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Stoic Psychology: Epictetus on Why What You Think is Up To You (Episode 23)
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Why did the Stoics believe what you think is up to you? What are the components of thought?
Caleb Ontiveros and Michael Tremblay discuss that in this episode. We start with the Stoic theory of mind and then move to how we can use their psychology to understand others and ourselves better. We then cover the radical Stoic ideas that no one does wrong willingly and the idea that weakness of will is impossible.
(00:53) Introduction
(03:14) The Hegemonicon
(07:12) Four Abilities of the Mind
(18:51) Choosing What To Believe
(31:41) The Importance of Preconceptions
(37:08) No One Does Wrong Willingly
(43:14) Thinking Better
***
Stoa Conversations is Caleb Ontiveros and Michael Tremblay’s podcast on Stoic theory and practice.
Caleb and Michael work together on the Stoa app. Stoa is designed to help you build resilience and focus on what matters. It combines the practical philosophy of Stoicism with modern techniques and meditation.
Download the Stoa app (it’s a free download): stoameditation.com/pod
Listen to more episodes and learn more here: https://stoameditation.com/blog/stoa-conversations/
Subscribe to The Stoa Letter for weekly meditations, actions, and links to the best Stoic resources: www.stoaletter.com/subscribe
Caleb Ontiveros has a background in academic philosophy (MA) and startups. His favorite Stoic is Marcus Aurelius. Follow him here: https://twitter.com/calebmontiveros
Michael Tremblay also has a background in academic philosophy (PhD) where he focused on Epictetus. He is also a black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. His favorite Stoic is Epictetus. Follow him here: https://twitter.com/_MikeTremblay
Thank you to Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music in the conversations: https://ancientlyre.com/
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Transcript
Introduction to Stoic Philosophy
00:00:00
Speaker
Another way of putting this is that everybody thinks they're kind of the hero in their own story, right? Everyone thinks there's a justification for what they're doing. And the reason for this is that our action, our impulse, is only ever a result of our ascent. There is no, and the stoic phrasing for this is that there is no impulse without ascent.
00:00:23
Speaker
Welcome to Stoic Conversations. My name is Caleb Ontiveros. In this conversation, Michael and I talk about Epictetus's psychology.
Understanding Stoic Psychology
00:00:32
Speaker
We start with the ancient Stoic theory of mind, then move to how we can use the Stoic psychology to understand others and ourselves better. In particular, we go through the radical Stoic ideas that no one does wrong willingly and that weakness of will is impossible.
The Human Mind in Stoicism
00:01:14
Speaker
Here is our conversation
00:01:17
Speaker
Unless you're really understanding the building blocks that Epictetus is working with, or the ancient Stoics in general, it can be really tempting to kind of put onto them contemporary conceptions of the human mind, more contemporary conceptions of how the mind works, and not even scientific conceptions, just these kind of folk psychology, intuitive perceptions of how the mind works. But when you do that, when you read those into the Stoics,
00:01:41
Speaker
you actually miss a lot of the value of what the Stoics are saying because you misunderstand what the Stoics are saying. And so whether or not, whether or not this stoic conception of human psychology is a hundred percent right.
00:01:54
Speaker
It's almost certainly not, because we have thousands of years of work pushing human psychology to its limit. They certainly got some things right, but whether or not it's entirely right is beyond the point, I think, by having an understanding in place.
00:02:14
Speaker
you're able to understand what they were saying. And if you understand what they were saying, you're able to take into account. So for me, it's not just this kind of descriptive account, it's this prescriptive account. It's this view of what we should do, how we should improve the workings of our minds to become better, more thoughtful people. And we can't really absorb that positive advice, absorb that recommendations unless we understand what they're talking about.
00:02:40
Speaker
So what I wanted to do with this podcast is kind of lay that foundation, the way that Epictetus provides it. And then when people go back and you're, you're seeing these quotes by Epictetus, you read Epictetus or your.
00:02:50
Speaker
you know, using the stoa app and you're going through these exercises that works with the stoic framing of the three areas of study or something like this, you'll have a lot greater sense of what you're working on, what parts of the mind we're talking about, what parts of kind of human thought we're talking about, and it will provide more value in those exercises. So does that sound good? Jump into it? Yeah, that sounds good to me. Let's do it.
00:03:14
Speaker
Yeah, great. So Stoic psychology is important because the Stoics saw, we've talked about this a lot in this podcast. The Stoics saw our fundamental identity as being with our minds. We are thinking things, which is not to say that we are things that also happen to think, but we are thinking things. Human beings are their minds.
00:03:40
Speaker
And there's a lot of upsides to this view. One of the upsides is this sense of this kind of great egalitarianism, the Stoics thought. You know, everybody was kind of equal because everybody was, you know, you're not, oh, are you tall or short? You're not, you know, are you rich or poor? You're all kind of on equal playing fields as human minds, you know, human souls.
Faculties of the Mind
00:04:04
Speaker
But even by soul, they're referring to a mind, they're not something abstract from the physical world. But the other flip side of that, so the Stoics viewed ourselves as our minds. The other flip side is that when we talk about self-improvement, we're really talking about mind improvement. We're talking about making sure the mind is performing as well as possible, is responding to the world as well as possible. Even when you're improving ethically,
00:04:34
Speaker
All really you're improving is the way your mind thinks, the way your mind responds to situations. When you're becoming a better person, you're just kind of mastering these psychological processes to become the best mind possible. You know, a mind that tends towards what is true and not a mind that tends towards, you know, thinking what is false, being misled, getting caught up in extreme emotions.
00:04:57
Speaker
So we want a sense of psychology because the entire stoic sense of self-improvement relies on self-improvement as just mind improvement. So we need to understand what the mind is to really understand self-improvement. Now, the first thing, the first, I guess, technical deviation the stoics make here, which is crucial to their philosophy but often gets left away, is the idea of the hegemonicon. And so the hegemonicon is the ruling faculty.
