Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
The Discipline of Judgment (Episode 83)
860 Plays1 year ago
Want to become more Stoic? Join us and other Stoics this October: stoameditation.com/course
“The discipline of assent consists essentially in refusing to accept within oneself all representations which are other than objective or adequate.”
In this conversation, Caleb and Michael discuss the discipline of judgement (also called the discipline of assent).
It's all about how to think like a Stoic.
(01:48) Introduction
(07:49) Significance
(14:30) Lines from Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus
(19:32) The Judge
(22:49) Decomposition
(26:43) Basic Mistakes
(32:49) Logical Skill
(35:43) Changing Behavior
(38:39) Suspending Judgement
(40:42) Impression vs Lekta
(46:55) Helping the Ignorant
***
Subscribe to The Stoa Letter for weekly meditations, actions, and links to the best Stoic resources: www.stoaletter.com/subscribe
Download the Stoa app (it’s a free download): stoameditation.com/pod
If you try the Stoa app and find it useful, but truly cannot afford it, email us and we'll set you up with a free account.
Listen to more episodes and learn more here: https://stoameditation.com/blog/stoa-conversations/
Thanks to Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music in the conversations: https://ancientlyre.com/
Recommended
Transcript
Building Virtue Over Time
00:00:00
Speaker
Plutidus uses this analogy, you have to build it slowly and steadily through a series of actions, a series of reps, but it is virtue like muscle, it's diachronic, it's something that's gained over time, maintained over time. I like that. I think act versus character is really important. When we're talking about the discipline of ascent, we're not just talking about act.
Introduction to Stowe Conversations
00:00:21
Speaker
Welcome to Stowe Conversations. In this podcast, Michael Trombley and I discuss the theory and practice of stoicism. Each week we'll share two conversations, one between the two of us, and another we'll be an in-depth conversation with and experts.
Exploring the Stoic Domain: Discipline of Ascent
00:00:38
Speaker
In this episode, Michael and I discuss the discipline of ascent, also called the discipline of judgment. We use both terms here and elsewhere. It's one of the three essential Stoic domains. And in this conversation, we talk about what is important, significant about it, how to practice it, what sorts of exercises are available,
00:01:04
Speaker
and then finally talk about challenges, common obstacles to work through when applying the discipline of a set.
Stoicism Applied: Upcoming Live Course
00:01:12
Speaker
Before we start, Michael and I are running our live course this month, Stoicism Applied. It's grounded in the three Stoic disciplines with our experience teaching Stoicism in the academy and also, of course, through the Stoa app.
00:01:29
Speaker
So do check that out. We're kicking it off October 23rd. You can find more information about it at stoameditation.com slash course. Here is our conversation.
Understanding the Discipline of Assent
00:01:42
Speaker
Welcome to Stoa Conversations. My name is Caleb Ontiveros. And I'm Michael Trombley.
00:01:49
Speaker
And today we're gonna be talking about one of the Stoic disciplines, the discipline of judgment, also called the discipline of assent. We're gonna be going through what we think are the most significant and important aspects of this discipline, exercises one can do to train,
00:02:15
Speaker
in this discipline and then finally go through some of the challenges that we or we notice others hit when thinking of applying this discipline to our own own lives.
00:02:32
Speaker
If you don't know about these disciplines yet, the three disciplines of stoicism, I think this is a good place to start. This would be a deep dive into one of them.
The Three-Fold Division in Stoic Philosophy
00:02:40
Speaker
But for those that do, you know how important the discipline of ascent is, along with sometimes called the discipline of desire and the discipline of action. There's a three-fold division in stoic philosophy around how to live and how to educate ourselves
00:02:53
Speaker
And so today we are digging into that epistemology, that question of knowledge, that question of how do you think that the right way, discipline of judgment and assent. Yeah, yeah. So the discipline of judgment, that's broadly all about reasoning well, making good judgments, assenting to the impressions that one ought to or withholding a sense from places where you should be more uncertain.
The Importance of Accurate Judgments
00:03:20
Speaker
I'd say it's fundamentally about seeing things as they are without adding unnecessary value judgments, making mistakes in reasoning, and so on. Of course, all the disciplines work together. You need accurate judgments in order to know what one ought to desire, and for the Stoics, desire and judgments are critically linked.
00:03:48
Speaker
And then of course, the judgments one makes are in many cases decisions and lead to lead to action. What do you want to say in terms of just some like introductory remarks for people to get a sense of the discipline of judgment in case they have encountered it before?
00:04:07
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think you did a good job with it. Yeah, so the discipline of ascent, I think in many ways is the most important discipline. So stoic virtue is, it's about knowledge. So the stoics think, you know, if you think the right way, then you'll feel the right way and you'll do the right thing, right? So if you know what's important in each situation, if you understand what's really good and bad, if you understand what's worth doing, what's not worth doing, you'll do it. So character,
00:04:35
Speaker
Our character, our desire, our motivations, all of that is a type of knowledge and understanding of what to do and why it's the right thing to do and what matters. So the discipline of ascent in that way, it seems fundamental. It seems like the most important one. But on the flip side of this, one thing that Epictetus talks about is he also says it's really the last one.
