Seneca: Epistles. Number 88: “”On Liberal and Vocational Studies.” Richard Mott Gummere translation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1920.
Addressed to “his friend Lucilius,” a Roman procurator, Seneca’s letters range over an array of topics likely to concern a gentleman-politician. Gentleman-politicians distinguish themselves from ‘the vulgar.’ But on what terms? By what criteria? Most immediately, because they are “free-born,” neither slaves nor dependent upon civil-social superiors, and therefore potentially capable of self-government and of governing the city. But capable in what way? And how can the desired capability be cultivated? Roman gentleman often hope to make their sons distinguished from ‘the vulgar’ by providing them with an education in the liberal arts.
“You have been wishing to know my views with regard to liberal studies,” Seneca begins, alluding to the famous opening sentence of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, “All men by nature desire to know.” Gentlemen, however, direct this natural human inclination in a gentlemanly direction. “I respect no study,” Seneca continues, “and deem no study good, which results in money-making.” Respect or honor; deeming or judging; goodness: these are the preoccupations of one who wants to rule, one who wants to rule prudently, one who wants to rule virtuously, not with mere virtuosity. And surely not for a task so base as money-making. Seneca distinguishes the work of a gentleman from the work of buying and selling, some “profit-bringing” work “useful only in so far as” it prepares the mind for better things, which is “our real work” as gentlemen and perhaps as human beings simply. That is, while practical, the gentleman is no ‘utilitarian.’ Liberal studies “are studies worthy of a free-born gentleman,” and there is really only one such study, the one “which gives a man his liberty.” That is “the study of wisdom,” which is “lofty, brave, and great-souled.” The love of wisdom, which will lead a soul to the study of wisdom, is philosophy. But loftiness or high-mindedness, courage, and magnanimity are moral virtues par excellence. Seneca seems to conjoin philosophy not only with a life animated by morality but with the most conspicuous virtues, the virtues a gentleman-politician might most want to possess. He associates liberty primarily with philosophy, secondarily with what a gentleman would ordinarily think, that liberty is citizenship, sharing in the rule of the city.
Do liberal studies really “make men good,” though? The liberal arts, the objects of liberal studies, consist of the trivium—grammar, rhetoric, logic—and the quadrivium—arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music. What have they to do with moral virtue? When it comes to “investigations into language,” including works of history and poetry, Seneca doubts that they have much to do with it at all. “Pronouncing syllables, investigating words, memorizing plays, or making rules for the scansion of poetry, what is there in all this that rids one of fear, roots out desire, or bridles the passions?” Unlikely: linguistics, history, and poetry “would resemble each other if they taught the same thing,” whether it were morality or anything else. They don’t. That is, in terms of the trivium, logic tells us that grammar and rhetoric (specimens of which highlighted the works of the classical historians) do not teach virtue.
What about rhetoric, the most persuasive manifestation of which might be said to be poetry? Teachers of this liberal art often make the claim that Homer teaches virtue, that Homer “was a philosopher,” and therefore a teacher of virtue as Seneca has defined “philosopher.” Did Homer deploy poetry in defense of philosophy? If so, what school of philosophy did Homer represent? Some call him a Stoic, some an Epicurean, some a Peripatetic/Aristotelian, some an Academic/Platonist. “Yet “no one of these doctrines is to be fathered upon Homer,” just “because they are all there,” all seen in one or another of the characters he presents in his poems, and these characters “are irreconcilable with one another.” Homer’s characters thus defy the principle of non-contradiction, the principle of logic, the third liberal art of the Trivium. And even if Homer was indeed a philosopher, a philosopher who anticipated and comprehended all subsequent philosophic schools, “surely he became a wise man before he had any knowledge of poetry.” His wisdom must have preceded his art. The study of poetry didn’t make him wise.
What did? One cannot learn that by what ‘moderns’ would call the facts one might turn up by reading his poems—asking where Ulysses voyaged “instead of trying to prevent ourselves from going astray at all times.” There are storms of the soul “which toss us daily,” troubling us as much as all the misadventures of the Homeric hero. “For us there is never lacking the beauty to tempt our eyes, or the enemy to assail us; on this side are savage monsters that delight in human blood, on that side the treacherous allurements of the ear, and yonder is shipwreck and all the varied category of misfortune”; “show me rather, by the example of Ulysses, how I am to love my country, my wife, my father, and how, even after suffering shipwreck, I am to sail toward these ends, honorable as they are.” A philosopher will inquire not whether Penelope actually was “a pattern of purity,” or whether “she suspected that the man in her presence was Ulysses, before she knew it was he”; “teach me rather what purity is, and how great a good we have in it, and whether it is situated in the body or in the soul.” That is, a philosopher will ask questions about how things are, what they are, what good things are, and the nature of things—the ‘What is?’ questions of Plato’s Socrates. At best, poems might be the work of a poet who, already knowing the answers to these questions, or at least knowing the several opinions about them and thereby being capable of raising questions about the answers, portrays characters who illustrate virtues, vices, good fortune and bad, bringing them to us for our own investigation.