00:05:24
Speaker
So when we say something like, you are your mind, the Stoics themselves didn't think of the mind or the soul as being so focused on the brain. They thought of it as being this rational breath that permeates the entire body. And that's how they...
00:05:42
Speaker
understood you know you're able to move your fingers something happens something cuts your hand and you feel it you know you feel angry and your face flushes they understood maybe in a way that we could communicate to our central nervous system now or something like this they understood that what was happening in the mind was permeating the entire body so they didn't they didn't just correspond with the brain
00:06:03
Speaker
But what they did correspond as being our sense of self or our idea of ourselves is the hegemonicon, which is the ruling faculty, which is the part that controls everything else, the part that determines the rest of our body and the rest of our psychological responses. And in the hegemonicon, there was a number of faculties, so a number of capacities or things that the hegemonicon could do, the things that this ruling center, this really seat of identity could do.
00:06:31
Speaker
And some of those don't, some of those are what we relate to the senses. So that was sight, smell, hearing, taste, touch. That's very common in today's psychology is that this ruling faculty has those abilities to perceive. They also gave an interestingly, the skill of reproduction.
00:06:52
Speaker
So the ability to produce more hegemonicons, to have children and voice, the ability to make sounds. But in terms of our psychological processes that we care about, in terms of stoic practice, there was another four which were critical, which was impression, reflection, ascent, and impulse. And unless you're really across those four, stoic therapy and stoic psychology are not going to make sense. Those are the core
00:07:21
Speaker
rational abilities that are going to inform our choices, our behavior, our emotions, and really the outcomes of our lives. And that, again, is impression, reflection, ascent, and impulse. So in terms of what those are, we can go through those one by one. So the impulse is a representation of the world that the mind is able to hold.
00:07:47
Speaker
There was a lot of metaphors of this. This folks uses metaphor of kind of
Human vs Animal Reasoning
00:07:51
Speaker
like a seal, a ring sealing itself in wax. So there's this representation that
00:07:58
Speaker
or there was this understanding even then that the representation in wax might not be exactly the same as the ring that gave that seal, but you're referring to kind of that wax representation, that wax impression that gets left in your mind. And then there was impulse, and impulse is a psychological force, a motivational force, away or towards or away from an object, towards or away from the impression in this case.
00:08:27
Speaker
So on an animal sense, the view is that a dog can see food and get to the impulse towards that food. They receive an impression of food. Likewise, a dog can see a larger dog and receive an impulse to run away from that dog. A quote here from Philo is that the animal is superior to the non-animal.
00:08:48
Speaker
So this is plants or rocks in two respects, impression and impulse. An impression is formed by the approach of an external object which strikes the mind through sensation. So again, that metaphor of striking, they're left with this impression and then some impressions won't produce any impulse, but if it's about something that the animal by nature is directed towards like food or by nature is directed away from like a predator, they'll then receive an impulse.
00:09:16
Speaker
And this is a really basic input output way of thinking about the mind. And the Stoics thought this was, this was, you know, representative of animal thinking is it was information in, it kind of goes through.
00:09:31
Speaker
nature, so instinct or nurture, but nurture in this case is training. You can train an animal to have a different response to food, right? An animal might receive the impulse of food and they might run towards it, but you might train them to sit. You might train them to stay where they are, but it's still kind of input output. They get the information and then they get the impulse outwards that goes through this process of going through either their nature as an animal or their training as an animal.
00:10:01
Speaker
And so that's the first two parts, impression and impulse. Now, the next two, the other two are reflection and ascent.
00:10:12
Speaker
And I have a quote here by origin that I'm taking are from Long and Sedley's The Hellenistic Philosophers, which is a compilation of ancient sources on what the Stoics thought. So a lot of, we've lost a lot of the original sources from the Stoics, but what we have is we have other people quoting them, discussing them.
00:10:33
Speaker
And Long and Sadly is a great collection. The Hellenistic Philosopher is a great collection because it sorts those quotes by theme or by topic. So Orgin, who was a Christian philosopher in On Principles, talks about how humans differ from animals in terms of their psychology, according to the Stoics.
00:10:52
Speaker
And they note that a rational animal, however, in addition to its impressionistic nature, has reason, which passes judgment on impressions, rejecting some of these and accepting others. So the distinction here is that, you know, if a dog is just impression and impulse, then a human also has reason
00:11:15
Speaker
which is capable of rejecting some impressions and accepting others. Reason, which can also be called reflection, is this self-reflective capacity that humans have. So if animals are input-output, the human has the special ability, based on the way our mind works, to pause things and go, whoa, whoa, okay. I have received, you know, I saw this, was it true?
00:11:40
Speaker
Is it, is it the case? What is my impression, a reflection of reality? Humans actually have the capacity to do that, to think, to self-reflect. And in that moment, self-reflection is not just pausing, it's then judging, then saying, okay, yes, I do think this impression reflects reality and I will feel what I will feel if I take this to be true. Or no, I don't think this impression reflects reality and I won't take it to be true.
00:12:07
Speaker
And so the way I like to describe it is that if that, if, if impression and impulse in an animal is like, oh, there's like a little black box where it's input output and what, what is produced the other end is dependent upon their nature and their training.
00:12:23
Speaker
For humans, it's not a black box. For humans, we have the capacity to engage in an action in between that impression and that impulse, and that action is this reflection. Ascent is the judgment. Do I assent to it as true, assent to it as false, or suspend judgment? And then the result, the impulse, the motivation, the feeling, the passion, the emotion, the output is going to be dependent upon what my reflection is, how I think about things.
00:12:52
Speaker
And those are the four crucial faculties of stoic psychology. And any sort of stoic training is going to focus on attacking one of those, is going to focus on improving that process, whether that is
00:13:07
Speaker
As some stokes talk about recognizing that impressions are impressions, recognizing that impressions aren't true, whether that is gaining criteria and rule sets to better evaluate those impressions when you're in, when you're reflecting, when you're doing an assent, whether that is a reminder to assent very carefully what it's about important things.
