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The first principle of practical Stoicism is this: we don’t react to events; we react to our judgments about them, and the judgments are up to us. We will see the Stoics develop that idea in the pages to come, but this expression of it is typical:

If any external thing causes you distress, it is not the thing itself that troubles you, but your own judgment about it. And this you have the power to eliminate now.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 8.47

The Stoic claim, in other words, is that our pleasures, griefs, desires and fears all involve three stages rather than two: not just an event and a reaction, but an event, then a judgment or opinion about it, and then a reaction (to the judgment or opinion). Our task is to notice the middle step, to understand its frequent irrationality, and to control it through the patient use of reason. This chapter starts with the noticing. Later chapters will talk about the irrationality and offer advice about control. We begin here because the point is foundational. Most of the rest of what the Stoics say depends on it. Soon we will hear from them about “externals,” desires, virtues, and much else. But it all begins with the idea that we construct our experience of the world through our beliefs, opinions, and thinking about it – in a word, through our judgments – and that they are up to us.

For many students of Stoic philosophy, this first principle starts as counterintuitive, gradually becomes convincing, and finally seems obviously true – and then the cycle may be repeated, because the mind constantly gives us an opposite impression that appears convincing in its own right. Our reactions to whatever happens usually feel direct and spontaneous. They don’t seem to involve judgment at all, or at least no judgment that could ever be otherwise. The Stoics consider all this an illusion. The work of dispelling it is hard because the mind is an unreliable narrator of where our reactions come from. It tells us that we respond to externals – to things out there, not to the mind itself. It has to learn to see and describe its own role more accurately. Stoicism means to help us think better about our thinking, to teach the mind to understand the mind, to make the fish more aware of the water.

The truth of the Stoic claim is easiest to see when we react to an offense given strictly to the mind. Suppose someone insults you. The insult is meaningless apart from what you make of it. If you are bothered, it must be because you care: a judgment. Instead you could decide not to care, and that would be the end of the insult for you. All irritations can be viewed the same way – the noisy neighbor, the bad weather, the traffic jam. If you are riled up by these things, you are riled up by the judgments you make about them: that they are bad, that they are important, that one should get riled up about them. The events don’t force you to think any of this; only you can do it. The same then goes for bigger setbacks, and for desires, fears, and all the rest of our mental events. We always feel as though we react to things in the world; in fact we react to things in ourselves. And sometimes changing ourselves will be more effective and sensible than trying to change the world.

When we feel physical pain or pleasure, the role of the mind in forming our reaction is harder to see. Pains and pleasures seem like immovable facts that owe nothing to our thinking. But even then the Stoics insist that our judgments about those feelings produce our experience of them. Yes, pain is pain: a sensation that exists no matter what we think about it. But how much bother it causes, how much attention we pay to it, what it means to us – these are judgments, and all ours to determine. Pains and pleasures are made bigger or smaller by the way we talk to ourselves about them, or by judgments that are too deep to articulate but are nevertheless our own. We underrate the power of these judgments because we barely notice them. Stoics notice them. (For more discussion of pain in particular, see Chapter 10, Section 11.)

The idea that our reactions depend on our judgments can seem especially strange if “judgments” are all imagined to be conscious and rational. But a judgment can take many forms. You conclude that spiders aren’t dangerous yet still are afraid of them; does this show that your fear is separate from any opinion you hold about spiders? No, it just means you have conflicting judgments – that spiders are safe and that they aren’t. The second will take time to uproot even after you decide it’s wrong. Put differently, some judgments are just things we say to ourselves, and those are the easier ones to fix. Others are ingrained and nonverbal. The Stoics will sometimes include under “judgments” everything that we bring to the world when we meet it – the appetite that we have or don’t have that makes a plate of food look better or worse, or a lifetime of conditioning that produces the same effect. These may not be easy to change. Here, then, is another reason why Stoicism is hard, and why nobody gets to perfection. Some reactions may belong to us and yet not quite be up to us. Or they are up to us in theory but we don’t have the psychological strength to change them.

