Stoic Objectivity
The Art of the Adequate Representation
“What in all this prevents the mind from preserving itself in tranquillity, in true judgement of circumstance and readiness to use any event submitted to it? So that Judgement says to Circumstance: ‘This is what you really are, however different you may conventionally appear.’”
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 7.68
Bare matter is continually coloured by our value judgements. What is “lucky”, or “sad”, or “tragic”, or “pleasing” is our interpretation of goings on in the world, and not representative of those events as they actually are.
Reality imposes itself on the mind through our senses. We see, hear, smell or feel events and objects that can be alluring, shocking, frightening and so on. Our consciousness is transformed by experiences that we often have no choice in encountering.
Consider the sensationalist daily news cycle, advertisements, or shop window displays. Each is designed to elicit some powerful emotional response in us, to ultimately make us do another person’s bidding, to make us irrational.
An earthquake is a rearrangement of matter. It sounds callous to say such a thing, but in the eyes of the universe, it’s precisely that. A dead person is food for the worms, who speed up the dispersal of atoms as the soul falls back into the stream of being whence it emerged. A diamond ring is some old carbon fashioned to look shiny, set in a soft yellow metal. The indifference of the universal perspective is the indifference of truth — naked and unsullied by human values.
In Stoic theory, our first impressions are no different from this objective truth — we see changing matter as an image, which we recognise as discrete things (phantasia). We then very quickly form a judgement of what we witness, as surely as thunder follows lightning. This is “reflection” (dianoia). Then in the final stage of our comprehension, we are given a moment to choose if we assent (sunkatatheseis) to that reflection.
The first two stages we have little control of — the phantasia imposes itself simply by being sensed, and our first reflection is a harried, unconsciously-driven response. It is the moment of giving or withholding assent that the rational mind can take control.
The Stoics trained themselves to see the objective truth by refusing to assent to the inevitable judgement that follows any sight or experience. This wasn’t to harden themselves to emotion — it was fully acknowledged by Epictetus and Seneca, among others, that emotions were antecedent and attendent to rational thoughts.
That initial reflection — the thunderclap following the bolt of lightning — is luridly coloured by our unconscious feelings about the matter in front of us so, instead, the Stoic sought to replace it with an objective description closer to the initial impression.
For Epictetus, this was known as the “adequate impression”. The adequate impression is one that corresponds exactly to reality as presented to us by the senses — the pure description of an event, without the addition of any subjective value judgement that may bubble up from the mind.
Controlling the mechanism of assent to impressions is at the heart of Stoic ethics, it is fundamental to tranquillity, excellence, and happiness. The alternative is, according to one source, foolishness.
In the Attic Nights — a compendium of anecdotes and facts from the second century, is it reported that Epictetus said the following to his students,
“the foolish man thinks that such ‘visions’ are in fact as dreadful and terrifying as they appear at the original impact of them on his mind, and by his assent he approves of such ideas as if they were rightly to be feared, and ‘confirms’ them.” (19.1.15)
The Discipline of Assent
Pierre Hadot called this core teaching “the discipline of assent” — one of the three disciplines of the Stoicism of Epictetus that corresponds to each of the “movements of the soul”. These are desire (and aversion), assent (or judgement), and action.
The famous Epictetan formula, “It is not events that disturb people, but their judgements concerning them.” Appears in many variables, such as, “Sickness is a problem for the body, but not the mind — unless the mind decides that it is a problem.” (E 5&9)
The traditional interpretation of this formula is that life’s misfortunes and travails need not get us down since there we have no control over them, yet we do have control over our emotional response to them.
The view that is more accurate — the view generative of this essay and those others in this series — is that nothing external can touch the power of the will, which can choose to be happy. Stoic Objectivity is important to this notion because it’s part of the work necessary to unlearn patterns of conventional thought and shatter the illusion of the ego. It is to be indifferent to indifferent things.
