Prosoche

Prosochē — attention, attentiveness — names the master exercise of the Stoic spiritual life. Where modern usage hears in “attention” a faculty of the mind, the Stoics meant a sustained discipline directed at the hegemonikon, the soul’s governing faculty. Epictetus formulates the goal: “the goal of philosopher’s principles is to enable us, whatever happens, to have our hēgemonikon in harmony with nature and to keep it so” (Epictetus, Discourses III.9.11, in Sharpe and Ure 2021). Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations are the literary residue of the practice — an emperor’s nightly exhortation to his own hegemonikon to remain awake.

Prosoche is the operational form of the Stoic theory of assent. An impression — phantasia — arrives unbidden; the soul’s freedom resides in the moment between the impression and the rational faculty’s assent. To practice prosoche is to inhabit that interval, to refuse mechanical agreement to whatever appearance presents itself. The Stoic apatheia is approached through prosoche; one does not eradicate the passions, one declines to assent to the appearances that, given assent, become passions.

Sorabji documents the transmission: “first movements” — the involuntary somatic shocks the Stoics distinguished from emotion proper — are exactly what Christian writers would rename logismoi and place at the center of the desert ascetic discipline (Sorabji 2000). Clement of Alexandria, formulating the bridge, calls the philosopher’s task the cultivation of amerimnia through eulabeia and prosochē — a sentence Hadot identifies as carrying “the whole thought world of ancient philosophy” (in Sharpe and Ure 2021). The Christian nepsis is prosoche relocated from the Stoic schoolroom to the desert cell.

Relationships

• nepsis
• apatheia
• logismoi
• contemplation-theoria
• active-imagination

Primary sources

• philosophy-as-way-of-life (Sharpe and Ure 2021)
• sorabji-emotion-peace-of-mind (Sorabji 2000)