Practice like a Stoic: 37, Catch and examine the judgments underlying your impressions and impulses

Learning how to use logic to better deal with daily irritations

A long and frustrating wait at the doctor’s office, generated by Midjourney.

[This series of posts is based on A Handbook for New Stoics—How to Thrive in a World out of Your Control, co-authored by yours truly and Greg Lopez. It is a collection of 52 exercises, which we propose reader try out one per week during a whole year, to actually live like a Stoic. In Europe/UK the book is published by Rider under the title Live Like A Stoic.Below is this week’s prompt and a brief explanation of the pertinent philosophical background. Check the book for details on how to practice the exercise, download the exercise forms from The Experiment’s website, and comment below on how things are going. Greg and/or I will try our best to help out! This week’s exercise is found at pp. 220-224 of the paperback edition.]

“Epictetus urged the need of a sound grammar of assent; and in dealing with the impulses, to take good heed to keep them subject to reservation, unselfish, and in due proportion to their object: always to refrain inclination, and to limit avoidance to things within our own control.” (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 11.37)

Marcus offers several interesting concepts this week. To begin with, let’s look at the idea of a “sound grammar of assent.” Here, Marcus highlights Epictetus’s insistence on employing logic, one of the three fields of study of the ancient Stoic curriculum, the other two being physics (understanding how the world works) and ethics (figuring out how to best live one’s life). Logic is important because it allows us to think through what we do, and why. Properly applied, it helps us curb our impulses to act.

Suppose that one of the things we lose our cool about is a long wait at the doctor’s office. Then, by using logic, if we feel the stirring of anger arise when waiting, we wouldn’t blame ourselves since we know (logically) that these initial impressions are beyond our control. What we do with such impressions, however, is within our sphere of complete control, and our best aid in deciding how to act is sound logic. With logic, we understand that if we question the presumptions of what’s really valuable in life that leads to feelings such as anger, we can cut this passion off at the pass. We also know that we can take Marcus’s advice and check our impulses to act and ensure they satisfy three criteria:

1. They are proportionate to the issue at hand. For example, is waiting a couple of hours really the end of the world?

2. They are prosocial, which yelling at people usually isn’t.

3. They are subject to reservation, by keeping our serenity in mind, as we practiced in Week 18; see also the very useful “reserve clause” notion in Week 31.

After logic, Marcus mentions the concept of an “impulse.” In Stoic psychology, an impulse is the urge to act that comes from assenting to a proposition on how to act. These propositions are all specifically concerned with how appropriate your action may be in a given situation. Consider, for example, the proposition “it’s appropriate to walk now.” Assenting to this proposition will result in walking, as Seneca briefly describes in his Letters to Lucilius. We first mentioned this idea of impulses back in Week 1, which underlies the entire Discipline of Action. The modern scholar Margaret Graver has written extensively about this important aspect of Stoic theory.

Finally, notice that Marcus reminds himself to always “refrain inclination.” This phrase is sometimes translated as “refrain from immoderate desire,” which in the context of ancient Greek culture essentially means to keep your proclivity for pleasure in check. The idea, again, is not that pleasure is inherently bad (technically, for the Stoics, it’s an “indifferent”). Preferring pleasure over pain is perfectly natural, but pleasure carries the danger of our wanting to seek more and more of it, ultimately at the expense of virtue. It is this tendency that we need to keep in check.