00:04:57
Speaker
the last one to focus on, the one to focus on after you've gotten the other two disciplines right. Epictetus talks about, you know, you don't want to solidify, if you don't think the right things and you're misguided and you're misled and you don't understand stoicism, you don't want to work on solidifying your beliefs, cementing those opinions, really becoming more confident in acting in accordance with your opinions. You don't really want to work on any of this process unless you have the right material to work with.
00:05:27
Speaker
So in one sense, assent, judgment, it underpins all of stoicism. At the other sense, it's also the most advanced thing you can do. It's also the thing that people need to work on to transition from advanced stoic to sages is really perfecting this final act too. So I don't know if that's confusing, that goes both ways, but it's something where it's both fundamental and advanced. And I think that's something worth keeping in mind as we talk about it.
00:05:54
Speaker
Some of the stuff we'll talk about is really basic to stoicism. And some of the stuff is the kind of stuff, you know, only ever ascending properly, right? Always changing your mind. If you're presented with compelling evidence, always suspending judgment, unless you have sufficient evidence, that's kind of stuff that, you know, only the sage will be able to do. So perfecting it is really advanced, but I think the basic, the base of any stoic practice is going to involve some of this as a beginner too.
00:06:21
Speaker
Right, right. Yeah, that's a good point. So for this conversation, we reread the chapter on the discipline of ascent from the book, The Inner Citadel, by the French philosopher Pierre Hadeau. And this book is principally on the philosophy of Marcus Aurelius and especially pays attention to how Marcus Aurelius' philosophy and his meditations
00:06:49
Speaker
is derived from some of the key teachings of Epictetus, especially the three disciplines. And Hiddo, in his list, as he goes through the three disciplines, he has the discipline of judgment, the discipline of desire, then the discipline of action, perhaps because the discipline of judgment is so central to Marcus's thinking, but it's also true that
00:07:12
Speaker
behind our Marxist thinking is infused with all three. And as such, we'll be going through some of the later disciplines in podcast episodes. So the key way we organize our course working on the course on Maven, and it's going to be structured using these disciplines as well.
00:07:37
Speaker
But we should get into what we think is most important, most significant about the discipline of judgment in particular. So do you want to kick things off?
00:07:55
Speaker
Again, there's these three disciplines, you have assent, desire and action. And I think these can, I always think this back in terms of stoic psychology. So when we're talking about stoicism, we're talking about character development, being better people, always thinking about, well, how does the mind work?
00:08:13
Speaker
How are we training the mind? How are we improving ourselves? And when you think about stoic psychology, they provide this model where you get impressions. So that's kind of this input coming from the physical world, the things you're encountering. Then there's this ascent process or this reflection process that you then ascent to that impression or not. And then that ascent, once it's completed, that produces your beliefs. And if it's something to do with value, it produces desires.
00:08:43
Speaker
it produces your actions, your motivations. So really, why I think of so much so as this kind of input output, and then there's this black box in the middle, and that's you, maybe it's this, maybe it's maybe it's an opaque bar or a see through box, a glass box that you have an understanding of, but there's this there's this step in the middle, and that's you, right? So if somebody's a cowardly person, and there's this impression of danger, then the output is going to be running away fear,
00:09:13
Speaker
if you're a courageous person and there's this impression of danger the you know the the output is going to be well an appropriate response maybe a cautious response but not an extremely fragile impassioned response and so the discipline of ascent is is what determines the output right the ascent is is where you get your desire your belief your emotions your passions so when
00:09:37
Speaker
The reason the discipline of ascent is important is because everything that follows, that we judge ourselves by, what are the quality of your beliefs? How are the quality of your actions?
00:09:50
Speaker
What is your character like when push comes to shove and you're in an extreme event? That's kind of big, even in smaller moments, how irritable are you? How selfish are you? How grateful are you in the kind of a day to day even? All of that comes down to how are you responding to those impressions? When we say responding, I mean, how are you assenting to those impressions? How are you relating to them? So in that way, it's fundamental both in terms of your character over time
00:10:16
Speaker
And in terms of your vices and in terms of your virtues and your mood, everything comes down in stoicism to, if not a sense in the moment.
00:10:27
Speaker
than a series of ascents over time, a series of either successful or unsuccessful reactions to impressions. So I don't know if you think of a boat or something that's on a trajectory, then the ascent is how you can slowly start to move that trajectory as you build your character over time. So it's really, it underpins
00:10:50
Speaker
everything about us, everything that we evaluate ourselves for comes from this. The other things that we'll criticize, which is passions, mistaken beliefs, poor behavior, that is just a sense. Epictetus has this beautiful line,
00:11:08
Speaker
He talks about the Iliad, the story of the Battle of Troy. It's nothing but a series of impressions and reactions to it. Someone had the impression to be offended and to take offense and launch the war. So Paris had the impression of Helen and fell in love. And then because of that, you get this entire war.
00:11:34
Speaker
If Paris hadn't responded to that impression that way, we would have lost the Odyssey that follows from it. So this view of this entire great work of art, Evictetus is reducing down to the discipline of ascent and how it, how it, how that ascent occurred in a single moment. And I think that's a, I think that's a really, that, that just underpins the importance of it and goes back to the point I was making before about being in some way the most basic building block of Stoic philosophy, while also the most advanced important thing you can do.
