Judgements (opinions)

The claim

A judgement, in Stoic usage, is the opinion you form about something: that it is good, bad, harmful, shameful, or worth chasing. The Stoic claim is blunt. Things themselves have no power to produce these opinions. You produce them. Marcus Aurelius states it as directly as it can be stated: "Things themselves touch not the soul, not in the least degree; nor have they admission to the soul, nor can they turn or move the soul: but the soul turns and moves itself alone, and whatever judgements it may think proper to make, such it makes for itself the things which present themselves to it" (Meditations 5.19). Elsewhere he puts the same point as a rule of practice: "It is in our power to have no opinion about a thing, and not to be disturbed in our soul; for things themselves have no natural power to form our judgements" (Meditations 6.52).

The popular misreading

The easy way to hear this is as a trick for feeling better: if something upsets you, just decide not to be upset, and the upset goes away. That reading turns judgement into a mood switch you flip when things get hard, a kind of willpower over feelings.

That is not what Marcus is doing. He is making a claim about where trouble actually lives. Pain, loss, insult, even death itself, he says, are operations of nature, not evils in themselves (Meditations 2.12). What is evil to you does not exist in another person's mind, and it does not exist in your body, however damaged. It exists only "in that part of you in which subsists the power of forming opinions about evils" (Meditations 4.39). So the point is not to suppress a true reaction to a real evil. It is that many of the things we call evils were never evils to begin with, until we judged them so. Marcus makes the diagnosis explicit about his own distress: "To-day I have got out of all trouble, or rather I have cast out all trouble, for it was not outside, but within and in my opinions" (Meditations 9.13). The trouble was never in the world. It was in the verdict he had written about the world.

What follows from this

If judgements are where the trouble lives, then judgements are also where the remedy lives. Marcus works this out with an image of pursuit and avoidance: things that disturb you through desire or aversion do not come looking for you, in a sense you go to them. Let your judgement about them rest, and they rest too, and you are no longer seen chasing or fleeing anything (Meditations 11.11). This is not indifference to what happens. It is the recognition that the disturbance was added by you, and can be withdrawn by you.

This has a further consequence Marcus draws out at 4.49: if a setback has actually happened, it cannot by itself make you unjust, cowardly, intemperate, or imprudent, unless you let it. What it can prevent is not your character but only, at most, your comfort. Bearing it well, he says, is not misfortune. It is good fortune, because your character, which is what actually matters, remains intact.

The same structure applies to opinions about the gods. For Epictetus, right opinion about the gods, that they exist and govern the universe with goodness and justice, is what allows a person to follow events willingly instead of accusing providence of neglect (Handbook 31). Wrong opinion, not the events themselves, is what produces complaint.

The honest objection

The obvious objection is that some things really are bad: a child's death, torture, betrayal. Marcus is not claiming these events feel the same to everyone or that pain is an illusion. His claim, following the wider Stoic view, is narrower and more radical at once: nothing external can touch your faculty of choice, the part of you that judges and chooses, unless you hand it that power yourself. Health, reputation, even the body, are preferred but not good in the full sense. Only the quality of your own judgements and choices is good or bad, because that is the only thing truly up to you.

This does not make Marcus indifferent to suffering. He praises Sextus for tolerating "those who form opinions without consideration" (Meditations 1.9), and Severus for never concealing his own opinions from friends (Meditations 1.14), which suggests judgement, honestly examined and honestly spoken, is part of a decent life, not a wall against it. The discipline is not to stop caring. It is to stop mistaking the world's furniture for the source of your peace, and to notice that the pen writing your verdicts is your own.

What to do with this

The next time something disturbs you, ask where the disturbance actually is. Not in the event, which has already happened and cannot be changed, but in the sentence you are writing about it. You cannot always undo the event. You can examine the sentence, and, if it is unfair or exaggerated, erase it.