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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 would hear that and you’d be like, why are you bringing Greg Sadler into this as distinctive?

So there’s nothing particularly Stoic about this. All of the other robust virtue ethics that we can find throughout the centuries, not just in Western philosophy, but also in Chinese philosophy and Indian philosophy, all over the place, are going to advise that at least at some point in time, you pay attention to and slow down your reactions, and analyze your own thought processes and emotions, and pay attention to habits and all of that sort of stuff.

So just shifting back to the Western sphere and talking about ancient mediterranean and near eastern thought on this, well the Platonists advise doing that. You’ve just got to read Plutarch a bit and you’ll see that. The Aristotelians definitely suggest doing this. The Stoics do. The Epicureans do. Even the Skeptics who some of them don’t believe in much of anything, they certainly are suggesting doing that as well. This shows you that we’re already covering a lot of ground

But it’s not just philosophy people. We could say that this is an important part of many religious traditions as well. And so you can find in the Biblical Wisdom literature some references to doing this sort of thing. We can say that it also pops up in literature as well. And speaking of literature, it even shows up in science fiction. I brought up in that particular session, that recording on the person’s podcast, that one prime example of this is from A.E. Van Vogt, who was a Golden Age science fiction writer, probably most famous for his World of Null-A and Slan, but he wrote a lot of other works as well. And he called it the “thalmic pause”, because he was saying you put the part of your brain that likes to make snap decisions on a sort of pause ,and you think through what’s actually going on here. He’s describing exactly the same process.

Now, of course, if you know your history about this guy, Van Vogt had some philosophical training, specifically, he was involved with the Institute for General Semantics and Korzybski and those people. But there’s many other people who advise taking some sort of pause before making a snap judgment or a decision.

I mean, we might even say that we see something like this going on in the very first book of the Iliad, because Achilles is hearing what Agamemnon has to say, and he’s getting angry, and he’s thinking: “I should kill this b*****d right here where he stands. I’m going to pull up my sword and do this jerk in. He’s not a very good king at all.” And Athena helps him to stay his hand. This might be a prime example of this sort of thing.

And, you know, we have a great character in Homer who will often do that sort of thing, and typically only gets himself in deep trouble when he makes quick decisions, and that’s Odysseus. So it’s not as if this is a distinctively philosophical idea, let alone just a Stoic idea, but it is a really good thing to do.

I think philosophies might be particularly helpful for helping us understand why we should do it, how it can be beneficial to us, and then what we should be filling that pause with, how we should be examining the thought processes and decision-making processes, the evaluations that we’re engaged in.

So I’m not going to call this the “Stoic pause” myself, because as we’ve just talked about, it’s got a much wider base than just Stoicism. But if somebody wants to call it the “Stoic pause”, that’s up to them. They can certainly do that. But I do think it’s something that all of us would benefit from incorporating into our practice, even if we get away from our ordinary lives. And we’re just talking about studying philosophy.

I’ll give you just a prime example of this before we end here. So you’re reading something and you think you understand exactly what the author is saying. And they write something that to you seems really, really stupid, and you find yourself thinking: “Why am I reading this dummy? I’m wasting my time with an idiot like this.” Well, that’s a great place to take a pause.

You might actually be right. Now, you might be right in your assessment that they’re an idiot, and have gotten something fundamentally wrong, and then wrote about it. You might also be wrong at the same time, that it’s a total waste of your time. So you should actually look at the connection between those two statements, right? Because one doesn’t necessarily imply the other.

But odds are, if they’re a great thinker, and you are reading them for the first or eighth time, and other people think that reading them is valuable, and as you’re reading them, your take is: “No, this person is stupid and their ideas are stupid.” Odds are that you’re missing something, and you’re probably bringing something to the reading that’s getting in the way. So you might want to take a pause there and think about how you are responding and whether it really makes all that much sense. And if you do that, you will probably save yourself some headaches and not throw away books that would be useful for you to refocus on.

So you see that even outside of our ordinary scope of life, if you’re just doing study, this pause, whatever you want to call it. We could call it the “Stoic pause", the “Platonic pause, the “A.E. Van Vogt” pause, whatever you want to call it. This practice of pausing, and then filling that pause with the sorts of mental activities that are going to be helpful for you, this can be incredibly powerful. And you’re probably going to need to do this thousands of times over the course of your life in order to be happy.

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Gregory Sadler is the founder of ReasonIO, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.

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