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‘The Ruling Faculty’ = The Command Center of the Mind.
In summary:
Judge’s impressions and decides what they mean.
Chooses how to respond to external events.
Governs your will, opinions, and actions.
Remains free even when your body or circumstances are constrained.
Key Principles from Epictetus:
1. It’s the only thing that is truly yours.
Everything else, your body, possessions and reputation can be taken away.
But -
Your ruling faculty, your inner citadel, is inviolable unless you surrender it.
2. It operates through assent.
You control whether you agree with an impression.
E.g.: Someone insults you = just sound waves.
Your ruling faculty decides if it means something harmful.
Do you see the difference?
3. It distinguishes what’s “up to us” vs. “not up to us.”
This is Epictetus’s famous dichotomy.
The two areas are split into two distinct sides with the notion that true peace comes from focusing entirely on the first and letting go of the second.
In other words, things that are in our control, or up to us, remain in our power and the rest can just stream away down the drain, but only if you let it.
If you are intent on being in control of absolutely everything in your life coming in and out of it, then the act of mindfully ‘'letting go’’ wont sound like your cup of tea, let alone doing it for real.
In that case you will need to be patient.
You will need to be determined but kind with yourself as well as others as you learn how to let external things be, particularly those which really do not concern you and are not emergency situations requiring your attendance.
As you can see, it will take practice.
Keep This in Mind:
Your ruling faculty is always “up to you” - your judgments, intentions, and responses. Everything external is not.
4. It can be trained.
Through practice (askesis), you strengthen your ruling faculty to remain rational, virtuous, and undisturbed in turn achieving freedom from destructive passions (apatheia).
Practical Application:
Epictetus taught that when something disturbs you, the disturbance comes not from the thing itself, but from your judgment about it.
Knowing this can help you want to train your ruling faculty to:
- Pause before reacting
- Examine your impressions
- Choose responses aligned with reason and virtue
- Accept what you cannot control
Now when we go over that and ponder awhile, it might seem daunting, at first.
That’s because it will take determined effort to understand and apply each of these in your life and, if you are accustomed to taking the easier and faster route then the idea of becoming suddenly determined and focused like this could initiate an image of a fish out of water, but look, it really needn’t be like this.
Once you begin, the practices will eventually become second nature.
We have mentioned the word hegemonikon in part A. of this series, taken from the Greek ‘hegemon’ which means ‘leader or guide’ and it’s this term that Epictetus employed to name the governing part of the human mind, the part that chooses.
Now I want to dive deeper.
Consider that you have been feeling the following:
-
You have been anxious.
You have been exhausted.
You have been overwhelmed by circumstances you did not choose.
Yet, something inside you observed all of it.
Something watched the anxiety without being consumed by it.
-
If this is true of you, you might be thinking, ‘no, I have felt pretty much overwhelmed by it, there’s no simple watching going on here.’
-
But here’s the thing:
What it is that kept watching, was not you, it was something inside you.
And if every single anxiety-inducing scenario did actually overwhelm you then you would likely be in hospital or in front of a psychiatrist right now, not deliberating over whether you’ve been struggling or not.
The understanding and application of the benefits of how the ruling faculty method works in action, has never been intended for practice for persons who are struggling with severe mental illness.
Having said this, I hope that does not describe you or anybody you know who is attempting to learn about Stoic application right now, but if it does, please take the rest and time you need or help others to do the same to recover first, before attempting any practice or suggestion provided here.
I cannot emphasis this fact enough.
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You must be reasonably healthy in mind and body to practice any method of Stoicism.
In line with that we might again highlight this:
The ruling faculty is the one domain of human existence that external circumstance cannot reach without your permission.
And if your mind is in a state of imbalance then sound reasoning cannot be warranted for the needed permission from you, either way.
So, be well, live well, choose well.
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The Modern Parallel.
Ever heard of a man called, Victor Frankl?
This is fast forwarding into the nearer past now, but he also arrived at the same conclusion as did Epictetus.
How?
Although his methods were different the route Frankl took was equally unsparing.
An Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist, he was imprisoned in Auschwitz, Theresienstadt and Dachau between 1942 and 1945.
Now Frankl wasn’t sitting there with the epiphany that he would survive the camps if he just learned the mind of Epictetus.
But his time in the camps did allow him ample opportunity to observe one specific thing.
