“It is not things that disturb people, but their judgements about things.”

What does it mean?

The mainstream reading is that disturbance lives in the judgement added to an event, so the workable part is the verdict rather than the fact. A competing reading says this underplays bodily shock and other people's real cruelty, which can harm you before any tidy judgement is formed. The sentence is Enchiridion 5, and it is the claim modern therapies often echo, knowingly or not. Assent, not the first flicker, is where he locates the work.

Did Epictetus really say this?

The library’s label is Paraphrase or translation. Close translation of a core Epictetan sentence, via Arrian. Modern therapies that sound like this are often, knowingly or not, in this line.

Where it comes from

Enchiridion 5

Approximate date: c. 108 CE.

How to use it

Name the fact in plain words, that the manager criticised the report in front of the team, and then name the sentence you added, that this ruins you or that they meant to humiliate you. Challenge the added sentence before you rewrite the whole day. The fact may still need a practical reply, but the verdict is a second event.

A mindset reading

You are not asked to feel nothing. You are asked to notice that a judgement arrived and called itself the event. The habit is to catch the moment of assent, the 'yes' you give to an impression, because that is the step he thinks is yours.

Understand the philosophy

Stoic psychology says impressions arrive and we then assent or refuse. Pathē, the passions, are judgements on this theory, not mere bodily storms. Epictetus is answering why the same event leaves one person shaken and another steady. He trains attention at the point of assent before he tries to rearrange circumstances.

Related

• “Some things are up to us and some are not. Up to us are judgement, impulse, desire, aversion — in a word, whatever is our own doing. Not up to us are our body, our property, reputation, office — in a word, whatever is not our own doing.”

  Paraphrase or translation

• “Do not seek to have events happen as you wish, but wish them to happen as they do happen, and all will be well with you.”

  Paraphrase or translation

• “Sickness is a hindrance to the body, but not to the will, unless the will itself consents.”

  Paraphrase or translation

Related bias. Confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, remember, and accept what supports a view you already like, and to skim past what would hurt it. It is not a claim that every belief is stubborn. It is a pattern in how attention is spent.

Practise the nine skills