Suffering as False Judgment

Classification

Position level

specific

Domains

Ethics

Overview

The Stoic account places the origin of suffering in assent. As Chrysippus analysed it, distress rests on two judgments: that something bad is present — this loss is a catastrophe — and that it is right to be pained by it. Distress follows only once the mind assents to them. Events themselves are outside our control and carry no such verdict with them.

Cessation is therefore available in principle at every moment, by examining impressions and refusing assent to those that treat external things as good or bad. The scope is evaluative distress. Bodily pain is an indifferent that no judgment removes, and the Stoics allowed involuntary first stirrings of feeling that even the sage undergoes; what assent creates, and its withdrawal ends, is the passion built on those judgments. This is an alternative account of the same pair of questions that Dependent Origination answers, reached from a tradition with no shared vocabulary, and the two locate the origin differently: in mistaken judgments about value, rather than in craving conditioned by ignorance.

Position on

• The Origin and Cessation of Suffering

Held by traditions

• Stoicism

  Question scope: The Origin and Cessation of Suffering

References

• Epictetus, Enchiridion §§1, 5
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stoicism, §4.3 'Indifferents' and §4.7 'Passions' (pain as an indifferent; passions as judgments, with involuntary first movements that are not passions)
• Cicero, Tusculan Disputations III.61–62, 76 (Chrysippus's analysis of distress as the belief that something bad is present together with the belief that it is right to be pained by it)
• Epictetus, Enchiridion §5 — 'Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of them' — with the remedy in §1's division between what is and is not in our power