A man came to Epictetus and told him that when his small daughter was sick, he had run out of the house and stayed away until someone brought word that she was better. Epictetus asked him whether he thought he had done right. The man said he had acted naturally. Let’s watch what Epictetus does with that word.
I was acting naturally, he said.
But really, you must first convince me of this, that you were acting naturally, said he, and then I will convince you that whatever is done in accordance with nature is rightly done.
This is the way, said the man, all, or at least most, of us fathers feel.
And I do not contradict you either, answered Epictetus, and say that it is not done, but the point at issue between us is the other, whether it is rightly done. For by your style of reasoning we should have to say of tumours also that they are produced for the good of the body, just because they occur, and in brief, that to err is in accordance with nature, just because practically all of us, or at least most of us, do err.
The man is not lying and he is not unusual. He felt what he says he felt, and most fathers would feel it. He gave an accurate report of what happens in people, and then the report arrived in his mouth as a verdict, and he did not notice the moment it changed jobs. The word natural carried it across.
If common is a reason, then everything you already do is already approved, and there is nothing standing outside the habit to check the habit against. Epictetus runs the sentence somewhere it gives the man nothing: tumours occur, so on this reasoning tumours are produced for the good of the body.
If you go the other way and hold everything that comes naturally under suspicion, you spend the day standing over yourself asking for papers. Nothing gets examined that way. It only gets doubted, and doubt is not a criterion either.
So what are we aiming at. We want to hear the word while it is in use.
Natural, normal, anyone would — these report that a thing is common. Whether it is right is a separate question, and it has not been asked yet.
Epictetus does not leave the man with the word taken away and nothing in its place. A few lines on he asks what we use to settle such things. For white and black we use sight. For hot and cold, touch. For rightly and not rightly done, what criterion would you have us take. The man says he does not know. That is an honest answer, and it is the exact spot the word natural had been standing in, keeping the question from being asked.
Let us see where this shows up in an ordinary day. Three places.
- A small thing at home always goes one particular way, and when someone asks why, the answer is that this is how it is done here.
- You are short with someone in the evening, and the explanation, offered to yourself, is the kind of day it was.
- Someone tells you how they do something in their own house, it sounds wrong to you, and the wrongness is that it is not what you do.
In all three a word arrives and the question stops. One thing to watch: whether that word described something, or ended something.
You are not deciding anything in that second, and you are not trying to talk yourself out of what you did. Watch which word closed the question, and leave it as it is.