Stoic News

Do the Six Commitments Oppose Modern Marxism in Theory and Practice?

Based on Sterling’s Stoicism and the Six Philosophical Commitments. Theoretical framework: Grant C. Sterling. Analysis and text: Dave Kelly, 2026.

Prompt: Do the six commitments oppose modern Marxism in theory and practice?

Yes, and the opposition is systematic rather than incidental. The six commitments and modern Marxism conflict at every foundational level — metaphysical, epistemological, ethical, and practical. The conflict is not between different answers to the same questions. It is between frameworks that disagree about what the questions are.

Substance Dualism vs. Marxist Materialism

Marxism is committed to dialectical materialism: reality is material through and through, consciousness is a product of material conditions, and the self is constituted by its social and economic relations. On this account, the agent is not prior to his circumstances — he is produced by them. Class position, mode of production, and historical forces shape who he is at a constitutive level.

Substance dualism denies this at the root. The agent is his rational faculty, which is ontologically distinct from all material conditions including body, social position, and economic circumstance. No external condition constitutes the self. The standing point — the prohairesis — is prior to all of this. A Marxist account of the self is precisely what substance dualism is designed to exclude.

Libertarian Free Will vs. Historical Determinism

Marxism holds that historical development follows deterministic laws — the dialectic of productive forces, class struggle, and historical necessity. Individual agency is real but subordinate to structural forces. The trajectory of history is not chosen by individual rational agents; it is driven by material contradictions that individuals instantiate but do not originate.

Libertarian free will asserts that the agent is the originating cause of his acts of assent, genuinely uncaused by prior material conditions. This is not merely a different account of freedom — it is a direct negation of historical determinism. If the agent genuinely originates his judgments, he cannot be explained as the product of his historical moment. The Marxist framework requires that individual consciousness be structurally explained. The libertarian free will commitment refuses structural explanation as constitutive of the agent.

Ethical Intuitionism vs. Class-Relative Morality

Marxism holds that moral ideas are part of the ideological superstructure — they reflect and serve the interests of the dominant class. There are no moral facts independent of historical and class position. What counts as just or unjust, right or wrong, is determined by the material interests of those who hold social power. Moral claims that present themselves as universal are, on the Marxist account, class ideology in disguise.

Ethical intuitionism holds that moral truths are necessary facts about reality, directly apprehended by the rational faculty, independent of what anyone believes or what class interests anyone serves. Theorem 10 — that virtue is the only genuine good — is not a class ideology. It is a moral fact. The rational faculty that apprehends it is not shaped by productive relations. The Marxist critique of morality as ideology is itself false on the intuitionist account, because it denies the possibility of non-ideological moral knowledge that intuitionism specifically claims.

Foundationalism vs. Dialectical Revisionism

Marxist dialectics holds that all positions are historically conditioned and subject to negation and supersession. There are no fixed foundational truths — the dialectic moves through contradiction toward historically determined syntheses. What counts as knowledge is itself historically relative.

Foundationalism holds that some propositions are self-evident necessary truths that do not require justification by appeal to something further, are not subject to historical revision, and are not conditioned by the position of the knower. Theorem 10 could not have been otherwise. 2+2=4 could not have been otherwise. The dialectic has no authority to supersede necessary truths. The foundationalist position is by design immune to the Marxist critique of fixed positions as historically conditioned ideology.

Correspondence Theory vs. Ideological Truth

On the Marxist account, what counts as true is shaped by social and material conditions. The correspondence of a proposition to reality is never a simple matter because what appears as reality is itself mediated by ideology. True consciousness is class consciousness — an understanding of one’s position within the productive system and its interests. False consciousness is the acceptance of the dominant ideology as universal truth.

Correspondence theory holds that a proposition is true if and only if it corresponds to reality, independently of who believes it, what class interests it serves, or what historical moment produces it. The Marxist account of false consciousness is itself a truth claim that presupposes correspondence theory — it claims that the worker’s beliefs fail to correspond to how things actually are. The Marxist cannot both deny correspondence theory and diagnose false consciousness, because the diagnosis requires the standard the theory provides.

Moral Realism vs. Historical Materialism’s Ethics

Moral realism holds that moral facts — that virtue is the only genuine good, that externals are indifferent — exist independently of what anyone believes, prefers, or constructs. These facts are not produced by social relations and cannot be revised by historical development.

Historical materialism holds that the good is historically variable, that justice is a class concept, and that communist society will produce a different moral vocabulary appropriate to its conditions. There are no eternal moral facts — morality is always the morality of a particular mode of production. On the Marxist account, Sterling’s claim that virtue is the only genuine good is either bourgeois ideology or a naïve philosophical abstraction. On Sterling’s account, the Marxist denial of objective moral facts leads directly to the conclusion that draws his most concentrated argument: if there are no objective moral facts, there is no basis for calling anything unjust, no basis for the Marxist critique of exploitation, and no reason why the proletariat’s interests should take precedence over the bourgeoisie’s. The Marxist project is morally self-undermining without moral realism.

The Practical Opposition

In practice the opposition is equally sharp. The Stoic framework locates the problem of human suffering entirely within the agent’s own false value judgments. Unhappiness is caused by assenting to impressions that present externals as genuine goods or evils. The solution is the correction of those judgments, available to the agent at every moment regardless of his material conditions. A slave can practice Stoicism. A prisoner can achieve eudaimonia. The external conditions of production, class position, and economic structure are all indifferents — appropriate objects of practical attention but not constitutive of the agent’s good or harm.

Marxism locates the problem of human suffering in the structure of productive relations. Alienation, exploitation, and false consciousness are products of material conditions that the individual cannot overcome through interior correction. The solution is collective political action to transform the material base. Individual interior work is at best secondary and at worst a distraction from the real source of suffering — or worse, a mechanism of accommodation that stabilizes an unjust system by making individuals content with their conditions rather than motivated to change them.

From the Stoic framework, the Marxist diagnosis is itself a false value judgment at a collective scale: the claim that material conditions are genuine evils and that external transformation is the genuine good. From the Marxist framework, the Stoic solution is ideology in the precise sense — it produces acceptance of material conditions by relocating the source of suffering in the individual’s own psychology rather than in the structure that produces the individual’s conditions.

The Two Frameworks Are Not in Dialogue

The two frameworks are not in dialogue. They are in fundamental opposition at every level — about what the self is, what knowledge is, what morality is, what truth is, and where human suffering comes from and what can be done about it. Every one of the six commitments contradicts a load-bearing element of the Marxist system. And the contradiction runs in both directions: Marxism, to sustain its own critique of exploitation and false consciousness, requires objective moral facts and a correspondence theory of truth — the very commitments it denies at the theoretical level. Sterling’s reconstruction is not one political position among others. It is a philosophical framework within which the Marxist project, as theory and as practice, is incoherent.

Theoretical framework: Grant C. Sterling. Analysis and text: Dave Kelly, 2026. Analytical judgments are Dave Kelly’s; prose rendering is Claude’s.

Grant C. Sterling on What Makes a Stoic

Post by Grant C. Sterling. Originally posted to the International Stoic Forum, May 24, 2021.

Grant C. Sterling on What Makes a Stoic

International Stoic Forum — May 24, 2021

All:

Of course, you’ve heard this before. Steve was brief…I’ll be brief as well. Of course, I’m incapable of being anywhere close to as brief as Steve.

“Being a Stoic” is not an objective factual matter, like being over 6’ tall. It requires people to develop criteria.

Suppose someone agrees with everything Karl Marx said (for simplicity, let’s pretend that h⁰e was completely consistent in his beliefs). There would be no rational doubt, then, whether or not he was a “Marxist”. But suppose he didn’t agree with Marx’s view of religion — suppose, in fact, that he was a Christian. Is he still a “Marxist”? It depends on how important you think Marx’s view of religion is to his philosophical system. I, personally, think that the answer is “of course he is”. I think the heart and soul of Marx’s philosophy is his view on economics, specifically things like the labor theory of value, the ultimate superiority of communism, etc. If this man believes those things (even if they have to be fitted into the rest of his system differently than Marx fit them into his, since Marx’s system included different religious ideas), then he’s a Marxist.

{You may have different standards. But this is not entirely an arbitrary, subjective matter — I would say that someone who calls someone a “Marxist” entirely on the basis of whether or not the person shares Marx’s views on, say, Judaism was being irrational. But there is certainly a subjective element.}

(I just had this exact discussion about Christianity. What do you have to believe, in order to count as a “Christian”? Do non-Trinitarians qualify? Those who deny the existence of Hell? Etc.)

So unless someone believes 100% of the things that the Stoics believed, we’ll have to decide what is so central and distinctive of Stoicism that it should count as a defining feature, and what shouldn’t count. And since the “Stoics” didn’t agree with each other about 100% of things, then we either say there never were any Stoics, or we’ll have to define what is required to be “in”. (This doesn’t have to be a list of necessary and sufficient conditions. It can be a list of distinctive ideas, and someone counts as a Stoic if they agree with 80% of them or something.)

I think that what is truly central, important, and distinctive of Stoicism is the moral psychology. The theory of what things are good, of the origin of emotions, of eudaimonia, etc. So I think someone who believes those things is a Stoic. I do not pretend that this is 100% of the things that the ancient Stoics believed. But I think it was what set the Stoics apart from other philosophers throughout history. And my view is not idiosyncratic — I’ll bet that if you look at the cases where someone has been described as being a “Stoic”, after you sort out the cases where the term is being used in its colloquial sense (someone who doesn’t display much emotion), you’ll find that 99% of the time it’s based on those characteristics. Stand up at a philosophy convention and say “what philosophical system do I follow?”, and then start reciting those characteristics. People will say “Stoicism”, without waiting to hear whether you believe in cataleptic impressions or pantheism.

You can have a different set of criteria if you want to. I don’t object. But be careful — I don’t think Epictetus was a pantheist, for example. If you make pantheism essential to Stoicism, then Epictetus wasn’t a Stoic. Chrysippus was a strict determinist. I’m not sure which other Stoics were strict determinists, but I’ll bet not all of them were. (Again, I have doubts about Epictetus, for one.) Is determinism central? Cataleptic impressions? Belief in fiery pneuma? You can end up defining “Stoicism” in such a way that no living person would ever want to be one. I think that’s unhelpful — your mileage may vary.