00:13:28
Speaker
or whether that's a reminder that you can't control what you feel or you can't determine what you feel once you've been carried away. So once you've made a judgment and you've accepted that, your body's going to kind of have a natural reaction. And so the moment to intervene is in that moment of judgment and reflection. The moment to intervene is not in kind of the suppression of feeling.
Stoic Decision-Making
00:13:52
Speaker
All of these ideas, all of these stoic therapeutic ideas are working off this
00:13:57
Speaker
this four-part system of the human mind or the hegemonica and the ruling faculty. Anything you want to add there, Caleb? Yeah. Well, how do you think about the following description? So as the Stoics are trying to do or trying to live according to nature, that requires an understanding of human nature. And as humans, the Stoic philosophers saw us as choice-making machines. We are choice-making creatures.
00:14:27
Speaker
And what are we making choices on? Well, we're making choices on the impressions we receive and the impulses we have. And how do we make those choices, if you will, via reflection, controlling our attention, deciding to pause and a sense, deciding what to accept as true, deciding what to judge as true. How does that sound?
00:14:52
Speaker
Yeah, much more to the point. That's perfect. I think that's great. And I think to add to that, where we're making choices about if those impressions are reflections of nature. So that point about going back to living in accordance with nature, we're making choices about this impression doesn't represent the way the world actually is. And that's the way that your choice can be in accordance with nature or not, is your choice is like, yeah, I think it's good to do this. Well, is it actually good to do this? Or I think this matters.
00:15:22
Speaker
or I think I'm actually harmed when someone insults me, is that really the way the world is? Is that if you say yes to that impression that this person assaulted me so they deserve anger, they deserve revenge, if you say yes to that impression, is that choice representing the way the world actually is? Is it in accordance with nature?
00:15:42
Speaker
And that's kind of the crux of ethical behavior, which you can't do unless you've mastered or understood these kind of psychological processes. One thing I wanted to add to this is that assent is, not all assents are equal, I think is one thing that I wanted to add. So there's this concept of stoic psychology as well about weak assents and strong assents.
00:16:03
Speaker
And so it is not just that I receive an impression and I say, well, this is true or this is not true. So someone might say to me, you know, virtue is the only good. And so now I have this idea in my mind, virtue is the only good. And then I assent to that it's true. I suspend judgment. I don't really know if I agree with that or I say, no, that's false. Virtue is not the only good.
00:16:24
Speaker
There's different strengths of ascent. So I can ascent to that strongly or weakly according to the Stoics. And a strong ascent is one that is very difficult to have your mind changed. And a weak ascent is one that's very easy to have your mind changed.
00:16:43
Speaker
And so the stoic goal is to have not just the cent correctly, but have strong ascents. And strong ascent is caused by the other things you believe to be true.
00:16:55
Speaker
So if someone is a very persuasive speaker and I agree with them in the moment, I might assent to that in the moment and go, yeah, yeah, okay. But then I walk away from the impressive speech and I think about it and it starts bouncing off my other beliefs and it starts not that assent, that judgment starts like not really fitting in with my other beliefs, I'll get knocked out of it because it was a weak assent, it was a weakly held judgment and I'll lose it.
00:17:18
Speaker
So what you really want is you want, and this is why the Stoics talk about philosophy as being an interconnected system. So you can't just take the ethics. You have to understand everything and everything has to fit together because if
00:17:32
Speaker
If your ethical beliefs are not informed by your beliefs about the world, the rest of the world, you know, metaphysics, physics, things like this, then when you study those, it'll knock around your ethical beliefs. So your goal here is to not just believe the right things, but to believe the right things strongly.
00:17:52
Speaker
and to have strong a sense of the kind that other people couldn't persuade you, otherwise that you can't lose these kinds of things. We'll talk a bit more about that later, but I guess I just wanted to make the distinction that not all ascents are equal. You can believe the same thing with more or less strength is basically the insight here. That makes sense. Moving on to Epictetus, what I just mentioned with the hegemonicon, those four faculties,
00:18:18
Speaker
That is basic Stoic thinking. If you don't believe that the other things, well, you're not an ancient Stoic, all ancient Stoics agree with those as being the four essential kind of faculties of the mind and all of their therapy, all of their way of thinking about human character development is based upon training those four faculties. What Epictetus does is he makes this really interesting distinction. So the Hegemonicon is the ruling faculty.
00:18:46
Speaker
And he makes this distinction with what in Greek is called the proheiruses. But that is just like, that is to grasp something is the proheiruses. So it's often translated in English as the faculty of choice, selection, choosing. And so Epictetus talks less about the hegemonica and the ruling faculty. He talks more about the faculty of choice.
The Faculty of Choice
00:19:10
Speaker
And the distinction there that I argue at least is that the faculty of choice only contains three of the four, the three of the four kind of rational faculties. So it is reflection, assent, and impulse. It is not impression. And the reason for that, I think, is that impressions are not up to us. So other people can force impressions on us.
00:19:38
Speaker
Other people can, you know, they can tie you to a chair, open your eyes and make you watch a movie. They can bring an air horn when you're trying to sleep. Other people can force impressions onto you. But the other three things, those only have to do with you. Your reflection, your ascent, and then what you feel after you ascent, those only have to do with you. So what Epic fetus does is he kind of tightens his concern.
00:20:04
Speaker
to just the pro-hiresist, to just the faculty of choice. And that's what he talked about when he talks about self-development. I think it's a really interesting difference. I use the metaphor of kind of like the judge. So the faculty of choice is the judge, maybe the judge's reflection, the jury is assent and the executioner is impulse, whatever, however you wanna stretch this metaphor. But the impression is the person coming into the judge. The impression is the person coming into the courthouse. And you can't control that person coming in,
00:20:34
Speaker
But everything else is up to you. Everything else is a reflection of who you are and what you are. And so that's why Epictetus really focuses his language and his work on the Prohyrosys instead of the Hedgemonicon. So this is a quote from Handbook 9 from Epictetus.
