Epictetus reputedly told his students that the founders of Stoicism distinguished between two stages of our response to any event, including threatening situations. First come the initial impressions (phantasiai) that are imposed involuntarily on our minds from outside, when we’re initially exposed to an event such as the storm at sea. These impressions can be triggered, says Epictetus, by a terrifying sound such as a peal of thunder, a building collapsing, or a sudden cry of danger. Even the mind of a perfect Stoic Sage will initially be shaken by abrupt shocks of this kind, and he will shrink back from them instinctively in alarm. This reaction doesn’t come from faulty value judgments about the dangers faced but from an emotional reflex arising in his body, which temporarily bypasses reason. Epictetus might have added that these emotional reactions are comparable to those experienced by non-human animals. Seneca, for instance, notes that when animals are alarmed by the appearance of danger, they take flight, but after they have escaped, their anxiety soon abates and they return to grazing in peace once again.16 By contrast, the human capacity for thought allows us to perpetuate our worries beyond these natural bounds. Reason, our greatest blessing, is also our greatest curse.
In the second stage of our response, the Stoics say, we typically add voluntary judgments of “assent” (sunkatatheseis) to these automatic impressions. Here the Stoic wise man’s response differs from that of the majority of people. He does not go along with the initial emotional reactions to a situation that have invaded his mind. Epictetus says the Stoic should neither assent to nor confirm these emerging impressions, such as anxiety in the face of danger. Rather, he rejects them as misleading, views them with studied indifference, and lets go of them. By contrast, the unwise are carried away by their initial impression of external events—including those that are terrible and to be feared—and continue to worry, ruminate, and even complain aloud about a perceived threat. Seneca gives a more detailed account of the Stoic model of emotion in On Anger,17 which divides the process of experiencing a passion into three “movements,” or stages:
FIRST STAGE: Initial impressions automatically impose themselves on your mind, including thoughts and emerging feelings called propatheiai, or “proto-passions,” by the Stoics. For example, the impression “The boat is sinking” would quite naturally evoke some initial anxiety.
SECOND STAGE: The majority of people, like those on the boat, would agree with the original impression, go along with it, and add more value judgments, indulging in catastrophic thinking: “I might die a terrible death!” They would worry about it and continue to dwell on it long afterward. By contrast, Stoics, like the unnamed philosopher in the story, have learned to take a step back from their initial thoughts and feelings and withhold their assent from them. They might do this by saying to themselves, “You are just an impression and not at all the things you claim to represent,” or “It is not things that upset us but our judgments about them.” The boat is sinking, but you might make it ashore; even if you don’t, panicking won’t help. Responding calmly and with courage is more important. That’s what you’d praise other people for doing if faced with the same situation.
THIRD STAGE: On the other hand, if you have assented to the impression that something is intrinsically bad or catastrophic, then a full-blown “passion” develops, which can quickly spiral out of control. This actually happened to Seneca during a storm when he grew seasick and panicked so much that he foolishly clambered overboard and tried to wade ashore through the waves and rocks when he would have been much safer remaining on the boat.18
In other words, a certain amount of anxiety is natural. Indeed, the hearts of even the most experienced sailors might leap into their mouths when their ship looks like it’s about to be overturned. Bravery would consist in carrying on regardless and dealing with the situation rationally. The Stoic likewise tells himself that although the situation may appear frightening, the truly important thing in life is how he chooses to respond. So he reminds himself to view the storm with Stoic indifference and to respond with wisdom and courage while accepting his initial nervous reaction as harmless and inevitable. What he does not do, though, is make things worse for himself by continuing to worry.
For this reason, once the pallor and anxious expression have left his face, the wise man’s anxiety tends to abate naturally, and he regains his composure before long. He reevaluates his initial anxious impressions, confidently asserting that they are both false and unhelpful. On the other hand, the unwise and fearful perpetuate their own distress for much longer. Gellius read about this in the lost Discourse of Epictetus and learned that there is nothing un-Stoic about someone turning pale with anxiety for a while during a perilous situation like the one he’d just survived. It’s natural and inevitable to experience feelings like these, as long as we don’t escalate our distress by going along with the impressions accompanying them and telling ourselves that some awful catastrophe is about to happen.
Seneca likewise noted that certain misfortunes strike the wise man without incapacitating him, such as physical pain, illness, the loss of friends or children, or the catastrophes inflicted by defeat in war.19 They graze him but do not wound him. Indeed, Seneca also points out that there is no virtue in enduring things we do not feel. This is important to note: for a Stoic to exhibit the virtue of temperance, he must have at least some trace of desire to renounce, and to exhibit courage he must have at least these first sensations of fear to endure. As the Stoics like to put it, the wise man is not made of stone or iron but of flesh and blood.
In The Meditations, Marcus himself writes that although he tells troubling impressions to go away, he is not angry with them because they have come according to their “ancient manner”; in other words, they arise in the way basic feelings also arise in animals.20 That implies that, like the anonymous Stoic teacher on Gellius’s storm-tossed boat, Marcus views them with indifference rather than judging them as inherently bad. Elsewhere he says that pleasant and unpleasant sensations in the body inevitably impinge on the mind because they’re part of the same organism.21 We shouldn’t try to resist them, but rather we should accept their occurrence as natural, as long as we don’t allow our mind to add the judgment that the things we’re experiencing are good or bad. This is important, because people who confuse “Stoicism” with “stoicism” (i.e., having a stiff upper lip) often think that it’s about suppressing feelings like anxiety, which they view as bad, harmful, or shameful. That’s not only bad psychology, it’s also totally in conflict with Stoic philosophy, which teaches us to accept our involuntary emotional reactions, our flashes of anxiety, as indifferent: neither good nor bad. What matters, in other words, isn’t what we feel but how we respond to those feelings.
Although Marcus was reputedly introduced to philosophy at an unusually early age, it’s believed that he didn’t wholeheartedly commit his life to Stoicism until Junius Rusticus supplanted Fronto as his main tutor, when Marcus was in his early twenties. Looking back on this time, Marcus was grateful that when he first began to dabble in philosophy he didn’t completely fall under the spell of a Sophist, like Fronto, or end up obsessively poring over books, working out logical puzzles, or speculating about physics and cosmology. Rather, he focused on Stoic ethics and its practical application in daily life. Whereas Fronto counseled Marcus to dress and speak more like an emperor, Rusticus did the opposite. He was among those who encouraged Marcus to set aside the vanity of status and dress down whenever possible rather than walking around in the formal attire of a Caesar (and later an emperor). This was exceptional behavior for a Roman of his status, incidentally, but the British Museum has a statuette in its collection that seems to confirm it really happened. It shows Marcus dressed not like an emperor but as a common citizen, apparently while visiting Egypt late in his life.