Stoic Autonomy
Understanding The Limits of Your Freedom
“Nothing pertains to human beings except what defines us as human.”
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 5.15.
Autonomy is largely assumed in the West’s individualistic culture. A person is an individual unit of society — in contrast with many old and some current cultures where the family is the individual social unit.
It’s common to assume the self is identical with the physical body, or as the coupling of the body and an unseen soul. While Stoicism recognises the individual as the subject of Stoic doctrine, it does not conceive of the self as we commonly do. It’s important, therefore, to define and understand autonomy — its scope and its nature — in order to understand Stoic ethics.
Epictetus begins to define selfhood from the outset of the Enchiridion — we are not our bodies, we are not what we own, we are not our reputation. All these facets of our individuality are “none of our concern”.
Why? Because we have no control over those things. We cannot choose when we are sick, everything we own can be taken away, and our reputation is at the mercy of other peoples’ opinions.
The only “self” left after this process of elimination is the directing force of our decisions. This “ruling power” (Hēgemonikon) or “guiding principle” is found in the “faculty of judgement”. It is here we have power over our desires and aversions and our impulses to act.
Even if we were prevented from ever acting on our judgements, we would still have our judgements. Your thoughts are yours and can never be changed by anybody else through coercion. This is the unbreachable domain of the self famously described by Pierre Hadot as the “inner citadel”.
Marcus wrote,
“Things have no hold on the soul. They have no access to it, cannot move or direct it. It is moved and directed by itself alone. It takes the things before it and interprets them as it sees fit.”
For Stoics, this is not only unbreachable, but also the indestructible part of the human being. As Epictetus puts it, “a man can only lose what he has”. The Hegemonikon is not something you have, it is you — it is the only slice of being that is fully identical to you.
What’s more, it’s unplaceable — it is not located anywhere, nor has it any form as such. It is, as I’ve previously written, nothing of any substance. There is no part of our body that is the ruling power, you wouldn’t find it with an MRI scanner or a surgeon’s scalpel.
And yet, it is real. It is the product of our body being enmeshed in a social existence.
The Two Worlds We Inhabit
In the Stoic view of the universe, the human being is caught between the physical world of the body and the divine world of the soul. Like everything else in the purely physical universe of Stoicism, the human body is part of God, since the universe is a living organism. The soul, however, shares in God’s divinity.
Just as the ancient Stoic idea of self is “caught between” divinity and the material world, the self as we will analyse it is “caught between” the material world and the mind-world. While our bodies are material and mortal, they are host to immaterial and immortal ideas.
What is meant by “immortal” here? Ideas can be hosted in brains, texts, computer code, film and so on. While the hosts of ideas are subject to change and decay, the ideas could, in theory, remain pristine and live forever as long as they spread through material hosts like paper, stone, metal, bodies and so on.
Think, for example, of a printed text like a newspaper. The page consists of symbols from our 24-letter alphabet arranged in sequences on the page with spaces between them.
This is just stuff — printed ink on cheap paper. It can burn, it can rot. In time, it will dissolve to nothing. Yet, step close enough to read those sequences of printed symbols and your mind will meet the mind of the person that wrote those words.
Worlds merge when we read. Vivid images will appear to you, you’ll calculate, you’ll imagine, you’ll be moved by what you’ll read. Symbols give us infinite meaning, the 24 graphemes that make up the alphabet allow us to participate in the worlds of the mind that can extend and endure well beyond the life of the brain.
It is thought that the poems attributed to Homer spread by word of mouth for hundreds of years before they were committed to writing. They were consigned to flesh and blood bodies. The ideas in your mind could endure in the same way, whether they are ideas from somewhere else, such as how to add two numbers, or ideas of your own making, such as what you think of the latest novel you read.
Of course, ideas can be forgotten or erased. In practice they can be considered “mortal”. But in principle they are immortal — an idea can endure until the end of time if given the means to.
Complicated ideas can also undergo changes, Homer’s Iliad probably changed as it was transmitted from bard to bard before it was committed to the definitive version shared today.
But the form of ideas remains the same — a rational structure underpins how we use ideas. We use syllogistic logic, for example, to arrive at conclusions based on separate premises.
“Socrates is a man, and men are mortal, therefore Socrates is mortal.”
That’s a syllogism. You likely use this form of reasoning thousands of times a day, consciously or unconsciously.
In the same way the physical world has its consistencies — gravity keeps our feet on the floor, water boils at a hundred degrees centigrade and so on — the world of ideas, the mind-world, has consistencies thanks to the rational structure of the mind.
The ancient Stoic belief that the rational mind of the human being is a fragment of God’s divinity may not or may be true. What’s certainly true is that the rational mind is what human beings have in common.
The rational mind has given us language and logic, the capability to transfer ideas from mind to mind by means of sounds and symbols. These sounds and symbols taken together add that dimension of immortality to the physical body.
Autonomy and the Illusion of Self
Our bodies are a collection of particles constantly in flux and will eventually break down and disperse, a vast majority of the facets of our identity — nationality, ethnicity, name, gender and so on — are accidents of birth that we had no choice over. The thoughts in our head can conflict, change, be lost to oblivion.