Regards,
GCS

The One Thing You Cannot Outsource

A Stoic reading of Enrique Dans, "AI is creating the first generation of cognitively outsourced humans,” Fast Company, March 25, 2026.

Enrique Dans opens with a familiar inventory. We outsourced memory to search engines. We outsourced navigation to GPS. We outsourced social coordination to platforms that decide what we see and when we respond. Each transfer was so gradual that it barely registered. Now, he argues, we are outsourcing something categorically different: not a peripheral cognitive function but the labor of forming a judgment before expressing one. The generation now growing up with generative AI may be the first in human history for whom thought itself — the act of examining an impression and deciding what to assent to — is routinely delegated to a tool.

The article is correct in its diagnosis. It is incomplete in its explanation of why the diagnosis is serious. Stoic philosophy, and specifically the framework developed by Grant C. Sterling, supplies what is missing.

What the Stoics Were Actually Protecting

Sterling’s framework begins with a claim about identity. A person’s true self is constituted by the rational faculty alone — the prohairesis, the capacity for deliberate choice. Everything else: the body, reputation, wealth, social outcomes, the opinions of others — is external to the self. Not unimportant in a practical sense, but external in the strict philosophical sense: not you.

From this follows the control dichotomy that governs the entire system. The only thing genuinely within your control is whether you assent to an impression or withhold assent. That act — the act of judgment — is not one function among others. It is the constitutive act of the self. Sterling puts it directly: “Choosing whether or not to assent to impressions is the only thing in our control … and yet, everything critical to leading the best possible life is contained in that one act. All our desires, all our emotions, all our actions are tied to assenting to impressions. If I get my assents right, then I have guaranteed eudaimonia. If I get one wrong, I cannot have eudaimonia.”

Notice what this means for Dans’s thesis. When he writes that we are now outsourcing “thought itself,” he is describing, in secular and empirical terms, the outsourcing of the one thing that Stoic philosophy identifies as the self. Previous cognitive outsourcing was peripheral. Outsourcing memory to Google leaves the faculty of judgment intact. Outsourcing navigation to GPS leaves the faculty of judgment intact. Outsourcing the formation of judgment to a generative AI does not leave the faculty of judgment intact. It vacates it.

The Correspondence Failure Hidden in the Enthusiasm

Dans notes a specific danger in the AI productivity narrative: the temptation to confuse frictionless output with understanding, and fluent answers with earned judgment. The research he cites confirms the pattern empirically. Higher confidence in generative AI correlates with less critical thinking. Greater AI dependence correlates with lower critical thinking. Performance gains from AI use should not be confused with learning.

Sterling’s framework names this pattern precisely. It is a Correspondence Failure — a false assent. The agent receives an impression: I have produced a fluent, confident answer; therefore I have understood the problem and exercised good judgment. The impression is false. The answer was generated by a tool. The judgment was not formed by the agent. The assent to the impression “I have reasoned well” does not correspond to reality.

The mechanism Sterling describes for how false impressions become habitual is directly relevant here. When an agent assents to a false impression, that type of impression becomes more common and more compelling over time. Character is built — or degraded — by the cumulative pattern of assent. Repeated assent to the impression “the AI’s output is my judgment” gradually replaces the real act of judgment with the appearance of it. The agent’s rational faculty does not atrophy all at once. It atrophies one delegated assent at a time.

Preferred Indifferent, Not Genuine Good

This is not an argument against using AI. Sterling’s framework handles this cleanly through the doctrine of preferred indifferents. Some externals are appropriate objects to aim at, though they are not genuinely good. A well-functioning AI tool is a preferred indifferent. It is rational to use it, prefer it, and direct effort toward using it well. What is irrational — what constitutes a false value judgment — is treating the tool’s output as a substitute for the only thing that is genuinely good: the correct exercise of the rational faculty itself.

The distinction is not merely philosophical. It has a practical shape. The agent who uses AI as a thinking instrument — who brings his own formed judgment to the tool, evaluates its output, and assents or withholds assent based on his own examination — is using a preferred indifferent correctly. The agent who presents AI output as his own judgment, or who foregoes forming a judgment in advance because the tool will produce something plausible, has misclassified the tool. He has treated a preferred indifferent as though it were the genuine good it cannot be.

The Structural Problem Dans Identifies

Dans frames his concern as a strategic mistake: treating AI as a substitute for judgment rather than a tool to sharpen it. The Stoic framework agrees with the practical conclusion but gives a more fundamental account of why it is a mistake. It is not primarily a strategic error. It is a false value judgment about what the self is and what the good consists in.

If the self just is the rational faculty, and if the rational faculty just is the capacity for deliberate assent, then outsourcing that capacity is not a productivity decision with unfortunate side effects. It is a decision about whether to exist as a rational agent at all. Dans is worried about a generation that will be less capable of critical thinking. Sterling’s framework identifies the deeper worry: a generation that has progressively abandoned the one activity that constitutes them as persons.

Epictetus states the stakes without softening them. “We will never achieve eudaimonia by holding on to the old view and making some little modifications — that will only make the chains more comfortable.” The chains, in this case, are the false impressions that AI-assisted output is equivalent to earned judgment, that frictionless production is equivalent to understanding, that delegated assent is equivalent to the genuine article.

What Correct Use Looks Like

Sterling’s prescriptive framework, applied to this situation, produces a clear action-structure. The agent who wants to use AI correctly must, at minimum, do the following.

First, form his own judgment before consulting the tool. The impression should arrive, be examined, and receive a provisional assent or withholding of assent before the AI is engaged. This preserves the act of judgment as the agent’s own act. The tool then operates on a formed position rather than substituting for a position never formed.

Second, audit the tool’s output against his own examination. The output is an impression. It arrives with a value component if the agent is tempted to assent to it simply because it is fluent and confident. The discipline of assent — sunkatathesis — applies to AI outputs exactly as it applies to any other impression. Does it correspond to reality? Has the agent verified this independently? Fluency is not correspondence.

Third, apply the reserve clause. The agent acts toward preferred indifferents — including the goal of producing good work with AI assistance — with the understanding that outcomes are outside his control. This prevents the false assent that would occur if he identified his success with the tool’s performance rather than with the correctness of his own engagement.

Conclusion

Dans is right that something categorically new is happening. The earlier cognitive outsourcing left the rational faculty untouched. What is being outsourced now is the act that the Stoics identified as the self’s constitutive activity. The empirical research he cites confirms the damage in measurable cognitive terms. The Stoic framework explains why the damage is not merely a performance deficit but a failure at the level of what a human being fundamentally is.

The technology is not the problem. The false value judgment is the problem — specifically, the impression that a tool’s output is equivalent to one’s own judgment, and the repeated assent to that impression that progressively displaces the real thing. Correct use of AI, on this framework, begins with the recognition that there is exactly one thing no tool can perform on behalf of its user: the act of assent itself.

That act is not one cognitive function among many that can be rationally delegated when more efficient alternatives appear. It is the only thing, in the precise Stoic sense, that is ever genuinely ours.

Grant C. Sterling is Professor of Philosophy at Eastern Illinois University. The framework applied here rests on Sterling’s Core Stoicism and his ISF writings. A prior Claude session reduced those nine excerpts to a 14-proposition logical summary. Dave Kelly then expanded that summary — through closer examination of the nine excerpts and additional Sterling ISF messages — to produce the 58 Unified Stoic Propositions. The Sterling Logic Engine (v3.1), which operationalizes the 58 Propositions as a decision instrument, is Kelly’s synthesis.

A note on method: Posts on this blog are researched, directed, and editorially governed by Dave Kelly. The philosophical framework applied in all analyses is Grant C. Sterling's, developed over decades and documented by Kelly. Claude (Anthropic) is normally used to render final prose from Kelly's direction and the supplied corpus. Analytical judgments are Kelly's. Sentences are Claude's. Both facts are true.

The Anti-Modernist Movement in the Catholic Church and the Six Commitments

A Note on Method

This essay reads the Catholic conflict over modernism and the Novus Ordo through a specific philosophical lens: Sterling's Six Commitments and their modern replacements. That lens is not neutral — no philosophical lens is. The claim is not that Catholic theologians explicitly held or rejected these commitments by name, but that the Six Commitments identify the precise philosophical fault lines along which the conflict runs. A Marxist reading of the same history would emphasize class and institutional power; a Schmittian reading would emphasize the friend-enemy distinction. This reading emphasizes epistemology and metaphysics, because that is where the conflict's roots lie. The thesis stands or falls on whether the mappings illuminate — not on whether they exhaust.

The Historical Situation

The Catholic Church's internal conflict over the Novus Ordo is, at its philosophical core, not primarily a liturgical dispute. It is a dispute about whether the Church will organize itself around the classical philosophical commitments or their modern replacements. The Six Commitments provide the diagnostic frame.

The Modernist Error — And What Pius X Condemned

Pope Pius X's 1907 encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis identified modernism as a systematic error, not a collection of scattered mistakes. The condemned positions map onto the replacements of the Six Commitments with notable precision.

Modernist immanentism — the view that religious experience arises from within consciousness rather than from objective revealed truth — is a rejection of the correspondence theory of truth and foundationalism. There is no objective deposit of faith to which doctrine must correspond; doctrine evolves from inner religious sentiment.

Modernist agnosticism — the claim that we cannot know metaphysical realities — attacks substance dualism (the soul as immaterial substance is unknowable to reason) and moral realism (objective moral facts are inaccessible). Note that this is the modernist agnosticism Pius X condemned, not general philosophical skepticism.

Modernist vital immanence — the view that doctrine is the outward expression of inner spiritual forces and must evolve with them — directly attacks foundationalism. There are no fixed, self-evident foundations. Everything develops; everything is contingent.

