Resist and Persist
Resist and Persist is a five-day course on the Stoic art of self-discipline. Through the disciplines of desire, judgment, and action, it explores how to become less governed by impulses, pleasures, fears, and circumstances. *** This course is exclusive to Dying Every Day members.
The Discipline of Assent: Training the Mind
Resist and Persist (Day 4 of 5)
At the end of Day 3, I asked you to notice something.
You chose one action worth doing, and when the moment came, you watched for the thought that appeared to free you from it: “Not today.” “You’re too tired.” “Ten minutes won’t matter.”
I asked you not to argue with the thought.
Only to notice that it appeared.
Now we turn toward it, because that thought is not yet a command. It is not necessarily a fact. It is what the Stoics called an impression: something presented to the mind that asks to be taken as true.
In the distinction between what appears and what we agree to believe about it, the Stoics located one of the most important forms of human freedom.
This is the discipline of assent.
We have already worked with the first two disciplines. Desire asks, “What is worth wanting?” Action asks, “What is mine to do?”
Assent turns toward the judgments beneath both: “What am I agreeing to believe?”
The question matters because desire and action do not arise in a vacuum. Beneath them are judgments.
“I want the promotion because I have judged it desirable.”
“I avoid the conversation because I have judged it threatening.”
“I abandon the work because some part of me has decided that the discomfort is unnecessary, intolerable, or no longer worth enduring.”
These judgments often happen so quickly that we don’t experience them as judgments at all. They arrive already dressed as descriptions of reality: “This is terrible.” “She disrespected me.” “I can’t handle this.” “Everyone can see that I’m failing.”
The thought and the world seem to arrive together.
The Stoics ask us to separate them.
Epictetus states the principle in one of the most famous lines of the Enchiridion:
“Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of things.”
This sentence is easy to misunderstand. Epictetus is not saying that events don’t matter. Lose someone you love, and something real has happened. Receive a frightening diagnosis, and something real has happened. Be betrayed, assaulted, dismissed, humiliated, or treated unjustly, and something real has happened.
Stoicism does not require us to pretend otherwise.
Nor does it claim that we deliberately choose every bodily or emotional response.
Seneca, writing about anger, distinguishes between an initial, involuntary reaction and the judgment that may follow. A sudden noise can make us flinch. Bad news can tighten the stomach before we have formed a sentence about it. The face can flush. The heart can accelerate. Fear can arrive before philosophy has found its shoes.
The Stoics sometimes described these as first movements. They happen to us. Assent concerns what follows.
