Catch and examine the judgments underlying your impressions and impulses
If you’ve been working through this book from the beginning, you’re already experienced in many Stoic techniques. But sometimes you may not make as much progress as you’d like, even with consistent practice. Tekanyo has practiced the Disciplines of Desire and Action for a long time. While he’s made progress, he knows through his nightly journaling habit that there are still plenty of times when he loses his cool and can’t quiet his desire for externals. For the past few months, his practice has felt stagnated. Tekanyo knows that this is to be expected, since the first two disciplines are about progress, not perfection. That’s why he has chosen to move on to the Discipline of Assent, which, as you, too, will learn, deals with the same lessons as the first two disciplines, but requires working with them in much greater detail.
"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 Tekanyo (and the rest of us) curb his impulses to act. Suppose that one of the things Tekanyo loses his cool about is a long wait at his doctor’s office. Then, by using logic, if he feels the stirring of anger arise when waiting, he wouldn’t blame himself since he knows (logically) that these initial impressions are beyond his control. What he does with such impressions, however, is within his sphere of complete control, and his best aid in deciding how to act is sound logic. With logic, Tekanyo understands that if he questions the presumptions of what’s really valuable in life that leads to feelings such as anger, he can cut this passion off at the pass. He also knows that he can take Marcus’s advice and check his impulses to act and ensure they satisfy three criteria:
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.1 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.2
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.