00:20:48
Speaker
where he really focuses, he's talking about the proheiruses here. Whenever I say choice, he's talking about the proheiruses reflection, ascent, impulse. And we also get that really strong connection between this and identity. We said that at the start of the episode, but we see this here in Epictetus. So he says, disease is an impediment to the body, but not to choice.
00:21:07
Speaker
the Prohyrosis, unless choice wills it to be. Lameness is an impediment to the leg, but not to choice. Tell yourself the same with regard to everything that happens to you, for you'll find that it acts as an impediment to something else, but not to yourself.
00:21:23
Speaker
And so the idea is this, this proheiruses becomes this kind of core that cannot get affected by external things. And it becomes this reflection of you that your job is to cultivate and perfect. That's the distinction there that I think a lot of people lose reepictetus, which I think is, is a, is a great innovation of his to focus on those three parts.
00:21:45
Speaker
Yeah, that's right. We sometimes talk about stoicism being a matter of identifying with your mind, controlling with what's in your mind. But Epictetus helps us be more precise or focused on specific aspects of us and of our mind. And that helps us focus on our ability to reason and less about worrying about particular impressions or sensations that
00:22:12
Speaker
arrive due to no cause of our
Stoicism in Practice
00:22:15
Speaker
own. I think it's a common experience for anyone who's meditated to notice that impressions will just occur even without any prompting. If you just sit for a while, you'll notice particular sensations arise, particular thoughts, and it's what happens next that matters for the stomach.
00:22:32
Speaker
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00:22:59
Speaker
Yeah, and as you point out, that's often happening when you're meditating in a quiet room by yourself. You know, try to walk you down the street and you'll be accosted with everything. Whether that's rude people, loud noises, smells. These are not the things, these are not reflections of you. Even though they become parts of your mind, they're not really reflections of you.
00:23:21
Speaker
Epictetus shrinks that idea and that focus down to just the reflection, ascent, and the consequences of the ascent, the impulses. Anything you wanted to add to this before moving on, Caleb? I think this is one of Epictetus's most useful philosophical innovations, if you will.
00:23:38
Speaker
a very clear statement of the stuck view of identity and a actually sort of essential concept, this concept of pro-Hyrussis or to use the English language, this idea that we are choice-making beings is crucial and still underrated, I think, by some modern stuff. Yeah. I agree. And it's how we
00:24:08
Speaker
It's how we preserve a lot of equanimity or preserve a lot of calm in difficult situations by making and understanding that distinction. It's also what prevents a lot of anxiety. I was just reading, just before this, I was just reading Epictetus' Discourses and I didn't write this one down, but he had a line where it says, you know, whenever anyone's anxious, I just ask myself, what do they want that's outside of their choice? Because they can't be anxious if they don't want anything outside of their choice.
00:24:35
Speaker
is that this is why the liar player, the musician can play by themselves without stress, but gets nervous in front of the crowd, because what they want is the crowd to like them. But the crowd liking them is outside of their choice.
00:24:49
Speaker
And when he says that, he doesn't say, no, not up to you. He's not even saying, you can't control it. He means literally it's outside of those psychological faculties. It's outside of that. It's in the world beyond your reflection, ascent, and impulse.
Preconceptions and Moral Progress
00:25:08
Speaker
Another thing that I wanted to bring up that Epictetus raises, and he actually focuses this, so now we have the
00:25:15
Speaker
So at this point in the podcast, we have kind of the, the, I would say the foundation of stoic psychology. Okay. That's how the stoics of the mind works. Well, what does that mean for progression? What does that mean for me becoming happier? What does that mean for me dealing with emotions, anxiety? What does that mean for me becoming a better person? So we can say, okay, that's the foundational understanding. What does that have to do with, with self-improvement?
00:25:38
Speaker
And now we'll get into some of those ideas and why that understanding of psychology was necessary to go there. But one other thing that Petitas talks about when he talks about self-improvement is the idea of preconceptions. These are prolepsis. You can almost think of these as innate ideas. I think innate ideas has a fair amount of philosophical baggage, but there is this idea of them being, they are innate and they are ideas. They are ways of thinking about things.
00:26:09
Speaker
And what preconceptions are is they are human psychological tendencies to put things in certain kinds of buckets. And so a really easy example of a preconception is something like good. That's a preconception.
00:26:28
Speaker
So every human being understands what it means for something to be good. What it means is I want it. It's better to have it than not to have it. If given the choice, I would choose it. That's what it means for something to be good. And that's a preconception that we all share. This is contrast of the idea of a concept or a non innate idea. And these are ones that we
00:26:51
Speaker
make over time. Kids aren't born knowing what a horse is. Kids aren't born knowing what video games are. These are things that they develop over time experiencing things. But these innate ideas are shared by all humans. These pre-concepts are shared by everybody.
00:27:06
Speaker
And so what Epictetus says with our moral progression is that the issue is not actually these pre-concepts, the issue is applying them correctly in particular situations. So we all share the idea of good, but the issue is, well, what actually is good? What should I actually apply that label to? What should I put into that bucket? We all know what it means for something to be bad,
00:27:33
Speaker
about what should I put into that bucket? What should I label as bad? To do some Epictetus quotes here on this, when he's talking about how all us humans share this in preconceptions, he says, hence the Jews, Syrians, Egyptians and Romans hold conflicting views, not about whether holiness should be valued above all else and pursued in all circumstances, but whether the specific action of eating pork is holy or unholy.
00:27:57
Speaker
So all humans share this category, you know, wholly or unholy, I think is a bit culturally specific, but this idea of at the very least good, proper, the correct thing to do or not. And the battle there is how you apply it and the disagreement is about how you apply those categories.