00:12:01
Speaker
Absolutely. I think one of the most significant aspects for me is that this discipline grounds the idea that we can form an inner. There's this line that life doesn't happen to us. It's not an external matter. It happens within.
00:12:23
Speaker
And I think one way to understand that slogan is that our judgments, what we assent, how we respond to impressions, that's where life really goes on, as it were, and the impressions that were given, these external events that cause impressions.
00:12:42
Speaker
Those aren't the sorts of things that are up to us. Rather, it's how we respond to them that matters, that forms our character, and that determines the trajectory of our lives. And if we do that well, I think one of the key promises of stoicism is that we can
00:13:02
Speaker
build a kind of resilience, build a source of meaning by simply thinking well, responding to the impressions we receive.
00:13:15
Speaker
appropriately. And the way that's done is by practicing this discipline of assent and ensuring that we accept all the impressions or representations that are objective, that are true, and that either withhold our judgment when matters are uncertain or refuse the irrational impressions we might receive or impressions that represent things other than the way they are.
00:13:45
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think that connects to my point because I think my point was more descriptive while there's this three stage process, impression, assent, then belief action. But your point is descriptive, but also kind of, I was thinking as like part of, as you said, the promise of stoicism.
00:14:01
Speaker
Well, hey, that's actually pretty cool. Hey, that means we have an inner citadel. That means we have freedom. That means we have the space between impression and action. That's a space the stoics say that animals don't have, right? Like that's something that differentiates us as rational creatures from non-rational animals. And that provides that in this inner citadel what life happens. So it's not just a description of the fact, but it's like, oh, this is pretty important and pretty meaningful that this exists. And that's where the fun happens, I guess.
00:14:30
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. And I think we often add stories or value judgments to things that are not necessarily true and trying to improve that, trying to correct that. That's a matter of practicing the discipline of assent. So, uh, Hadeau has two excellent quotes he pulls out from Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius at the very beginning of the chapter, one from Epictetus. He was sent to jail. What happened? He was sent to jail, but he is unhappy.
00:15:00
Speaker
is added by oneself. And then the other from Marcus Aurelius, don't tell yourself anything more than what your primary representations tell you. If you've been told so-and-so has been talking behind your back, then this is what you've been told. You've not, however, been told that somebody has done a wrong to you. So there's that idea of, okay, you received an impression and then the next step is a sense and
00:15:26
Speaker
That's where you can refuse to accept any impression that includes these added stories that are maybe these subjective matters, these value judgments. And then that's going to impact your beliefs and actions.
00:15:41
Speaker
Yeah, and that's the other thing that I thought was important about this discipline that I think Hado does a really good job of calling out. I'm guilty of this. I think with all this talk of impressions, it's easy to forget that many of the impressions we judge are self-generated or at least influenced by ourselves.
00:16:02
Speaker
One way you present this picture is you see a car. Is it really a car? It becomes this kind of detached fact game about the external world. But really, when we see a car, the kind of impression that we're judging, that we generate is like, wow, there's a car. It's in front of me, so I'm going to be late for work. Or, wow, that's a real beautiful thing because I like cars. Or, wow, that's a real noisy, annoying thing.
00:16:26
Speaker
The impression is often very rarely are we judging just a factual impression in a vacuum, almost never. We're almost always distorting that impression or I would say it's running through the filter of our subjective experience.
00:16:45
Speaker
So that what we're actually putting to the test and evaluating is something that we've added to in some respect, right? We've altered it. And I mean, that's what your quotes speak to is this idea of, well, take a step back, unalter it. If he's gone to jail, take away the part that you've altered, which is like, wow, that's really bad. He must be really sad. His life is ruined.
00:17:06
Speaker
unalter it, just decompose it. We talk about this a lot on this show, the exercise decomposition, take it back to its original nature. But that's our internal dialogue. That's our subjective self, which is both altering these impressions and then also generating them. Anytime you've sat and had regret or thought about a past memory or felt embarrassment about something that you did in middle school
00:17:34
Speaker
You know, or got angry about a perceived slight that happened a long time ago. That's actually you generating an impression that you're reflecting upon from your memory. Right. And so that kind of, it's not just input output from the external world. There's also the self-generated input.
00:17:51
Speaker
This imagination, this internal life, this internal dialogue, which is constantly adding to that. Your self-talk really is constantly adding to that. It's constantly creating impressions that you're having to decide what to do with. And I think calling that out, Hiddo does a really good job of because that's something that I sometimes don't emphasize enough. And I think it's a really important thing to remember.
00:18:11
Speaker
I think so. I mean, just this morning I had a thought of an episode five years ago. This is as soon as I woke up where I just completely misinterpreted what someone had said to me at a lunch and was embarrassed. And for whatever reason, this is the sort of thought just that keeps on appearing on a, you know, maybe every two months or something like this. And I have
00:18:35
Speaker
both the, there's sort of the natural judgments one makes about doing embarrassing things like that. And then also, it's so easy to let those thoughts sort of run away and think about, well, imagine those two people at a lunch mentioning that embarrassing thing I said, and that's just a descriptive matter, a hypothetical, and it's really pretty easy to let these thoughts sort of run away from you.
00:19:00
Speaker
I don't know what you said, Caleb, but I don't think they do. I'm not pretty sure they don't. I don't I don't do that. I don't talk about embarrassing things people said five years ago. That's probably the sort of thing where they've likely forgotten and.
