We may consider it the Stoic goal, in any event, to become conscious of our judgments and take control of them as far as we can. One’s ability to do this may be limited in ways that we now understand better than the ancients did; a psychiatric patient would not be well-served by a helping of Epictetus alone. But even after making allowances of that kind, the Stoics would say that our ability to change our experience by changing our thinking about it is much greater than we usually suppose. Many of the judgments they urge us to notice and to reconsider aren’t so deeply rooted. They’re just habits and conventions.
The Stoics don’t expect these claims to be taken on faith. They support them with arguments. Sometimes they use easy examples, such as the insults already discussed – things that anyone can see are a big deal only if we decide they are. For reactions that more stubbornly seem to be inevitable, though, the Stoics often use comparisons to make their point. They look at the different ways that people react to the same events in different circumstances, times, and places. What some people fear (and can’t imagine not fearing), others don’t; what some are ready to die for, to others is nothing. The pain or grief that seems a brute fact to us is experienced very differently in other conditions and cultures. Evidently our reactions aren’t inevitable after all. They somehow must be our doing, and depend on judgments that we hold and thus might be able to change.
1. The general principle. Stoicism starts with the idea that our experience of the world – our reactions, fears, desires, all of it – is not produced by the world. It is produced by what the Stoics call our judgments, or opinions.
Everything depends on opinion. Ambition, luxury, greed, all look back to opinion; it is according to opinion that we suffer. Each man is as wretched as he has convinced himself he is.
Seneca, Epistles 78.13
Cicero’s expression of the Stoic thesis:
Grief, then, is a recent opinion of some present evil, about which it seems right to feel downcast and in low spirits. Joy is a recent opinion of a present good, in response to which it seems right to be elated. Fear is an opinion of an impending evil that seems unbearable. Lust is an opinion about a good to come – that it would be better if it were already here.
Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 4.7
How Epictetus put it:
For what is weeping and wailing? Opinion. What is misfortune? Opinion. What is discord, disagreement, blame, accusation, impiety, foolishness? All these are opinions and nothing else.
Epictetus, Discourses 3.3.18–19
Men are disturbed not by the things that happen but by their opinions about those things. For example, death is nothing terrible; for if it were, it would have seemed so even to Socrates. Rather, the opinion that death is terrible – that is the terrible thing. So when we are impeded or upset or aggrieved, let us never blame others, but ourselves – that is, our opinions.
Epictetus, Enchiridion 5
The first line of this last passage from Epictetus was a favorite of Montaigne’s. He inscribed it in Greek into one of the beams in the ceiling of his study.
An ancient Greek saying holds that we are tormented not by things themselves but by the opinions that we have of them. It would be a great victory for the relief of our miserable human condition if that claim could be proven always and everywhere true. For if evils have no means of entering us except through the judgments we make of them, it would then seem to be in our power to dismiss them or turn them to good.
Montaigne, That the Taste of Good and Evil Things Depends in Large Part on the Opinion We Have of Them (1580)
Things in themselves may have their own weights, measures, and qualities; but once we take them into us, the soul forms them as she sees fit. Death is terrifying to Cicero, coveted by Cato, indifferent to Socrates. Health, conscience, authority, knowledge, riches, beauty, and their opposites all strip themselves bare when they enter us and receive a new robe, of a new color, from the soul…. Let us therefore find no excuses in the external qualities of things; what we make of them is up to us. Our good or bad depends on no one but ourselves.
Montaigne, On Democritus and Heraclitusi (1580)
Comfort and poverty depend on the opinions we have of them; and riches, glory, and health have only as much beauty and pleasure as is attributed to them by their possessor. Each of us is as well or badly off as we believe. The happy are those who think they are, not those who are thought to be so by others; and in this way alone, belief makes itself real and true.
Montaigne, That the Taste of Good and Evil Things Depends in Large Part on the Opinion We Have of Them (1580)
Or as Montaigne said elsewhere in the same essay: “That which gives value to a diamond is our having purchased it; to virtue, the difficulty of it; to devotion, our suffering; and to medicine, its bitterness.” Compare:
HAMLET: … There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
Shakespeare, Hamlet, 2, 2
It is not what things are objectively and in themselves, but what they are for us, in our way of looking at them, that makes us happy or the reverse.
Schopenhauer, The Wisdom of Life (1851)
2. Stoic practice. As stated so far, this first teaching might seem to be a way to understand the workings of the mind and where our reactions come from. It is that. But Stoicism differs from some other philosophical traditions because it is an activity, not just a theory. If we view the idea of this chapter in that way, it is an instruction to take more responsibility than usual for one’s thinking – to treat how we talk to ourselves as a choice. If distress is caused by our thoughts about things rather than by the things themselves, we should try dropping those thoughts and using new ones.
That claim may sound so elementary, or perhaps so much easier said than done, as to barely be worth making at all. But it does have to be said, because treating thoughts and judgments as matters of choice is central to the practice of Stoicism but something that many people rarely do and some never do. It is more normal to take for granted whatever ideas and opinions pass through our minds, living them out with no more scrutiny than we give to the air we breathe. Stoics try to get enough separation from those mental events to control them – to notice the irrationality that drives much of what we say to ourselves and to replace it with something wiser. Sometimes this is indeed easier said than done, or even impossible. But sometimes, to the contrary, it is easier than it sounds. You stop saying one thing to yourself and say another instead. Later you work on judgments less verbal in form. Squashing a noxious and conventional thought is a wholesome source of Stoic satisfaction, and an ability that improves with practice.
Consider some examples of our first Stoic teaching expressed this way by Marcus Aurelius – not just as an interesting idea to think about, but as a practice useful to try.
Take away your opinion about it, and “I have been harmed” is taken away. Take away “I have been harmed,” and the harm is taken away.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 4.7
How easy a thing it is to push away every thought that is disturbing or out of place, and to be at once in perfect peace.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 5.2
We can choose to have no opinion about a thing, and not to be troubled by it; for things themselves have no power of their own to affect our judgments.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 6.52
An example from Seneca:
What is important? To raise your life high above chance occurrences, and to remember that it is a human life – so that if you are fortunate, you know this will not last long; or if you are unfortunate, you know that you aren’t really, if you don’t think you are.
Seneca, Natural Questions 3 Pref. 15
There is