More broadly, the Stoics didn’t distinguish in their thinking as we now might between all the forms that our judgments can take – conscious opinions, unconscious attitudes, conditioned responses, chemical predispositions, genetic tendencies, and so on – and how some of those can be changed more easily than others. They do make a few such acknowledgments. The Stoics say that some reactions have a physical basis we can’t control. (See Chapter 9, Section 1.) And Seneca concedes that we are born with some temperamental features that can’t be changed. (See Chapter 10, Section 10.) But our ordinary reactions to things – our reactions at rest – are viewed mostly just as ours to control with practice. Anyone can see how difficult this idea would be to carry out in full; just think of your own strongest likes and dislikes, and how hard it would be to reverse them with any amount of thinking. But fortunately, and importantly, Stoicism doesn’t care what our tastes are, and doesn’t call for reversal of our aversions and desires. It calls for detachment from them. That isn’t easy, either, but it is far more often feasible.

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 some risk that these passages, taken in isolation, could seem to encourage a kind of vacuity. The goal of the Stoic, though, is not to empty the mind, but to clear it of foolishness and misjudgment. Learning to identify foolishness and misjudgment will be the work of the chapters to come. In the meantime, we may recall that neither of the authors just shown was seeking a placid or retiring existence, or a mind free from complexity. Each of them, in their times, was among the most powerful people on earth.

3. Comparisons. The Stoics claim that our reactions to all things are created by the thoughts or subtler judgments that we have about them. They seek to show this, first, by asking us to look at ourselves more carefully. Some of our reactions, when viewed in a dispassionate mood, seem obviously to be the results of our own sensitivities.

When pleasures have corrupted both mind and body, nothing seems to be tolerable – not because the suffering is hard, but because the sufferer is soft. For why are we thrown into a rage by somebody’s cough or sneeze, by negligence in chasing a fly away, by a dog that gets in the way, or by the dropping of a key that has slipped from the hands of a careless servant?

Seneca, On Anger 2.25.3

But sometimes the conclusion isn’t so obvious, and in that case the Stoic’s favorite way of proving the claim of this chapter is by use of comparisons. If a reaction that seems natural isn’t found elsewhere, maybe it isn’t so natural; perhaps it is up to us. The Stoics start by comparing our own reactions to similar things in different circumstances, thus demonstrating that the reactions aren’t inevitable even in ourselves. They especially like to consider our strong but inconsistent responses to whatever we find annoying. The inconsistency shows that those responses reflect more on us than on the things we curse.

These same eyes of yours – which at home won’t even tolerate marble unless it is varied and recently polished … which don’t want limestone on the floor unless the tiles are more precious than gold – once outside, those same eyes look calmly at the rough and muddy pathways and the filthy people they mostly meet, and at the walls of the tenement houses that are crumbled, cracked, and crooked. What is it, then, that doesn’t offend your eyes in public but upsets them at home – other than your opinion, which in the one place is easygoing and tolerant, but at home is critical and always complaining?

Seneca, On Anger 3.35.5

Cicero’s account of the Stoic view used the same general approach, comparing how the same people react to identical things in different ways when they bring different judgments to them.

The mere fact that men endure the same pain more easily when they voluntarily undergo it for the sake of their country than when they suffer it for some lesser cause, shows that the intensity of the pain depends on the state of mind of the sufferer, not on its own intrinsic nature.

Cicero, On the Ends of Good and Evil 3.13

Or as Montaigne put it more concretely:

We are more sensitive to a cut made by a surgeon’s scalpel than to ten wounds by sword in the heat of battle.