Pius X called modernism "the synthesis of all heresies" — because it does not attack one doctrine but the entire philosophical framework that makes doctrinal stability possible. Sterling's Six Commitments, taken together, are precisely that framework. This is not a retrospective imposition: Pius X's own analysis is structural and epistemological, not merely theological.

The Novus Ordo and the Pastoral Council

The Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) and the subsequent liturgical reform (1969) did not formally adopt modernist philosophy. The Council formally maintained that Catholic doctrine is normative and that truth is singular. What traditionalist critics identify, however, is not formal doctrinal capitulation but a shift in the operational standards by which liturgy and pastoral practice are evaluated — a shift whose philosophical implications run deeper than the Council's explicit intentions.

The transformation of active participation. The phrase participatio actuosa originates with Pius X himself in Tra le Sollecitudini (1903), where it denotes active interior engagement with the objective liturgical action. Traditionalist critics argue that the post-conciliar implementation transformed the phrase's operative meaning: the standard shifted from the objective form of the rite to the visible, external engagement of the congregation. When the measure of liturgical value becomes the experience of the participants rather than the integrity of the sacrificial form, the evaluative standard has moved from correspondence to pragmatism — whatever works for interior life is the criterion. That is a philosophical displacement, even if unintended.

Ecumenism and doctrinal confidence. The Council officially maintained Catholic doctrine as normative. Ecumenism was presented as dialogue, not epistemic surrender. Traditionalist critics do not dispute the official position — they dispute its practical effect. Where doctrinal differences are systematically underemphasized in favor of shared ground, the implicit message is that no particular formulation uniquely and fully corresponds to truth. That practical drift is a correspondence problem, regardless of what the documents formally assert.

The sacrificial form of the Mass. The reformed Mass retains the affirmation of sacrifice and Real Presence. What traditionalists contest is the shift in liturgical grammar: the reorientation toward the assembly, the vernacular, the table rather than the altar, the priest facing the people. These changes do not formally deny the metaphysical reality of the Eucharist — but they alter the symbolic structure through which that reality is communicated and apprehended. When the form consistently emphasizes communal gathering over objective sacrifice, the metaphysical claim is present in the text but receding in the lived experience of worship. Substance dualism is not denied — but the liturgical form no longer performs it.

The Traditionalist Resistance and the Six Commitments: A Structural Parallel

The movement against the Novus Ordo — represented by Archbishop Lefebvre, the Society of St. Pius X, and the broader traditionalist milieu — is functionally aligned with several of the Six Commitments, particularly correspondence theory, foundationalism, and moral realism. It defends objective, unchanging truth against modern subjectivism and doctrinal relativism. But its ground is revelatory and institutional, not philosophical in Sterling's sense — and that distinction matters. Sterling's framework can diagnose the conflict from outside; it does not describe the movement on its own terms.

Foundationalism. Catholic doctrine is revealed, interpreted, and historically articulated — it is not identical to philosophical foundationalism in the strict technical sense. But it operates functionally as foundationalism: defined dogmas serve as fixed premises from which all further theology proceeds and against which no theological conclusion may contradict them. The traditionalists insist on that functional structure. The modernist position is that even defined formulations are historically conditioned expressions of deeper religious experience, subject to re-expression. The traditionalist refuses this: the foundations hold, or there are no foundations.

Moral realism and ethical intuitionism. The resistance to post-conciliar moral theology — particularly on contraception, divorce, and sexuality — rests on the conviction that moral truths are objective, apprehensible by reason, and not subject to revision by pastoral sensitivity. It is important to distinguish official doctrine from sociological dissent. Humanae Vitae (1968) reaffirmed objective moral norms and natural law — the encyclical itself is not a retreat from moral realism. What the traditionalists identify is the widespread dissent from it, and more significantly, the pastoral accommodation of that dissent within Catholic institutions. Dissent is not official doctrine — but when dissent becomes the operative standard of pastoral practice, the philosophical displacement is real regardless of what the documents say.

Substance dualism. The classical Mass is structured around the real distinction between the material and the spiritual. The priest acts as a real mediator between the visible and invisible worlds; the sacrifice is a real metaphysical transaction; the soul has a real ontological status distinct from the body. The post-conciliar pastoral reorientation toward psychological wellbeing does not formally deny the soul — one can affirm the soul while addressing psychological conditions, and Catholic pastoral care has always recognized diminished culpability, ignorance, and psychological constraint as factors in moral judgment. The traditionalist concern is not that psychology was introduced but that it became the dominant register of pastoral discourse, displacing rather than supplementing the ontological register. When the primary pastoral question shifts from "what does the soul require for salvation" to "what does the person need to flourish psychologically," substance dualism is formally intact but operationally marginal.

Libertarian free will. Catholic theology has always recognized diminished culpability — this precedes Vatican II by centuries. The traditionalist argument is not that context was introduced after the Council but that the balance shifted. The classical framework treats diminished culpability as an exception requiring specific demonstration; the post-conciliar pastoral tendency treats contextualization as the default. When moral responsibility is routinely distributed across social, psychological, and developmental factors rather than located primarily in the will of the agent, libertarian free will is not denied in principle but is systematically underweighted in practice.

The Deeper Point: Modernism Is a Philosophical Error Before It Is a Theological One

Pius X was right that modernism is the synthesis of all heresies — but the reason is that modernism first dismantles the philosophical commitments that make truth-claims stable, and the theological errors follow automatically. The causal chain runs from philosophy to theology to liturgy, not the reverse.

If correspondence theory falls, doctrine cannot be permanently true — it can only be currently useful.
If foundationalism falls, defined dogma is not a fixed foundation but a revisable formulation.
If moral realism falls, the Church's moral teaching is a tradition to be pastorally applied, not an objective law to be obeyed.
If substance dualism falls, salvation of the soul becomes indistinguishable from psychological wellbeing.
If libertarian free will falls, moral culpability is a pastoral tool, not a metaphysical fact.
If ethical intuitionism falls, moral knowledge requires sociological or magisterial authority rather than rational apprehension.

The Novus Ordo controversy is the liturgical surface of this deeper philosophical displacement. Traditionalists are, without necessarily knowing Sterling's framework, defending the same classical commitments Sterling defends — against the same modern replacements.

Sterling's system gives this resistance its proper philosophical articulation: not as nostalgia for a medieval aesthetic, not as mere SSPX-style institutional critique, but as the recovery of the only philosophical framework under which stable religious truth-claims are even possible. The thesis is conditional in the way all systematic philosophy is conditional — it holds for those who share the classical commitments, and it demonstrates to those who do not that abandoning those commitments has a cost that runs all the way down.

Two and One-Half Ethical Systems

Corpus Entry — Sterling/Kelly Philosophical System

Author: Grant C. Sterling
Source: International Stoic Forum
Date: August 18, 2011
Preserved and posted by: Dave Kelly, Stoic News (stoicnews.blogspot.com), July 10, 2022
Layer: Theoretical Core — Ethical Theory
Attribution: Sterling

Summary

Sterling argues that consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics do not constitute three independent ethical theories of equal standing. Consequentialism and deontology offer competing accounts of how to define a correct action. Virtue ethics adds the requirement of settled character to one of these accounts but offers no independent action-selection criterion of its own. The result is not three rival theories but either two and a half, two, or one and a half — depending on how completeness is measured. The argument identifies deontological intuitionism as the natural and smooth fit for Stoic virtue ethics, with the Stoic framework additionally requiring that the good not be identified with external consequences.

Commitments Engaged

Moral realism: The argument presupposes that the question of what Jones should do has a genuine answer — not a matter of preference or cultural norm but a real moral fact.
Ethical intuitionism: Ross's prima facie duties are directly apprehended contextual moral demands, not rule-derived outputs. Sterling identifies this intuitionist structure as the basis of the fit between deontology and Stoicism.
Correspondence theory: Ethical theories are evaluated against how things actually are morally, not against internal consistency or social utility.
Foundationalism: The action-selection question is foundational; character theory is an addition to it, not a replacement for it.
Substance dualism: Jones is treated as a rational agent distinct from his circumstances throughout. Consequentialism's reduction of correct action to circumstantial calculation implicitly undermines this.
Libertarian free will: The entire inquiry presupposes that Jones's assent is genuinely his to give or withhold.

Propositions Engaged

The argument engages the propositional layer of the Sterling/Kelly system at the level of the relationship between correct action, virtue, and the good. Specifically: the identification of virtuous action with the right use of impressions (not defined in terms of virtues but the reverse); the rejection of external consequences as the definition of the good; and the grounding of appropriate action in truthfulness rather than outcome-calculation.

Text

Are consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics three ethical systems? I think they are not.

Let us stipulate that consequentialism and deontology can be collectively summarized as ethical theories that try to answer the question "what should I do now?" (This is a wretchedly simplified account, but I'm hunting bigger, or at any rate different, game here so please allow the oversimplification.) They give competing answers to that question, so they are clearly not a single ethical theory. Obviously, you could break each general category down into any number of more specific versions, but let's leave that complication out of the matter for a moment — for the purposes of this thread, I will use Benthamism and W.D. Ross's version of intuitionism.

So let's imagine a simple case. Jones is a married man. While having lunch one day his best friend's wife happens by. She stops to chat with him, and then to his great surprise she tells him that she has always been sexually attracted to him, and that she hopes very much that he will stop by her house the next day while her husband is out of town at a conference, and she promises him that it will be worth his while. Coincidentally, Jones' wife will be out of town the next day on a shopping trip with some friends. What should Jones do now?

Bentham will say that Jones should calculate how much pleasure he and his friend's wife are likely to have if he has an affair with her. He must also calculate the chances of them getting caught (presumably displeasing his wife and her husband/his friend), although in this case the chance seems extremely remote. Other longer-term factors must be considered (could she get pregnant? could one of them transmit a sexual disease to the other? will either of them want to insist on further encounters? will it change their sex lives with their spouses? etc.). After all these factors have been weighed, he ought to have sex with her if the total pleasure-minus-pain for everyone affected will be higher than the total p-p if they don't do it. It seems that in some circumstances having sex with her would almost certainly turn out to be the right thing to do, but in many (probably most) other circumstances it wouldn't.

