Stoic Terms
Prohairesis: the Faculty of Choice
The governing faculty by which a person judges, assents, refuses, and chooses.
The central distinction
The governing faculty by which a person judges, assents, refuses, and chooses.
The relevant primary texts approach this through Epictetus, Enchiridion, and Epictetus, Discourses. Read the excerpts as parts of arguments, not as slogans.
How to examine it
Name the event in plain observable language. Then name the judgment, prediction, demand, or appetite added to it.
Separate what belongs to choice—attention, assent, refusal, intention, and action—from another person, the past, chance, and the final outcome.
A practical method
Use The Dichotomy of Control: Sort what is yours from what no choice can command. The practice supplies a fixed sequence so the idea is tested in experience rather than admired in the abstract.
Claim only the practice and the felt experience of doing it. Do not turn a philosophical exercise into a promise that an emotion, relationship, or circumstance will be cured.
Common confusion
Stoic practice does not require pretending that pain, fear, grief, or anger never appeared. The first movement can arrive before deliberate choice.
The work begins with the use made of that movement: whether it is accepted as a command, enlarged by a story, examined, delayed, or answered with character.
Primary-text evidence
These excerpts are shown with their exact work locators. Read them as evidence for study, not as detached slogans.
“Of things some are in our power, and others are not. In our power are opinion (ὑπόληψις), movement towards a thing (ὁρμή), desire, aversion (ἔκκλισις, turning from a thing); and in a word, whatever are our own acts: not in our power are the body, property, reputation, offices (magisterial power), and in a word, whatever are not our own acts. And the things in our power are by nature free, not subject to restraint nor hindrance: but the things not in our power are weak, slavish, subject to restraint, in the power of others. Remember then that if you think the things which are by nature slavish to be free, and the things which are in the power of others to be your own, you will be hindered, you will lament, you will be disturbed, you will blame both…”
“Of all the faculties (except that which I shall soon mention), you will find not one which is capable of contemplating itself, and, consequently, not capable either of approving or disapproving. How far does the grammatic art possess the contemplating power? As far as forming a judgment about what is written and spoken. And how far music? As far as judging about melody. Does either of them then contemplate itself? By no means. But when you must write something to your friend, grammar will tell you what words you should write; but whether you should write or not, grammar will not tell you. And so it is with music as to musical sounds; but whether you should sing at the present time and play on the lute, or do neither, music will not tell you. What…”
“Every man will read a book with more pleasure, or even with more ease, if it is written in fairer characters. Therefore every man will also listen more readily to what is spoken, if it is signified by appropriate and becoming words. We must not say then that there is no faculty of expression: for this affirmation is the characteristic of an impious and also of a timid man. Of an impious man, because he undervalues the gifts which come from God, just as if he would take away the commodity of the power of vision, or of hearing, or of seeing. Has then God given you eyes to no purpose? and to no purpose has he infused into them a spirit so strong and of such skillful contrivance as to reach a long way and to fashion the forms of things which are seen?…”