Montaigne, That the Taste of Good and Evil Things Depends in Large Part on the Opinion We Have of Them (1580)

Next, the Stoics suggest that we think of others who react more strongly than we do to an event or any other provocation. From our vantage point, those others look hypersensitive. But we seem different to ourselves – not hypersensitive – only because we take our own sensitivities for granted. When everyone shares a weakness, it no longer looks like a weakness. It looks like the state of nature.

Those things with respect to which everyone is weak, we regard as hard and beyond endurance. We forget what a torment it is to many of us just to abstain from wine or be made to get up at daybreak. These things are not essentially difficult. It is we who are soft and slack.

Seneca, Epistles 71.23

To someone with jaundice, honey tastes bitter; to one with rabies, water becomes terrifying; to small children a little ball is a wonderful thing. Why then am I angry? Do you suppose that mistaken thinking has any less effect on us than bile has in a man with jaundice, or than the poison has in someone bitten by a mad dog?

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 6.57

In the same way that studying is a torment to the lazy, so is abstinence from wine a torment to the drunkard, frugality a torment to the extravagant, and exercise a torment to the delicate and the idle; and so it is with all the rest. Things are not that difficult or painful in themselves. Our weakness and cowardice make them so.

Montaigne, That the Taste of Good and Evil Things Depends in Large Part on the Opinion We Have of Them (1580)

This style of thought can be applied not just to the sensitivities that others have to suffering and annoyance, but also to the behavior (and especially the extremes) to which their beliefs drive them—beliefs that may seem strange to us, but no stranger than ours would seem to them.

Any opinion can seem important enough for someone to die for. The first article of the fine oath the Greeks swore and defended in their war against the Medes was that everyone would sooner exchange life for death than their own laws for those of Persia. How many people, in the wars between the Turks and the Greeks, accept cruel deaths rather than reject circumcision for baptism!

Montaigne, That the Taste of Good and Evil Things Depends in Large Part on the Opinion We Have of Them (1580)

Or think about those who react less strongly than you do to something. If you see them putting up with things that you can’t, it makes your reaction seem more clearly to be your own doing. Thus Seneca’s conversation with his own pain, which he belittles by thinking of people who endure the same or worse without complaint:

In truth you are only pain – the same pain that is despised by that wretch who is ridden with gout, that the dyspeptic endures for his fancy foods, that a girl bears bravely in childbirth.

Seneca, Epistles 24.14

In this passage and others, the Stoics often are shown to speak of despising pain or other externals or as having contempt for them. In English the words “contempt” and “despise” are often used to suggest varieties of hatred. In this book they do not necessarily have that shading. They usually suggest viewing a thing as small, as unimportant, as something to which we should rise superior; and one can have any or all of this without the overtones of vituperation and dislike.

When you have seen children at Sparta, and young men at Olympia, and barbarians in the amphitheater, receive the severest wounds, and bear them in silence – will you, if some pain happens to brush against you, cry out[?] …. Will you not rather bear it with resolution and constancy? – and not cry, “It’s intolerable! Nature cannot bear it!” I hear what you say: boys bear this because they are led on by the wish for glory; others do it out of shame, many out of fear – and yet are we afraid that nature cannot bear what is borne by so many, and in such different circumstances?

Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 2.20

We cope with the pains of childbirth, deemed to be great by doctors and by God himself, through our many rituals; yet there are entire nations that make nothing of them. Never mind the Spartans; among the Swiss women who walk among our foot soldiers, what difference does childbirth make except that, as they trot after their husbands, they carry on their backs the infants that just the day before they carried in their bellies?

Montaigne, That the Taste of Good and Evil Things Depends in Large Part on the Opinion We Have of Them (1580)

As these examples suggest, Stoics are known to engage in casual anthropology – sometimes very casual; the reader may not be impressed by the sophistication of their discussion of childbirth. But the important point is the spirit of these inquiries. Convention and habituation have a remarkable power to affect our judgments. What we are used to seeing others do, and what we are used to doing or feeling ourselves, can make anything seem normal or strange, inevitable or a matter of choice. And those forces tend to do their work invisibly. Once we take in a custom or habit, the judgments they produce feel as though they are strictly our own, not anything that was implanted and could be different. The spell of familiarity must be broken, and this is best done by looking at the great range of responses to the same things that have come to seem natural to people in different conditions.

