Position
Suffering as False Judgment
Suffering arises from our judgments about events rather than from the events themselves, and it ceases when assent is withheld from false judgments about what is good and bad.
Classification
- Position level
- specific
- Domains
- Ethics
Overview
The Stoic account places the origin of suffering in assent. An impression presents itself — that a loss is a catastrophe — and distress follows only once the mind agrees. 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. 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 a mistaken judgment about value, rather than in craving conditioned by ignorance.
Position on
References
- Epictetus, Enchiridion §§1, 5
- 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