The Dogmatic Core of the Discipline of Assent

In The Inner Citadel Pierre Hadot (pp. 107--8) shows how the discipline of assent is intimately linked to the doctrine of good, bad, and indifferent things.

"It is human beings who, thanks to their freedom, introduce trouble and worry into the world. Taken by themselves, things are neither good nor evil, and should not trouble us. The course of things unfolds in a necessary way, without choice, without hesitation, and without passion.

'If you are grieving about some exterior thing, then it is not that thing which is troubling you, but your judgment about that thing (VIII, 47)'

"Here we encounter an echo of a famous saying by Epictetus:

'What troubles people is not things, but their judgments about things (Manual, 5).'


"Things cannot trouble us, because they do not touch our ego, in other words, they do not touch the guiding principle within us. They remain on the threshold, outside our liberty. When Marcus and Epictetus add that "what troubles us is our judgment about things," they are clearly alluding to the discourse which it is within our power to pronounce within ourselves, in order to define for ourselves the meaning of a given event. It is this latter judgment which may trouble us, but this is where the fundamental dogma of Stoicism comes in: there is no good but moral good, and there is no evil but moral evil. That which is not moral--that is to say, that which does not depend on our choice, our liberty, or our judgment--is indifferent, and ought not to bother us. If our judgment about things is troubling us, the reason is that we have forgotten this fundamental dogma. The discipline of assent is thus intimately linked to the doctrine of good, bad, and indifferent things (XI, 16):

'To live one's life in the best way: the power to do this resides in our own soul, if we are capable of being indifferent to indifferent things. And we can be indifferent to indifferent things if we consider each of these things, in each of its parts and in its totality, remembering that none of them can produce within us a value-judgment about them, nor can they reach us. Rather, things remain immobile, whereas it is we who engender judgments about them, and, as it were, write them down within ourselves. But it is possible for us not to write them down; it is also possible, if we have not succeeded in this, to erase them instantaneously" (Hadot, The Inner Citadel, pp. 107--8).

The Inner Citadel: the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius by Pierre Hadot