Hannah Arendt on Epictetus

Some comments on Epictetus by Hannah Arendt who had a real genius for making Ancient Greek Philosophy contemporary:
“. . . Epictetus, the Greek slave and the most acute mind, possibly, among the late Stoics. According to him, what must be learned to make life bearable is not really thinking, but ‘the correct use of imagination,’ the only thing we have entirely within our power. He still uses a deceptively familiar Greek vocabulary, but what he calls ‘the reasoning faculty’ (dynamis logike) has as little to do with the Greek 'logos' and 'nous' as what he appeals to as ‘will’ has to do with Aristoteliam 'proairesis'. He calls the faculty of thinking in itself ‘sterile’ (akarpa ; “Discourses”, bk. I, chap 17); for him the subject matter of philosophy is each man’s own life, and what philosophy teaches man is an ‘art of living (Discourses, bk I, chap 15),’ how to deal with life, in the same fashion that carpentry teaches an apprentice how to deal with wood. What counts is not ‘theory’ in the abstract but its use and application (chresis ton theorematon); to think and to understand are a mere preparation for action; to ‘admire the mere power of exposition’—the 'logos', the reasoned argument and train of thought itself—is likely to turn man ‘into a grammarian instead of a philosopher.’” (“The Manual”, 49) (p. 154).
“If thinking is normally the faculty of making present what is absent, the Epictetian faculty of ‘dealing with impressions aright’ consists in conjuring away and making absent what actually is present. All that existentially concerns you while living in the world of appearances is the ‘impressions’ by which you are affected. Whether what affects you exists or is mere illusion depends on your decision whether or not you will recognize it as real. . . . If one may count Epictetus among the philosophers, it is because he discovered that consciousness makes it possible for mental activities to recoil upon themselves.
If while perceiving an object outside myself I decide to concentrate on my perception, on the act of seeing instead of the seen object, it is as if I lost the original object because it loses its impact upon me. I have, so to speak, changed the subject—instead of the tree, I now deal merely with the perceived tree, that is, with what Epictetus calls an ‘impression’ [I assume this would be phantasia as in the Handbook, 1.5]. . . . The trick discovered by Stoic philosophy is to use the mind in such a way that reality cannot touch its owner even when he has not withdrawn from it; instead of withdrawing mentally from everything that is present and close at hand, he has drawn every appearance inside himself, and his ‘consciousness’ becomes a full substitute for the out side world presented as impression or image (Arendt, H., _The Life of the Mind_, p. 155-6)
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