Can we really control our beliefs and desires?

Epictetus is not describing a psychological fact you can test like a reflex. He is drawing a line between two kinds of things: those that belong to your faculty of choice and those that do not. Opinion, pursuit, desire, and aversion sit on one side because they are, in the end, your own actions, exercises of judgment rather than events that happen to you (Handbook 1). Body, property, reputation, and command sit on the other side because something external can always interfere with them.

The common misreading takes this as a claim about willpower: that with enough effort you can simply flip a switch and stop wanting what you want, or believe whatever you decide to believe. Read that way, the doctrine sounds false on its face. Nobody can just choose to stop desiring a person they love or to disbelieve something obvious in front of them. Epictetus's own text pushes back on the easy version. In Handbook 2 he does not say desire is already mastered. He says that for now, totally suppress desire, because as long as you desire things not in your control you will be disappointed, and even desiring what is laudable and in your control is premature if you do not yet possess it. That is not a description of an achieved state. It is a training instruction for someone who is not yet free.

The Discourses make the same point more directly. Epictetus lists three areas of practice: desires and aversions, appropriate action, and freedom from deception in assent (Discourses III 2). He calls the first the most urgent, because a passion arises only when we fail to get what we desire or fall into what we try to avoid. He also says plainly that guarding your assent even in sleep or drunkenness is above our power right now. So the claim is not that beliefs and desires are already fully in hand. It is that they are the kind of thing that can, in principle, be trained, unlike the body or your reputation, which no amount of training makes fully secure.

It is your reaction to how things appear, your assent or withholding of assent to an impression (Handbook 6, Meditations 11.37). You do not control whether a frightening or tempting appearance shows up in your mind. You do have a say, with practice, in whether you endorse it as true and act on it. That is the faculty of choice, and Epictetus treats it as the one thing that is, in the strict sense, your own.

This changes what you are actually working on. You are not trying to numb desire or fake indifference. You are trying to notice an impression before you have fully assented to it, and ask whether it concerns something in your control or not (Handbook 1). Marcus makes a related point when he strips himself down to flesh, breath, and the ruling part, and asks that ruling part not be pulled like a puppet by every impulse (Meditations 2.2). The ruling part is not omnipotent. It is trainable, the way a hand becomes steady through practice rather than through a single decision to stop shaking.

Epictetus places belief and desire in the category of things that are ours to work on because they are acts of judgment, not because we already govern them perfectly. The discipline he describes in the Handbook is exactly what you would expect if the task were hard and gradual: suppress desire for now, use aversion only toward what genuinely opposes your own good use of your faculties, and examine every harsh or tempting appearance before you grant it your assent. The concrete exercise is small and repeatable: the next time you notice desire or aversion rising, pause before you act on it and ask whether the object concerns something up to you at all.