Ross would say that as a result of marrying his wife and taking vows of faithfulness to her, Jones has a duty not to betray her sexually. (This is a "duty of fidelity.") This is only a prima facie (that is, "ceteris paribus") duty, so it can in principle be outweighed by other duties. It is unlikely that any other duty would outweigh this in the imagined case (we are not considering some bizarre science fiction case where only by having an adulterous affair can he save the world from being consumed by malevolent space aliens or something), so on Ross's view Jones must not have sex with her even if it seems likely to produce more slightly pleasure than refraining.

What about virtue ethics? As should no doubt be clear, neither theory we have cited has mentioned Jones' character (either his actual character, or his ideal character). Aristotle might say that Jones should act "in the way that a person with virtue [or, perhaps, with the virtue of temperance] would act." Now this seems to be a third way of answering our question, and so we seem to have a third ethical theory.

But I think this is far too fast. How, exactly, would a virtuous person behave, on Aristotle's view? Luckily, Aristotle tells us specifically about Jones' case:

But not every action nor every passion admits of a mean; for some have names that already imply badness, e.g. spite, shamelessness, envy, and in the case of actions adultery, theft, murder; for all of these and suchlike things imply by their names that they are themselves bad, and not the excesses or deficiencies of them. It is not possible, then, ever to be right with regard to them; one must always be wrong. Nor does goodness or badness with regard to such things depend on committing adultery with the right woman, at the right time, and in the right way, but simply to do any of them is to go wrong.

Sounds remarkably deontological, doesn't it? I think it not merely sounds that way, it is that way. And not just with Aristotle, for the Stoics also talk about our duties and identify virtuous action with (at least) the right use of impressions — and the right use of impressions is based on truthfulness, and is not defined in terms of virtues (but rather the reverse).

In other words, I think virtue theories add to obligation theories an extra element — the idea that the ultimately correct action must include a settled disposition of character that will produce such actions consistently. In other words, if Jones refuses to have sex with his best friend's wife the deontologist will say that he has acted rightly, and the consequentialist will say that he has acted rightly (if the circumstances are such that the p-p value is lower for sex than for no sex), and they will stop there. The virtue ethicist will go further and say (using Stoic language now) "Jones' action was appropriate, but it can only be fully virtuous if Jones has the character of the Sage [if his moral judgment in general has been perfected]." But getting the choice of actions correct is a necessary requirement for a virtuous action, and the method by which we define which choices are correct could in principle be identical to the method used by the deontologist. (Indeed, I think they might not only be identical in principle, I think that the two theories are a natural and smooth fit, which is why I claim to be both a deontologist ethical intuitionist and a Stoic.)

So the virtue ethicist may well argue that his theory is superior to either of the other two theories because those theories are incomplete. (The Stoic virtue ethicist will have to go farther in the case of consequentialism — insofar as consequentialism identifies the good with the external consequences to be maximized, it is fundamentally mistaken. But in theory a non-Stoic virtue theory could be compatible with consequentialism.) But this doesn't leave us with three rival ethical theories on the same level — it leaves us with two theories that offer rival accounts of how to define a correct action but which neglect the question of character, and a third theory that emphasizes character but offers no independent account of how to define a correct action.

That means, I think, that we have either 2½ ethical theories (two accounts of correct action, and one theory that piggybacks an additional consideration on top of one of the other two), or 2 ethical theories (one complete theory, and two half theories), or possibly 1½ ethical theories (three theories each of which only answers half the question).

Grant C. Sterling
Eastern Illinois University
Deontologist Stoic

Notes

This post is [not] one of Sterling's nine foundational excerpts hosted on Stoic News. It demonstrates the Six Commitments functioning simultaneously as discriminating tests applied to ethical theory: moral realism establishing that the question is real; ethical intuitionism identifying the method of correct apprehension; correspondence theory providing the evaluative standard; foundationalism establishing the priority of action-definition over character-addition; libertarian free will as the background presupposition of the entire inquiry; and substance dualism as the implicit structure distinguishing the deliberating agent from the circumstances presented to him.

The identification of the Stoic framework with deontological intuitionism rather than with a rule-based system is precise: both Ross's prima facie duties and the Stoic kathêkon are directly apprehended contextual moral demands requiring judgment for their application, not rule-prescribed outputs. The smooth fit Sterling identifies is grounded in this shared intuitionist structure.

Two and One-Half Ethical Systems

By Grant C. Sterling. Message to the International Stoic Forum, August 18, 2011. Posted by Dave Kelly.

Are consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics three ethical systems? I think they are not.

Let us stipulate that consequentialism and deontology can be collectively summarized as ethical theories that try to answer the question "what should I do now?" (This is a wretchedly simplified account, but I'm hunting bigger, or at any rate different, game here so please allow the oversimplification.) They give competing answers to that question, so they are clearly not a single ethical theory. Obviously, you could break each general category down into any number of more specific versions, but let's leave that complication out of the matter for a moment — for the purposes of this thread, I will use Benthamism and W.D. Ross's version of intuitionism.

So let's imagine a simple case. Jones is a married man. While having lunch one day his best friend's wife happens by. She stops to chat with him, and then to his great surprise she tells him that she has always been sexually attracted to him, and that she hopes very much that he will stop by her house the next day while her husband is out of town at a conference, and she promises him that it will be worth his while. Coincidentally, Jones' wife will be out of town the next day on a shopping trip with some friends. What should Jones do now?

Bentham will say that Jones should calculate how much pleasure he and his friend's wife are likely to have if he has an affair with her. He must also calculate the chances of them getting caught (presumably displeasing his wife and her husband/his friend), although in this case the chance seems extremely remote. Other longer-term factors must be considered (could she get pregnant? could one of them transmit a sexual disease to the other? will either of them want to insist on further encounters? will it change their sex lives with their spouses? etc.). After all these factors have been weighed, he ought to have sex with her if the total pleasure-minus-pain for everyone affected will be higher than the total p-p if they don't do it. It seems that in some circumstances having sex with her would almost certainly turn out to be the right thing to do, but in many (probably most) other circumstances it wouldn't.

Ross would say that as a result of marrying his wife and taking vows of faithfulness to her, Jones has a duty not to betray her sexually. (This is a "duty of fidelity.") This is only a prima facie (that is, "ceteris paribus") duty, so it can in principle be outweighed by other duties. It is unlikely that any other duty would outweigh this in the imagined case (we are not considering some bizarre science fiction case where only by having an adulterous affair can he save the world from being consumed by malevolent space aliens or something), so on Ross's view Jones must not have sex with her even if it seems likely to produce more slightly pleasure than refraining.

What about virtue ethics? As should no doubt be clear, neither theory we have cited has mentioned Jones' character (either his actual character, or his ideal character). Aristotle might say that Jones should act "in the way that a person with virtue [or, perhaps, with the virtue of temperance] would act." Now this seems to be a third way of answering our question, and so we seem to have a third ethical theory.

But I think this is far too fast. How, exactly, would a virtuous person behave, on Aristotle's view? Luckily, Aristotle tells us specifically about Jones' case:

But not every action nor every passion admits of a mean; for some have names that already imply badness, e.g. spite, shamelessness, envy, and in the case of actions adultery, theft, murder; for all of these and suchlike things imply by their names that they are themselves bad, and not the excesses or deficiencies of them. It is not possible, then, ever to be right with regard to them; one must always be wrong. Nor does goodness or badness with regard to such things depend on committing adultery with the right woman, at the right time, and in the right way, but simply to do any of them is to go wrong.

Sounds remarkably deontological, doesn't it? I think it not merely sounds that way, it is that way. And not just with Aristotle, for the Stoics also talk about our duties and identify virtuous action with (at least) the right use of impressions — and the right use of impressions is based on truthfulness, and is not defined in terms of virtues (but rather the reverse).

In other words, I think virtue theories add to obligation theories an extra element — the idea that the ultimately correct action must include a settled disposition of character that will produce such actions consistently. In other words, if Jones refuses to have sex with his best friend's wife the deontologist will say that he has acted rightly, and the consequentialist will say that he has acted rightly (if the circumstances are such that the p-p value is lower for sex than for no sex), and they will stop there. The virtue ethicist will go further and say (using Stoic language now) "Jones' action was appropriate, but it can only be fully virtuous if Jones has the character of the Sage [if his moral judgment in general has been perfected]." But getting the choice of actions correct is a necessary requirement for a virtuous action, and the method by which we define which choices are correct could in principle be identical to the method used by the deontologist. (Indeed, I think they might not only be identical in principle, I think that the two theories are a natural and smooth fit, which is why I claim to be both a deontologist ethical intuitionist and a Stoic.)

So the virtue ethicist may well argue that his theory is superior to either of the other two theories because those theories are incomplete. (The Stoic virtue ethicist will have to go farther in the case of consequentialism — insofar as consequentialism identifies the good with the external consequences to be maximized, it is fundamentally mistaken. But in theory a non-Stoic virtue theory could be compatible with consequentialism.) But this doesn't leave us with three rival ethical theories on the same level — it leaves us with two theories that offer rival accounts of how to define a correct action but which neglect the question of character, and a third theory that emphasizes character but offers no independent account of how to define a correct action.

That means, I think, that we have either 2½ ethical theories (two accounts of correct action, and one theory that piggybacks an additional consideration on top of one of the other two), or 2 ethical theories (one complete theory, and two half theories), or possibly 1½ ethical theories (three theories each of which only answers half the question).

Grant C. Sterling
Eastern Illinois University
Deontologist Stoic

How the Six Commitments Stabilize the Rational Faculty

Theodore Millon called the borderline condition the stable unstable. His point was that the borderline condition is not chaos plus stability alternating — it is a stable organization around instability. The person reliably returns to fragmentation. That is their ground state. The six commitments address this at precisely the structural level where the instability is organized.

