溫故知新 Old wisdom, today’s insight — ONGO
Is It the Event That Torments Me, or My Judgment of It?
Does my regret over a past event come from the event itself, or from the judgment I attached to it?
It is not things that disturb people, but their judgments about things.
This question was the core of Stoic cognitive theory and its seed that traveled furthest. Chrysippus analyzed emotion as mistaken judgment, and Epictetus forged this into the language of practice, setting the principle "not events but judgments." Marcus carried it on as an emperor's meditation. From the other side, however, the Aristotelian tradition saw emotion not as an error for reason to suppress but as a part of nature to be well trained, and later Romanticism even praised the truthfulness of feeling. Is emotion the product of judgment or the voice of nature — this ancient fork revived, two thousand years on, as the root of a modern cognitive psychology that holds "change the thought and the feeling changes."
For us who daily feel the difference between collapsing and enduring before the same event, Epictetus's question — whether the source of suffering is the event or the thought — remains the nearest seat of practice.
Epictetus, born a slave and living with a lame leg, taught that what shakes us is not the event but our judgment of it.
📝I, Too, Stand Before It
Epictetus, born a slave and living with a lame leg, taught that what shakes us is not the event but our judgment of it. The same failure is ruin to one and a lesson to another; the event is single, but the size of the suffering is set by judgment. I sense this question is the most practical key for governing regret — I cannot change what has happened, but I can change the thought I attached to it. I stand before it too, sorting again whether what kept me tossing all night was the event, or the story I attached to it.
✍️Your Answer
The lineage of the ancients ends here. Now it is your turn before the question. There is no right answer — only how you, today, would answer.
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