4. Food. We don’t need to look to Sparta or swordfights to find good topics for the types of comparisons just shown. As a case study, consider some ways the principle of this chapter can apply to food, a common subject of Stoic reflection. Reactions to what we eat feel unavoidable as we are having them, and seem to be brought about by the food rather than anything in ourselves; but those reactions often owe as much to us as they do to what is on the plate. The Stoics are close students of the appetites that produce our reactions to foods and all else.

My baker is out of bread; but the overseer, or the steward, or my tenants all have some to offer. “Bad bread!” you say. Wait; it will become good. Hunger will make even that bread taste delicate and seem to be from the finest flour. For that reason we should not eat until hunger bids us; I will wait until I can get good bread or cease to be fussy about it.

Seneca, Epistles 123.2–3

Who does not see that appetite is the best sauce? When Darius, in his flight from the enemy, had drunk some water which was muddy and fouled by cadavers, he declared that he had never drunk anything more pleasant; the fact was, he had never drunk before when he was thirsty…. Compare [to those who use moderation] those you see sweating and belching, being overfed like fatted oxen; then will you perceive that they who pursue pleasure most attain it least, and that the pleasure of eating lies in having an appetite, not in being glutted.

Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 5.97, 99–100

Our topic in this chapter is the role of our own judgments, or opinions, in producing our experience. An appetite can be considered an example of such a judgment if judgments are understood to include all those things within us that shape our reaction to what we meet in the world. From a certain point of view this is obvious. On the one hand, there is the food – an external thing; on the other hand, there is how much we want it – a judgment of our own. Still, it might seem surprising to describe the appetite for food as a “judgment” in the Stoic sense, because we feel it as a physical fact. Our hunger or thirst presents itself as a sensation of the body, not as something in the mind that we might be able to change with our thinking. But the Stoic would challenge those impressions.

First, our appetites often are up to us – in advance. We may have trouble changing them once they exist, but we have a lot to say about whether and how they arise in the first place. Stoics become more aware not just of how our appetites affect our experience, but of how our choices affect our appetites. We allow ourselves to get hungry, or not; we tantalize ourselves with comparisons and other thoughts that stir desire, or we don’t. The management of appetites – when and how to cultivate them, when and how not – is part of Stoic practice. (Cultivation is called for in cases like the one Seneca describes above, as when learning how to take satisfaction from simple and natural pleasures.) All this is an example of the reorientation the Stoics recommend in general: spending less energy on getting or avoiding things, and more on knowing why we want them (or don’t) and how the way we think might affect this. We will come back to these points in later chapters.

Second, though, the Stoic wouldn’t concede too quickly that appetites, even once they exist, are physical facts entirely beyond the reach of the mind. Of course great hunger may be a hard fact of that sort, just like other kinds of pains and sensations. But in this setting and others, it is easy to forget how strongly our minds can influence the sensations that external things create for us. A food that looks delicious can become impossible to enjoy, and cause physical revulsion, if you hear something disgusting about how it was prepared. (You might say then that you’ve lost your appetite.) It is not much better – it may even be worse – if the mind makes such a discovery afterwards.

Very often, when men have eaten fancy foods with great pleasure, if they perceive or learn afterwards that they have eaten something unclean or unlawful, not only is this discovery attended by grief and distress, but their bodies, revolted at the notion, are seized by violent vomiting and retching.

Plutarch, On Moral Virtue 4 (442f)

Montaigne gave a more picturesque illustration.

I know a gentleman who, having entertained a large group of company at his house, a few days later boasted as a joke (for there was nothing to it) that he had fed them a pie made out of a cat. One of the young ladies in the party was so stricken with horror that she developed a violent stomach disorder and a fever. It was impossible to save her.

