What is up to us

One is free only in proportion to what one can do without: every need is a hold that the world, fortune or the powerful have on us. From this the Cynic draws autarkeia (self-sufficiency) as the goal, living so that nothing external is necessary and no one therefore holds anything we depend on. When Alexander, master of the known world, offered to grant him any wish, Diogenes asked only that he stand out of his sunlight: this shows that the most destitute of men, if he desires nothing, is more invulnerable than the mightiest of kings, who remains at the mercy of what he owns.

Diogenes Laertius, Lives, VI, 38

The division is the founding act: only our judgments, desires and impulses are truly up to us, not the body, reputation or fortune. The argument is practical: tying one's good to what is not up to us dooms one to disturbance, whereas concentrating effort on the one masterable domain makes serenity invulnerable to circumstance, even in exile or prison.

Epictetus, Enchiridion, §1 · Epictetus, Discourses

The world already follows its own ziran 自然 (the spontaneity of the natural): to set it right by will, by law or by calculated effort is to break that order and produce the opposite of what one intends, as one kills a plant by pulling at its shoots. From this observation Taoism draws wu wei 無為 (non-action, action without forcing): not inertia, but an efficacy through espousal rather than constraint, like water that, being the most yielding, wears down the hard by giving way to it. Where Confucianism would reform man through moral effort and ritual, the Taoist holds that all willful action deepens the very disorder it means to mend: it is the exact reverse of a Promethean drive to mastery.

Laozi, Dao De Jing (Tao Te Ching), ch. 43, 78 · Zhuangzi, ch. 6 (The Great and Venerable Teacher)

One is free only in proportion to what one can do without: every need is a hold that the world, fortune or the powerful have on us. Hence autarkeia (self-sufficiency) as the goal, living so that nothing external is necessary and no one therefore holds anything we depend on. When Alexander, master of the known world, offered to grant him any wish, Diogenes asked only that he stand out of his sunlight: the most destitute of men, if he desires nothing, is more invulnerable than the mightiest of kings, who remains at the mercy of what he owns. The Stoics would later take up this operation as the dichotomy of control, but Diogenes carries it out through deeds and destitution rather than inner judgment, without turning it into a settled thesis.

Diogenes Laertius, Lives, VI, 38

The root of all unhappiness, Epictetus argues, is to expect one's happiness from things that are not in our power. Hence the opening move of the Enchiridion: sorting our concerns into two classes by the single criterion of mastery, what is wholly up to us (judgments, desires, aversions) and what is not (body, goods, reputation). The dichotomy is not one thesis among others but the operation that conditions everything that follows: all disturbance arises from having claimed a hold on what eludes us. Where the older Stoics dwelt on cosmic fate, Epictetus brings the division down to the concrete use, here and now, of what is properly mine.

Enchiridion, §1 · Discourses, I.1

Taking up the dichotomy of Epictetus, Marcus continually brings his mind back to the one masterable domain: external things do not touch the soul, which is disturbed only by the judgment it adds to them; remove that judgment, drop the « I am harmed », and the harm itself is gone.

Meditations, V, 19 · Meditations, VI, 52 · Meditations, VIII, 47

Misfortune comes not from things but from our grip on them: only what we wrongly count as ours can be torn away. From this Seneca draws the dichotomy of control: to count as one's own only one's judgements and desires, surrendering fortune to the chance that gives and reclaims it. Less a speculative thesis than a practical directive, it makes the wise man invulnerable by shrinking the surface he offers to blows: what he carries within, no fortune can reach.

Letters to Lucilius, IX (the wise man is self-sufficient) · On the Constancy of the Wise Man, V-VI

Against the voluntarism that would bend the course of things to a design, Laozi observes that forced intervention turns against itself: the more one grasps, the more one loses; the more laws are made, the more thieves arise. Wu wei is not passivity but the art of espousing the spontaneous course of things, like water that flows around the obstacle without fighting it: act without forcing, and everything is accomplished. It is the exact reverse of the Prometheanism that measures the human by their grip on the world.

Dao De Jing, ch. 37 and 48 · Dao De Jing, ch. 57 and 64

Cook Ding carves an ox without ever dulling his blade: he does not cut, he follows the openings the carcass offers, and the knife moves through the void. The parable gives effortless action its most concrete sense: not inaction, but action so wedded to the real that it ceases to be effort. Against the voluntarism that bends things to a design, efficacy comes to one who imposes nothing and slips where the situation yields, like the swimmer of the falls who "goes in with the swirl and comes out with the eddy." Where Laozi draws non-action toward the art of governing, Zhuangzi unfolds it as a lived, almost bodily mastery of the right gesture.

Zhuangzi, ch. 3 (Cook Ding) · Zhuangzi, ch. 19 (the swimmer of the falls)