The “self”, a stable and integrated whole, is an illusion for all those reasons. The Stoic self is not defined as what it is, but by what it does. In fact, the power of choice negates the physical self. Marcus, quoting Epictetus, remarks on the person as a “bit of” soul carrying around a dead body — as far as the Stoics were concerned even the human soul wasn’t complete, but merely a fragment of a greater whole.
So the body is already written off in Stoicism. What’s important is the ruling mind, which is unlocatable because it’s part of something greater — the divine logos.
Even if we dismiss the notion of a divine logos, have autonomy precisely because the self is an illusion, because we are irrevocably caught between the mortality of a material body and the immortality of the ideas in our mind.
Our sense of self is woven together from these two worlds by consciousness. The world as it comes into the mind through our senses is fragmented and incomplete. Our mind makes our experience coherent by synthesising all the fragmented data of our senses into a seamless and unitary experience.
Our “self” as it comes to us through our senses is just as fragmented and incomplete as anything else, our mind makes it seem coherent and stable. The “I” you see in the mirror is just a part of the woven tapestry of the world in our mind.
The weaving work of consciousness is yet another aspect of our being that we have no control over, but the choices that it stages is what we are, it is the domain of the ruling power attached to the stage dressing of “the self”.
So, instead of “self”, we have autonomy. The Stoic self is a kind of anti-self or non-self, defined only by what it is not.
Consciousness is purely transparent to our awareness. You can’t hear your ears or see your eyes, and so neither can you be directly conscious of your consciousness. Your ultimate self is indestructible, because it was never a thing in the first place.
This unplaceable nothingness that we call consciousness gives us the power to choose as individuals. Yet, we understand ourselves as autonomous thanks to the shared language we have. The self recognises itself as both apart from, and part of, the world and so it can choose.
The Art of Life
Stobaeus, a Babylonian scholar, recounts to us the Stoic division of good, bad, and “indifferent” from Zeno, Stoicism’s founder —
“Zeno says that those things exist which participate in being. And of the things which exist some are good, some bad, some indifferent. Good are the following sorts of item: wisdom, moderation, justice, courage, and all that is virtue or participates in virtue. Bad are the following sorts of item: folly, intemperance, injustice, cowardice, and all that is vice or participates in vice. Indifferent are the following sorts of item: life death, reputation ill-repute, pleasure exertion, wealth poverty, health sickness, and things like these.”
What is good or bad is of the mind only — wisdom, justice and their opposites folly and injustice are ways of thinking. What is indifferent is everything and anything in the physical world. Values, judgements and decisions are of the mind only and so only the mind matters to the Stoics.
Our autonomy, then, can be found in the “ruling power” — our power to choose how we judge the impressions in our senses. Once we understand that the faculty of choice is at the heart of our autonomy and nothing besides that, we can begin to cultivate autonomy.
Why “cultivate” autonomy? Because autonomy is not something we simply possess, but a good that we could strive to increase — a good that can liberate us from the constraints and frustrations of the fixed idea of selfhood.
In the Discourses (1.12) Epictetus discusses freedom, and it is here that we understand that we must find autonomy in order to transcend our individuality. “Freedom is having events go according to our will, never against it.” Our common idea of freedom is to do whatever we please, but Epictetus describes this as “madness”, in that it is senseless to expect life itself to bend to our will. As we’ve explored previously, the world of the mind conforms to patterns just as the physical world does.
As an analogy the philosopher explains that we cannot just spell a name any way we please. To use that name, we must spell it correctly. To write is to learn and master the rules of grammar. Freedom to communicate in writing is attained by following the common rules. It is the same with music and other arts.
Life, then, is treated as an art like grammar. Epictetus comes back to this theme a number of times in the Discourses. You learn to live as the musician or the writer learns — you must understand the rules to thrive.
The freedom we really possess is the freedom to accept our existence between the world of matter and the world of mind. To be truly free is not to make any choice we please, but to understand the choices we make in order to get as close to the right choice as possible, to become masters of the rules of life.
This is to be free from what prevents us from doing what is right. Instead of a freedom conceived of as “freedom-to” — freedom to do as we please, as we commonly understand freedom, we have a freedom conceived of as “freedom-from” — freedom from coercion, from trickery, from cognitive dissonance, from anxiety, from guilt and remorse.
Autonomy clarifies and defines us as moral agents. This is not simply to conform to some moral law. Stoicism has no laws. As a eudaimonic tradition aimed at excellence rather than moral compliance, Stoicism has a promise — live in accordance with nature, and nature will accord with you.
As we’ll discover in subsequent explorations of the fourfold root, the ethical project of Stoicism is to show that you can achieve magnanimity, exuberance, and joy through understanding.
This will make us happier citizens, lovers, siblings, carers, parents and creators. If you do what you love with purity and sincerity, what you do will love you in return.
A Spiritual Exercise for Autonomy
To find autonomy, methodically consider what you are not. You are not the things you own, you are not your reputation in other people’s minds, you are not your body, neither are you the body in photographs of “you”, you are not the image before you in the mirror. You are what decides is not you, you are the judgement behind the “not” in this exercise. It is an essence that withdraws from touch, sight, taste, hearing and ultimately from comprehension. As you understand this more, you become more autonomous. Respect this and you’ll not come to harm, becasue what you really are cannot be harmed.
Can you differentiate between understanding and realizations? I always thought that the later was like an epiphany deeper.
Thanks very interesting.