Prominent Pronouns. Self-Understanding and Self-Formation in the Stoic Philosopher Epictetus
The Stoic philosopher Epictetus (ca. 55 –135 AD) has been hailed in recent scholarship as an important contributor to innovations in ancient thinking about and experience of what it means to an individual human being, an “I” or a “self.” Already M. Foucault in the 1980s, with his notion of a “cultivation of the self,” emphasized the centrality of Epictetus, and with different emphases and perspectives scholars such as C. Gill, C. Kahn, C. Taylor, and A. A. Long have followed suit. In even more recent years E. Jeremiah has singled out Epictetus, together with Aristotle, as “boundary stones in the intellectual history of selfhood.”
In this paper I analyze Epictetus’ use of the Greek reflexive pronoun (“myself, yourself” (emauton, seauton) etc.) in order to investigate his thoughts about the human “I,” both its identity, its way of operating, and its relation to itself. The paper is part of a larger article based dissertation on the self-understanding and self-formation of Epictetus. In the dissertation I aim to draw a fuller picture of the functioning of the Epictetan human self in different context, for example the self in relation to itself (an anthropological dimension), the self in relation to god/the gods (a theological or cosmic dimension), the self in relation to others (a social dimension), the way the self expresses itself (rhetorical dimension), and the underlying courage and optimism of the self, engaging in the battle of life (an “existential” dimension).
Glenn Wehus is associate professor at MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion and Society