What are impressions?

In partnership with

Vladimir, a listener hailing from, I assume, Russia, has they submitted the following topic request a few weeks ago (originally in Russian):

This week, I’ll be exploring why exactly the examination of impressions is important – I would say critical – to our personal Stoic practice. Impressions are tied to Prosochē, Prosochē is the act of paying attention to what we’re thinking and feeling, and so I think I could also say that impressions, and the examination of them, are probably the single most important aspect of Stoicism – but I’m sure a great number of people would argue me on that (because this is the internet).

Before starting, a gentle reminder that there’s a weekly podcast associated with this newsletter, and which goes by the same moniker, “Practical Stoicism”. You can find it anywhere you listen to podcasts and my hope is that, if you don’t already listen, that you will consider checking it out. Simply search your podcast listening app of choice for “Practical Stoicism”.

Let’s start off by defining what an impression is, exactly

When stimuli activates our minds – such as when we hear a noise from around the corner, smell scents of fresh baking coming from the kitchen, or are provided with information by our local news channel – we immediately, without choosing to do so, begin forming notions concerning those stimuli. Those notions are what we call impressions.

The reason Stoics are meant to spend so much time examining their impressions is because they (the impressions) have a high probability of being factually inaccurate. A factually inaccurate impression (if internalized and adopted as truth) represents a significant threat to a Stoic’s aim of developing a virtuous character.

Yeah, but why?

Let’s imagine we smell fresh baking coming from the kitchen. We’re certain it is our grandmother’s apple pie. She’s in the kitchen, it’s the holidays, she loves to bake, and so the impression that our grandmother is cooking apple pie is not an unreasonable one. But is it a true one? What if it were actually the case that our grandmother had simply lit an apple pie scented Yankee Candle?

We don’t bother to go and check, we just “assent” to our impression (that is, commit to an impression being true) and grin ear to ear because we cannot wait to have some of apple pie tonight after dinner.

Imagine further that, at that very moment, our phone rings. It’s our sibling (or other loved one) who is also in town for the holidays. We pick up the phone, and, during the ensuing conversation, mention that Grandma is making an apple pie. The person on the phone is also excited by this, and tells us they’ll pick up some vanilla ice cream and head over later in the day.

Long story made short: our sibling shows up, ice cream in hand, raptured in joyous anticipation of the delicious apple pie they’re sure they’re about to be enjoying, only to find out, when grandma asks, “what’s with the ice cream?” that the only thing on the dessert menu is a candle and, now, vanilla ice cream.

Yummy.

Such a situation, of course, isn’t serious

No one is hurt by this silly series of miscommunications and assumptions which read like a poorly written sitcom episode — but what if it were something a bit more serious? What if it were a murder investigation? Suspected marital impropriety? Or something with much more serious consequences than a misunderstanding about dessert?

In these more serious scenarios, it ought to be obvious why it’s important to be sure about what you believe, why it’s important to carefully examine all the notions you’re forming about the information you have access to, and to ask yourself which ones are deserving of your assent.

Let’s consider our regional political landscape (and don’t worry, there’s no need to choose sides here, the example can be made without any polarization).

Perhaps we’ve been told something by a politician we find favorable, something we believe because we trust this politician. What if they’re lying, though? What if they lie a lot? What if our entire understanding of reality (as it pertains to the socio-political reality we’ve internalized and assented to as being “true”) is wildly out of sync with the facts?

What would that mean?

It would mean we’d have lost the ability to make morally just choices in concerns to some things.

How could we, for example, make a morally just choice about “Issue A” or “Person B” or “Policy C” if, fundamentally, our understanding about what was true of these things (or people, or policies) was incorrect?

When we outsource the forming of our opinions and beliefs to others (or when we’re careless about forming them ourselves), what hope do we have of moving closer to Virtue? What we believe to be true about the world around us is fundamental to whether we’re enabled to navigate that world justly and morally appropriately.

It is, of course, impossible to ensure that all our assented-to impressions are, in the end, determined to be morally just – but there’s important nuance to add here.

There are a couple ways of looking how to determine whether a choice was/is “morally just”. The first might be considered the non-consequential way, and the second the consequential way. The latter way would be to look at the consequences of the choice and to work backwards from there: if the consequence of the choice are unjust, then the choice was unjust.

The non-consequential way works in the other direction. If the choice can be considered to have been morally just at the time of its making, then the consequences are irrelevant in concerns to the choice’s justness as well as the moral uprightness of the chooser.

Stoicism falls into the latter category – non-consequential ethical theory.

We cannot tell the future, so if the future were to be what determined our moral justness, there’d be no way for anyone to ensure their moral justness in the present.

Stoicism asks us to look at the facts, to whatever extent can uncover and understand them, and then decide whether or not that landscape of understanding is understood well enough to say, “I’ve considered this enough, looked into this enough, to feel that assenting to Impression XYZ is morally just and, regardless of the outcome, I can feel confident in the choice I made because I know it was made carefully and considerately.”

As I said in the previous edition, it’s not about being right, it’s about the choice being morally justifiable and reasonable at the point of its choosing.

So, Vladimir, the importance of impressions is that they are the raw material of our internalized beliefs.

Without impressions we could never work to form beliefs about the world. Impressions are to morality what clay is to pottery. They don’t shape our views, we shape them into views by examining them carefully and deciding which of them ought to be included in the “vase of virtue” (😂) we’re trying to construct.

The better clay we choose, and the more carefully we mould it, the better quality vase we end up with.

Hope that helps, Vladimir.

Thanks for reading.