Stoic Assent, Emotion, and Reason: Intelligence as Elbow Room Within Necessity
A reading of a crucial moment in the history of intelligence: Causality learns to observe and adjust itself. It deciphers its hidden information, and it the act of deciphering learns to exert control. Causality learns to interrupt, interpret, and modify itself.
In this essay, I want to delve into an episode in our History of Intelligence that can shed light on how contingency becomes possible within the causal necessity of physical forces. The Stoic practices of the self include a prolonged elaboration of the problem of freedom, fate, and necessity. Freedom is defined doctrinally as the cultivated capacity to control one’s responses to fate and necessity. Crucially, for this to happen, the Stoics needed a theory of causation that provided elbow room within the hard determinism of a cosmos beyond human control.
Given my definition of intelligence as the expansive and adaptive capacity to turn necessity into possibilities for a better future, this episode is essential to understand. All concepts are operators, which makes the Stoic texts the traces of the cosmos itself learning to theorize how it works and thereby find elbow room within necessity. These are traces of a remarkably clear articulation of concepts that do the work of this separation by naming the separation itself.
The fact that this separation occurs in a mind should not force us to accept a hard boundary between subject (mind) and object (causally determined cosmos). Rather, intelligence is a feature of the Universe, not an independent entity created outside the Universe.
We’ll find in the re-reading of this episode the expansion of intelligence out of humanity’s contemplation of its capacity for evil and learning how to overcome its inevitabilities. Morality and ethics, therefore, are drivers of this expansion, which is why these texts are so powerful today. They mark a jump to universality (a term I borrow from David Deutsch) that reaches beyond their local origins—from Greece they traveled to the Roman Empire and down to us through myriad re-transmissions and re-printings of their practices, many of which arrive essentially unchanged from their origins.
Emotion and Reason
We are accustomed to thinking that emotions are separate from reason—they are opposed faculties of the mind. For Stoicism, emotion is a form of reason because it is a response to propositional content contained in an initial impression. The Stoics named this response ‘assent’. It can be either explicit or implicit. (We should avoid conscious or unconscious because those terms have no meaning in the Hellenistic age. The Stoic mind is not a repository of rooms with essential functions.)
Assent is the capacity to read the implicit propositional content of an impression—such as, ‘I have been insulted’—and make it explicit before taking the action it implies—‘therefore I should seek revenge’. Crucially, assent can only be granted or withheld. It does not itself introduce alternative options. It merely says, ‘Should I agree with the initial impression and therefore should I take the automated action? Yes or no?’ Wisdom seeks options, but we have not yet arrived at wisdom.
We have discussed this capacity for introducing contingency into necessity as fundamental to intelligence. Assent is the cultivated capacity to interrupt one’s own automated reactions and is therefore fundamental to intelligence. For assent to work, what appears to be necessary—I have been insulted therefore I should seek revenge—has to be understood as encoded with information.
Necessity, in other words, is decipherable. Fate is a choice whether we realize it or not.
Assent seeks to read the propositional content of the impression and in the act of reading learns to suspend the habituated impulse to act.
The Stoic practice of assent becomes the elbow room within necessity. But this was not just a practice of the self; it was how Stoicism saw the self integrated into a larger cosmos that was providentially determined. Fate and necessity are the fundamental conditions of human experience, and learning to deal with them is the heart of those practices.
This required finding some experiential separation from necessity.
Creating the Separation by Naming It
In On fate, Cicero engages with the long arc of Stoic thought on the relationship between responsibility, causation, fate, and necessity. His understanding of assent is entangled within this constellation of concepts.
To understand this, we should delve into the two different types of causes Stoics such as Chrysippus defined: triggers (proximate) and sustainers (primary). Chrysippus has a famous example: a cylinder that is rolling down a hill has two causes—the trigger that pushed it and the fact of its roundness, which allows the push to become a sustained rolling. The more important of the causes is the roundness; the trigger would n0t have the same effect on an equally heavy block.
Assent is equivalent to the roundness that is provoked by the external trigger:
‘Hence,’ he says, ‘just as the person who pushed the cylinder gave it its beginning of motion but not its capacity for rolling, likewise, although the impression encountered will print and, as it were, emblazon its appearance on the mind, assent will be in our power. And assent, just as we said in the case of the cylinder, although prompted from outside, will thereafter move through its own force and nature.’ (Cicero, On fate, quoted in Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic Philsophers, 388).
We should attend to the phrase ‘just as’. It appears throughout Stoic writing. We are easily tempted to read ‘just as’ as introducing a simile or a metaphor. But we should be more literal. The roundness of the cylinder is not a metaphor (or a simile) for assent; it is the same causal metaphysics at work in both—just as it is the same pneuma (breath) that animates water, fire, and the human soul. Pneuma is not a metaphor and neither is the same causality working in the cylinder as in assent.
The difference is this: the cylinder must, by virtue of its shape, respond in one and only one way to the trigger. In Bergson’s phrase about instinct, ‘It must because it must.’ If we are only to attend to causality in the context of the cylinder, then we are apt to collapse the two causes into each other: triggers will appear more important than sustaining causes because the cylinder can’t choose what to do.
Assent allows the Stoics to complicate causality and mark a distinction between necessity and fate. For Chrysippus (as quoted by Cicero), fate is the causal chain that requires that the sustaining cause (the roundness of the cylinder) respond to the triggering cause by its fixed nature. For the cylinder, fate and necessity are collapsed because of the roundness. But in human responses, he wants to separate necessity from the triggering cause to make room for moral responsibility. How does he do this?