Dualism Stops Identity Fusion with Content

The borderline instability begins at the location problem. When an impression arrives — rejection, praise, threat, desire — the faculty does not register it as about something external. It registers it as what I am right now. Identity fuses with content moment by moment. Dualism is the operation that prevents this by continuously locating the faculty at the subject pole prior to all content. It does not eliminate intense impressions. It keeps the faculty from becoming them. The stable-unstable pattern is precisely what you get when this operation is absent: the person is stable in their tendency to become whatever arrives.

Free Will Inserts the Structural Pause

The borderline pattern characteristically collapses the gap between impression and response. Something arrives and behavior follows with minimal interval. The structural pause that libertarian free will provides — the recognition that presentation is not yet assent — is what is missing. Without it the faculty is not handling impressions; it is being driven by them. Free will does not slow the faculty down deliberately. It inserts a structural fact: I have not yet assented. That fact alone changes what is possible next.

Intuitionism Grounds Moral Judgment in Apprehension Rather Than in the Other Person

A significant feature of borderline instability is the rapid oscillation of moral evaluations of others — idealization collapsing into devaluation and back. This happens when moral judgment is not grounded in direct apprehension of what is there but in what the other person is currently providing or withholding. Ethical intuitionism directs the faculty to look at the act or situation rather than at the emotional return it generates. The judgment becomes something read rather than something felt as a response to treatment received.

Foundationalism Provides Non-Negotiable Ground

The stable-unstable structure is in part a ground problem. The faculty has no fixed standing point that new impressions cannot move. Every intense impression is potentially identity-reorganizing. Foundationalism is the operation that establishes which commitments are load-bearing and treats them as immovable. This is not the same as rigidity about particular judgments. It is the establishment of a floor below which destabilization cannot reach. With that floor in place the faculty can be moved at the surface — by argument, by emotion, by circumstance — without losing its fundamental orientation.

Correspondence Theory Disconnects Value Claims from Emotional State

When correspondence theory is operating the faculty submits its value judgments to a standard outside itself. The judgment is an attempt to get something right, not an expression of current feeling. In the borderline pattern value claims tend to track emotional state directly — what feels true is treated as true, what feels like betrayal is a betrayal, what feels like love confirms the other person's goodness. Correspondence theory introduces the gap between how things feel and how things are. That gap is stabilizing because it means the faculty's assessments are not hostage to its current affective condition.

Moral Realism Gives Judgments Weight That Does Not Fluctuate

When moral realism is operating, virtue and vice are features of the world with fixed ontological status. They do not change based on the relationship, the mood, or the most recent interaction. In the borderline pattern the moral status of persons and acts shifts dramatically with context — the same person is wonderful and monstrous in rapid succession. Moral realism stabilizes this by insisting that the classification carries weight independent of how the faculty currently feels about the thing being classified. Evil does not become good because the person who did it is currently being kind. Good does not become evil because the person is currently withholding.

The Structural Summary

Millon's stable instability is what you get when all six operations are absent simultaneously. The faculty has no location, no structural pause, no direct moral apprehension, no fixed ground, no external standard, and no ontologically stable moral classifications. Every impression reorganizes everything. The six commitments are not therapeutic interventions applied to this condition from outside. They are the structural features whose absence is the condition. To operate with all six functioning is not to manage borderline instability. It is to have a differently organized faculty — one whose ground state is stable location rather than stable fragmentation.

The Six Commitments in Operation

Here is an account of each commitment as a moment-by-moment operation of the rational faculty — what the faculty actually does when the commitment is functioning.

Substance Dualism in Operation

At each moment the rational faculty registers that it is not identical to what is happening to the body, to the nervous system, or to the social position. When an impression arrives — pain, insult, loss, elation — the faculty notes that the impression is about something external and that the one receiving it is not that thing. This is not a theoretical claim made once and stored. It is a continuous act of location: I am here; that is there. Without this operation the faculty collapses into its content and assent becomes indistinguishable from reaction.

Libertarian Free Will in Operation

At each moment the rational faculty holds the impression in suspension before assenting. The operation is a pause — not a long deliberative pause, but a structural one. Something is presented; the faculty recognizes that presentation is not yet assent; it then either assents or withholds. The will is not the outcome but the gap before the outcome. When this operation is functioning the faculty never experiences itself as caused to assent. It experiences itself as the cause.

Ethical Intuitionism in Operation

When a value judgment is required the rational faculty does not run a calculation. It looks directly at the act or situation and reads what is there. The operation is something like recognition — the way one recognizes a shape before analyzing its geometry. The faculty is not indifferent to reasons; it uses them to clarify what it is looking at. But the judgment itself is not derived from the reasons. It is apprehended. When this operation is functioning the faculty does not experience moral truth as a conclusion. It experiences it as a given that reasons are unpacking.

Foundationalism in Operation

At each moment the rational faculty knows which judgments are negotiable and which are not. This is not stubbornness. It is structural orientation — the faculty is always standing somewhere, and foundationalism is the operation that keeps it standing on the same ground from one moment to the next. When a new impression arrives that conflicts with a first principle, the operation produces immediate resistance rather than immediate accommodation. The faculty recognizes: this cannot move me because I am already committed to what contradicts it. Without this operation every new argument is potentially destabilizing.

Correspondence Theory of Truth in Operation

When the rational faculty makes a value judgment it implicitly submits that judgment to a standard outside itself. The operation is one of referral — the judgment points away from the faculty's preferences and toward how things actually are. This means that at every moment of judgment the faculty holds open the possibility that it is wrong, not because truth is uncertain but because the faculty's grasp of truth is always fallible. Error is not a perspective; it is a miss. When this operation is functioning the faculty never experiences its value claims as expressions of what it happens to prefer. It experiences them as attempts to get something right.

Moral Realism in Operation

At each moment the rational faculty treats the distinction between virtue and vice as a distinction in the furniture of the world, not in the customs of a community. When it encounters an act, a disposition, or a judgment, the faculty classifies it as genuinely good, genuinely bad, or genuinely indifferent — and the classification carries ontological weight, not social weight. The operation is one of serious attribution: the faculty means what it says when it calls something evil. It is not reporting a preference or a cultural norm. It is identifying a feature. Without this operation moral language becomes rhetoric, and the faculty knows it has become rhetoric, which undermines every subsequent moral act.

These six operations are not sequential steps. They run simultaneously as aspects of a single functioning rational faculty. Dualism locates the faculty. Free will structures its agency. Intuitionism directs its moral attention. Foundationalism stabilizes its ground. Correspondence theory keeps it honest about error. Moral realism gives its judgments genuine weight. A faculty in which all six are operating is one that can assent, withhold, judge, and act without the constant leakage into reaction, calculation, drift, or performance that marks a faculty in which one or more are failing.

Enchiridion Two and the Discipline of Desire: A Conceptual Integration

The Structural Claim of Section Two

Enchiridion Two is the most compressed and technically precise statement Epictetus ever produced of what the Discipline of Desire actually requires. Almost every clause does philosophical work that is easy to miss.

Epictetus opens with a symmetry: desire promises attainment; aversion promises non-occurrence. Both are promissory notes. The question is whether the promise can be kept. He then identifies the exact condition under which it cannot: when the object of desire or aversion lies outside the agent’s control.

If a man desires something external — health, money, an outcome in the world — and that thing fails to obtain, he has failed in his desire and is therefore unfortunate. If a man fears something external — disease, death, poverty — and it happens anyway, he has fallen into what he sought to avoid and is therefore miserable. The math is simple: desire an external and you may fail; avert from an external and it may come anyway. You have no guarantee in either direction.

The move Epictetus makes is not to counsel resignation or reduced expectation. It is architecturally sharper than that. He says: withdraw aversion entirely from what is not under your control, and transfer it to what is unnatural among the things that are under your control. As for desire — remove it utterly for the present. Because if you desire any external, you are bound to be unfortunate; and there is nothing among the things under your control that is yet within your grasp as a proper object of desire. So for now: employ only choice and refusal, lightly, with reservations, without straining.

What Section Two Presupposes

The section presupposes the full doctrine of indifferents without naming it. Epictetus does not say here that externals are neither good nor evil — that is Section One’s territory. But Section Two’s instructions only make sense if that metaphysical foundation is already in place. The reason aversion to disease or death is irrational is not merely that it fails to work. It is that disease and death are not genuine evils. There is nothing there to legitimately fear. The aversion is built on a false judgment, and the misery that follows its frustration is built on the same falseness.

This is where the integration with Sterling’s corpus becomes essential. Sterling’s Theorem 7 states that desires are caused by beliefs — judgments about good and evil. You desire what you judge to be good; you are averse to what you judge to be evil. The Discipline of Desire is therefore not a discipline of will in the sense of willpower. It is a discipline of cognition. Aversion to death is not a brute emotional reflex to be suppressed. It is a judgment — “death is an evil” — that has been accepted, and it can be corrected by accepting the true proposition instead: death is an external and therefore neither good nor evil.

Theorem 13 follows directly: desiring things out of our control is irrational because it involves false judgment. Not merely impractical. Not merely prone to frustration. False. The Discipline of Desire is the project of replacing false cognition with true cognition regarding the class of objects that constitute externals.

My Desires Are My Judgments

The document “My Desires Are My Judgments” states the same point from the inside — from within the first-person experience of desiring — and the convergence with Enchiridion Two is exact. The desire and the judgment are not two events; the desire just is the judgment in its motivational form. If a man wants his health to continue, it is because somewhere — explicitly or, far more often, implicitly — he has accepted the proposition that his health is a genuine good. The desire is the acceptance.

This means that desires are in the agent’s control. Not directly, not by an act

My Desires Are My Judgments

I desire things. Let us begin there. At any given moment I find myself wanting certain outcomes — that my health continue, that my work succeed, that those I care about flourish, that I not be humiliated or dismissed or forgotten. These desires feel like facts about me, as basic and unchosen as my height. But they are not facts about me in that sense. They are conclusions. They follow from something.

What they follow from is a judgment. Specifically, they follow from the judgment that the thing desired is genuinely good — or, in the case of aversion, that the thing avoided is genuinely evil. You do not desire what you judge to be worthless. You do not fear what you judge to be harmless. The desire and the judgment are not two events; the desire just is the judgment in its motivational form. If I want my health to continue, it is because somewhere — explicitly or, far more often, implicitly — I have accepted the proposition that my health is a genuine good. The desire is the acceptance.