00:28:17
Speaker
The reason this is important, psychologically speaking, in terms of action is it's these innate ideas, it's these preconceptions, it's these categories which form the link between judgment and impulse. The reason you feel an impulse is because you've applied one of these emotionally charged preconceptions to a situation. So this is why it matters for our behavior. In other words, if I say that's a tree,
00:28:44
Speaker
I don't really feel anything. If I say that's a good tree, or it is good to have trees, that's going to be motivating to me. That's going to make me pursue conservationism. It's going to make me feel grateful that I have this tree in my neighborhood. Likewise, if I say that is poor, that's concept. There's no application of a preconception. There's no motivation. Or say that person's eating pork. But if I say it's good to eat pork,
00:29:12
Speaker
then it's going to be motivational, whereas it's bad, it's unholy, it's unjust to be doing that. That's going to provide this kind of motivational force. And so Epictetus, another quote by him is about how almost all of actually making use of impressions. So he talks about our moral progress as making correct use of impressions. So the impression comes in, we reflect and we assent to it correctly. But what it means to make correct use of impressions is
00:29:42
Speaker
both these kind of factual claims to reject the ones that are false and accept the ones that are true, but also to correctly apply to make sure when we're judging these impressions that we've correctly applied our preconceptions. We've correctly placed things in the appropriate value bucket. So another quote he has here is, what does it mean then to become properly educated? It is to learn to apply our natural preconceptions to particular cases in accord with nature.
00:30:09
Speaker
That's it. That's what he says. To be properly educated as a stoic is to know how to take these values you have of good, bad, evil, unjust, unholy, holy, and to know when a particular impression arises, when a particular case arises, how to categorize it, which bucket to put it into.
00:30:28
Speaker
But that's a really kind of simple, if you thought of like one way of looking at moral progress, one way of looking at self-improvement, that I think would be the one Epictetus take. That is kind of, I think a really interesting idea. And something that we've lost too in our modern discussion of stoicism, there's not as much of a focus on preconceptions as at least Epictetus would like there to be. So I know that's a lot. So happy for you to jump in, Caleb. What do you think about that?
00:30:53
Speaker
Yeah, well, it seems like the main takeaway for me is what does it mean to be properly educated? If he just asks what it means to make good value judgments, and that means
00:31:09
Speaker
using these sort of more abstract ideas like good, better, well, with respect to the particular cases, with respect to concrete cases. So we have some idea of goodness, justice, and what our job is to do in a variety of different roles is determine what concretely does that look like. And that's the main idea here.
00:31:34
Speaker
Yeah, I've also quite persuaded by it seems pretty straightforward. I don't think they're being innate or shared. Is that important?
Judgments and Emotions
00:31:42
Speaker
But maybe you do. So like that doesn't seem to me to be truly important to the practical upshot. I think the practical upshot of it is that it's not about as good, good to push on that. I think the practical upshot is that it's not about retraining yourself.
00:32:00
Speaker
in terms of the issue is not that you think some things are good. The issue is that you think the wrong things are good. The issue is not that you feel disgust or vengeance or anger. Maybe those are more extreme emotions, but it's not wrong that you feel hesitant about some things or concern. It's that it's the wrong thing. So it's this movement away from
00:32:25
Speaker
Look, there's nothing wrong with what you're feeling at the level of what you're feeling. That is what every human will feel if they make that judgment. That is a natural human response to when you put something in the bucket of being bad or being disgusting or being awful. You are going to feel the things you're feeling. The mistake then is not your emotional response. The mistake was the categorization beforehand.
00:32:51
Speaker
And what you can train yourself in is not in the response because every human will have that response if they categorize something like that. What you train yourself in is in the categorization. That for me is the distinction, is this focus on, which maybe is not an intuition you share, but this idea that ethically you're feeling the way you're supposed to feel.
00:33:14
Speaker
if you think this is happening, if you think this is true. This is the way humans are supposed to feel when they think these situations are happening. If you're feeling angry, if you're feeling vengeful, these are the ways people will feel if they think the things they think. The issue is you made a categorization mistake. You thought the wrongs. And that kind of shift, that kind of shift was an important one for me and my progress.
00:33:39
Speaker
Yeah, I think that idea, this idea of the focus on judgments, of course, there's this idea that what we think shapes how we experience the world and hence when we have vindictive thoughts, we're going to have a specific kind of experience.
00:33:56
Speaker
And our focus should be on our reflective abilities, on improving our thoughts instead of, say, trying to have the same thoughts with a different experience or something like that. Absolutely. That makes a lot of sense to me. I can see why some people, it might be for some people's view of human nature as important to this sort of thing as a sort of shared conception or is innate. But for, on the practical upshot for the bit that I just said, it seems like you can
00:34:24
Speaker
have that picture of the mind without assuming that it needs to be some sort of innate capacity or something like that. Yeah, I think you could lose the, I think you could lose the innateness. I think it also speaks a bit to the kind of egalitarianism of socialism and this idea that it's not like we
00:34:47
Speaker
It's not like if I meet another 30-year-old who was born in a different country, that now we can't have these conversations. We can't have ethical conversations because our ways of understanding the world are irreconcilable. Bickiness's point is that, no, they're very irreconcilable because you agree on a lot. You agree on, which might sound trivial, but it's important, you agree that you should be doing good things. You agree that you should be avoiding bad things.
00:35:13
Speaker
There's a lot you share in common. So there's a lot of space for kind of communication. I think that's an upshot, maybe not in my own practice, but it's an upshot in the way that you kind of approach, I guess, ethical conflict or disagreements.
00:35:25
Speaker
Yeah, that's a good point. Now, I suppose that is realized throughout different stoic, different concrete cases, you know, how they think of the issue of people doing wrong, of how they think about whether you should generally refrain from judging people and the sort of these sorts of ideas. And those are driven by the thought that we all have these similar ideas of good and bad at the highest level. We're the same sorts of
00:35:52
Speaker
creatures and that makes their philosophy more egalitarian than some of its ancient competitors. That's a good point.
