If you’ve read the other essays in The Foundations Series, it’s a safe assumption that you’re serious about exploring Stoicism. And that’s a good thing, because it’s about to get weird. Perhaps “counterintuitive” is a better word but, either way, we’ll need to challenge some fairly conventional ideas.
In Part 3, we discussed the importance of rational agency in human flourishing. To flourish, according to Stoicism, is to consistently decide well. Why? Because our decisions are the only part of the process that truly belongs to us. Humans choose. And that stands in clear contrast with the other animals, which are far more governed by instinct.
But making good decisions in a complex and unpredictable world depends on maintaining a strong and orderly Inner Citadel. The ideas behind this fortress are discussed extensively by Epictetus: it is the domain of the conscious mind, the place where we interpret our experience, form judgements, and exercise rational agency. That is to say: it is where our decisions are made.
It is the domain most fully under our control and, because of that, it sits at the very heart of Stoic practice. If we are to hold any hope of living Stoically, of achieving eudaimonia, then everything begins here.
Becoming Less Impressionable
Yesterday, Ellie and I were sitting on our roof. It’s a flat roof with walls around it, rather than a sloped one with tiles, I hasten to add; we’re not insane. Anyway, there we were, sitting on our roof, trying to enjoy our morning coffee. I say “trying” because somebody was making an annoying noise. They were running some kind of machine, constantly starting and stopping it. We had no idea what it was but, like I say, it was annoying. It wasn’t just the noise that was annoying. It was the person behind it. What sort of idiot keeps starting and stopping an irritating machine every few seconds? Get the job done and turn the thing off!
The longer it went on, the more annoyed I became. I eventually decided to look over the wall to see what was going on.
Ohhhhh, I realised; it’s a street cleaner! Making our road nice and tidy!
Thank you for your service, street cleaner! Ahhhhh… the sweet sound of civilisation.
Hmmmm, that’s odd…
Why is it that the sound annoyed me until I realised what was making it?
Well, as everyday and ordinary as that little episode was, it cuts right to the heart of one of the most important ideas in Stoicism.
The Stoics used a term that we normally translate as “impression” to describe anything that presents itself to consciousness. It can be physical pain, an emotion, a sensory input, a memory, or a thought. In short, it is anything that enters our awareness.
But, because I’m a bit of a computer nerd, I like to use the term “inputs”. I also think it’s a slightly more vivid way to visualise the concept. These inputs may come from within our bodies or minds, or may originate outside of us. But as far as the Inner Citadel is concerned – that central fortress of the conscious mind – they are inputs from outside the Citadel.
And we often have no control over these inputs. If your knee suddenly starts hurting, that is an input. If you hear a sound from the street, that is an input. If you suddenly feel a rush of excitement, that is an input.
But back to that hurting knee. Your knee hurts, so you suffer, don’t you? Not necessarily, said the Stoics.
Passing Judgement
So, anyway, like I say, we were sitting on the roof enjoying our coffee. Annoying noise. Except it was only annoying when we didn’t know where it was coming from, wasn’t it? As soon as I found out it was being made by a hardworking street cleaner doing something I value, it immediately stopped bothering me.
The annoyance I associated with the noise wasn’t part of the noise itself, but came from somewhere else. And the Stoics knew exactly where it came from: my own judgement.
Superficially, there’s nothing particularly remarkable about that. It’s common practice now to “reframe” things we don’t like to make them more palatable. But, here in the modern world, we don’t seem to make the next connection.
And that connection is this: we can’t control our inputs, but we can learn to control our judgements. This goes deeper than just reframing the thing; it’s about understanding that our judgement determines what the thing means to us. And we make that judgement.
Again, this wouldn’t surprise Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius; they’ve been trying to tell us this for thousands of years. But we still don’t quite get it.
Because, after all, your knee is hurting! How can you not suffer if your knee is hurting?!
Mind The Gap
Ok, back to your poor knee. Let’s see if we can ease your pain with a little philosophy.
Damn… it turns out we can’t. Pain is an input from your knee, and your knee can’t think, let alone read an essay. But suffering and pain are different things.
The Stoics believed there is a distinction between every input into the Inner Citadel and the judgement we eventually make about it. Most of the time, we don’t notice that distinction because our judgements happen so quickly they feel like part of the input itself.
But they aren’t.