As for the quadrivium, the study of music teaches virtue no more than poetry does. It teaches me to produce harmonies of sound, but that doesn’t “bring my soul into harmony with itself” or prevent “my purposes [to] be out of tune.” Mathematics, in particular geometry, teaches me “how to lay out the dimensions of my estates” but not “how to lay out what is enough for a man to own.” In teaching me to count, arithmetic only “adapts my fingers to avarice” without teaching me “that there is no point in such calculations,” except to ruin my soul. And as for my estate, why should I allow myself to indulge the love of what is my own—or rather, what only seems to be my own? If someone connives to take your carefully measured land that your father and grandfather owned, “Who owned the land before your grandfather?” And who owned it originally? After all, you are only tenant on that land, keeping it for some future tenant. Moreover, “what you hold and call your own is public property—it belongs to mankind at large.” And as for your grander calculations, your computations of “the distance between the stars,” if you were “the real master of your profession, measure me the mind of man!” And in terms of ethics, knowing what a straight line is doesn’t tell you what a straight life is.
Astronomy? “What benefit will it be to know this?” As for astrology, the planets and stars “are driven along by an unending round of destiny, on a course from which they cannot swerve.” That being so, “if they are responsible for whatever happens, how will it help you to know the secrets of the immutable?” You can’t do anything about them. The right-minded man weighs probabilities, preparing for whatever events may befall, good or evil, exhibiting phronēsis, practical wisdom.
What of the non-liberal, if not illiberal arts? Painting and sculpture are not liberal arts but mere “helps toward luxury.” Athletic training is even less liberal; to learn how to wrestle (for example) is to gain knowledge “compounded of oil and mud”—the oil with which wrestlers slather their bodies, the mud in the pits where wrestlers fight. As to the arts of perfumery and of cooking, they serve bodily pleasures, not the mind, catering to the wrong ordering of the soul. What of the strict warlike skills? “Do we really believe that the training which they give is ‘liberal’ for the young men of Rome, who used to be taught by our ancestors to stand straight and hurl a spear, to wield a pike, to guide a horse, and to handle weapons?” Those ancestors who taught their children “nothing that could be learned while lying down” were no better educators than our teachers of the arts of satiation. Why learn to “guide a horse and control his speed” without knowing how to bridle our passions? And why learn to beat opponents in wrestling, if we “find that we ourselves are beaten by anger?”
Do liberal studies “contribute nothing to our welfare,” then? Yes, “but nothing at all as regards virtue.” They contribute to “the equipment of life.” Like all equipment, and like all the arts that equip us for thinking and acting, they cannot “bestow virtue,” but they can “prepare the soul for the reception of virtue.” “The liberal arts do not conduct the soul all the way to virtue,” but they do “set it going in that direction.”
How so? Seneca calls upon the authority of Posidonius, the massively learned Greek who promoted the advancement of Stoicism throughout the Roman Empire. Posidonius identified four arts: the “common and low”—arts worked with the hands, “concerned with the equipping of life” with “no pretense to beauty or honor”; “those which serve for amusement,” pleasing to eye and ear; those deployed to educate boys, especially the trivium and quadrivium, which Romans call liberal; and the genuinely liberal arts, “whose concern is virtue,” which is what truly liberates the human soul from its passions. Only those are truly liberal, truly liberating. Stoic philosophy has exactly that purpose.
Admittedly, philosophy also consists of the study of nature, and quadrivial geometry and arithmetic assist in that study. “But many things aid us and yet are not parts of ourselves”; were they parts of ourselves, we would not need to acquire them. “Mathematics is as indispensable to philosopher as the carpenter is to the mathematician” but carpentry isn’t mathematics and mathematics isn’t philosophy. The natural philosopher inquires into the causes of natural phenomena “while the mathematician follows up and computes their numbers and their measurements.” Similarly, the natural philosopher learns “the laws by which the heavenly bodies persist” and “what powers belong to them,” while the astronomer “merely notes their comings and goings.” No art is self-sufficient because all arts rest on “first principles” the art itself cannot and does not discover. If an art “could march unassisted to the truth, if it were able to understand the nature of the universe, I should say that it would offer much assistance to our minds; for the mind grows by contact with things heavenly and draws into itself something from on high.” But the only thing that perfects the soul is “the unalterable knowledge of good and evil.” Arts exist in order to alter things, not to discover the unalterable. No art “investigates good and evil.” The arts are amoral in and of themselves, although they may be propaedeutic to morality, and to philosophy generally. The possible exception, the third art of the Roman trivium, logic, is no exception in the sense that logic does not discover its first principle, the principle of non-contradiction; it rests upon that principle. Exercise in the art of logic can aid morality by helping (for example) to prevent incoherence of moral precepts. But it is itself no virtue; it does not make us good.
