Glossary
Dichotomy of control
τὰ ἐφ’ ἡμῖν / τὰ οὐκ ἐφ’ ἡμῖν (ta eph’ hēmin, ta ouk eph’ hēmin)
The dichotomy of control is the modern name for the distinction that opens Epictetus’s Enchiridion: some things are in our power, others are not. In Elizabeth Carter’s 1758 translation the first list reads “Opinion, Pursuit, Desire, Aversion, and in one Word, whatever are our own Actions”; the second, “Body, Property, Reputation, Command, and, in one Word, whatever are not our own Actions.” The label itself is not ancient. Epictetus speaks of what is and is not eph’ hēmin, “up to us”; the English phrase belongs to twentieth- and twenty-first-century commentary.
The distinction is not a description of what a person can influence. Health, wealth and reputation can be influenced, but they can also be taken away, so Epictetus classes them with the things that are not ours. What is ours is narrower: the judgment we form, the desire we admit, the action we choose. Chapter I goes on to say that the things in our power are by nature free and unhindered, and the rest weak, slavish and belonging to others.
Marcus Aurelius states the same division from the inside, in George Long’s 1862 wording of Meditations, VIII, 47: what pains us is not the external thing but our own judgment about it, and that judgment can be wiped out now. In the Stoic texts the distinction is diagnostic before it is consoling. It locates where a disturbance comes from, so that effort goes where it can act, and it prepares the ground for the faculty of choice, prohairesis, that Epictetus places at the centre of the person.
In the texts
Epictetus · Enchiridion, I
In our Power are Opinion, Pursuit, Desire, Aversion, and in one Word, whatever are our own Actions.
Marcus Aurelius · Meditations, VIII, 47
If thou art pained by any external thing, it is not this thing that disturbs thee, but thy own judgment about it. And it is in thy power to wipe out this judgment now.
What the term does not mean
- It is not a claim that nothing outside us matters. Carter’s Epictetus calls the things not in our power “belonging to others”, not worthless, and the school kept a place for preferred indifferents such as health.
- It is not “focus on what you can influence”. Influence is not the criterion; complete dependence on us is. The body can be influenced every day and is still listed among the things not in our power.
- The word “control” is the commentator’s, not the translator’s. Carter writes “in our Power”, Long “in thy power”; neither uses “control” in these passages.
Related terms
- Prohairesis — προαίρεσις (prohairesis)
- Ataraxia — ἀταραξία (ataraxia)
- Premeditatio malorum — praemeditatio malorum (latin)
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