Self-Coherence: - College of Stoic Philosophers

meaning—judgment—than is necessary to the impression. The active portion of the discipline of assent invokesthe Delphic command to “Know Thyself.” As an adult, you are the “pattern of assents” that comprise yourpsychology—your character. Therefore, you must actively excavate cognitions, resulting from incorrect assentsof the past, which are causing emotional turmoil in your life today.Protect your inner citadel from incorrect judgmentsYour first and ever-present responsibility is to accurately judge the impressions forced upon you in daily life.The vast majority of these impressions result from events and causes outside of your control. Thus, you mustuse your guiding principle to accurately judge their veracity and meaning by reducing them to their essentialproposition and then assenting or withholding assent. As Hadot wrote:...the discipline of assent appears as a constant effort to eliminate all the value-judgments which we bring tobear upon those things which do not depend upon us, and which therefore have no moral value, Thephenomena of nature and the events of the world, once they are stripped of all the adjectives—”terrifying,”“frightening,” “dangerous,” “hideous,” “repulsive”—which humankind , in its blind anthropomorphismapplies to them, appear in their nudity and all their savage beauty. 12Every assent must be limited to the objective meaning of the impression; it must be stripped of allsubjective inferences.Perform some inner citadel housecleaningEveryone but the sage will discover their guiding principle entertaining irrational thoughts. We sense somethingis wrong when we ask self-reflecting questions like: “Why did I say that?” “Why did that make me so angry?”“What is it about him that irritates me so much?” etc. Those questions are important for inner citadelhousecleaning. To nurture the habit of housecleaning, pay attention to your emotional reactions to people, thingsand events. Then you can attempt to ascertain the false premises (prior assents) that lie beneath the emotionalreactions.Circumscribing your Self 13In Meditations 12.3, Marcus Aurelius details the process ofcircumscribing the Self. He begins by delineating our truenature into three elements: body, breath, and mind. Heasserts the body and breath are under your care, yet outsideof your control. Only the mind is within your control. Theprocess of circumscribing the Self involves realizing thethings outside your control, such as others, the past andfuture, involuntary emotions, and destiny are incapable oftouching your Self. That realization creates an impenetrable“inner citadel” within your soul where your Self can residein serenity. Your Self, once protected from influencesoutside your control, is capable of “doing what is just,”“desiring what comes to pass,” and “saying what is true.”Illustration 3 represent the concept of the inner citadel—that which is “up to us”—protected from those thingsoutside the Self which are “not up to us.”The concept of a circumscribed Self, unaffected byanything outside one's Self, can easily feed a commonmisunderstanding about Stoicism. Stoics have often beenInnerCitadelyour bodyotherspast & futureInvoluntary emotionsdestinyIllustration 312Hadot, The Inner Citadel, 111-11213 Hadot, The Inner Citadel, 112-1187