Montaigne, On the Power of the Imagination (1580)

Food interests the Stoic in another respect as well. It provides a useful source of analogies from the way the stomach works to the way the mind works.

Just as the stomach, when it is impaired by disease, gathers bile, and, changing all the food that it receives, turns every sort of sustenance into a source of pain, so, in the case of the perverse mind, whatever you entrust to it becomes to it a burden and a source of disaster and wretchedness.

Seneca, On Benefits 5.12.6

Such comparisons were recurring themes for Plutarch, who wasn’t a Stoic on the biggest questions but was with them on this and other more immediate issues.

In a fever everything we eat seems bitter and unpleasant to the taste; but when we see others taking the same food and finding no displeasure in it, we stop blaming the food and drink. We blame ourselves and our malady. In the same way, we will stop blaming and being disgruntled with circumstances if we see others accepting the same events cheerfully and without offense.

Plutarch, On Tranquility of Mind 8 (468f–469a)

Have you never noticed how sick people turn against and spit out and refuse the daintiest and most expensive foods, though people offer them and almost force them down their throats – but at another time, when their condition is different, their respiration is good, their blood is in a healthy state, and their natural warmth is restored, they get up and enjoy a good meal of simple bread and cheese and cabbage? Such, also, is the effect of reason on the mind.

Plutarch, On Virtue and Vice 4 (101c–d)

Dr. Johnson continued the idea, though reversing the facts of the illustration.

What we believe ourselves to want, torments us not in proportion to its real value, but according to the estimation by which we have rated it in our own minds; in some diseases, the patient has been observed to long for food, which scarce any extremity of hunger would in health have compelled him to swallow; but while his organs were thus depraved, the craving was irresistible, nor could any rest be obtained till it was appeased by compliance. Of the same nature are the irregular appetites of the mind; though they are often excited by trifles, they are equally disquieting with real wants: the Roman, who wept at the death of his lamprey, felt the same degree of sorrow that extorts tears on other occasions.

Johnson, The Adventurer no. 119 (1753)

Johnson refers to an anecdote told by Plutarch. Crassus and Domitius were Roman generals. Crassus was ridiculed by Domitius for weeping over the death of an eel-like fish that he owned; Crassus replied that the tears were more than Domitius had shed over his three late wives.

Food has been offered here just as an example of how Stoics might think about something familiar. Much of the stuff of daily life can be put through the same sort of analysis. Lest the reader think Plutarch was too preoccupied with food, for instance, here he opens a different field of application to which many of the points just made may be adapted:

Another illustration is the banishment and retreat of our private parts, which stay calm without trembling in the presence of those beautiful women and boys whom neither reason nor law allows us to touch. This happens in particular to those who fall in love, then hear that they have unwittingly fallen in love with a sister or a daughter. Then desire cowers in fear as reason takes hold, and the body exhibits its parts in decent conformity to that judgment.

Plutarch, On Moral Virtue 4 (442e)

5. Metaphors and analogies. The Stoics offer a vision of the mind and the role it plays in turning objects and events into an experience felt by the self. We don’t have good literal language for describing that role; the mechanisms of the mind aren’t visible to us in a way that allows for exact depiction. So as we just saw, the Stoics resort at times to figurative comparisons and analogies that make their ideas easier to see. Some further examples:

Like a bowl of water, so is the soul; like the light falling on the water, so are the impressions the soul receives. When the water is disturbed, the light also seems to be disturbed; yet it is not disturbed.

Epictetus, Discourses 3.4.20

It takes greatness of mind to judge great matters; otherwise they will seem to have defects that in truth belong to us. In the same way, certain objects that are perfectly straight will, when sunk in water, appear to the onlooker as bent or broken off. It is not so much what you see but how you see it that matters. When it comes to perceiving reality, our minds are in a fog.