00:19:15
Speaker
I have the fortune of keeping that event alive for at least the next few decades, depending on how well my memory upholds. We'll see. What else would you have on terms of the most important or significant aspects of the practice?
00:19:32
Speaker
So I think this is another thing that people actually miss at the discipline of assent. And I think this is really important. One metaphor that I like for the discipline of assent is I like to think of it as the lawyer, the kind of the judge. So the impression comes in and the judge evaluates it and gives it a verdict. You're true or you're false, bangs down the gavel. But the judge makes that decision based on the evidence that it's presented.
00:19:59
Speaker
And the evidence that the judge has presented comes from us, right? So we only can assent as well as our current beliefs. We only can have as good a sense as our current beliefs and evidence that we have access to. So someone can't spontaneously generate knowledge. It's built through a careful process of assent grounded in true beliefs that we then build up a store of evidence
00:20:25
Speaker
I don't know, take the thing you said that was embarrassing, right? In a vacuum, if you're 10 or 9 years old, you don't know how to deal with that situation. Now that we're our age, we have a series of evidence. We say, well, I'm the age I am now. I don't really spend time thinking about embarrassing things other people did five years ago. That's a piece of evidence.
00:20:43
Speaker
Well, I said something embarrassing to somebody else and then I asked them and they didn't remember care. That's another piece of evidence. But we kind of build up the storehouse of evidence that we can then use to put the impression on trial. And so what I mean by that is when we're progressing, often what we do is while I read it in a book, it's false.
00:21:02
Speaker
or I read it and stoicism told me that this doesn't matter, so I'm fine. And we just pretend like that was assent when it's not. Assent is this kind of really deep, internalized belief in understanding. And that's built on slowly building a storehouse of evidence over time that you can then present to the inner judge. And I think that's a part that gets missed. You're not assenting in a vacuum. You're assenting based on
00:21:29
Speaker
whether or not, uh, impression seems true or false to you can only come down to the beliefs you currently have. And so you want to stack that in your favor by having as good beliefs as possible. And you do that by reading smart people, by reading Stoics, by learning about philosophy, by engaging with arguments, and you build up the storehouse of evidence to use against these impressions. But I think that's a really important thing to remember. These aren't things that happen in vacuums, these, these moments of ascent.
00:21:58
Speaker
Yeah, that's a, I think that's a very important. I think we should come back to that when we're talking about challenges, because I think there's both some important lines of thoughts around.
00:22:10
Speaker
how people might misconstrue the discipline. And then also, okay, you know, given that you might not have the best beliefs in your store, given that sometimes it's difficult to deeply internalize principles of what, you know, what's next, what should you do? Um, so we can, we can touch on that somewhere when we come to the challenges, but.
00:22:36
Speaker
I think now we can probably move to, okay, we have a good sense of the discipline. We've expressed why we think it's significant, what's important about it. Now, what can we do to improve our ability to set to what we ought to?
00:22:59
Speaker
And strategy we both noted here is this practice of describing things in objective terms. The decomposition exercise from Marcus Aurelius, you know, he has this famous passage in the meditations where he describes this fancy filerian wine merely as grape juice, the
00:23:25
Speaker
royal tunic as the blood of a dried shellfish, and just that as an effort, as a way to shift perspective and see these things about which there are so many different narratives about prestige, power, but instead see them as they are in their physical sense. There's a passage from Hadeau that I have here,
00:23:52
Speaker
one must always make a definition or description of the object which is presented in a representation so as to see it in itself as it is in its essence in its nakedness in its totality and in all its details one must say to oneself the name which is peculiar to it as well as the names of the parts which compose it and into which it will be resolved i mean yeah i love this decomposition i think that's a really
00:24:23
Speaker
I think that's a really helpful one. The point here is that we receive a sense impression.
00:24:32
Speaker
but by the time we're judging it, it's gone through our subjectivity and we've turned it into something else. Like that car example I was using, like you were using a Royal robe, you know, there's a sense impression of something materialist, like materially, this is a dyed piece of cloth, but we think, wow, this person's really amazing. They're really rich, really important. We add all these other things to it. And so decomposition is taking that away. I really like it because it,
00:25:01
Speaker
It stops this. I mean, one of the other exercises I have is suspending judgment. I think suspending judgment is really important. But you don't want to get into this state where you're just always suspending judgment, right? You got to kind of move forward. You have to accept some things. And so the things the stoic can accept with confidence are the physical things.
00:25:20
Speaker
The thing that the stoic has to be more cautious about is those value judgments. Make sure those are right. But you can accept these physical things. You go, look, this is a piece of dyed cloth in front of me. OK, what does that mean for me? That's a question the stoic can immediately act from.
00:25:35
Speaker
You know, oh, this is a this is a really important person who's more important than me. And and I should revere. That's a judgment that requires a lot more pausing, thought, introspection and caution. So I like decomposition because it actually gives me when I practice it, it gives me something to act from, you know, it gives me something to move from in the situation rather than just suspending my judgment, but something that I can act from with confidence. I don't know about you. What do you think?
