The Pause: Substance Dualism and Libertarian Free Will in the Examination of Impressions

 

The Pause: Substance Dualism and Libertarian Free Will in the Examination of Impressions

The examination of impressions begins with a pause. Before assent is granted or refused, before the dogmata are applied, before the correspondence test is run — there is a moment in which the impression is held at arm's length and the practitioner does not immediately react. Epictetus prescribes this pause as the first and most fundamental act of Stoic practice. But what kind of act is it? What is doing the pausing? And is the pause genuine — a real withholding — or merely a mechanical delay in a deterministic system?

These questions are not peripheral. The answers determine whether the entire practical program of Epictetus is coherent. Sterling's Core Stoicism answers them directly through two of its six philosophical commitments: substance dualism and libertarian free will.

What the Pause Requires

Epictetus is unambiguous that assent — and the withholding of assent — belongs to what is exclusively up to us. It is the central capacity of the prohairesis, the one thing that cannot be compelled from outside. But this claim only makes sense if two conditions are met.

First, there must be a genuine self capable of doing the withholding — not merely a stream of physical events that includes a pause-event among its contents, but a real agent that stands over the impression and owns the act of withholding. This is what substance dualism provides. The hegemonikon — the rational faculty — is not reducible to the body or its states. It is a genuine immaterial substance whose causal powers are not exhausted by physical antecedents. Without substance dualism there is no self doing the pausing. There is only mechanism.

Second, the outcome of the pause must be genuinely open — the practitioner must be capable of granting or withholding assent in a strong sense, not merely registering whichever output a prior causal chain has already fixed. This is what libertarian free will provides. The pause is not a mechanistic delay. It is an agent-causal act — an originating exercise of the soul's own powers that is not necessitated by prior physical or psychological conditions. Without libertarian free will the pause is theater.

Contemporary Philosophical Support

Contemporary philosophy provides clear support for both commitments operating together in precisely this way. J. P. Moreland's defense of substance dualism ties the immaterial soul directly to libertarian, agent-causal freedom. On his account the human person as immaterial substantial soul acts by spontaneously exercising causal powers — and crucially, no set of conditions exists within her that is sufficient to determine the outcome. This is the originating agent of the Stoic pause: a self that is not just one more event in a causal chain but the genuine source of the act.

Agent-causal libertarians generally treat the deliberative pause — the withholding or granting of judgment — as an exercise of agent-causal power at the level of the person rather than the physical event. E. J. Lowe's defense of non-reductive dualism provides a framework in which mental states grounded in a mental substance can be genuine causal factors not reducible to physical laws. These frameworks converge on the same picture: there really is a someone who can stand over against the flux of events and own a pause, a reconsideration, or a withholding.

Empirical research adds a further observation: folk belief in free will is more strongly predicted by substance dualism than by any other metaphysical commitment. People intuitively grasp that genuine freedom requires a non-physical self — that without an immaterial agent there is no one home to do the choosing. Sterling's framework gives that intuition its philosophical grounding.

The Medieval Confirmation

The connection between an immaterial soul and genuine assent has deep roots in the Western philosophical tradition. Medieval Christian moral theology treated the human being as a rational soul whose act of will can either consent or not consent — and located responsibility precisely in this inner act of assent, irreducible to bodily motions. Augustine held that coercion is excluded by definition from the will: if a will were coerced it would not be a will. The freedom at stake is non-necessitated in the strong, libertarian sense.

In this tradition the pause before sin or obedience is literally an event in the immaterial soul — an inner fiat or non fiat — rather than a slower physical process. This is not Stoicism, but it confirms that the combination of substance dualism and libertarian free will as the ground of genuine assent is not a novel or eccentric philosophical position. It is a well-established account of what moral responsibility requires.

The Synthesis

On a dualist-libertarian picture of agency, the Stoic dynamics of impression and assent can be taken with full metaphysical seriousness. An impression arrives, but the soul as immaterial substance does not merely register a causally fixed output. It actively exercises its own causal powers in a genuine pause — a withholding or granting of assent that is not necessitated by prior physical or psychological conditions. What is up to us is not a mechanistic delay in a deterministic system but an agent-causal act of a real self, whose inner assent or refusal is the originating source of action and the proper ground of responsibility.

This is what Sterling's commitment to substance dualism and libertarian free will secures for Core Stoicism. Chrysippus's compatibilism attempted to preserve the language of assent being up to us while conceding that all events including assent are determined. The cylinder rolls as it must according to its own nature. Sterling follows Epictetus rather than Chrysippus — and provides the philosophical framework that makes Epictetus's claim coherent. The pause is real. The withholding is genuine. The self doing both is not a physical event. The outcome is not predetermined.

Without these two commitments the examination of impressions is an elaborate description of a mechanism. With them it is what Epictetus always said it was: the one thing genuinely up to us.