18 James B. Stockdale: Courage under Fire-Testing Epictetus’s Dpctrines
18 James B. Stockdale: Courage under Fire-Testing Epictetus’s Dpctrines
COURAGE UNDER FIRE
Testing Epictetus’s Doctrines in a Laboratory of Human Behavior
James Bond Stockdale
I came to the philosophic life as a thirty-eight-year-old naval pilot in grad school at Stanford University. I had been in the navy for twenty years and scarcely ever out of a cockpit. In 1962, I began my second year of studying international relations so I could become a strategic planner in the Pentagon. But my heart wasn’t in it. I had yet to be inspired at Stanford and saw myself as just processing tedious material about how nations organized and governed them- selves. I was too old for that. I knew how political systems operated; I had been beating systems for years. Then, in what we call a “feel out pass” in stunt flying, I cruised into Stanford’s philosophy corner one winter morning. I was gray- haired and in civilian clothes. A voice boomed out of an office, “Can I help you?” The speaker was Philip Rhinelander, dean of Humanities and Sciences, who taught Philosophy 6: The Problems of Good and Evil. At first he thought I was a professor, but we soon found common ground in the navy because he’d served in World War II. Within fifteen minutes we’d agreed that I would enter his two-term course in the middle, and to make up for my lack of background, I would meet him for an hour a week for a private tutorial in the study of his campus home. Speech delivered at the Great Hall, King’s College, London, Monday, November 15, 1993.
Phil Rhinelander opened my eyes. In that study it all happened for me––my inspiration, my dedication to the philosophic life. From then on, I was out of international relations––I already had enough credits for the master’s––and into philosophy. We went from Job to Socrates to Aristotle to Descartes. And then on to Kant, Hume, Dostoyevsky, Camus. All the while, Rhinelander was psyching me out, trying to figure out what I was seeking. He thought my interest in Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion was quite interest- ing. On my last session, he reached high in his wall of books and brought down a copy of The Enchiridion. He said, “I think you’ll be interested in this.” Enchiridion means “ready at hand.” In other words, it’s a hand book. Rhinelander explained that its author, Epictetus, was a very unusual man of intelligence and sensitivity, who gleaned wisdom rather than bitterness from his early firsthand exposure to extreme cruelty and firsthand observations of the abuse of power and self- indulgent debauchery. Epictetus was born a slave in about A.D. 50 and grew up in Asia Minor speaking the Greek language of his slave mother. At the age of fifteen or so, he was loaded off to Rome in chains in a slave caravan. He was treated savagely for months while en route. He went on the Rome auction block as a permanent cripple, his knee having been shattered and left untreated. He was “bought cheap” by a freedman named Epaphroditus, a secretary to Empe