00:26:01
Speaker
No, yeah, I think that's right. I think that decomposition is useful because it gives you those basic physical facts, gives you a usual perspective that one can always check into. And I suppose it's especially effective in cases where there are these
00:26:19
Speaker
narratives, there are these very compelling value judgments, which is I think what you see in the case maybe of fancy cars or clothing or perhaps an even more subtle spheres where redescribing things can put those narratives into question or at least help you think about them more appropriately. Yeah, great.
00:26:44
Speaker
way to practice the discipline of ascent that I think is important. Sounds very cliche and somewhat unhelpful, but I think is just to not make basic mistakes and reasoning. And one way to do that is think about
00:27:02
Speaker
if you were the kind of person who wanted to get this issue, whatever issue is bothering you, right? What would you do? How would you think about this if you had to in the space of five minutes or something like that? So to make that more concrete, I was reading the book, A Liberated Mind, recently by the psychotherapist, clinical psychologist, Stephen C. Hayes, who we'll hopefully have on the program,
00:27:31
Speaker
soon. And he talks about the story where he had a patient come in who was convinced that nothing matters to them. They didn't care about their family. They didn't care about their career and even care about having fun.
00:27:45
Speaker
And then Steven's response is, well, you know, we didn't try to convince him that that belief is completely false. He just said, you know, notice when you experience pain, you know, you're in here for a reason, you're probably experiencing pain. Just check in and see if anything matters at that point in time or if there's something you care about. And the person, of course, comes back and they, you know, they have a story about how they notice sadness or they're eating alone at a restaurant and they saw, oh,
00:28:12
Speaker
a happy family and they realize, oh, I do in fact care about happy family. And that's the sort of thing where emotions can overleap our reason in such a way that some basic things that we can catch if we're paying attention can escape.
00:28:32
Speaker
our notice. So I think maybe a useful, hopefully useful frame, I think is just try your best not to make basic mistakes. In some sense, that's completely useless advice, but in another sense, you know, don't over-confocate things. Think about things from the framework of if someone is really trying to get this right in the space of five minutes, what sorts of things would they do?
00:28:52
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, the don't make mistakes thing is like, I think you're right to joke about it being a bit frustrating as advice, but the don't make basic mistakes point is that if you flip it, the idea is that a lot of the mistakes we make are basic. And I think that's a good, that's a good point, right? Like that's the, that's the, okay. A lot of them don't overcomplicate a lot of the mistakes you're making on mistakes. People make are just basic ones. And if you put some attention to it, you can catch a lot more of those and make a lot more progress than you might suspect.
00:29:20
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. I think that's the main motivations, just that I think there are a number of things one can do in order to think better. And it seems if I think about my life, the mistakes I've made are on reflection, often the sorts of things I could have figured out relatively easily if I had paid attention in the right way or simply thought through things in a more detailed or diligent
00:29:51
Speaker
matter. That might be not true for everyone, but I think as a general observation, it does seem clear to me that often it's just hard to get all the basics right. So before looking at maybe some more complex strategies, always useful to sort of just double check, go through checklists. And before I should stop before going on this point too long, but there's I think some additional evidence for this view is there's a book called The Checklist Manifesto,
00:30:20
Speaker
by a doctor, which goes through how powerful checklists are when performing different medical procedures, surgical procedures, and often each item on those checklists are not that important.
00:30:37
Speaker
But when you're in the thick of it, doing something exceptionally high stakes, high stakes medical procedure is especially important that you do all those things and having something as basic, even almost paternalistic as a checklist has been found to be.
00:30:52
Speaker
very effective in the medical procedure. I'm sure many of you have had experiences in business where you think about, especially if you're putting on some complex logistical event or something like that. Each part is in itself simple, but making sure the whole thing comes together is non-trivial. So perhaps our thinking is like that in the same way. So what would a stoic checklist look like? What would like three check boxes be?
00:31:19
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I think that it's of course, one of the key ones is, is this up to me or not? Is this my own? Another one that I think is useful is if you have, if you can think about this role modeling, you know, what would someone who wants to get this right, how, and had to think about it for five minutes, what would they actually do? What would they check? And then finally you have.
00:31:49
Speaker
The other one might just be, okay, now that you've role modeled how someone might think about this, if it's useful, actually do it and set that timer and try to think through the matter if that's something that's available to you. And I think we'll touch on some other ones here as well, but those are some initial ones that come to mind.
00:32:12
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I was thinking of decomposition as a third one, something that can work. Yeah, but I like that idea. I mean, I like the idea of the checklist, the getting the small things right, like so many other things in life, so many other skills or crafts. The art of living is just getting those small things right again and again and again. And I think that in some ways might be frustrating if you're looking for a secret, but in other ways is, I think, to be expected and where the hard work comes in, right?
00:32:40
Speaker
Another one that I do in terms of basic errors that I try to avoid, and this is one of my exercises, I think one of the things you can do is learn the rules of logic, learn about logical fallacies, so just kind of understand basic errors of reasoning that people fall into, basic biases, to try to identify those and slow down when they're happening.