00:36:04
Speaker
you know, these people are terrible people, these foreigners, they don't, you know, we can't, we can't, we, they're just built different. So we can't like, agree with them. This is an ancient that like, this is me pretending to be an ancient stoic, having this conversation. It's like that step is pushing back against that, you know, the Egyptians, the Syrians, you know, the Jewish people, you can, you can have conversations with these different cultures, even if you're a Roman, which would have been, you know, Epictetus is Epictetus is cultural background. And that I think is, uh,
00:36:34
Speaker
you know, for the time, perhaps a bit more insightful for the time than it might be today where we might share those views, given our immense globalization.
Stoic Intellectualism
00:36:43
Speaker
Hi all, it's Caleb, just interrupting to remind you that we've just launched a new newsletter, a new newsletter, and it's called the Stoa Letter. Find it at StoaLetter.com, and if you sign up, we'll send you a free PDF of an course that Michael and I have put together.
00:37:01
Speaker
It's seven lessons on managing negative emotions. Cheers. And so one thing you raised is this idea of forgiving others. So I want to get into some practical implications of the psychology as well, some other ones. I'm not going to add any more ideas about the mind, but I'm going to add some ideas about the way this has to do with our moral development.
00:37:24
Speaker
So one implication this stoic psychology has for moral development is intellectualism. Intellectualism, in other words, is the idea that
00:37:33
Speaker
We do the things we do because we think they are the right thing to do. In other words, an implication of this is that no one does wrong willingly. It's a very controversial claim for the ancient Stoics, but one that they're committed to. No one does wrong willingly. Another way of putting this is that everybody thinks they're kind of the hero in their own story, right? Everyone thinks there's a justification for what they're doing. And the reason for this is that our action, our impulse,
00:38:02
Speaker
is only ever a result of our assent. There is no, and the still phrasing for this was that there is no impulse without assent. That was something they were committed to. Now, assents can be very conscious, you know, should I steal this food or should I not? Should I, you know, it can be something more trivial. Should I go to the party or should I not?
00:38:28
Speaker
But even when we're acting without reflecting, even when we're acting without having those kinds of conversations with ourselves, those really big dramatic choices, we're still assenting to impressions, we're still reflecting, we're still making decisions.
00:38:41
Speaker
And because all behavior and motivation comes from those decisions, those judgments, there is no, going back to Epictetus' idea of preconceptions, there's nobody that does anything unless they think it's the good thing to do or they think they're properly avoiding the bad thing. I know that's controversial. I'm quite persuaded by the stoic account of psychology. I've had some time to chew on this and find it quite persuasive.
00:39:04
Speaker
But an implication of that is in your own behavior, when you're acting a certain way, evaluate what your values are, what your thoughts were, that is feeding into that behavior. The second, the other thing to that is this idea of this kind of radical forgiveness, which is this idea that if you thought with that person that insulted you, that hurt you, that you're angry with, if you thought what they thought, you would do the same.
00:39:29
Speaker
So they have an issue of ignorance, not an issue of some sort of perverse or distorted character. So then the question is, if no one does wrong willingly, why do I end up doing all these stupid things? Why do I do these things that I regret when I'm upset with myself? Well, that doesn't really seem to make sense. And the stoic account of that is a lot of it can be put up to what I call hasty judgment or
00:39:59
Speaker
non-critical or careless assent. And so that means is that, look, every decision you make, every choice, every action is the result of the judgment process. Just some of those judgments are more careful, deliberate, thoughtful than others. And some of them are more hasty.
00:40:18
Speaker
maybe even subconscious as in you weren't even aware that you did it or non-reflective. I wouldn't use the word subconscious with the Stoics, but I would say more non-reflective as in you didn't even think about the fact that you were doing it when you did it, right?
Correcting Mistakes
00:40:33
Speaker
And so the mistake is not, the mistake is not one
00:40:41
Speaker
of there being something inherently wrong with you, something distorted with you, but the mistake is either ignorance, and if it's not ignorance, it's carelessness.
00:40:52
Speaker
It is not, hey, Epictetus talks about when an impression strikes you, the first thing you could do, the first step you can take to becoming a better stoic is just learning to say, stop impression. I recognize you're not reality. I'm going to take a second to judge you, like a, like a piece of, like a coin of gold. Let me take a bite into you to test you to see if you're real or not.
00:41:13
Speaker
I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to be careful about this. And so a lot of our mistakes, they either, well, first of all, they come from ignorance, but second of all, if they're not from ignorance, they come from being hasty. And that's an interesting way to think about our flaws, thinking about flaws as, as hastiness, carelessness, a lack of focus and attention. That's an interesting distinction. And I think a helpful distinction because ultimately carelessness is something totally up to you.
00:41:39
Speaker
to fix and totally in your power to fix because you can train yourself to apply attention. You can train yourself to apply focus. And so recognizing that a lot of the mistakes are coming from a lack of focus, a lack of intentionality. Well, that puts a lot of power into your hands to fix it. And any, any thoughts on that?
00:41:59
Speaker
Yeah, I think going back to our initial four ingredients of the mind, why do you get this view that everything you do is the result of some judgment or a judgment related process? Well, when you make mistakes, going back to the four ingredients of mind, that indicates that maybe you weren't
00:42:20
Speaker
reflecting or pausing when you should have, or that you assented to something too quickly, or that particular impulses were the result of earlier judgments that were done in error. So there's this focus on
00:42:39
Speaker
managing of improving these parts of our mind to reflect, to judge things as correct or not, and then act on the ideal impulses. Yeah, that's totally right. Another reason, another thing that causes bad behavior, bad behavior in us, you know, if we think, well, I'm not ignorant, I know what kind of life I want, why am I acting poorly?
00:43:08
Speaker
Another reason for this that fits in this sense of stoic psychology is what Epictetus refers to as weakness. And what weakness is, I talked before about strong ascents and weak ascents.