This means that desires are in my control. Not directly, not by an act of pure will in which I simply decide to stop wanting what I want. But indirectly, in exactly the way that impressions are indirectly in my control: through the governance of judgment. If I change what I accept as genuinely good or evil, my desires will follow. They cannot do otherwise, because they have no source other than those judgments.

Now: what actually is genuinely good? The answer the Stoics give is precise and, at first encounter, almost unbelievable in its narrowness. The only genuine good is virtue — that is, the correct use of my rational will. The only genuine evil is vice — the incorrect use of it. Everything else, without exception, falls outside those categories. My health, my reputation, my life, the lives of those I love, my comfort, my success — none of these are genuinely good. Their opposites are not genuinely evil. They are preferred or dispreferred, more or less appropriate to pursue, but they carry no genuine value of the kind that could make me happy if I obtain them or unhappy if I do not.

The consequence for desire is immediate and total. Any desire I have for an external outcome rests on a false judgment. I desire continued health because I have judged health to be genuinely good. That judgment is false. The desire that follows from it is therefore built on nothing — or rather, built on an error. And an error of that kind is not merely intellectually unfortunate. It is the direct cause of every unhappiness I will ever experience, because unhappiness just is the frustration of desire, and I have filled myself with desires for things I cannot control.

What should I desire, then? Virtue. That is the whole answer. I should desire to judge correctly, to will correctly, to act from rational assessment of what is appropriate rather than from appetite for outcomes. And here is the aspect of this that most people miss entirely: this desire can always be satisfied. It can be satisfied right now, regardless of what is happening around me, regardless of what has been taken from me or what has not yet arrived. Whether I am healthy or sick, employed or destitute, loved or alone — none of those circumstances affect whether I can, at this moment, judge correctly and will correctly. The object of the one desire I should have is always within reach.

There is more. Once I have relinquished the false desires — or begun to relinquish them, since this is not done in an afternoon — something opens up that was previously crowded out. I find that I can take genuine pleasure in things I previously only grasped at. The taste of a meal, the quality of light in the late afternoon, the interest of a conversation — these produce positive feeling without requiring that I desire them to continue. I enjoy them while they are present and release them when they are not, because I have not judged them to be genuine goods whose loss would harm me. The grasping was what prevented the enjoyment. The desire was what made the pleasure anxious.

So what I am after is this: to want only what is genuinely mine to achieve, and to hold everything else as it actually is — neither good nor evil, available or not available, present or absent — with the equanimity that follows not from indifference but from correct understanding. This is not a diminished life. It is the only life in which the positive feelings are not perpetually threatened by the possibility of losing what produces them. I cannot lose virtue except by my own choice. Everything else I never truly had.

Defending Classical Philosophy: The Positive Account

"How does one defend oneself against modern anti-classical philosophy"

Defending Classical Philosophy: The Positive Account

The question assumes that anti-classical philosophy is on offense and classical philosophy must defend. That assumption should be rejected at the outset. The burden of proof runs the other way.

Anti-classical positions — relativism, constructivism, postmodernism — are not the default from which classical philosophy deviates. They are departures from commitments that any coherent rational enterprise already presupposes. The task is not to parry attacks but to make those presuppositions explicit.

What classical philosophy actually claims

Classical philosophy is not a collection of positions that happen to be old. It is the systematic working-out of six commitments that any serious inquiry already implicitly accepts:

That there is a mind-independent reality distinct from our representations of it. That beliefs can correspond to or fail to correspond with that reality. That some things are genuinely good or evil, not merely preferred or avoided. That some moral and logical truths are known directly rather than inferred from prior premises. That rational agents have real causal power over their own assent. That knowledge requires genuine justification, not merely coherent belief.

These are not arbitrary starting points. They are what you are already committed to the moment you assert that your anti-classical thesis is true, that your opponent's view fails to correspond to reality, that classical foundationalism is really wrong rather than merely unfashionable, that you chose to reason rather than simply being caused to produce sounds, and that your critique is justified rather than merely expressed.

The peritrope is not enough

The standard defensive move — showing that relativism is self-refuting — is correct but incomplete. It establishes that the anti-classical position cannot be coherently asserted. It does not establish what should replace it. A positive account is required.

The positive account is this: the six commitments named above are not hypotheses under test. They are the preconditions of testing anything. You cannot run an inquiry — philosophical, scientific, ethical, or logical — without already operating within correspondence, foundationalism, and the real efficacy of rational assent. Anti-classical philosophy does not escape these commitments. It relies on them silently while attacking them explicitly.

Why anti-classical philosophy arose

The historical question matters because it identifies what went wrong rather than merely what is wrong now.

Anti-classical philosophy gained traction by attacking each commitment separately, in sequence, without acknowledging that they stand or fall together. Substance dualism was abandoned first, which made libertarian free will implausible, which made genuine rational assent a fiction, which made the correspondence of belief to reality a contingent accident rather than an achievement, which made foundationalism look like dogma, which made moral realism look like projection. Each step felt local and manageable. The cumulative result was the evacuation of every condition that makes inquiry possible.

The reconstruction runs in reverse. Restore the real distinction between the rational faculty and its material substrate and libertarian free will becomes coherent again. Restore free will and genuine assent becomes possible again. Restore genuine assent and correspondence becomes an achievement rather than an illusion. Restore correspondence and foundationalism becomes recognizable as what it always was: the acknowledgment that justification must stop somewhere or it does not start anywhere. Restore foundationalism and moral realism follows as the recognition that the stopping point in ethical inquiry is direct acquaintance with genuine value, not arbitrary commitment.

The practical upshot

When confronted with an anti-classical move, the right response is not tactical. It is to name which commitment is being covertly relied upon while being explicitly denied, and to ask whether the critic is prepared to relinquish it consistently — in their own inquiry, not merely in their thesis.

A relativist who argues carefully relies on correspondence. A constructivist who claims power distorts knowledge relies on the contrast between distorted and undistorted cognition — which is a foundationalist and realist commitment. A postmodernist who publishes relies on the real efficacy of rational persuasion. None of them can do their work without the ground they are trying to remove.

Classical philosophy does not need a defense playbook. It needs to be stated.

Conceptual Integration: The Three Disciplines Across Four Sections

The three disciplines — assent, desire, and action — are the organizational spine of Stoic practice in Epictetus. What the four sections together provide is a complete account of each discipline at three distinct levels: the phenomenological, the axiomatic, and the operational. No single section provides all three levels for any single discipline. The integration is therefore not a summary of what each section says but an account of what they establish jointly.

The Discipline of Assent — Section 7

Section 7 is the primary phenomenological account of the discipline of assent. Impressions arrive propositionally — already carrying claims about the world, frequently including claims about value. The agent’s sole point of leverage is the act of assent: acceptance or rejection of the impression as true. If he refuses to assent to a value-laden impression, nothing follows — no desire, no emotion, no action. The entire causal chain is severed at its first link.

Section 7’s account of assent has two faces, positive and negative. The negative face is refusal: declining to accept that an external is genuinely good or evil. The positive face is substitution: actively formulating a true counter-proposition and assenting to that. Refusal alone leaves a vacuum; substitution fills it with correct judgment. Both faces are required for the discipline to function.

Section 9’s axiomatic structure then provides the logical warrant for why the discipline of assent is architecturally primary. Theorem 7 establishes that desires are caused by beliefs about good and evil. Theorem 3 establishes that all unhappiness is caused by frustrated desire. The causal chain therefore runs: false assent → false belief about value → desire for external → frustrated desire → unhappiness. The discipline of assent intervenes at the origin of that chain. Every other discipline presupposes it.

The Discipline of Desire — Section 11, Section 7 (a and c), Core Stoicism Section Two

The discipline of desire concerns what the agent pursues and avoids. Its governing principle is that desire should be directed only at what is genuinely good — virtue — and aversion directed only at what is genuinely evil — vice — with everything external held as neither.

Section 11 provides the phenomenological and operational account. Desires are not brute facts about the agent; they are judgments in motivational form. To desire health is to have already accepted, implicitly or explicitly, that health is genuinely good. The desire and the false judgment are not two events — they are one event at two levels of description. This means desires are indirectly in the agent’s control through exactly the same mechanism as impressions: governance of judgment. Change what is accepted as genuinely good or evil, and desire follows without remainder.

Section 11 further establishes that the object of correct desire — virtue, the right use of rational will — is always available. Unlike every external object, it cannot be placed beyond reach by circumstance. This is not consolation; it is a structural feature of the object itself. And Section 11 identifies what becomes available once false desires are released: the sensory and aesthetic pleasures that were previously crowded out by grasping. Enjoyment without desire for continuation is not diminished pleasure — it is pleasure freed from the anxiety that attends every object one has falsely judged to be a genuine good.

Section 7’s instructions (a) and (c) specify the discipline of desire at the practical level. Instruction (a) — do not assent to impressions that depict externals as good or evil — is the discipline of desire in its negative form: the refusal to generate the false judgment from which false desire flows. Instruction (c) — consciously formulate true propositions regarding the lack of value of external things, in advance where possible — is the discipline of desire in its positive form: the active construction of correct value judgment before the impression arrives with its emotional charge. Sterling’s example is precise:

“My wife’s actions are not in my control. They are neither good nor evil. My happiness is in my control, not enslaved to the actions of others.”

This is not a coping statement. It is a correct value proposition, assented to in advance, that preempts the false desire before it forms.

Core Stoicism Section Two provides the axiomatic foundation. Theorems 3 through 14 establish the complete logical structure: unhappiness follows from frustrated desire; desire follows from false value judgment; false value judgment concerns externals; externals are not in the agent’s control; therefore desire for externals is irrational and is the sole source of all unhappiness. Theorem 10 — the only genuine good is virtue, the only genuine evil is vice — is the axiomatic warrant for redirecting desire entirely. Theorems 11 and 12 complete the structure: since virtue and vice are acts of will, they are in the agent’s control; therefore the only genuine goods and evils are in the agent’s control; therefore correct desire is always satisfiable.