00:33:04
Speaker
You know, one thing that I try to do that I would say is on my checklist is I try to have a, we should maybe write one of these up a stoic thinking checklist, is to have a consistent standard of judgment, which means to be a standard of judgment that I apply, even if the situation benefits me or the situation harms me, right? So, you know, if I'm having an argument with somebody, I might say, well, look, I looked up this peer reviewed literature,
00:33:31
Speaker
or it says on Wikipedia that I'm right. So I would take that as evidence to confirm my view, but then if someone arguing against me was like, oh, well, look, I found this article or I found it on Wikipedia, and then I start to say, well, I don't really believe that. That shows me that I don't have a consistent standard of judgment, that I'm bending the rules to suit some sort of greater desire or need, which is maybe to be right or to preserve my ego in this situation.
00:33:58
Speaker
So I try to catch myself in points like that, not just in arguments, but in terms of my own believing. If I'm like, well, this is the standard of judgment that I'll have before I believe something, if something I don't think is true stands up to that, well, I guess I need to change my mind on the matter. I need to change my mind or I need to change the standard and be consistent with it. And that's been really helpful with me because it's so easy in our reasoning.
00:34:19
Speaker
to fall into a kind of confirmation bias thing where very low standards, if we agree with it or it benefits us, very high standards if we disagree or it harms us. And so that's a simple checklist rule that I apply. And I think something that people can use to get that discipline of assent in check. So Epictetus, for example, talks about
00:34:40
Speaker
having a set of scales that you weigh things by. He's like, you would never go to the market and you don't have a scale to measure up the weight of the fish you're buying next to the gold or something like this. When you think about things, you need a scale. What's that scale going to be? He's talking specifically about the dichotomy of control. We're talking about good and bad. Is that scale up to us? Is it our own? But I think that same thing is to be really clear about what
00:35:07
Speaker
really clear about what gets an assent from you or what justifies a belief and make sure that standard of standard criteria is consistent. That's one thing that I work on. Yeah, I think that's all. I think that's especially useful, things like consistency. And we really should put together a checklist of sorts, I think. It's probably the sorts of thing that both of us and I imagine many listeners as well have in our heads, but haven't yet made as explicit.
00:35:37
Speaker
I'm going to add it to my to-do checklist. Write this checklist. Got a checklist for our checklists. Another exercise I think I want to mention here is that one ascent, I think it's easy to think of it, and maybe I'll say a little bit more about this later when I come to challenges, easy to think about it as a matter of a simple snapshot. You get an impression. Next step is
00:36:05
Speaker
you agree to it or not and then next you move on. But often I think forming our beliefs, forming our habits is something we need to do repeatedly and
00:36:21
Speaker
one way to really internalize a belief or improve our thoughts is to make those correct assents over and over again. But we can also make it easier to assent to what is true by changing our behavior. And I think this is what
00:36:42
Speaker
things like exposure therapy help people do. So there are some people who really don't like going outside at all and they become hermits and rob themselves of social interaction. And I think one way to approach that would just be whenever they notice those ancient thoughts, try to rebuke them and then move on. But another way to take on those thoughts is to change the impressions you're receiving and
00:37:10
Speaker
that could involve, you know, slowly exposing yourself to more social situations, exposing yourself to going outside and doing that in a reasonable way, you know, scaling to scarier and scarier situations, as it were, until you're able to
00:37:27
Speaker
live out a good social life. So by doing that, you might have some belief, I cannot survive, but if I go to a house party, well, one way to show that belief is false is by getting to that state where you can go to the house party and noticing that you survive.
00:37:49
Speaker
And that's going to be, I think, useful in, in fact, you know, shaping your beliefs. And in that case, living, perhaps having a better, better social life. Yeah. It's like that evidence before the judge thing, right? Like we're not brains and vats who are self-generate. Sometimes it's, it's, it's, if
00:38:10
Speaker
If you go out into the world, you will get pieces of evidence, especially if you do it in a way that's like sustainable within your comp, like just a bit outside your comfort zone, you will get pieces of evidence. You will get types of experiential knowledge that can then play back into this feedback loop. So instead of generating change behavior, instead of generating change behavior through a set of thinking, you change your thinking through a set of behavior because that behavior then inputs evidence into the, into the thinking, right? It changes the course of the thinking.
00:38:40
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Awesome. Well, we want to move on to challenges, but I want to get just one, I want to get one last of my exercises here, which is suspending judgment.
The Art of Suspending Judgment
00:38:51
Speaker
And so we talked about spending judgment a lot. It's one of these basic stoic exercises, which is first things first, when you become a stoic, extend that space between impression and ascent.
00:39:02
Speaker
give yourself time to think, give yourself time to reflect. But I really just want to explain using the framework we've been talking about today, or at least my judge metaphor, which is to say, by suspending judgment, you're not just doing nothing. You're not just delaying the inevitable, or you're not just assuming a skeptical position.
00:39:18
Speaker
you're really increasing the length of the court case, right? And the view is that if I give this judge five seconds to deliberate, he might come up with a poor decision, but if I give him five minutes, I have space and time to introduce new arguments, to introduce new evidence, to actually change the decision. So even though the judge is the same, even though I'm the same person, whether I sent it in five seconds instantly or in five minutes or in a week,
00:39:45
Speaker
I can actually change the way that I relate to that impression by changing the evidence that I'm considering, changing the beliefs that I'm putting forward. And this was a big part of Stoicism, Epictetus's Discourses in Handbook. Discourses were the lectures, the handbook was something literally meant to be carried in your hand, and the function of the handbook actually was to serve that function, was in these moments of deliberation to introduce the appropriate quote, introduce the appropriate consideration
00:40:14
Speaker
to be evidence in that court case in your mind, right? And so suspending judgment, I guess I want to say spending judgment is a really crucial exercise, but I want to encourage people listening to be more active in that suspension of judgment. When you do suspend that judgment, don't just assume a skeptical position or delay, but actually actively introduce counterarguments, consider stoic thoughts or even your own thoughts and your own values in that situation, make it more of an active process.