Assent becomes the moment in the causal chain when necessity can be interrupted. Assent names the capacity to find some elbow room in the causal chain set off by the trigger. I am not a cylinder; I do not have necessity programmed into me beyond the necessity of experiencing the trigger. What I do with the triggering cause downstream requires my assent—consciously granted or not.
Elbow Room
Assent has three qualities that we must understand. First, a temporal elbow room between trigger and reaction. The Stoic subject is deeply tied into the cosmos—the breath that causes an earthquake is the same breath that animates our souls. This is the non-metaphorical ‘just as’ discussed above. But this entanglement is the basis for explaining the elbow room, not its impossibility.
In their commentary on this passage from Cicero explaining Chrysippus, Long and Sedley write:
From the cosmic perspective, fate is the entire conjunction of causes…. But from the point of view of the human individual, there is a sharp divide between himself, comprising his beliefs, moral qualities, etc., and the external world with which he interacts. It would seem absurd to him to become a mere spectator of a single undifferentiated causal nexus in which his own beliefs and attitudes were swallowed up. (Long and Sedley …)
The ‘sharp divide’ is purely an experience of one’s separation from the rest of the causal chain of fate. But these texts are not just describing that separation; they are cultivating it. The texts themselves, by naming assent, become operators in the causal nexus—we learn to intervene in the causal chain by separating triggers from necessity, and reading these texts teaches us to do so.
It will take many hundreds of years before this experience becomes the modern subject, but the fact that these texts remain our contemporaries suggests that a jump to university was achieved in the operational concept of assent. This jump to universality is the crucial moment in the history of intelligence that I am tracing in this essay.
Moral Milieu
The second quality of assent that we must understand is its power of being habituated. Impressions are shaped and can therefore be reshaped by the moral milieu we inhabit—and that inhabits us.
This is possible because impressions are encoded, and this code can be deciphered. They exist before assent, and their function is to give meaning to what we feel—to translate the raw causal force of the world into something the intellect can receive and evaluate. Impressions are the embodied feeling of being in the causal nexus of the cosmos, and in this sense they are translators of the environment. They can happen all over the body, and they carry implicit meaning that the intellect can decode if it learns to intervene in the movement from trigger to reaction.
What makes this possible is that impressions are not noise. They are structured signals—and structure, unlike randomness, can be read. The intellect that has learned to pause before assenting is precisely one that has become a skilled receiver: capable of noticing that an impression is a code before asking what that code says. The first act is syntactic—recognizing that one is being addressed by something formed, not merely struck by something brute. The second is semantic—reading what the impression claims, and evaluating whether to affirm it.
We ought not, however, ascribe this encoding only to natural instinct. Much of what Stoic texts treat is encoded by one's moral surroundings. If one has the impression of being insulted, is it nature or culture that implants the meaning? The boundary is fluid, but the more important point is this: the moral milieu through which impressions pass is not merely a source of distortion. It can corrupt the signal—habituating us toward vice—but it can equally clarify it, training us to receive triggers with greater accuracy and freedom. This latter opens to the path to wisdom.
Thus, the same cultural transmission that encodes vice can encode virtue. This is why Stoic practice is not a retreat from the social world but a deliberate reshaping of the channel through which one receives it.
The only way freedom from necessity works is to see impressions as encoded and decipherable by the mind. Understood this way, the distinction between nature and culture is less a boundary than a gradient—one that is itself emergent, part and parcel of the expansion of the cosmos learning how to find increasing elbow room in necessity. A purely deterministic system passes triggers through to reactions without remainder: one input, one output, no freedom—the automated movement of a pushed cylinder. What Stoic practice cultivates is genuine indetermination at the point of reception: the capacity to receive a signal without being compelled by it.
Or, as Henri Bergson put it, 'at the root of life there is an effort to engraft onto the necessity of physical forces the largest possible amount of indetermination' (Creative Evolution, 114). I am calling this intelligence.
Wisdom
The third quality of assent, beyond the elbow room of contingency it seeks, is the possibility for the contingency to endure long enough for options to be considered. This becomes the condition of possibility for ‘wisdom’, and it represents the attainment over time of a broader liberation—freedom to choose our reactions.
We shall take this up in later essays, but for this essay I would like to focus on a more nuanced issue that, if lost, would lead to tremendous confusion.
The Unfolding
We might be tempted to see this separation that I’ve been tracking as a conventional bifurcation—a split where something wholly different emerges from the root. That’s not what is happening here. Nor should we lean on an equally conventional story that the human mind is discovering its essential separation from the external world. Rather, we are witnessing in these texts the traces of a long and protracted emergence.
Many metaphors could be used to describe this emergence. No single metaphor will suffice. For this essay, I’ll treat this moment in the history of intelligence less has a branch or the self-discovery of an essential separation and more of an unfolding.
What is unfolding? Causality is learning to observe and adjust itself. It is deciphering its hidden information, and in the act of deciphering it is learning to exert control.
Causality is learning to interpret, interrupt, and modify itself.
The Stoic mind is the current location of this emergence, but we need not see the mind as originally separate from the cosmos. That would be out of synch with Stoic doctrine. If we don’t see this entanglement of mind and intelligence, then we risk treating intellect and the mind as the same thing. This requires asserting a hard separation between mind and nature. We would be dealing with essences squared off against each other.
That’s not what is happening here. Causation is learning to read itself and thereby control itself.
Let’s re-read our analysis: The Stoics understood that the cosmos produces, through the human mind, its own capacity for interruption. Assent—the pause between trigger and response—is not imposed on the causal chain from an entity that is outside the chain. It must emerge from inside causality itself, which is why Chryssipus divides causality into proximate triggers and sustaining causes.
Let’s understand the radical nature of this perspective: causal necessity is generating, from its own complexity, the means to read and temporarily suspend itself.