And this thing could only be realized to its fullest because of the horrific camp conditions he saw others enduring alongside himself.
Frankl saw that the very last of human freedom, the one thing that could not be taken by the Nazi guards, the environmental conditions or the entire system was this:
The freedom to choose one’s responses - to every monstrous external horror that came along.
Now if you are not familiar with Vicktor Frankl prior to reading this, then you must take into consideration the man’s vantage point of arriving at these camps equipped with training in neurology and psychiatry that afforded him advantage.
To make an honest evaluation of what Frankl saw and was exposed to himself clearly suggests he was in no way broken beyond sanity as he scrutinized his surroundings so thoroughly.
His attention to furthering his studies like this, by making use of such raw data while being fully exposed to it himself simultaneously, was not only a unique opportunity for Frankl but it consciously shifted his mind to a structural place of theory and analytical collection of data.
With the mind operating this way, what was happening around him was simply observed and what happened to him could be deliberately measured as a parallel study of the human spirit.
Frankl’s observations of the pain inflicted on his neighbors and the various responses, opposed to experiencing any pain directly himself and the choice of reactive emotions that could surround this either way as violent scenarios unraveled daily and he witnessed victims either become resolved over time or crumble in the first instance, granted him invaluable access for advancement in his area of expertize.
Those that chose a resolve and would not surrender their integrity of self, of their dearest beliefs, were the ones in the end who did not even fear death.
This was a remarkable observation.
Like notable others, Frankl chose to control what he could - his own reaction to circumstances with what he had to work with.
In this, a trained state of mind prior to real time tests cannot be denied as to its significance for survival.
The fact that Frankl was a trained psychiatrist and neurologist tends to also highlight the better resilience of mind he had by way of understanding the brains workings prior to his captivity, proving to be perhaps an unusual kind of lifeline for him in that he was accustomed to analyzing and studying what was the inner mind under trying situations already, and hence he was more capable of externalizing his thinking then to wallowing in what could only be the pain and grief of the majority.
This may seem contradictory to letting go of external factors but it isn’t.
The start is knowing how to take control of what one can. Frankl did this.
After that he could direct his thoughts to the external but in the way of analytical research.
Without this ability and former studious routine, what was external would either have drowned him emotionally, not being capable of separating what was happening outside himself with what was directly occurring to him, or he might have become like those who in states of severe shock, shut down.
The other alternative might have been that Frankl’s fight or flight response would have pushed him to self-destruct in the quickest way possible with what was available to him such as deliberately running into electric fencing, or irritating a guard so as to be quickly shot, we do not know, but what we do is that how each individual encamped during the Nazi regime reacted to any horror was never exactly the same nor could it ever have been, unless we consider any group case scenarios of peoples bound together to support one another during the time and who like Frankl in some respects, held onto a mind vision of something greater then where they were presently.
When we apply the understanding of what the ruling faculty is in such extreme cases, it cannot be helped but to question if some persons not only learned this fundamental truth about the self or certainly naturally were more tuned into it like the Stoics were without guidebooks to explain that it was there before they realized it, but also to help learn how such a truth may possibly relate to a higher spiritual being.
To discover this, it seems apparent that in our modern lives, a connection to anything higher then the self must be discovered without traditions and doctrines. And I think this is why methods of Stoicism practice appeal to certain people, because it feels safe, it rewards the self and allows the same self to be answerable to nobody beyond it.
But if we take Epictetus again as way of example, he did not just lay back and allow his leg to be smashed because he felt safe.
It begs the question that even Epictetus channeled a connection to something or someone greater then self, so that his strength of mind wasn’t all that made him somebody we still refer to today, and by this I do not mean his ruthless human master who clearly enjoyed bloody theatrics, but I refer to that which seems to thread together all that we know and can master as humans but leaves us still desiring something beyond the reach of mere flesh and blood.
Of course, we must all travel our own journey and doing this in the best way possible means letting go of what cannot be changed and embracing that which can.
This we have established.
If we take the idea alone of ‘letting go’ of what cannot be controlled and remaining true to what reasonably can within the self, then endurance through such misery as mentioned above, for not just Frankl but others like him, will remain a paramount example of the strength of the human spirit when both the body and mind are in sync.
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” - Victor Frankl
- Cont. reading in part (D) - the guide.
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