00:40:42
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. I think that's useful. Cool. Well, what do we have for challenges? Yeah. So these are, I mean, a couple of ways you can take challenges. One is challenge in applying the discipline of ascent correctly and actually what challenges people have when they go about trying to succeed in this.
00:41:02
Speaker
So one thing that I wanted to call attention to, which Hado does a really good job of calling out, is this difference between impression and lekta. Lekta is a, you know, it's a technical Greek term translated as sayable, but the lekta is the thing that you assent to. So you don't assent to the, you know, the physical sense impression information. What you do is you, you represent that in some sort of proposition in your mind.
00:41:28
Speaker
Like, oh, there is a noisy car in front of me and that's a pain.
00:41:32
Speaker
That's annoying. That's the actual proposition that you construct from the sense information. And that is the lecta. That's the sayable. And that's the thing you assent to or don't assent to. One implication of this is that multiple people can have the same impression. We can all be walking down the street. One person goes, wow, it's a beautiful car. One person has total equanimity. And the person goes, wow, that car is super annoying and loud, or even I think it's ugly. So multiple people can have different lectas.
00:41:59
Speaker
different propositions from the same sense impression, right? And so I think the challenge, I think first of all, that's interesting to note and important to note, and Hadeau does a really good job of calling that out. But second, I think this challenge is, you know, how do we improve our sayables? How do we improve our electas? How do we become the kind of people that, you know,
00:42:22
Speaker
create charitable impressions of things or accurate impressions of things or stoic impressions of things right from the get-go. Because the person who has bad sayables or bad lecta, they're at a major disadvantage. They have to pay more attention. They have to be more careful. You think about someone like this with an anger problem, right? That person is going to get much worse impressions when they're encountering frustrating situations or the people in their life.
00:42:47
Speaker
they're going to get much worse propositions that their assent has to deal with. So I think one of these struggles or one of the questions is, you know, not just that discipline of assent, not just that moment of action, but how can you stack the odds in your favor by having these like nicer people on trial, these better things, these easier situations on trial instead of these complicated, frustrating, difficult ones, right? I think that's something that I'm, I'm thinking about personally, my own practice.
00:43:14
Speaker
Yeah, it's an important challenge. I think it's related to a...
00:43:21
Speaker
that the challenge that I have here, which is thinking of the discipline of judgment in a sort of snapshot way, misses that what you're aiming to do is training or virtue. So there's this fancy way of framing this, which is synchronic versus diachronic, where synchronic, that's just looking at a very specific time. What's the right action at this time? Diachronic, you're looking across time.
00:43:48
Speaker
And thinking about what's maybe the optimal behavior, optimal character to have in order to think through these situations well. Sort of an act versus character distinction. And I think one way in which this can come into one's life in interesting ways is that
00:44:06
Speaker
If you take anxiety, if someone has an anxious, irrational thought about, oh, I say they've got some logistic matter, they need to call someone to make sure it's sorted out, and they just have this urge that needs to be solved right away. For some people, that sensation
00:44:28
Speaker
in a sense, works well for them because they do, in fact, call the person right away. Whereas for others, it might be more distracting or debilitating. And I think that when you're thinking about this discipline of judgment coming to accurate judgments, in a sense, for the person who is, it's working relatively well,
00:44:55
Speaker
what they may do to practice this discipline perhaps isn't necessarily disputing those thoughts and by doing so perhaps breaking a system that works for them relatively well but instead seeing if they can perhaps maybe convert those into
00:45:14
Speaker
experiences that are less about anxiety and more about ways to practice caution and prudence and I suppose I think that's related to this issue about how can you ensure you have better impressions because both of these matters you need to take in I think the whole context really look at this diachronic picture and focus on these patterns in the life as opposed to thinking about
00:45:42
Speaker
for the specific impression, you know, what's going on, what do I need to do? Which makes things more difficult, you know, no one has to say. I love that idea of diachronic, this idea of really don't look at
00:45:56
Speaker
So your character is nothing but a set of snapshots over time, something you build over time, but your character influences each snapshot, right? And it's that kind of back and forth relationship that I think we're hitting on. Don't underplay the importance of moments in time. Each ascent matters. But don't forget that each of those ascents are only as strong or weak as the character that underpins them, right? And all you can do in the moment
00:46:22
Speaker
is kind of push things in a certain direction a little bit, but you can't just wake up one day and be a sage. You have to, like building muscle, Epictetus uses this analogy, you have to build it slowly and steadily through a series of actions, a series of reps, but it is virtue like muscle, it's diachronic, it's something that's gained over time, maintained over time. I like that, I think act versus character is really important,
00:46:50
Speaker
When we're talking about the discipline of ascent, we're not just talking about acts, even though those acts do matter. Another concern here I have is I was thinking about how to help the ignorant. The ignorant sounds intense in our language. It may be more like stoic talk. That's anybody who's not virtuous, myself included. But I mean, people that are going the wrong way, I guess.
