Someone starts asking you a question you have been asked before. Your answer is finished before they reach the end of the sentence. Epictetus had a name for the thing that does that, and he says it is the first thing a person has to put down.
What is the first business of him who philosophizes? To throw away self-conceit. For it is impossible for a man to begin to learn that which he thinks that he knows. As to things then which ought to be done and ought not to be done, and good and bad, and beautiful and ugly, all of us talking of them at random go to the philosophers; and on these matters we praise, we censure, we accuse, we blame, we judge and determine about principles honorable and dishonorable.
Self-conceit is the opinion that we already know. It does not arrive feeling like an opinion. It arrives as the answer, and the question it answers has not finished being asked.
Epictetus is not saying the ready answer is wrong. He says learning cannot begin in a place that is already occupied. Whatever is different about this instance — this person, this version of a problem you have seen fifty times — has nowhere to land.
Keeping the answer ready costs us the instance. We stay right about the general case and we stop receiving the particular one. We also lose the way an error would normally reach us, because nothing was open for it to come into.
Putting the answer down costs us speed and standing. We have to sit through a question we could have cut in half. And Epictetus’s own list is what we give up in that second — we praise, we censure, we accuse, we blame, we judge. Those are the fastest things we do, and they are what knowing feels like from the inside.
So what are we aiming at. We want the answer made after the question.
Let us see where this shows up in an ordinary day. Three places.
- Someone at home starts describing a problem whose shape you recognise in the first six words.
- A stranger stops you to ask the way to a place you have walked to a hundred times.
- Someone asks you how to do a thing you learned so long ago that you no longer remember learning it.
One thing to watch in all three: where in their sentence your answer was finished.
You are not deciding anything in that second, and you are not trying to hold your answer back. Watch where it was finished, and leave it as it is.