道，得之有命』，是求無益於得也，求在外者也。」對孟子來說，「在我者」是自己品格的修養；「在外者」是富、貴與壽命。孔子用六個字描述自己的態度：「不怨天，不尤人。」儒者給了「外」一個名字：「命」；並且教導，人要把分內該做的都做了，然後等待那個命。

🔊Zhuangzi states the conclusion in its most extreme form: “To know what cannot be helped and to rest in it as in fate is the perfection of virtue.” The resemblance to the Stoics is close, and the two traditions arose with no contact. The similarity of their situations may explain it. Both were philosophies for people living under powers they could not influence, an emperor in one case and the warring kings in the other.

莊子把這個結論說到了最極端的形式：「知其不可奈何而安之若命，德之至也。」這跟斯多噶學派非常相像，而兩個傳統是在毫無接觸的情況下各自出現的。處境的相似，也許可以解釋這一點。兩者都是給「活在自己影響不了的權力之下」的人的哲學：一邊是皇帝，另一邊是爭戰中的諸王。

🔊In September 1965 the American pilot James Stockdale was shot down over North Vietnam. He had studied philosophy at Stanford a few years earlier, and a professor had given him the handbook of Epictetus. As he drifted down under his parachute, he later wrote, he said to himself that he was leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus. He was a prisoner for seven and a half years, four of them in solitary confinement, and was tortured repeatedly. He credited his survival to the first sentence of the handbook. His captors controlled his body, his food, and his news of home. They did not control what he would agree to, and he organized the other prisoners around that fact. He noticed that the men who broke were often the optimists, who told themselves they would be home by Christmas, and were crushed when Christmas passed.

1965 年 9 月，美國飛行員斯托克戴爾在北越上空被擊落。幾年前他在史丹佛讀過哲學，有位教授送了他愛比克泰德的《手冊》。他後來寫道：當他吊在降落傘下往下飄的時候，他對自己說，他正在離開科技的世界，進入愛比克泰德的世界。他當了七年半的戰俘，其中四年被單獨囚禁，並且一再遭受酷刑。他把自己能活下來，歸功於《手冊》的第一句話。俘虜他的人控制了他的身體、他的食物、他與家鄉的音訊。他們控制不了他同意什麼；而他就圍繞著這個事實，把其他的戰俘組織起來。他注意到：崩潰的人往往是樂觀的人；他們告訴自己聖誕節前就能回家，而聖誕節過去的時候，他們就被壓垮了。

🔊The method has also been tested in clinics. The psychologists who founded cognitive behavioral therapy in the 1950s and 1960s, Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck, both cited Epictetus as a source, and the therapy’s central technique is his: identify the judgment that stands between an event and the distress, and examine whether it is true. It is among the best-supported treatments for anxiety and depression.

這個方法也在診間裡被檢驗過。在 1950、1960 年代創立認知行為治療的心理學家艾里斯與貝克，都把愛比克泰德列為思想來源；而這種治療的核心技術就是他的：找出站在事件與苦惱之間的那個判斷，檢視它是否為真。它是對焦慮與憂鬱最有實證支持的療法之一。

🔊Three doubts are worth carrying into the exercise. The first is whether the division is too sharp. Epictetus has two lists, and most of life seems to fall between them. My health, my child’s character, and whether I win the match are things I influence and do not determine. A modern Stoic, William Irvine, proposes a third category for these and a rule for handling them: set your goal in terms of what is yours. Aim to play your best game, since winning is not up to you. The second doubt is whether the first list is as secure as Epictetus thought. Our judgments are shaped by mood, fatigue, upbringing, and illness, and a person in a deep depression cannot simply wipe one out.

有三個疑問，值得帶進下面的練習。第一：這個劃分是不是太截然了？愛比克泰德只有兩份清單，而人生的大部分似乎落在兩者之間。我的健康、我的孩子的品格、我能不能贏下這場比賽，都是我影響得了、卻決定不了的事。一位當代的斯多噶學者厄文，提議為這些事設立第三個類別，並且給了一條處理它們的規則：用「屬於你的東西」來設定目標。目標定為「打出自己最好的一場球」，因為贏不贏不由你。第二個疑問：第一份清單，真的像愛比克泰德以為的那麼牢靠嗎？我們的判斷受到情緒、疲勞、教養與疾病的塑造；一個陷在重度憂鬱裡的人，沒辦法說抹去就抹去一個判斷。

🔊The third doubt is moral. A philosophy that teaches people to change their desires and not their circumstances suits the powerless, and it also suits those who would like the powerless to stay quiet. Epictetus tells a man to remind himself, when he kisses his child, that he is kissing a mortal, so that he will not be shattered if the child dies. Many readers feel that something has gone wrong when grief is treated as an error of judgment. The Stoic reply is that one can love fully and still know what one loves. Whether that is wisdom or a refusal to be fully in one’s life is the question the school has always had to face.

第三個疑問是道德上的。一套教人「改變自己的欲望、而不是改變處境」的哲學，適合無權無勢的人；它也適合那些希望無權無勢者保持安靜的人。愛比克泰德要一個人在親吻自己孩子的時候提醒自己：他親吻的是一個會死的人；這樣，孩子若是死了，他就不至於崩潰。當悲傷被當成一種判斷上的錯誤時，許多讀者覺得有什麼地方不對了。斯多噶的回答是：人可以全心去愛，同時仍然知道自己愛的是什麼。那是智慧，還是拒絕完全活在自己的人生裡？這是這個學派一直必須面對的問題。