Seneca, Epistles 71.24

From Plutarch:

Clothes seem to warm us, but not by throwing off heat themselves; for in itself every garment is cold, which is why people who are hot or have fevers frequently are constantly changing clothes. Rather, the clothes that wrap us keep in the heat that is thrown off by the body and don’t allow it to be dissipated. A somewhat similar case is the idea that deceives the mass of mankind – that if they could live in big houses, and get together enough slaves and money, they would have a happy life. But a happy and cheerful life does not come from without. On the contrary, a man adds the pleasure and gratification to the things that surround him, his temperament being, as it were, the source of his feelings.

Plutarch, On Virtue and Vice 1 (100b–100c)

6. Implications. This chapter has introduced the most basic idea in the practice of Stoicism: that our reactions to all things are of our own making, even if they don’t seem that way, and that we underrate our power to rid ourselves of the ones that serve us poorly. We can end the chapter with some reflections on the fundamental nature of this point. From Epictetus:

Behold the beginning of philosophy! – perception of men’s disagreement with one another, and a search for the origin of the disagreement; rejection and distrust of mere opinion, and inquiry to see whether an opinion is right or wrong; and the discovery of some standard for judgment – just as to deal with weights we discovered the balance, or for straight and crooked things, the ruler.

Epictetus, Discourses 2.11.13

Epictetus’s description, taken broadly, can indeed be viewed as an account of how Stoic philosophy came into being in general, and also of how it might begin for anyone who studies it. We see others talking or thinking or acting differently than we would, or differently than we had imagined anyone might – the disagreement to which Epictetus refers. This causes us to take our contrary thoughts and customs less for granted, and to see them as more dependent on choice and circumstance than we had supposed (the rejection and distrust of mere opinion). We are led to look harder at our own thinking, and to seek a more true and accurate basis for it – the acquisition of the balance and ruler. The result may not be our old opinion or the alternative that surprised us; it may be a perspective that accounts for both and in some way elevates our understanding. Run through that cycle a thousand times and you might reasonably end with the principle discussed in this chapter.

We have reviewed some specific examples of that cycle, but the point goes beyond any particular case. It isn’t that our reaction to this or that is created by our own minds. It’s that our experience of everything is, and that it is up to us to a greater extent than we usually know. The work of philosophy is to take responsibility for our own thinking, and in so doing to liberate ourselves from the attachments and misjudgments that otherwise dictate our experience.

Two more ways to summarize the point of this chapter:

Pay attention to your impressions, watch over them without sleeping, for what you guard is no small thing: self-respect and fidelity and self-possession, a mind free from emotion, pain, fear, disturbance – in a word, freedom.

Epictetus, Discourses 4.3.7

It seems to me that in this whole doctrine about mental disturbances, one thing sums up the matter: that they are all in our power, that they are all taken on as a matter of judgment, that they are all voluntary. This error, then, must be uprooted, this opinion stripped away; and just as things must be made tolerable in circumstances we regard as evil, so too in good ones, those things thought to be great and delightful should be taken more calmly.

Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 4.31

We can find a good closing remark for this discussion in what Cicero said to close a related discussion of his own.

Now that we have determined the cause of these disturbances of the mind – that they all arise from judgments based on opinion, and by choice – let there be an end to this discussion. Besides, now that the boundaries of good and evil have been discovered so far as they are discoverable by man, we ought to realize that nothing can be hoped from philosophy greater or more useful than what we have been discussing for the last four days. For besides instilling a proper contempt for death, and making pain bearable, we have added the calming of grief, as great as any evil known to mankind…. For there is one cure for grief and other ills, and it is the same. They are all matters of opinion, and taken up voluntarily because it seems right to do so. This error, as the root of all evils, philosophy promises to eradicate utterly. Let us therefore devote ourselves to its cultivation and submit to being cured; for so long as these evils possess us, not only can we not be happy, we cannot even be right in our minds.

Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 4.38