The Discipline of Action — Section 10, Section 7 (b and d), Core Stoicism Section Four

The discipline of action — the discipline of kathēkon, appropriate action — concerns how the agent moves from correct desire to correct conduct in the world. Its governing principle is the reserve clause: pursue rational ends by rational means with the conscious recognition that outcomes are never genuinely the agent’s to produce.

Section 10 provides the operational account. On the Stoic view, the agent’s action just is his choice — not the physical occurrence that follows from it. The choice is appropriate or inappropriate at the instant it is made. Whether the restaurant is open, whether the colleague arrives, whether the sidewalk is safe — none of these are the agent’s action. They are the world’s response to it, and the world’s response is always already outside the agent’s purview. This means the agent who has made a correct choice has already acted correctly, completely, regardless of what follows.

The three-part structure Section 10 makes explicit — identify rational ends, select rational means, hold every choice with the reservation that outcomes are not mine to guarantee — is not a practical heuristic. It is the behavioral form that correct assent and correct desire take when extended into the world. The agent who holds his choices with reservation is the agent who has refused to assent to the impression that the outcome is genuinely good or evil. The reserve clause and the discipline of assent are the same act seen from different levels.

Section 7’s instructions (b) and (d) specify the discipline of action at the practical level. Instruction (b) — if you have failed to refuse the initial false assent, do not then assent to subsequent impressions that depict immoral responses as appropriate — concerns the containment of failure: when the discipline of assent has not prevented a false value judgment, the discipline of action prevents the false judgment from issuing in irrational conduct. Instruction (d) — consciously formulate true action propositions, attending to preferred and dispreferred indifferents and to the duties connected with one’s various roles — is the positive face of the discipline of action: the explicit construction of the correct choice before acting. Sterling’s example is equally precise:

“I should report truthfully to my boss regarding the sales numbers from the last quarter: truth-telling is virtuous, and I have a duty to act faithfully at work. If my boss fires me, I should remember that my job is an external, neither good nor evil.”

The action proposition contains the reserve clause within it. The correct action and the correct attitude toward its outcome are formulated simultaneously.

Core Stoicism Section Four provides the axiomatic foundation. Theorem 24 establishes that acts of will require objects — action is always action toward something. Theorem 25 establishes that some objects are appropriate to aim at without being genuinely good — the preferred indifferents. Theorem 27 establishes that virtue consists of rational acts of will. Theorem 29 is the pivot: virtue consists of the pursuit of appropriate objects of aim, not the pursuit of desired outcomes. Such pursuit produces good feeling and, because it carries no desire for the actual outcome, can never produce unhappiness. The discipline of action is therefore not a constraint on desire — it is what correct desire looks like when it takes the form of movement in the world.

Positive Feelings — Core Stoicism Section Three

Core Stoicism Section Three stands somewhat apart from the three disciplines as an account of what correct practice yields rather than what it requires. Its three sources of positive feeling — joy in virtue (Theorem 17), sensory and aesthetic pleasure (Theorems 18–19), and appreciation of the world as it is (Theorem 22) — correspond precisely to the three disciplines.

Joy in virtue is the affective consequence of the discipline of action: the agent who has chosen correctly and assents to having done so receives appropriate positive feeling as the direct result. Sensory and aesthetic pleasure is the affective consequence of the discipline of desire: the agent who has released his false desires no longer grasps at pleasures, and the pleasure that was previously anxious becomes available as simple enjoyment without vulnerability. Section 11 makes this explicit — the grasping was what prevented the enjoyment. Appreciation of the world as it is is the affective consequence of the discipline of assent: the agent who meets each impression without the overlay of false value judgment perceives what is simply as what it is, and that perception is itself a source of continuous positive feeling available at every waking moment.

The Integration: One Practice, Three Registers, One Consequence

The deepest result of the integration is that the three disciplines are not three practices coordinated with one another. They are one practice — the governance of rational assent — described at three levels of resolution.

At the perceptual level, the practice is: meet each impression without assenting to its value claims about externals, and actively substitute correct propositions in their place. This is the discipline of assent.

At the motivational level, the practice is: direct pursuit only toward what is genuinely good and aversion only toward what is genuinely evil, which means toward virtue and away from vice alone, holding all externals as indifferent. This is the discipline of desire. It is the discipline of assent applied to the question of what to want.

At the operational level, the practice is: identify rational ends, select rational means, act with the reserve clause that outcomes are never genuinely mine to produce. This is the discipline of action. It is the discipline of desire applied to the question of how to move.

Core Stoicism Section Three then describes the single consequence of the practice operating correctly at all three levels simultaneously: the agent who judges truly will never be unhappy, will experience continual uninterrupted appropriate positive feeling, and will always act virtuously. These are not three outcomes achieved by three disciplines. They are one outcome — eudaimonia — described from the perspectives of the three disciplines at once.

Section 9’s closing statement is therefore not a conclusion to an argument. It is a description of what the agent is when the practice has taken hold: someone for whom assent, desire, and action have converged into a single continuous act of correct engagement with whatever presents itself.

Stoicism Is Not Therapy, But Training

Author: Grant C. Sterling
Source: International Stoic Forum, February 25, 2008 (three-part exchange with Jules Evans)
Compiled by: Dave Kelly
Corpus status: Primary source — Sterling’s argument; Kelly editorial framing

Editorial Note — Dave Kelly

In February 2008, Grant Sterling engaged Jules Evans in a three-part exchange on the International Stoic Forum concerning whether Stoicism functions as therapy. Sterling’s position, developed across the three messages, is that Stoicism operates as immunization rather than cure, that its psychological benefits are fully parasitic on its philosophical doctrine, and that no technique carries Stoic content apart from the beliefs that give it content. The exchange is reproduced here in full as a primary source document.

Part One

Sterling’s first message, responding to Evans’s proposal that Stoicism can help ordinary people with emotional suffering through practical techniques and concrete applications.

As one of the professional philosophers on this List, and someone who has often engaged on this list in highly technical discussions, I thought I should say something on this topic.

My position, which I am sure is unpopular, is that it is impossible to give people an idea of “how Stoicism can help their emotional suffering” without having a clear grasp on what Stoicism is.

Suppose my neighbor has lost a loved one. What does Epictetus advise? Simply that I console him and pretend to grieve with him. In a situation like that, it is highly unlikely that Stoicism [or, I think, virtually any other belief system or therapeutic method] will be able to do much for him.

I didn’t say that Stoicism is helpless to deal with such grief. It is not. The problem is that the Stoic medicine has to be administered before the shock. Stoicism functions as an immunization, not as a cure. Let me have a chance to convince my neighbor of the truth of Stoic doctrine long before the loved one dies, and he will feel no debilitating grief when it occurs — or, at least, he will be in a position where he can feel no grief, and where I can help him by reminding him of the Stoic truths he has embraced.

So what would this Stoic immunization therapy look like? It will and must take the form of nothing other than convincing him of the truth of the core doctrines of Stoicism. If I can convince him that things not in our control are neither good nor evil, and that Virtue is the only Good and source of happiness, then he will be able to have a better life. But if he does not make these beliefs part of his belief system, Stoicism can do little or nothing to help him with his distress from the outside. That’s why I disagreed with Malcolm’s claim that a modern day Stoic would be a psychologist and not a philosopher — all psychological benefits that Stoicism conveys can come only to those who believe Stoic principles. [The psychological systems that most resemble Stoicism do precisely this — they teach some basic Stoic doctrines, sometimes with direct quotes from Stoic philosophers.] The psychology is parasitic on the philosophy.

Now of course I need not convince him of these things using Stoic technical terminology. But such terminology is helpful on this List in allowing us to say things quickly and precisely. But if I begin to discuss Stoic thought with my neighbor, I will bet [given my experiences doing this sort of thing with friends and students] that he will ask questions like “but doesn’t this mean that I’d have to be an emotional zombie?” and “doesn’t this mean that I’d never eat or do anything else, since it wouldn’t be good or evil to do so?”, etc. If he is persuaded of these things, he will never believe in the principles of Stoicism, and will never rid himself of desires for external things, and will therefore continue to suffer distress. How can I answer such questions? By understanding the doctrine of eupatheia, and the doctrine of preferred indifferents. Again, I need not use that terminology with my neighbor, but I will have to explain those ideas if I wish to convince him that Stoicism is not absurd.

“But”, he will object, “I cannot change my desires.” So I will have to explain to him [in whatever words I choose] the Stoic doctrine that desires follow from beliefs about value, that such beliefs are in our control, that I can refuse to assent to impressions that I have been harmed, etc.

So, speaking for myself, all my successes at making other peoples’ lives better through Stoicism have come from convincing them of the truth of Stoic ideas — in other words, by engaging in exactly the kind of conversations we have on this List. While [e.g.] Epictetus talks a great deal about dealing with distressing circumstances, in every case that I can think of off the top of my head his comments are addressed to someone who already accepts Stoic doctrine. He offers little or nothing in the way of advice as to how to deal with the suffering of someone who does not know and accept Stoic ideas already. Indeed, I don’t think he can say anything about that, because at the bottom Stoicism says that distress comes from false beliefs about the world, and the distress will not go away while the false beliefs remain. If your problem is dealing with the suffering of someone who is not able to rationally consider these fundamental truths, then Stoicism has nothing to offer you — look elsewhere for that advice. But even then, if Stoicism is true [and I think it is], you will look elsewhere in vain — unless the sufferer changes his beliefs about being harmed, he will continue to suffer.

Now I am not very good at offering general advice to people who already have Stoic beliefs but fail to follow them in some area or other. So if that’s what you want — advice on dealing with anger for someone who is convinced that Stoicism is true but still gets upset — then of course it will be fine for people on this List to offer whatever suggestions they may [or to cite suggestions from the ancients on such matters, some examples of which you gave in this post]. But I claim no special expertise in such matters, and in any case as I said such advice comes only after the person has come to believe that Stoicism is true — and whatever small contributions I might be able to make to Stoicism will have to come in that area — “Stoic Apologetics”, if you will.