00:43:20
Speaker
What weakness is, is when you've assented to something weekly. So that means that you believe something, you assented to something is true, but it didn't really correspond or fit with your other values. It didn't correspond or fit well with the rest of the way you view the world. So I give this example of like, I'm going to study on Saturday. Maybe you assented that.
00:43:44
Speaker
And in the moment, you believe that. But you've assented to it quite weekly because you also very much value partying. You very much value spontaneity. You very much think those are the secrets to a good life. And so when it comes to be Saturday and you come to sit down and have the discipline to study, you don't find that a sense motivating. If anything, you actually lose that judgment and you switch over to a different judgment being that I'm not going to study. So you lose that discipline.
00:44:13
Speaker
And the interesting thing here, I guess, is that discipline then, good behavior, is this culmination of both attention in the moment, but that attention doesn't happen in a vacuum, right? We're not only our last choice. We are a culmination of our choices and our beliefs. And so that choice then gets measured against those other values. And if it corresponds and fits well with them, it becomes very strong. It becomes very motivating. It becomes very empowering.
00:44:43
Speaker
If it doesn't, it's quite weak and it can be knocked off path really easily. So that is a conception of why we fail on Saturday to act the way we might've wanted to on Thursday when we told ourselves we were gonna study. Well, it's because your motivation was fleeting because your motivation was a single judgment in a web of beliefs and the other beliefs did not support that judgment.
00:45:11
Speaker
So that's an account on, that's Epictetus's account of kind of this, he would call it, he calls a weakness and it's a weakness not to, not personal weakness, it's a weakness of your judgments, your beliefs. They're weak beliefs instead of strong ones.
00:45:25
Speaker
Yeah, well, yeah, often they're almost just sort of made lazily, right? So last night I had this estimate that, oh, we're going to play a game. I'm just going to take 45 minutes. You know, I didn't think through that estimate very much at all. I just sort of said it out loud. It was really quick. And it turned out the game was much longer than 45 minutes, which I probably could have figured out if I had taken, you know, even an additional 10 to think about.
00:45:47
Speaker
the amount of steps involved in the game and then, you know, the fact that there are some new players and that I could have come up with a much more accurate estimate, but I did. And I think something that...
00:45:57
Speaker
is always a useful reminder in ancient philosophy is that a lot of bigger mistakes one makes in life are kind of like these simple mistakes I made about estimating the length of the game. I think that's always interesting. They're just other kinds of mistakes and judgments, other kinds of hastiness or some other sort of advice and thought.
00:46:23
Speaker
One idea that I think that's worth mentioning here is this, if you have some sort of reservations about this picture, it does put more responsibility on the individual. And it says, the reason why you do many things is often because of these judgments you're making. It's not because of some outside factor. And I think that
00:46:49
Speaker
It's useful sometimes to sort of step back and think about yourself as another person and imagine if I just saw another person in this position, what would I assume or what would I predict they were thinking? What would I predict they want?
00:47:10
Speaker
sort of in a similar way to the way an economist has this idea of a reveal preference. You know, given this person's behavior, what do I think their behavior reveals? You know, they say they really don't enjoy going out every evening, but it turns out they do it. So maybe there's something about that that they probably do want or do judge is good in some sense.
00:47:37
Speaker
So that's one other one thought I have. If you have some sort of resistance to this, you know, maybe try stepping back and it's always a useful exercise to see, you know, what do my, what does my behavior reveal about my judgments and preferences? Yeah, I totally agree with that. Like what you're doing there, Caleb, which is the difference is that instead of saying, Oh,
00:47:58
Speaker
Instead of having these behaviors and your preferences be separate things, like, well, I want this, but I want A, but I'm doing B. I want to study, but I'm going out. You say, well, no, what does, what does your behavior reveal about what you want? You know, there's, there's some sort of causal link there.
Habituation and Beliefs
00:48:16
Speaker
And so we can reverse engineer what we value from how we act. And now there's another thing, another thing that Epic Titus mentions also is the kind of power of habituation.
00:48:28
Speaker
So the idea that when you dispose yourself to a kind of, so again, we're not, I would say the pushback to this, I would say the downside to this.
00:48:38
Speaker
would be that it's very tempting to look at this as if it's happening in a void. It lends itself very well to as if it's happening in a void, which is to say that I am a person without history, without context. I am a mind reflecting on an impression in a void. And what do I decide to be good? And that's just not what's happening, right? As I try to give that sense of strong and weaker a sense,
00:49:03
Speaker
the strength you can, the strength you can ascend to something or kind of make convictions or judgments is going to depend on your other. There's also a sense of habituation. So there's the sense of when you, when you lend yourself to a kind of behavior, it becomes easier to, to, to, this was recognizing it becomes easier to do that again. So if you, if you are in the tendency of getting angry, it becomes easier to get angry. So you have to kind of fight against this momentum. So when we're experiencing things, we're,
00:49:28
Speaker
Ultimately, the causal link is a judgment, but it's also being influenced by a series of past judgments and that kind of web of belief that creates your personality and who you are and what you value. Another thing that Epictetus talks about is that many of these ascents will be forced. So Epictetus uses the example that if it's sunlight out, you're outside and it's sunny, you can't believe it's not daytime.
00:49:59
Speaker
You can try. You can try to imagine what it would be like to be in the Matrix. You can try to imagine what it would be like that some evil demon is deceiving you or something. But you have to believe it's day. The mind cannot go against such a strong, clear impression of the truth.
00:50:17
Speaker
really strong clear impressions of the truth will just compel the mind and force this process. Those are those are cataleptic impressions which we haven't we haven't gotten into but those are impressions does the idea of impressions that are so clearly true that they just put they just push their way through this this rational process. Likewise we can also feel that way about things that aren't true if we depending on our other beliefs like
00:50:43
Speaker
I don't know, I'm trying to get an example. Like if I'm really cynical and I think that somebody, if I think a friend is likely to betray me and I haven't done any kind of stoic work or mindfulness to think of that, and then they do some questionable behavior, it might just seem really clear to me that they're betraying me. And I just can't think differently because just with my kind of perspective, with my degree of stoic progress, I just can't think, like that is just, that just seems so true to me in that situation that I don't have the ability to kind of abstract and step outside of that.
