Remaining Epicurean in Times of Order: Three Questions and One Premise v0.1
Remaining Epicurean in Times of Order: Three Questions and One Premise v0.1
Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.
Two days before asking how to remain Stoic in disordered work conditions, Jess posted three questions in Donald Robertson’s Facebook group. This document answers them from the corpus.
The Beginning
Everyone wants happiness (Th1), and it is irrational to accept incomplete happiness where complete is possible (Th2). All unhappiness is caused by desiring an outcome that does not result (Th3), so a desire for anything out of one’s control leaves a man open to unhappiness (4). Only beliefs and will are in our control (Th6). Only virtue is good and only vice evil (Th10), so externals are never either (12).
Definitions
- External: whatever is not one’s own belief or act of will (Th6, 12). Order, disorder, work and leisure are externals.
- End: what a man judges good and so desires (Th7).
- Epicurean: one who holds the end to be pleasure, specifically tranquility of mind and absence of bodily pain, with virtue valued only as a means to it (Classical Ideological Audit: Epicureanism, P2).
- Soundness: the condition of the rational faculty, which is correct when it judges truly (14; Th27).
The Post
How to remain epicurean during times of order ?
How to stay sound and sane ??
Specially if it is affecting you at leisure.
The Premise
Each question assumes that conditions can take from him something he needs: his Epicureanism, his soundness, his leisure. By 12 conditions are neither good nor evil, and by Th6 they do not reach his beliefs or his will. The three answers follow from that.
The First Question: How to Remain Epicurean in Times of Order
To remain Epicurean is to keep tranquility as the end. Tranquility is a feeling. To hold a feeling as the end is to desire that it be achieved and that it continue, and Th19’s bracket names that desire as the judgment that the feeling is good, which is irrational.
An end of that kind can be interrupted by conditions. By Th3 and 4 it leaves him open to unhappiness under every condition, order as much as disorder. That is why the question arises at all.
By Th2 an end that can be interrupted is not worth holding where an uninterrupted one is possible, and 14 says one is. So the corpus offers no method for remaining Epicurean. Its answer is that what he wants to keep is what exposes him. The audit finds Epicureanism Divergent on C6 for this reason: it grounds the good in a hedonic state.
The feeling itself is not refused. Appropriate positive feelings follow correct judgment as a result (17, 23), and pleasant feeling that is not desired is not irrational (Th18, 19). The Stoic has the tranquility without making it the aim.
The Second Question: How to Stay Sound and Sane
Order cannot make a faculty unsound. Only its own judgments can (Th6, Th27).
If orderly conditions feel like a threat to sanity, what he reports is a feeling. Emotions are caused by beliefs about what is good and evil (Excerpt 4, a). So the feeling follows a judgment that the present state is an evil, or that something absent is a good. By 12 that judgment is false, whether the order is felt as constraint or as sameness.
The corpus has a direct answer to sameness. Appreciation of the world as it is can be had “every waking second” (23), since at every moment something can be perceived as what it is (Th22). Appropriate positive feeling does not depend on change.
The Third Question: When It Affects Him at Leisure
The question assumes leisure is owed to him undisturbed. Epictetus answers a man who wants to stay where life is pleasant that this is the language of those who make pleasure the end, and he describes their day of unhindered ease (Discourses 3.24.36–41).
Leisure is an external (12) and has no special standing. Virtue is the pursuit of appropriate objects of aim (29), at leisure as at work.
Enchiridion 4 already covers it. Its own example is going to the bath, which is leisure. Before he goes, he puts before his mind what happens there and states his double aim: the leisure, and his will kept correct. What leisure gives he may enjoy while it is present, without desiring that it continue (Th18, 19).
The Two Posts Together
Two days later he asked how to remain Stoic in disordered work conditions. First order at leisure, then disorder at work.
When a condition and its opposite both unsettle, neither is the cause. What is constant is the judgment that an external is an evil (12; Excerpt 4, a). Epictetus says no external is the cause of what we do, only our own opinions and decisions (Discourses 1.11.33).
In both posts the thing to be kept is treated as a state that conditions threaten. The corpus puts what is to be kept in the act of judging (Th27), which conditions do not reach.
What This Document Does Not Claim
- That the post was meant in earnest. It is taken at its word.
- What “order” means in the post. The answer is the same on any reading, since order is an external.
- That Epicurean practical counsel is useless. The audit does not address that, and this document addresses only the end.
- That Sterling addresses these questions. Applying Th19’s bracket to the Epicurean end is a reading.
- That the post was checked at its source. It is given as supplied by Dave Kelly, who dates it two days before the later post.
Sources
- Core Stoicism: Th1, Th2, Th3, 4, Th6, Th7, Th10, 12, 14, 17, Th18, 19, Th22, 23, Th27, 29.
- Nine Excerpts: Excerpt 4.
- Classical Ideological Audit: Epicureanism (P2; the C6 finding).
- The Little Enchiridion: Enchiridion 4 (W. A. Oldfather’s translation).
- Epictetus, Discourses 1.11.33 and 3.24.36–41 (W. A. Oldfather’s translation).
- Enchiridion 3 and 4 at Work: Two Exercises for Disordered Conditions v0.2.
- Jess’s two posts, Facebook, October 2026.
Version Note
v0.1. First draft.
Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.
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