What do we mean by “indifferent”? Objects and events do not care about us — they know nothing, and certainly nothing of themselves. They do not try to manipulate us themselves, they do not plot or intend to seduce or trouble us. They are simply indifferent — utterly devoid of agency.
It is us who allow ourselves to be troubled or seduced by events and things. This is because objects and events can become prisms through which we perceive each other’s fears and desires. Mere things — inert and lifeless — become imbued with values and take on a life of their own, seeming self-coherent and complete and not contingent as they really are.
As an example, we desire gold as valuable in-itself, rather than deem it merely useful as an abstraction of value through which we can progress the common good. Gold is valuable because we think it so, not because it has value within it, yet we are easily deceived into believing in magic.
Perceiving self-coherence in an object like a piece of gold comes at the cost of our own self-coherence, since we see gold as being something that can complete us, making us “rich” or “desirable” — two imagined states of complete being postponed into the future.
We need to understand that we are complete and self-coherent — as a reflection of the cosmos — at every moment as long as we are indifferent to all that is itself indifferent. There is no good in the world except the ethically good, and there is no bad in the world except the ethically bad.
Totality
Stoic objectivity — the discipline of assent — is also the most controversial aspect of Stoic philosophy in modernity. This is because it is thought to betray callousness and even cowardice from exercising empathy.
But this discipline of thinking is not so much a defence mechanism, rather a way to grasp the world more clearly and precisely — to grasp the totality of reality, rather than the fractured world we see in the broken mirror of egoism.
Epictetus discusses representations (phantasiai) with his students in the Discourses as if the representations interrogate our minds,
“Just as we practice answering sophistic questions, so should we train for impressions every day, as they implicitly impose their own questions. […] ‘His son died’ What happened? His son died. ‘Nothing else?’ Nothing.”
He gives a number of examples in these small dialogues — shipwrecks — the ancient equivalent of a plane crash, imprisonment, death sentences, and so on.
Consider this advice given to students that was recorded in the Handbook,
“When you see someone weeping in sorrow because his child has gone away, or because he has lost his possessions, take care that you’re not carried away by the impression that he is indeed in misfortune because of these external things, but be ready at once with this thought, ‘It isn’t what has happened that so distresses this person — for someone else could suffer the same without feeling that distress — but rather the judgement that he has formed about it.’ As far as words go, however, don’t hesitate to sympathize with him, or even, if the occasion arises, to join in his lamentations; but take care that you don’t also lament deep inside.” (E 16)
It makes for hard reading, especially for us moderns. But Epictetus is not advocating being cold. In the above passage the philosopher recommended that his fellows comfort people in distress, and even join in their lamentations — all people deserve love and respect.
As we’ve seen in other passages, Epectetus is ultimately recommending that we behold the sheer totality of reality, which is best known purely and nakedly as it is.
Marcus picks up this theme a number of times in the Meditations. His musings on all that surrounded him — written only for himself — appear tinged in disgust and pessimism, but point to the intrinsic beauty of the totality. He writes in one section,
“Like seeing roasted meat and other dishes in front of you and suddenly realizing: This is a dead fish. A dead bird. A dead pig. Or that this noble vintage is grape juice, and the purple robes are sheep wool dyed with shellfish blood. Or making love — something rubbing against your penis, a brief seizure and a little cloudy liquid. Perceptions like that — latching onto things and piercing through them, so we see what they really are. That’s what we need to do all the time — all through our lives when things lay claim to our trust — to lay them bare and see how pointless they are, to strip away the legend that encrusts them.” (6.13)
What’s remarkable here are the “purple robes” being made by the extremely expensive dye — “shellfish blood” — used to mark out the Roman Emperor, Marcus himself. It was symbolic of his political and spiritual leadership of the world’s most powerful empire.
The apparent disdain seems to Marcus to be important to “pierce” the surface of things, as alluring and seductive as they are, dressed up in cultural customs. Marcus is swiping away the fantasy, so that he may see the reality.
In another section, we are given a hint of how this discipline can change the Stoic’s understanding of the world.
