Self-creation and Principles of Work with Insights in Epictetus’s School
The article discusses the importance of working with insights in Epictetus’s school for human development. The first part of the article analyses the concept of self-creation in its correlation with the concept of creativity. Three meanings of the self-creation concept are analysed: the unconscious influence of creativity on the creator themself, the conscious influence of culture on the author's own being and the conscious impact on the creator themself as a goal in itself. Insights management is considered to be an important stage of self-creation, leading to further changes in behavior and lifestyle. The article considers comprehending and non-comprehending, true and false insights; the dilemma of "my own - somebody else’s", to which Epictetus gives fundamental significance; the concept of free will that the Roman stoic only applies to what is somebody’s own. The principles used by Epictetus are analysed: 1) “comprehend” insights in accordance with God's instructions, great philosophers’ behaviour, the interests of the whole and your own goals of self-improvement corresponding to nature; 2) “look after what is yours in every possible way, do not seek someone else's”; 3) get away from everything that does not depend on your free will. The analogies are drawn between Buddhist liberation from desire and Epictetus’s liberation from affective fixation on external reality; the freedom of choice, about which Epictetus writes, and existentialist concept of ethical choice. Despite the fact that stoicism is now not a fashionable philosophical school, the principles formulated by Epictetus are reproduced in modern philosophical and psychological literature. For example, the principle of non-attachment to the external material reality, the principle of hyperstimulation and hypostimulation, which are used to achieve altered states of consciousness and the like, go back to the teaching of Epictetus. Today, the views of the Stoics, and of Epictetus in particular, are as relevant as they were in antiquity.