Episode 49: The Practice Of Taking A Pause, Whether "Stoic" Or Not

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Recently, I was a guest on another podcast, as I do from time to time, going on other people’s platforms and talking with them about whatever it is that they want to bring me in for. And in this case, the person wanted to talk about Stoicism and specifically Epictetus, and they hit me with a term that I wasn’t really familiar with but I could say “I think I know what you’re talking about”, especially after they cited a passage and explained what they meant.

It’s not something that’s actually new, but the term that’s circulating around is relatively new it’s being labeled as the “Stoic pause.”. The general idea behind it is one that you can find articulated across the Stoic corpus. Seneca talks about it. Epictetus talks about it. Marcus Aurelius talks about it. And so do others as well, and for good reason.

And it’s basically just this. Before you allow your reasoning processes or your reactions or your feelings or whatever it happens to be, to lead you to have a response, take a little break. Introduce a little pause temporally into the process.

And for the person who was asking me about this, he thought this had to do specifically with the notion of handling what the Stoics call “impressions” or “appearances”, or even “imaginations”, phantasiai, and whether we give assent to them or don’t give assent to them. And that’s all part of the picture, to be sure, but it’s not quite so simple and straightforward as that in all the Stoic writings.

There’s lots of passages where those people that I already talked about will say: ‘when you run into this, then pause for a moment and say, examine what’s going on with yourself.” It might be examine the impressions that are impinging upon you, test them to see if they are what they think they are. It could also be pause for a moment so you can choose what you’re going to do.

It might be framed in terms of reasoning processes that we could call unconscious, or subliminal, or implicit, or below the level of our conscious thinking. But we are engaging in thinking nonetheless, as we can later reconstruct it. And if we’re paying attention, we can actually see what’s And a lot of our emotions from a Stoic perspective, particularly the emotions that they call the perturbationes, the ones that are getting in the way, “perturbations” is a literal translation of the disruptive emotions.

They usually involve a set of judgments that we’re making, and we make those judgments because we have some appearances or impressions coming in, and then we think about those and we respond in turn.

So this isn’t the be-all and end-all of what Stoic practice would be, but it’s very helpful to do. Really, we could say you cannot function without doing this, and doing it repetitively and doing it consciously, and over time with practice getting good at it. If you don’t do it, all the other stuff that you do is probably not going to work out very well for you. This is going to be one big deficit area.

So far, so good, right? That’s an important idea, taking a pause, not just to take a pause and count to 10 or something like that, but to actually refocus your attention on: “Hey, what’s going on here today?”, and paying attention to what it is that you think, what it is that you feel, the judgments that you’re making, what information you’re using that might be a little dubious. All those sorts of things.

That’s all great. Nothing wrong with that at all. It’s also not distinctively Stoic. And to call it the “Stoic pause”, I’m not sure who came up with this term, is a little bit weird and culty, and maybe a little bit too grifter self-helpy as well. Because again, it’s not the unique property of Stoic philosophy.

It would be sort of like talking about “Greg Sadler’s soccer kick,” right? Everybody else plays soccer in the world. Of course, many of them call it “football” and we could change it to “Greg Sadler’s football kick”. Well, so many other people are doing it. You wou