Epictetus and Stoic physics

From my other blog at Tumblr, The Examined Life, someone posed a good question:

In your opinion, how does Epictetus's maxim “Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions,” fit into the materialistic/deterministic/monistic Stoic physics? Who is “our” and what kind of “control” does this suggest?

I wonder if Stoic physics could accurately be called ‘deterministic’ (in spite of all of Stoicism’s talk of ‘fate’) because a central idea of Stoicism is that all things are organically connected to the cosmos, and therefore inter-dependent.  Stoic physics seems to imply that since there is no actual separation of one’s self from everything else, it isn’t that ‘fate’ is really something set against free will.  To the extent that we (and all things) are particular extensions of the universal, the notion of setting a ‘self’ against an ‘other’ (or vice versa) doesn’t actually apply.  It seems to me that the issue of ‘free will’ and ‘determinism’ is misleading. 

With that in mind, the Stoic attitude is not one of resignation but of an existential realisation this organic unity of which all things, including oneself, is a part.  One should recognise oneself as a cosmopolitan, ‘a citizen of the cosmos.’  Stoic physics appears—at least to my understanding—to examine something prior to this ontological division, and to reconcile this division by truly understanding this unity. It is within this larger context of Stoic physics that Epictetus speaks of ‘things within our control.’ 

There are two aspects that need to be considered here.  [1] Insofar as an individual possesses its own distinctive and unique consciousness, it may be understood a distinctive part of the universe.  We can reify individual entities as individual entities.  But [2] insofar as an individual is also a sort of natural expression of the universe itself, that individual then is not ontologically separate from the cosmos and all other individuals, things and events, but intimately entwined with everything else.  And Epictetus’ ‘things in our control’ and ‘things not in our control’ correspond to these two interrelated perspectives of the cosmos itself. 

However, I also think that there is a qualitative difference in the ‘control’ of which Epictetus speaks.  The control of ‘things within our control’ is a different kind of control from the ‘things not in our control.’  The control of the latter entirely relies solely on a strict subject/object division, whereas in the former, the control involved is more a matter of attitude, judgement and perception.  Things that fell outside that scope were regarded as indifferents (though most Stoics agreed that some indifferents were perhaps more useful than others). 

Our human predicament is that we tend to remain ignorant of the organic unity part of the equation, and as a result, we make ourselves (and often those around us) miserable.  We imagine ourselves as ontologically independent of everything else, and seek to control things and events around us that in reality we can’t entirely control.  We see the reified aspect of existence, but not its unified aspect.  And when we allow ourselves to get into this state of mind, we become, as the Stoics would often say, ‘slaves’ to things ‘external’ to our consciousness.  What is more, this eventually results in hubris: We want to extend our control beyond not only what is humanly possible, but what is ontologically possible.

The Stoic attitude then is one that recognises the proper boundary between the self as part of the universe and the self as an expression of the universe.  To put it this way is to say the same thing as Epictetus, but from the perspective of Stoic physics rather than ethics.