“Nothing but what you get from first impressions. That someone has insulted you, for instance. That — but not that it’s done you any harm. The fact that my son is sick — that I can see. But “that he might die of it,” no. Stick with first impressions. Don’t extrapolate. And nothing can happen to you. Or extrapolate. From a knowledge of all that can happen in the world.” (M 8.49)
Again, from a basic reading this can seem like a defensive psychological tactic to anticipate and dampen any emotional distress. But a close reading, couched in our understanding of Epictetus, gives us more insight into Marcus’s deeper intent. “Or extrapolate. From a knowledge of all that can happen in the world.” — This key phrase needs unpacking to understand that deeper intent better.
If we “stick with first impressions” — an objective description — we can better maintain control enough to keep our will aligned with nature — that is, we can remain rational. But we can also evenly distribute the emphasis of our consciouness to take in everything, rather than let our attention skip from thing to thing.
Stoic Perspective is to take in a wider view of many things so that we see them in a greater context, Stoic Objectivity is to see individual things as emanations of greater processes. Hence, “extrapolate” from “a knowledge of all that can happen in the world.”
Self-Coherence
Our conscious attention is most often like a spotlight beam, bouncing from one thing to another quickly and uneasily. The goal of apatheia (tranquility) demands that our consciousness takes on a form more like a floodlight — to see things not in a one-by-one sequential manner, but as a whole and in an all-at-once manner.
If we were to open our attention to the peripheral as well as the focal point of conscious thinking, we come closer to understanding the totality — the cohesive completeness — of the cosmos and our place within that unity.
When Marcus dissembles various foods, luxury goods and pleasurable sights and acts, he is as much multiplying those things as he is reducing them to their constituent parts.
The conventionally seductive pirouette of the dancer is a succession of infinite movements. One is less seduced by the dance when one considers it in this forensic way, but one is also rightly more enamoured by the divine cosmos of which that dancer is a part when you consider all the dimensions the dancer’s expression takes from this objective view. The illusiary self-coherence of the event is shattered as its parts are dissolved into the truly self-coherent and unspeakably beautiful Whole.
Marcus writes,
“Always make a definition or sketch of what presents itself to your mind, so you can see it stripped bare to its essential nature and identify it clearly, in whole and in all its parts, and can tell yourself its proper name and the names of those elements of which it is compounded and into which it will be dissolved.” (M 3.11)
The Stoic preserves their sovereign self-coherence by disintegrating the indifferent objects around them that are so alluring to conventional desire that they take on a magical form. “The Imperial Robe” is an item with an aura, one that can bewitch the beholder. “Sheeps wool dyed in shellfish blood” — a different description of the same thing — is subsumed into the constantly changing cosmos.
When we use emotive words like terrible, catastrophic, horrible, and frightening, we are unnecessarily embellishing reality with value judgements. We do this freely, but according to habit. The same can be said of exclamations such as “why is life so unfair?” or “why would God allow this to happen?” These, again, are value judgements that don’t correspond with an adequate description of any objective representation.
Stoic objectivity works to strip away these artificial values of habit, convention and custom, allowing us to see all things in the universe as they are as part of the totality in its naked beauty. That is, we see the impermanence of their current form, being within the unending flow of the universal metamorphosis.
We are no longer seduced by conventional desire nor spooked by conventional fears, but astounded by the beauty of the Whole by which all things are connected.
A Spiritual Exercise for Objectivity
Take an object that is seductive and alluring to you. Firstly, break it down to its constituent parts and name them. This object becomes a list. Consider what those parts are — their colours, textures, sounds, as well as their origin and their destiny as far as you can imagine. See those parts as being in the cauldron of reality, thier continual metamorphosis through various forms as centuries and millenia pass by. Now see the object itself anew, as among other objects all in the web of our cosmos. Pay attention to the periphery around it, the whole view in which many objects are present and connected. See the spaces between those things as fully as you see the things themselves, appreciate the beauty of the Whole itself and your own place within it.