Somebody does something in front of you and a verdict appears. Not a thought about them — a verdict, already formed, about what kind of person does that. Epictetus takes that apart in two short sections, and the second one is almost comically small.
“When any person does ill by you, or speaks ill of you, remember that he acts or speaks from an impression that it is right for him to do so.”
“Does anyone bathe hastily? Do not say that he does it ill, but hastily.”
trans. Elizabeth Carter
The whole argument is in the difference between two words. Hastily is what you saw. Ill is what you added. They arrive together and feel like one thing, and they are not — one is an observation and the other is a judgement that requires knowing why the person was in a hurry, which you do not.
Keeping the verdict has a cost that looks like efficiency. You now know what sort of person that was, so you can stop attending to them. The knowing is free and it is almost always wrong, and you will never find out it was wrong, because you have stopped looking.
Dropping it costs certainty. You are left holding hastily and nothing else, which is genuinely less satisfying. There is no story, no character, nothing to tell anyone later.
So what are we aiming at. We want to be able to see the fast thing without the word ill attached. Not to think well of people. To hold only what we actually saw, which is a smaller and more accurate amount than we are used to carrying.
One more voice, because there is a question about what the extra word even is. Sankara, an eighth-century commentator, describes a rope in dim light taken for a snake. The snake is vivid and you will jump back from it, and it was never there — and what removes it is not bravery, it is light. Ill is the snake. It is not an exaggeration of something real in the other person. It is laid over them by us, and it comes off the same way the snake does, by seeing what is actually on the ground.
Let us see where this shows up in an ordinary day. Three places.
- The driver who cuts across you.
- The person on the phone who is short with you.
- The reply to your message that comes back in four words.
In all three the thing to watch is the same — the gap between what you saw and what you concluded, and whether there was any gap at all. Usually the verdict arrives with the observation, fused.
You are not deciding anything about those people, and you do not have to give anyone the benefit of the doubt. Watch how much arrived that you did not actually see, and leave it as it is.