Epictetus' Philosophy: A Constructive Critique

Epictetus made many excellent points on how he believes would be the best way for people to live though there were a point or two where I differed from his opinion on how life should be lived. One point of differing would be at passage eleven when he is saying that you should just believe that you are giving something back when it is taken from you. I don’t think this is quite the best way to go about anything since it would, more or less, just be someone saying that their own property or the people around them don’t matter to them in the least. I think that it is far too much an emotionless state to be in to think like this about everything around you. In passage eleven it is spoken that if something or someone is taken then you should just

I don’t completely agree with this passage though it helps me to see sort of how it can be a simple understanding to treat the world and the people in it in such a way as to not care about them. As this passage talks about that I must not force something to come to me but let it come to me on it’s own, I understand that if I treat the world as if I don’t care about it then it will never really become something that I hold a piece of; if the world is thought of as something that shouldn’t be cared about then the only holding I will have over it will be temporary and never really have something that will be mine. I don’t think this is the way that anyone should go through the world since it provides no real enjoyment of the things around me and the lack of being empathic toward anyone else in the

On passage eleven I shall have to disagree with him since it seems far too cold of a way to go through life. As he wrote this passage it seems that Epictetus was focusing on the fact that the world is an easier place if empathy is lacked in how I go through it so that I can lack any sort of connection to the things that I come in contact with. The world is a cruel place, obviously, and the way I know it can be changed in an instant so it just makes the world easier if I don’t try to become connected to anyone I meet or any of the property I own. I should keep from becoming empathetic about the world around me and never care about the people who are suffering since it causes too much harm to be worried about anyone else. It works if I am able and willing to keep from getting close to anyone in my life though it would make for a lonely existence to always be thinking that to keep everything from being taken away at a moment 's notice, I must not care about anything that I come in contact