Imagine I told you people pay money to feel sad. Would you believe me? Have you ever cried while watching a film at the cinema, or known anybody who has?
“Well, of course,” you might reply, “but I wasn’t really sad!”
No?
There were actual tears running down your face! There was mascara everywhere, Keith. Your body responded to the sadness. So why weren’t you suffering in the same way?
Well, because the story wasn’t real. You knew it wasn’t real, and your judgement reflected that. The sadness was genuine; your evaluation of it, though, was different.
And what about fear? Have you ever been on a theme park ride, deliberately terrifying yourself for fun? I have! And, honestly, I was scared. I paid money to be scared.
There isn’t a special kind of evolved cinema response that makes happy people burst into tears. Nor is there a special rollercoaster response that makes relaxed people scream. The emotions are real. What changes is the judgement we make about them.
The Stoics argued that much of our suffering is caused not by the input itself, but by the judgement we attach to it.
We can see the same thing happening in another familiar phenomenon: habituation.
This is something absolutely all of us are familiar with. We all know that it’s possible to get used to things. But have you ever reflected on the mechanics behind that?
If you’ve been caught up in the recent fad to have cold showers or ice baths, then there’s a similar but conscious shift. At first it’s all “OH MY GOD I CAN’T BREATHE AND I’M GOING TO DIE.”
And then it just gradually gets more and more comfortable. Same input, different judgement. We can see habituation through that lens. When we get used to something, that something still exists, but the judgement gradually changes.
Is your knee still hurting, btw? Did you momentarily forget about it while reading these words? Then you forgot to judge it, and you forgot to suffer.
And so an interesting question emerges. If our minds naturally learn to respond differently to the same inputs, why shouldn’t we be able to cultivate that process deliberately?
Telling Better Stories
We absolutely can do this. And it starts with recognising our existing stories.
Back to cold showers: have you ever tried one just to notice what your mind screams at you? It’s instructive.
For me, the story during a cold shower is panic-inducing. I mean, I really hear that I can’t breathe, and that I’m going to die. Now, looking back as a person who’s still alive, it turns out that was wrong.
I’ve tried this a few times now, and noticed that I’ve also been breathing while my mind panics about not being able to breathe.
You know what, I’m beginning to think that story might have been a lie?
So, in order to break the story, I have taken several cold showers, just listening to it and comparing it with what I know to be true: “The story is that I’m struggling to breathe. Well, my breaths are definitely shallower than usual, but I am still breathing well enough. There’s definitely a sense that this could overwhelm and kill me, but that hasn’t happened during my previous cold showers.”
As I progress with this, it’s not as if the story disappears; instead, the thoughts described in the previous paragraph become the new story. And that story is better because it corresponds more closely with reality.
But the key thing I’ve learnt is that these stories can be rewritten. As you can gather, it takes time, deliberate practice and motivation.
But Why Bother With All This?
Why? Because I now have a more accurate understanding of whether or not I can withstand cold showers. OK, that’s not terribly compelling! Let’s try again…
I now know that cold showers don’t kill me, but if I continued believing the old story, they might as well be able to.
As it is, if the boiler breaks down, I won’t labour under the false understanding that I can’t have a shower; I will have twice as many options: no shower or cold shower.
And that’s what it means to cultivate rational agency. A mistaken judgement distorts the choices we perceive, forcing us to act within a false understanding of reality. Good judgement allows us to see the full range of choices before us and choose the one which best takes us towards our goals.
Stoicism absolutely refuses to promise any outcomes at all. But I can confidently say that, whatever hand life deals you, you will play it better if your rational agency is cultivated.
And, you’ve probably guessed by now, the secret to that cultivation is all in the Four Cardinal Virtues.
Just in case you’re new to all of this, I described the Virtues in Part 3: Rational Agency – The Bedrock of Stoicism, which you really should read! But a recap never hurt anybody, so…
The Virtues and The Inner Citadel
The Four Cardinal Virtues are Wisdom, Courage, Justice and Temperance. And if we think of the Inner Citadel as the place where our judgements are formed and our decisions are made, their purpose makes almost immediate, intuitive sense.
Wisdom asks whether our judgement corresponds with reality. Courage stops fear from making the judgement for us. Temperance stops our appetites and impulses from doing the same. And Justice reminds us that we aren’t making decisions in a vacuum; we live among other rational agents, and our decisions take place within social systems whose stability we depend upon too.