00:47:12
Speaker
And for the Stoics, the main way you help the ignorant or you help the people who are getting things wrong is you show them contradictions, right? You show them the Stoics are very optimistic about the power of reason and the idea is something like, you know, if I reveal to somebody it's a Socratic method, right? We had an episode on the Socratic method that I would encourage people to go listen to. But if I reveal to somebody that they hold position A and position B and A and B are in contrast, they're going to have to either say they're
00:47:39
Speaker
they don't conflict or they're going to have to give up one of those people just have to do that right and that's one way to help people but and it's one way to kind of push people's ascents in the right direction is to make it clear maybe how their beliefs are conflicting with each other and how they might need to rectify those beliefs but
00:47:58
Speaker
What about, I think of this challenge, what about in our day and age, internet trolls, nihilists, people that are ironic. As Hadeau points out in his chapter, he says that all stoic and Socratic argument relies on both parties, accepting that something good is better than something bad, which seems like a pretty low bar. But it's like, what do you do with the people that refuse this proposition? What do you do with the people who aren't afraid of a contradiction?
00:48:24
Speaker
Maybe that's not the people listening to this podcast. Maybe that's not people who consider themselves practicing Stoics. But it makes me wonder about, you know, do any of these exercises work on those kinds of people? And is there any way to kind of get the point across or, or guide the essence or the belief formation of this group? It's confusing for me. I'm not really sure what to do about it.
00:48:47
Speaker
Right. I think it's made more confusing by the fact that Hado rightly points out though, as you know, we've been sort of talking about practicing this discipline in an internal way, doing it to build character, but another aspect of it is not just.
00:49:04
Speaker
and perfecting that inner discourse, but also working on your external discourse, how you talk with others, how you represent the world to others, and communicating those, ideally communicating these true beliefs you have or these epistemic virtues you have with others. So thinking about how to do that with people who are not playing the same game,
00:49:29
Speaker
is exceptionally, exceptionally difficult. And it might be the case that maybe that's, I think, the sort of thing where I think especially for many of these cognitive strategies, a precondition is ensuring that both people are interacting in good faith. And perhaps for those other cases, what's needed is
00:49:55
Speaker
less cognitive strategies and more, if we can, showing the person another way or trying to almost break their frame, reframe things for them in a way that properly motivates what we think is the right picture. But that's certainly a non-trivial thing to do.
00:50:15
Speaker
Yeah. And there's a thing about arguing in good faith. Like the person is the person, you know, it's just, it's just bugging you because they want to bug you. But I think there's some people, this people that I think are really lost, really struggling, who are the people who aren't willing to commit to something or aren't willing to play the game of saying, well, this is, this is a way to live. That's better than a different way to live. And if they're not playing that game, you know, I don't really know how to, I guess, yeah, it's like, how do you, how do you communicate that? I think you said, well,
00:50:45
Speaker
you try to shock them, you try to get a paradigm shift, not shock, but try to, you don't reason up, you try to make a kind of a perspective change. Yeah, I think so. I suppose there's another frame on this is, well, sometimes we're the ignorant people and acting in bad faith. And when do we catch
00:51:11
Speaker
when we're that person, you know, when you, going back thinking about this book, a liberated mind, you know, people who show up to therapy, often there's a sense in which they already know what's going on, right? They already know what they ought to do in the verbal sense, but there's still seeing a therapist and there's a question, well, why?
00:51:38
Speaker
is that and maybe they're deceiving themselves about something or going through the motions in some way. I think maybe you might see this with people who read self, so much self-help, listen to the podcast. They already know what's right in a sense. So what are they doing or are they merely procrastinating? Are they truly interacting in good faith? And of course we can be those people at certain times.
00:52:07
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's great. Don't ever be that. And they'll be part of the discipline of ascent. Don't ever be that person or try to always catch yourself if you're doing that. Right, right. Well, I think we have a few others here, but we're actually at a pretty good spot to wrap this up. What do you think? Yeah, sounds good to me. All right. Awesome. Yeah. So this was our bit on the discipline of judgment.
00:52:31
Speaker
we'll be covering the other two disciplines over the next few weeks, the discipline of desire, discipline of action to ground these conversations or revisiting Pierre Hadeau's inner citadel. It's not really a book review, but the sort of thing, I think it's good for both of us to go over again. And also that's what's going on. That's sort of feeding our thoughts right now. So if you want to dive deeper, you can also check out Hadeau's book as well.
00:53:01
Speaker
Great. Thanks, Caleb.
Closing and Course Promotion
00:53:02
Speaker
Thanks again for listening to Stoa Conversations. If you found this conversation useful, please give us a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and share it with a friend. And if you'd like to practice stoicism with Michael and I as well as others walking the stoic path, we are running our three-week course on stoicism applied. It'll be live with
00:53:28
Speaker
a forum interactive calls that I think will be an excellent way for a group of people to become a more stoic together. So do check that out at stomeditation.com slash course. And if that's not to your fancy, you can find links to the Stoa app as well as the Stoa letter, our newsletter on stoic theory and practice at stomeditation.com. Thanks for listening. Until next time.