Enchiridion 6 — Take No Pride in Another's Excellence

Be elated at no advantage that belongs to another. If a horse, priding itself, were to say, "I am beautiful," that would be bearable. But you, when you say with pride, "I have a beautiful horse," know that you are taking pride in the horse's good. What, then, is your own? The use of impressions. So when you handle your impressions in harmony with nature, then take pride — for then you will be taking pride in a good that is genuinely your own.

This brief chapter turns the dichotomy of control onto the subtle territory of self-esteem. We routinely take pride in things that are not, strictly, ours: our wealth, our looks, our talents, our family, our possessions. Epictetus's image is deliberately absurd to expose the error — at least when a horse boasts of its beauty, the beauty actually belongs to the horse. But when the rider boasts of the horse's beauty, he is borrowing glory from something outside himself. Most human pride, Epictetus suggests, is exactly this: claiming credit for an advantage that is not our own doing.

The phrase allotrion proterema — "another's advantage" or "an advantage belonging to someone else" — reaches further than it first appears. Even my good looks, my intelligence, my inherited fortune are, in the Stoic accounting, externals: gifts of nature or chance, not achievements of my will. To rest my sense of worth on them is to rest it on sand, because they can all be taken — and because, never having earned them, I cannot truly own them.

So what is ours to be proud of? Epictetus gives the same answer the whole book gives: chrēsis phantasiōn, the use of impressions — how we judge, choose, and respond. This alone is our own doing. When you handle your impressions well — meet provocation with patience, loss with steadiness, temptation with self-command — then you may take a clean and rightful pride, because you are praising something you actually accomplished. The chapter relocates self-worth from what we have to how we conduct ourselves: from the borrowed to the earned.

The teaching that we should not identify with our possessions or accidental advantages runs through the contemplative traditions. The Buddhist analysis of anattā (not-self) goes even further than Epictetus: not only is the horse not you, but the body, the talents, even the stream of thoughts are not, in the deepest sense, a fixed self to be proud of. Pride (māna) is named in Buddhist psychology as a fetter precisely because it builds a false, defended self around impermanent attributes.

The distinction between borrowed glory and genuine virtue echoes the Christian tradition's caution against pride in gifts of fortune. Many spiritual writers distinguished sharply between what we have received (and for which gratitude, not pride, is the fitting response) and the use we make of it (where genuine moral credit lies). The talents in the Gospel parable are given; what is judged is the use.

In the Vedic framing, identifying the self with its attributes — body, lineage, wealth, skill — is the basic confusion (avidyā) that the path works to undo. The advantages are aspects of prakriti (nature), perpetually changing; the witnessing self is not enriched by them and not diminished by their loss. Epictetus's "that belongs to the horse, not to you" is a Stoic instance of the same disidentification.

Examine what you take pride in, and ask of each: did I make this, or was it given? Beauty, intelligence, wealth, the achievements of your children, the prestige of your work — much of what we parade as ours is borrowed plumage, gifts of nature and circumstance we did nothing to earn. To stake our worth on them is fragile, because they can vanish, and false, because we never truly owned them.

The teaching does not forbid pride — it relocates it. There is one thing genuinely yours to be proud of: the quality of your responses, the use you make of whatever you've been given. A person of modest gifts who meets life with steadiness and integrity has more to take honest pride in than a brilliant, beautiful, wealthy person who squanders all three. Self-worth grounded in conduct cannot be taken, because no one can act for you.

This chapter is a quiet antidote to a culture of borrowed identity — where status is built on possessions, appearance, follower counts, and the reflected glory of associations. Each of these is, in Epictetus's terms, "another's advantage," and a self built on them is perpetually anxious, because the source of worth lives outside the self and can be revoked at any moment.

A useful practice: when you notice a surge of pride or, conversely, a sting of inadequacy, trace it to its object. Is this about something I did — how I treated someone, a hard thing I followed through on, a temptation I declined — or about something I merely have or merely am? Redirect the weight of your self-regard toward the first category. Over time this builds what psychologists describe as a more stable, internally-sourced sense of worth — noted here as a resonance with the Stoic point, not as a clinical endorsement of the ancient claim.