Think of the Virtues less as a list of admirable character traits and more like safeguards around our rational agency.
Think back to the cold shower. The initial story is that I can’t breathe and I’m going to die; Wisdom checks the veracity of that. I’m breathing, and the evidence from previous showers suggests death is unlikely. But knowing that isn’t necessarily enough. Fear is still screaming at me to turn the tap off. Courage allows me to act according to what I have judged to be true rather than simply obeying the fear.
Of course, this doesn’t mean Courage requires me to stay in the shower. If I genuinely had good reason to believe I was in danger, getting out would probably be the wise thing to do. Courage isn’t about ignoring fear; it’s about hearing it and denying its urges when that’s rational.
And the same applies to Temperance. We are constantly presented with appetites, urges and desires that would happily make our decisions for us. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with those inputs. But they must be interrogated. What do they want and why? Is that aligned with our goals?
Justice concerns a wider landscape than that of the individual: the social environment in which rational agents operate together. My actions have consequences for the decision spaces of others, just as theirs have consequences for mine. A really simple example is deceit. If I choose to deceive someone, I deliberately feed them false information, making rational decision-making harder for them.
Justice is the Virtue that most closely resembles what we normally think of as ethics or morality. But it also performs a practical function. Wherever rational agents live together, their actions inevitably constrain one another. Justice makes those constraints more legible, predictable and stable, allowing each of us to make decisions with a better understanding of the social environment in which those decisions will operate.
This, I think, is why the Virtues matter so much to Stoicism. They help keep the Inner Citadel in good order. They give us a way of interrogating the stories that arise there, and the judgements they contain, before those judgements become decisions.
Contrary to widespread opinion, none of this means that a cultivated Stoic stops feeling pain, fear, anger, desire or sadness. Nor does it mean that every judgement will suddenly be correct. We can only make the best judgement our current information allows. And even then we sometimes fail to do so. Like I said, it takes work. And, as you can see from yesterday’s episode on the roof terrace, I fail at it too.
Every Stoic writer I’ve read has recounted their imperfect efforts to live by this philosophy. Our inputs, emotions, appetites and automatic responses can all pull us away from what we have rationally decided to do. Learning to prevent that from happening is part of the practice.
But fundamentally, a Stoic considers rational agency the rightful controller of our decisions. And there’s a good reason for that. Our automatic responses can tell us we’re scared, or sad, or in pain. But our conscious mind can consider all of these inputs alongside our goals, our capabilities, other people and everything we know about the world outside us. The information flows into the Inner Citadel from everywhere else. It is the place where that information is considered in concert with our conscious thoughts.
The Inner Citadel is where we create a little more space between the input and the judgement. And, in that space, we have the opportunity to ask whether our response is wise, courageous, just and temperate.
So where do we go from here? What are we doing with these judgements? Just… judging?
Well, no. Because the Inner Citadel is also where we decide to move forward, whatever “forward” implies for each of us. That means understanding our values – recognising what matters to us and then figuring out how to pursue it. As we discussed in Part 3, Stoicism has no preference regarding our goals. It describes the conditions under which we can pursue them rationally – without undermining the rational agency through which we choose them, or the social environment in which our agency operates. In Part 5, we will explore the domain of Action, and what it means to work towards the outcomes we deem important. But before that, the Inner Citadel is where we identify desired outcomes – and the priorities, conflicts and trade-offs involved. Stoicism won’t intervene here, so this essay isn’t the place to address them.
Instead, we’ve taken a quick tour of the Inner Citadel and seen some of how it works; that doesn’t mean it works automatically. The world we live in doesn’t encourage the kind of analysis we’ve discussed here. We are often encouraged to see these inputs not as signals, but as commands that we have little choice but to follow. But whether you hand over authority to those signals or choose to examine them in light of your objectives, that is still a choice.
And making the right choice is difficult. Nobody said this was easy; how many realise we can even try?
But the prize is incalculable. Cultivated rational agency is available to us all. It is to me, as I discuss in my essay on Eudaimonia, as satisfying and beautiful as anything else this life can offer, and it is ours for the taking – as soon as we decide we’re ready.
Next essay: Coming Soon
Previous essay: The Foundations Series: Part 3: Rational Agency – The Bedrock of Stoicism
The Foundations Series main page
If you’re interested in the philosophical framework that eventually grew from these reflections, you can read my Stoicism Explainer here.