Regards, Grant

Part Two

Sterling’s second message, responding to Evans’s objection that Stoic benefit does not require acceptance of all Stoic theory, and that millions have benefited from Stoic techniques without committing to the full metaphysics.

Well, I don’t agree with you, Grant. I’m not saying that you haven’t done useful and helpful work with others, but I don’t agree that to get the benefit from Stoic techniques and ideas, you must accept all of Stoic theory.

I never said that. I said you must accept the core Stoic beliefs.

Imagine you went to the doctor with a terrible fever and they said ‘now, before I can treat you, I’ll need you to accept in entirety all of my theories’!

If the fever was caused by false medical beliefs, that’s exactly what I’d expect him to say. [Leaving out the “in entirety all” part.]

Imagine if Buddhists said, ‘before you come in and learn this meditation technique, you must accept all Buddhist doctrine and metaphysics’.

Again, Buddhists do not hold the same view as Stoics with regard to the origin of the ills meditation is meant to deal with.

In fact, millions of people have been greatly helped by learning the basic insight of Stoicism — that much of our suffering comes from our interpretation of external events, rather than the events themselves.

Specifically, that the events themselves are never worth suffering over. Yes, I quite agree. That is why the only doctrines I claimed must be accepted to derive benefits from Stoicism are the ones connected with this concept. Please re-read my post.

People can grasp that quite quickly, and take a leap forward in terms of how they view the world and their own minds.

I quite agree. I never said otherwise. But what you’re saying is that to derive the benefits of Stoicism, what is needed is that the person come to believe the core principle of Stoic thought — which is what I thought I was saying in my post. Stoic therapy does not work without this belief.

Of course you can use Stoic techniques (thought journals, staying in the moment, visualizations, thought analyzing and challenging) without accepting all of Stoic metaphysics.

I never said otherwise. But you cannot use these techniques — or, at any rate, there won’t be anything remotely Stoic about your use of these techniques — if you don’t accept the core principles of Stoicism.

Nonetheless, I used Stoic techniques to overcome social anxiety, by focusing on how my own thoughts caused my anxiety, rather than the people around me; and then learning to control those thoughts.

That’s great. But, as you say, that is a direct and simple application of a basic part of the Stoic belief system. Unlike the doctor’s fever medicine, or even the Buddhist’s meditation techniques, this method does not work unless you believe the principle upon which it is based. If you believe that our desires and emotions are caused by external events, or that they are not in our control, or that the external events are truly evil and so the anxiety is justified — then you can’t relieve the anxiety “Stoically”.

As to Stoicism only working as an immunization rather than a cure, there are literally millions of modern examples which disprove that, millions of examples where people have used Stoic techniques to overcome emotional disorders which they are already in the grip of.

Not without changing their beliefs, they didn’t.

And in the ancient world, Cicero used Stoic teachings to get over his breakdown when his daughter died. If he had fully accepted Stoic teachings before she died, he wouldn’t have had a breakdown. But he still found Stoicism very helpful to get over his bereavement. Stoicism is a therapy — it’s a cure. If we weren’t sick in the first place, we wouldn’t need the cure.

We are sick in the sense that we have an underlying condition that breaks out in incidents of distress. No real cure for the distress exists that doesn’t address the underlying condition.

Regards, Grant

Part Three

Sterling’s third message, responding to Evans’s claim that the “core insight” of Stoicism is more accessible than the radical claim that virtue is the only source of happiness, and that CBT and positive psychology have successfully incorporated Stoic techniques without the full doctrine.

This would be a pity, because the core Stoic insight — that our suffering often comes from our own thoughts and beliefs rather than from externals — is much easier to accept for most people. It’s much more practically useful. Stoicism has survived because of that insight, not because of the more radical idea that the only real source of happiness is inner virtue.

Slow down. The belief that our suffering comes from our own thoughts and not from externals is equivalent to the belief that externals are neither good nor evil. If externals were genuine goods or evils, then our perception of a genuine evil would cause suffering, as would the loss or absence of a genuine good. So you cannot coherently believe that our suffering never comes from externals without holding that externals are neither good nor evil.

Now, as I said, you can phrase this doctrine in whatever way will help the other person learn it. You don’t have to use the words “good” or “evil”. But that’s the doctrine.

It would be a shame to teach someone that externals have no value [in whatever way you wish to phrase it] and not teach them that Virtue does have value. It would be odd to teach them that suffering comes from our thoughts and beliefs and not from externals, and not teach them that happiness comes from having the proper thoughts and beliefs. I see no reason why this “more radical idea” would be hard to swallow for anyone who swallowed the “core insight”. Why would that be?

And the techniques of Stoicism — training oneself to stay mindful, to stay in the moment, to keep thought journals, to challenge negative thoughts etc. — are also much more generally accessible and applicable than the more radical idea that the only source of happiness is inner virtue.

Train oneself to stay mindful of what? To keep thought journals about what? All these techniques, it seems to me, either reflect the underlying Stoic doctrine [we are to challenge negative thoughts because negative thoughts are based on the false belief that externals have value], or else they are in no way distinctively Stoic techniques [many other philosophical systems recommend that you stay mindful of something, etc.]

The “pure” Stoic therapy would be to tell them that a girlfriend or a boyfriend is an indifferent, it’s not a source of real happiness, so they should rather spend their time trying to accept the will of the Logos. So they accept the will of the Logos and don’t change their situation.

This is false. This is a misunderstanding of the nature of goodness that results from not understanding the doctrine of preferred indifferents. Pure Stoic therapy would tell them no such thing. [Although it would tell them to accept the will of Logos if they try to meet someone and fail — but you’d better be teaching them that, or else your method won’t be relieving their suffering at all.]

This more practical form of Stoic therapy is what CBT, REBT and positive psychology has incorporated. Because it has retained the core insight of Stoicism (thoughts often cause suffering) without the more radical claims (only source of happiness is virtue) it has gained great acceptance with the medical community, with governments, and with ordinary people.

The success it has had is the result of incorporating Stoic doctrine. I see no reason to suppose that it would have less success or popularity if it incorporated more Stoic doctrine.

[This is no different from the way in which Freudian psychotherapy is based on Freudian doctrines about the nature of the unconscious, repression, etc. The only difference is that Freudian psychotherapy doesn’t work, because the underlying doctrines are false.]

There are six million people with depression in the UK, and about 4 million with anxiety disorders. You can’t wait for them all to accept that the only source of happiness is inner virtue. If they don’t, I still believe Stoic ideas and techniques can help them.

Indeed, it can help them because they will then be “making progress”, by adopting the first and most basic Stoic principles and working upwards. More power to them. I have no objection whatsoever to the expansion of Stoic-based psychological programs.

Regards, Grant

Stoic News

Saturday, March 28, 2026

Do the Six Commitments Oppose Modern Marxism in Theory and Practice?

Do the Six Commitments Oppose Modern Marxism in Theory and Practice?

Substance Dualism vs. Marxist Materialism

Libertarian Free Will vs. Historical Determinism

Ethical Intuitionism vs. Class-Relative Morality

Foundationalism vs. Dialectical Revisionism

Correspondence Theory vs. Ideological Truth

Moral Realism vs. Historical Materialism’s Ethics

The Practical Opposition

The Two Frameworks Are Not in Dialogue

Friday, March 27, 2026

Grant C. Sterling on What Makes a Stoic

Grant C. Sterling on What Makes a Stoic

Wednesday, March 25, 2026

The One Thing You Cannot Outsource

The One Thing You Cannot Outsource

What the Stoics Were Actually Protecting

The Correspondence Failure Hidden in the Enthusiasm

Preferred Indifferent, Not Genuine Good

The Structural Problem Dans Identifies

What Correct Use Looks Like

Conclusion

Tuesday, March 24, 2026

The Anti-Modernist Movement in the Catholic Church and the Six Commitments

The Anti-Modernist Movement in the Catholic Church and the Six Commitments

A Note on Method

The Historical Situation

The Modernist Error — And What Pius X Condemned

The Novus Ordo and the Pastoral Council

The Traditionalist Resistance and the Six Commitments: A Structural Parallel

The Deeper Point: Modernism Is a Philosophical Error Before It Is a Theological One

Saturday, March 21, 2026

Two and One-Half Ethical Systems

Two and One-Half Ethical Systems

Corpus Entry — Sterling/Kelly Philosophical System

Summary

Commitments Engaged

Propositions Engaged

Text

Notes

Two and One-Half Ethical Systems

Two and One-Half Ethical Systems

Friday, March 20, 2026

How the Six Commitments Stabilize the Rational Faculty

How the Six Commitments Stabilize the Rational Faculty

Dualism Stops Identity Fusion with Content

Free Will Inserts the Structural Pause

Intuitionism Grounds Moral Judgment in Apprehension Rather Than in the Other Person

Foundationalism Provides Non-Negotiable Ground

Correspondence Theory Disconnects Value Claims from Emotional State

Moral Realism Gives Judgments Weight That Does Not Fluctuate

The Structural Summary

The Six Commitments in Operation

The Six Commitments in Operation

Substance Dualism in Operation

Libertarian Free Will in Operation

Ethical Intuitionism in Operation

Foundationalism in Operation

Correspondence Theory of Truth in Operation

Moral Realism in Operation

Enchiridion Two and the Discipline of Desire: A Conceptual Integration

Enchiridion Two and the Discipline of Desire: A Conceptual Integration

The Structural Claim of Section Two

What Section Two Presupposes

My Desires Are My Judgments

My Desires Are My Judgments

My Desires Are My Judgments

Thursday, March 19, 2026

Defending Classical Philosophy: The Positive Account

Defending Classical Philosophy: The Positive Account

What classical philosophy actually claims

The peritrope is not enough

Why anti-classical philosophy arose

The practical upshot

Conceptual Integration: The Three Disciplines Across Four Sections

Conceptual Integration: The Three Disciplines Across Four Sections

The Discipline of Assent — Section 7

The Discipline of Desire — Section 11, Section 7 (a and c), Core Stoicism Section Two