00:51:10
Speaker
Or if I do have that ability, it would take almost like an inhuman amount of will in the moment to be very cautious, to really suspend the judgment.
00:51:19
Speaker
So all of this is just a long way of saying that Epictetus doesn't think nor is it true that we're making these judgments in a vacuum. And when you account for that, when you account for that, it makes a lot of what seems questionable about this view go away. But what we are doing, we're not doing these these reflections in a vacuum, but we are making these reflections with our faculty of judgment. So to go back to the courtroom example, you know,
00:51:43
Speaker
You don't all have the perfect judge. You don't all have the perfect courtroom, but it is your courtroom. It is up to you in that sense. It is what you're responsible for in that sense, but some are just going to be better worse than others.
The Ideal of Stoic Wisdom
00:51:56
Speaker
And that's the entire point of putting work in. We can't just snap our fingers and be perfect stoics immediately. What do you think about that? I think that, yeah, that sounded really good. I think that was a good last defense of what FITIS is up to.
00:52:11
Speaker
Trying my best. Is there anything else you want to add to this? Yeah, I just wanted to add, I just wanted to explain at the very end what wisdom is. So what does it mean to be a good person? Well, given this account, what wisdom is, so I talked about this idea of strong beliefs, right? Versus weak beliefs, strong sense, weak sense. What wisdom is, is when you know everything. So they talk about the wise person as being perfectly wise, the stoics do.
00:52:34
Speaker
They also say, which is really controversial, is that you can't have one virtue and not the others. You can't be courageous and not just. You either have all the virtues or none of them. And the reason for this was that they saw wisdom as this kind of final state. When you understand the nature of the world and yourself within it, you understand the nature of the good and what should be categorized, everything walks into place. It solidifies in this strong judgment.
00:53:02
Speaker
that you can't get knocked out of if you're drunk, if you're watching propaganda, if someone's arguing against you, you can't get knocked out of it because the truth of the stoic worldview is just so apparent to you and also justified by arguments. It's not just clear to you, it does not just seem clear to you, you also understand why it's true and it locks into place. And then what the wise person also is, is they're also incredibly adept at reflection.
00:53:30
Speaker
So they have this like, they have this locked in view and then everything that comes towards them, you know, they're like the, I'm thinking of the matrix now. So he's all the matrix like Neo when he's ascended in matrix one and he's like dodging all the bullets. It's like all the false impressions come in and they're just like, clearly that's false. Clearly that's false. The true one comes in, they go, I understand that's true. And they reach this kind of ability. And that's why they're viewed as like the sage, right? They're viewed as this Phoenix. They're viewed as this kind of like,
00:53:57
Speaker
incredible mythological person, the perfectly wise person, right? Not only is their wisdom, their past wisdom, irremovable, but they're always able to navigate moving forward successfully because they have mastered this, they've mastered this process of judging carefully, judging properly, and they've understood what's true so they can, so they can always assent correctly.
00:54:21
Speaker
And then because they're ascending correctly, they're not experiencing extreme emotions, which are knocking them out of this path as this kind of self-enforcing positive cycle. It's a bit of a, it's an extreme picture, which is why they're such, they're such uncommon characters, the truly wise stoic. But, but it makes sense when you, when you take this view of stoic psychology, the end point makes sense when you, when you see those four functions we have in play.
00:54:47
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so I hope that's a useful description for people of what the purpose of human life is for the Stoics wisdom and what that looks like and how you can detail that picture from understanding some of the key concepts of the mind.
00:55:09
Speaker
And then we also chatted about some of the other upshots about the stoic psychology, namely that no one does wrong willingly, weakness of the will is impossible, and then on the practical side, you know, there's always this focus on improving our reflection, being thoughtful, and not just
00:55:34
Speaker
lazily assenting to anything or assenting to things in order to protect our ego, but of course always focusing on seeing what is true to the best extent that we can.
Conclusion and Listener Engagement
00:55:47
Speaker
So that's my attempt at summarizing what you've been up to here. Is there anything else you want to add to that? You know, well done. I think that's great. I think what I would add is this, I mean, if you're already listening to this podcast, you're already on the right track, you made it to the end of this episode, you already understood the value of it, but
00:56:05
Speaker
There is a relationship between how you think about your mind and then how you experience your mind. Even this metaphor, this idea of an impression, even just saying,
00:56:21
Speaker
I'm going to start thinking about the way I experienced the world through the stoic lens of impression, reflection, ascent, impulse. Even if that's not a, even if that ancient conception is not a hundred percent true to how the mind works by thinking about things with that lens arm.
00:56:38
Speaker
you'll start to unlock some stoic ideas about therapy, self-improvement that do really work. So give yourself some time to apply that idea, not just as an abstract interesting theory in the history of philosophy, but as a way of kind of, okay, this is kind of a way that I'll start thinking about things, thinking about the way my mind relates to things.
00:57:01
Speaker
I'll start applying some of the tools that fit into this structure and it's, it's really helpful. And it's a, it's a, it's a good way to kind of sort the very confusing experience of being conscious and experiencing the world. Absolutely. Thanks so much. Thanks, Gil. Fun time. Thanks for listening. Wow.
00:57:21
Speaker
Thanks for listening to Story Conversations. If you found this conversation useful, please give us a rating on Apple, Spotify, or whatever podcast platform you use, and share it with a friend. We are just starting this podcast, so every bit of help goes a long way.
00:57:37
Speaker
And I'd like to thank Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music. Do check out his work at ancientliar.com and please get in touch with us at stoameditation.com if you ever have any feedback or questions. Until next time.