Our Judgment Counts

As I kept reading the Handbook of Epictetus I saw the same things I had seen in the previous sections. This is all about judgment and how it is the one guilty for everything. In the fifth sections it says “What upsets people is not things themselves but their judgments about things.”(Epictetus Section 5) This meaning that we don’t get angry at bad grades but at our judgment of bad grades, we judging them by saying they are bad.

In the sections I recently read I saw again that judgment is guilty of we being insulted. In section 20 it tells us “Remember that what is insulting is not the person who abuses you or hits you, but the judgment about them that they are insulting.”(Epictetus Section 20) Here it is repeating what it said before but in a different way and a different context. Here we are told that we aren’t being insulted by a person but by our judgment of that person being insulting that is insulting.

This is true because we decide what insults us, in other words we decide if we want to let ourselves be insulted or not. So what is really insulting is our decision to let the person insult us.