溫故知新 Old wisdom, today’s insight — ONGO
Sickness Hinders the Body — but Does It Hinder the Will?
When sickness and weakness lay hold of the body — what part of me is it that they cannot hold?
Sickness is a hindrance to the body, but not to the will, unless the will itself consents.
Epictetus' insight — sickness hinders the body but not the will — stands at one pole of the lineage divided over the human before suffering. The Stoics split the body's fate from the mind's freedom, holding that whatever one undergoes, the attitude toward it is free. This thought ran into the twentieth century to Frankl, who survived the camps and revived it: even stripped of everything, one keeps the freedom to choose one's stance in a given situation. Yet counters arise — to demand such inner freedom before extreme pain and illness can, at times, be cruel. Before the body's collapse, is the mind free, or does it collapse too? The lineage split.
The more an age sees sickness and aging only as things to manage and overcome, the more this question — what remains when the body fails — asks after dignity within finitude.
Epictetus, himself lame, left a cool and firm word about sickness: illness may lame the leg, but it is the leg that is lamed, not the will.
📝I, Too, Stand Before It
Epictetus, himself lame, left a cool and firm word about sickness: illness may lame the leg, but it is the leg that is lamed, not the will. Even when the body suffers what it cannot help, how one receives it remains one's own. I read this question as asking what is left to me before a finite body. Is there truly a place that does not collapse when the body does? This is at once comfort and challenge. I too, carrying a body that will one day weaken, stand before this question.
✍️Your Answer
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