The reserve clause: acting with a reservation

What the reserve clause is

A Stoic plan has two parts. The first is the intention to act, and it is meant seriously: the wise man in Seneca’s passages below still sails, stands for office and invests. The second is a condition on the result, said aloud or kept in mind: if nothing hinders me. The clause doesn’t shrink the effort. It changes what the effort is staking.

The name is modern. The ancient Greek term is hypexairesis (also transliterated hupexairesis), a word for an exception or reservation. Epictetus uses it in Enchiridion 2, where George Long translates it “with exceptions.” Marcus Aurelius uses it in Meditations 4.1, 5.20 and 6.50, and again in 11.37, where he quotes Epictetus; Long’s English for it varies from place to place. Its opposite, “without any reservation” in Long’s gloss, comes in 8.41. Seneca wrote in Latin and put the condition straight into the sentence: nisi si quid inciderit, “unless anything happens.”

In these Greek passages the reservation is attached to an impulse (hormē), the mind’s movement toward an action. Behind it is the Stoic idea of fate as an ordered chain of causes that runs through everything (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (opens in a new tab)). The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (opens in a new tab) gives an example: a good person wishes to see a friend on the condition that it is fated, so if the meeting never happens, the wish was never thwarted.

What the Stoics wrote

Seneca: the voyage, the election, the investment

The three plans are ordinary Roman ambitions: a sea voyage, election as praetor (one of Rome’s senior magistrates), a business venture. Seneca doesn’t tell the wise man to give any of them up, only to say them differently. The “we say” matters, because he is reporting a teaching of the school, not a private trick. So does his last distinction. Things happen to the wise man not “as he wished it would, but as he thought it would.” The wish is for success; the expectation already includes resistance.

Seneca: the saving clause

This passage answers a hostile question. The Stoics claimed the wise never regret a decision, so what happens if you promise someone a gift and then learn he is ungrateful? Seneca replies that the wise man never changes his plans while the conditions he made them under stay the same, and that he “begins everything with the saving clause.” Aubrey Stewart’s 1887 wording, “saving clause,” is already close to the modern name.

Epictetus: lightly, and with exceptions

Epictetus is advising a beginner. Desire for things outside our power is bound to be disappointed, and of the things in our power worth desiring, “nothing yet is before you,” so he says to suspend desire for now. What remains is the plain power of moving toward a thing or away from it, and he limits even that. Long’s “slightly and with exceptions and with remission” renders three Greek terms meaning lightly, with reservation, and loosely. The middle one is hypexairesis, which puts the reserve clause in the Handbook’s second chapter, straight after the first chapter sorts things into ours and not ours.

Marcus Aurelius: “with a reservation”

Marcus is thinking about people who oppose a course he thinks right. First he tries persuasion. If justice requires it, he acts against their will. If someone blocks him by force, he lets it go calmly and turns the obstacle into practice for some other virtue. Then comes the reminder: he never wanted the impossible. What he wanted was “some such effort as this,” and the entry goes on to say that in this sense he attains his object.

How the Stoics phrased their plans

The condition was short, it was part of the plan from the start, and it named no particular disaster.

Seneca is the most concrete. Later in On Benefits he works through promises, which are plans that other people are counting on.

Cold weather doesn’t release him from the supper; snow does. Indigestion doesn’t excuse him from the betrothal feast; a fever does. His exception has three parts: “if I am able” is about circumstance, “provided it is right for me to do so” is about conduct, and “if these things be so and so” covers the facts the promise assumed. A few chapters earlier he gives more: a case he agreed to plead that turns out to set up an attack on his father, a road now beset with robbers, an appointment missed because his son fell ill (On Benefits 4.35).

The last sentence of the excerpt matters as much as the exceptions. If nothing has changed, failing to turn up is “mere fickleness.” The condition is set when the plan is made, and it covers real changes. It isn’t a back door you cut later to escape something you no longer feel like doing.

Epictetus works through an everyday plan in Enchiridion 4. In our paraphrase: on your way to the public baths, expect the splashing, shoving and stealing, and tell yourself you intend two things, to bathe and to keep your will in accord with nature. If the bath goes badly, the second intention can still be kept, as long as you aren’t vexed by what happens. The guide to difficult decisions reads that chapter in full.

English keeps the same shape in “weather permitting” and “God willing.” Said seriously, it sounds like this: I’ll be at your recital on Thursday, unless something stops me. Or: We’re aiming to open in May, if nothing goes wrong. Neither sentence lowers the commitment. Each one tells you, and the person listening, which part is a promise about your effort and which part waits on the world.

How it softens failure

Here the clause decides whether an obstacle is a harm at all. If Marcus went at something “absolutely,” staking himself on the result, being stopped is a real evil to him. If he went at it with “the usual course of things” in view, he has “not yet been injured nor even impeded.” The entry goes on to say that what belongs to the understanding no one else can block.

Seneca’s claim at the end of On Tranquility of Mind 13 is more modest and easier to check against your own life. Because the wise man’s first thought was that his plan might meet resistance, “the pain of disappointed wishes” lands less hard. Less hard, not painless. Say you spent three months on a grant application and the grant went to someone else. Made with the condition in view, the plan still cost you those months, and you still don’t have the money or the project. The refusal didn’t come as a surprise that overturned you, though, and it says nothing about whether you did your part.

This is also what separates the clause from its neighbors. Premeditatio malorum rehearses particular misfortunes ahead of time, while the reserve clause names none and simply leaves room. Amor fati, Nietzsche’s phrase for welcoming whatever happens, applies once the result is in. The dichotomy of control, the modern name for the sort in Enchiridion 1, is what all three rest on. For setbacks, rejection and regret, see how the Stoics handled failure.