"It is, again, the capacity for choice that makes us accountable for our own actions and states. Epictetus is particularly fond of exploring the implications of this essentially Stoic conception. In studying his usage it is helpful to remember that his favored term prohairesis refers more often to the capacity for choice than it does to particular acts of choosing. The word is variously translated; the rendering “volition” is adopted here as in Long 2002. The volition, Epictetus argues, is “by nature unimpeded” (1.17.21), and it is for this reason that freedom is for him an inalienable characteristic of the human being. The very notion of a capacity to make one's own decisions implies as a matter of logical necessity that those decisions are free of external compulsion; otherwise they would not be decisions. But humans do have such a capacity and are thus profoundly different from even the higher animals, which deal with impressions merely in an unreflective way (2.8). It is the volition that is the real person, the true self of the individual. Our convictions, attitudes, intentions and actions are truly ours in a way that nothing else is; they are determined solely by our use of impressions and thus internal to the sphere of volition. The appearance and comfort of one's body, one's possessions, one's relationships with other people, the success or failure of one's projects, and one's power and reputation in the world are all merely contingent facts about a person, features of our experience rather than characteristics of the self. These things are all “externals”; that is, things external to the sphere of volition."
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