Consider the virtues, Seneca tells Lucilius, following the ‘What is?’ line of philosophic inquiry. Do liberal studies make us courageous? Courage “challenges and crushes the powers of terror and all that would drive our freedom under the yoke,” all that would deprive us of liberty, whether political or philosophic. In what way do liberal studies strengthen souls in this? Loyalty, a foundation of the friendship Seneca and Lucilius enjoy, “the holiest good in the human heart,” does not arise from such study, either. Nor does moderation, which “knows that the best measure of the appetites is not what you want to take”—which a mathematician might count and measure—but “what you ought to take,” which might be measurable in terms of bodily good, but not moral good. Liberal studies cannot teach us to be kind, to know “that it is not for man to make wasteful use of his fellow man.” Liberal studies are worthwhile preparations for the attainment of wisdom but wisdom “is not learned by means of these studies.”
Yet although “wisdom is not to be found in letters,” no man “ignorant of letters” will ever “be a wise man.” This is because “wisdom is a large and spacious thing,” indeed liberating, too large and spacious for any one person to become comprehensively wise. “One must learn about things divine and human, the past and the future, the ephemeral and the eternal”—time, the soul, the cosmos. “Whatever phase of things human and divine you have apprehended, you will be wearied by the vast number of things to be answered and things to be learned.” Better to “let all other things be driven out, and let the breast be emptied to receive virtue.” Winnow down your liberal studies to “as much of them as is essential.” Yes, all men by nature desire to know, but that desire too can be immoderate, as all desires can be. Pursue it immoderately to the peril of your soul. The “unseemly pursuit of the liberal arts makes men troublesome, wordy, tactless, self-satisfied bores, who fail to learn the essentials just because they have learned the non-essentials.” One scholarly pest wrote four thousand books; “I should feel pity for him if he had only read the same number of superfluous volumes,” writings that address “problems the answers to which, if found, were forthwith to be forgotten.” This being so, “I can show you many works which ought to be cut down with the axe.” To want to hear the praise, “What a learned man you are!” is vanity. If you want to be praised, seek the compliment, “What a good man you are!” A good man will refrain from “wallow[ing] in the geometrician’s dust.”
You are a gentleman, Lucilius. You have no time for such things. To chase after them, you would need to “take no thought of all the time which one loses by ill-health, public duties, private duties, daily duties, and sleep.” Life is too short to be wasted on “superfluous and unpractical matter.”
Where does this leave philosophy? In its place. Philosophers “have taken over into their own art all the superfluities of these arts,” and “the result is that they know more about careful speaking than about careful living.” That is, philosophy too is an art, but not often a liberal one, one that sets the soul free. Philosophers indulge in “over-nice exactness,” an enemy of truth. In so doing, they have gathered themselves into the distinct and opposing philosophic sects supposedly seen in Homeric poetry. Protagoras (the sophist Seneca classes with the philosophers) “declares that one can take either side on any question and debate it with equal success,” including the question of whether one can take either side on any question and debate it with equal success. And so it would seem, when examining philosophers who argue plausibly for atomism and reduce morality to mere rhetoric (Nausiphanes), for a cosmos that is real but whose various phenomenal manifestations are illusory (Parmenides), for the denial that anything at all exists (Zeno), and for the denial that we can know anything at all, with the possible exception of knowing that we do not know (the several schools of Skepticism). “You may sweep all these theories in with the superfluous troops of ‘liberal’ studies; the on class of men give me a knowledge that will be of no use to me, the other class do away with any hope of attaining knowledge.” Such philosophizing is nothing but a source of vexation. It is sophistry. It leads to intellectual confusion, not theoretical wisdom, and undermines morality, which requires practical wisdom not rhetorical posturing.
Genuine philosophy, Stoicism, centers the soul upon the virtues. In this, it calms the suspicions of the gentlemen who regard philosophy itself as suspect because so many philosophers evidently think in vain and undermine morality. At the same time, Stoic philosophy frees the philosopher, Seneca, not only from the threat of persecution by indignant gentlemen but for the pursuit of philosophy, including the investigation of nature—of the cosmos and of the place of human beings within it.
Recent Comments