Moral Independence
This week's concept is Moral Independence, rooted in the Stoic idea of the "hegemonikon" (the Greek word for what the Stoics called your governing self or ruling faculty, meaning the part of you that judges, chooses, and decides who you are). Moral Independence is the recognition that this inner faculty cannot be touched, overruled, or corrupted by anything outside you unless you hand it over willingly. By the end of this week, you will have a clearer sense of where you actually live inside yourself, and why protecting that place is the most important work you can do.
Passage
Of the things that exist, God has put some in our control, others not in our control. In our control he has put the noblest and most excellent part by reason of which He is Himself happy, the power of using our impressions. For when this is correctly used, it means serenity, cheerfulness, constancy; it also means justice and law and self-control and virtue as a whole. But all other things He has not put in our control. Therefore we ought to become of like mind with God and, dividing things in like manner, we ought in every way to lay claim to the things that are in our control, but what is not in our control we ought to entrust to the universe and gladly yield to it whether it asks for our children, our country, our body, or anything whatsoever.
— Musonius Rufus, Fragment 37X.1
Reflection
Musonius Rufus now places Moral Independence inside a larger picture. God, or the rational structure of the universe, has arranged things so that the one thing given over entirely to your control is also the noblest thing: the power to use your impressions well. This is the Stoic dichotomy of control, the distinction between what is up to you and what is not, and Musonius is saying it is not an arbitrary line. The things outside your control have been entrusted to the universe. You are not supposed to hold onto them with clenched hands. The things inside your control, your judgements, your choices, your character, those are the very things by which the divine principle in the cosmos operates happily. Moral Independence, on this reading, is not self-isolation. It is alignment: running the part of you that is yours as well as it can be run, and releasing everything else.
Go deeper
What are you currently holding on to, trying to control or secure, that genuinely belongs in the category of things not up to you, and what would it feel like to genuinely hand it to the universe rather than just telling yourself you have?
Practice
Draw the Line
Take a piece of paper and draw a simple vertical line down the middle. On the left, write three to five things you are currently worrying about or trying to control. On the right, write what part of each one, if any, is actually up to you. For the parts that belong on neither side because they are wholly external, write the word 'released' next to them and mean it, at least for the next few minutes.