Seneca: Moral Essays. John W. Basore translation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958.

 

The Senecan essays on providence, firmness, anger, and mercy might educate some prince who aspired to a philosophic life. Perhaps the young Nero raised such hopes in old Seneca? It would not be the first time or the last time a tyrannical soul inspired unwarranted philosophic dreams.

Anger is the passion of the political man, unless it is libido dominandi. How often does the rage for justice stand revealed as the rage to rule? In the Republic Socrates seeks to cure this passion. In his judgment, prudence is the crowning virtue of the political man, the one that needs to be made to guide spiritedness, to divert ardent young men from tyranny. Seneca’s essays are more accessible to those who actually may become political men.

If anger animates the desire to repay suffering, as Aristotle teaches (II. i. 115), then the justification of the ways of God to man becomes a prime theological end. God metes out suffering in mysterious ways. Why me? the sufferer asks. Why not that wastrel over there? Why do good men suffer while the bad prosper? To ask these questions insistently betrays a mindset of dependency; rebellion against God only reinforces resentment of and groveling before God—the sort of thing Rousseau satirizes in his pages on “the great conspiracy” against him, at the end of the Confessions.

Anti-theological ire poisons the soul, the potentially philosophic soul above all. Seneca advises a courageous acceptance of the will of God that will weaken superstitious worries about the gods. God makes you suffer because he wants you stronger, not softer. The worst sufferings may injure the individual but benefit onlookers who take heart at courage. Suffering aids philosophy: “To be always happy and to pass through life without a mental pang is to be ignorant of one half of nature,” the philosopher’s object of study (I. i. 25). Suffering brings you back to nature by illustrating the emptiness of things most people regard as desirable or fearful (I. i. 33). the good, man, by contrast, “despises externals” (I. i. 43). Finally, (and here Seneca appeals to the most spirited souls) suffering well is glorious. “In this you outstrip God; he is exempt from enduring evil, while you are superior to it” (I. i. 45). (Hence the theological need for Christ.) Resentment of God or nature (insofar as these can be genuinely distinguished in the thinking of any philosopher) can lead to no good. Indeed, it led to Machiavelli.

“On Firmness” centers not on the sufferings inflicted by God but on those inflicted by men, particularly the mental sufferings caused by insult. Once again, Seneca seeks to liberate the mind of his reader from dependence upon externals. “The wise man can receive neither injury nor insult” (II. i. 49), as “no baneful force can extend its power all the way to him” (II. i. 57). In retaliating against his would-be injurer, he moves not in anger but in benevolence, correcting the vice(s) that impelled his enemy to attack. The wise man “can lose nothing,” having “everything invested in himself” and “trust[ing] nothing to fortune” (II. i. 61). Fortune rules gross externals. Made of finer matter, autarchia or self-sufficiency, self-rule, eludes Fortune’s ham hands.

To so redefine what is ‘one’s own’ is to politicize philosophy even as Stoicism seems to depoliticize it. Stoicism depoliticizes philosophy ‘externally’—not for it the careful Aristotelian classification and weighing of regimes—but politicizes it ‘internally.’ When considering Aristotelian ethics, Seneca combines the great-souled man with the philosopher. For Aristotle’s philosopher, the love of one’s own is unphilosophic, as the philosopher directs his gaze at nature, ‘inner’ and ‘outer.’ For Seneca’s philosopher, and for his wise man, love of one’s own means love of one’s own soul, whose finest element is identical to the finest element of the cosmos, the natural law. Accordingly, the Senecan conquest of Fortune (II. I. 93) is exactly the opposite of Machiavelli’s conquest of Fortune. Aristotle—ever the moderate—lands in-between, albeit closer to Seneca.

Human nature is social, not punitive; reason cannot listen to others when anger towards others—gods or men—blinds it. Do not écrasez l’infame; learn from it, then correct it. Seneca can propose this dispassionate view in part because he does not regard reason or passions as essences. “[P]assion and reason are only the transformation of the soul toward the better or the worse” (III. i. 127). Unlike Plato’s Socrates, unlike Aristotle, who enlist the thumotic ‘part’ of the soul in alliance with reason against the appetitive ‘part,’ Seneca can make reason entirely self-sufficient. This is how he can conflate the philosopher and the great-souled man. His great-souled man is less thumotic than Aristotle’s, and so reconcilable to philosophy. (At the same time, as noted above, his philosopher and his wise man are more assiduous than Aristotle in loving ‘their own’ to the exclusion of political life, and thus more animated by what Plato and Aristotle call thumotic desire.)

Following Socrates, Seneca ascribes evil to error. Why get angry at a mistaken man? (This is not to be confused with sentimental compassion: “Sometimes the truest form of pity is to kill” (III. i. 147), a remark Rousseau endorses when he writes, “such pity is a great cruelty toward men.”) To give scope to anger is dangerous because anger will rule or ruin, being “enraged against truth itself if this is shown to be contrary to its desire” (III. i. 157). Indeed, as imperial Rome and modern America so amply confirm, “What vice, pray, has ever lacked its defender” (III. I. 195)? Worse still anger is the only vice that can seize the public as a whole” (III. i. 157). Seneca may have somewhat underestimated greed. (Living in a regime with a substantial aristocracy, the mistake is understandable, but here attention to Aristotle’s fully-developed regime theory would have prevented the error.)

Seneca recommends six techniques in avoiding error. Arraign and convict it in your own heart—presumably with such arguments as Seneca provides. Consider that the highest heaven is unperturbed by storms. Attempt neither too little nor too much, thus avoiding restlessness and frustration. Live with a calm and good-natured person, rather than, say, Xanthippe. Soothe yourself with music and poetry (Seneca was of course innocent of the likes of Beethoven). Know your own weaknesses, so as to avoid being injured and thereby angered; this is another way in which wisdom or self-knowledge encourages the tranquillitas ordinis of the soul. If angry already, do nothing; “fight against yourself,” not the other (III. ii. 287); and think of mitigating circumstances.

This sequence of essays culminates in an essay on mercy, dedicated to Nero. Seneca commends mercy to Nero as one of the virtues of the great-souled man. Appropriately enough, the essay is incomplete. Its conclusion may have remained unwritten, or severed.

Seneca contends that cut-off lives (unlike cut-off essays) can be said to have been full, if well-lived. Virtue “is her own reward,” meaning, there is nothing higher than “a mind made perfect” (“On the Happy Life,” i. 123). Euthymia or good-spiritedness makes the present perfect; the rest is only multiplication of that perfection (“On the Tranquilllity of the Soul,” ii). “[L]ife, if you know how to use it, is long” (“On the Shortness of Life,” ii. 289). “He who bestows all of his time on his own needs, who plans out every day as if it were his last, neither longs for nor fears the morrow” (Ibid. 308). A short life, which may linger chronologically, consists in having the fears of mortals and the desires of immortals (Ibid. 295). “Who of these would not rather have the state disordered than his hair” (Ibid. 323)?

And so the philosopher “argue[s] with Socrates, doubt[s] with Carneades, find[s] peace with Epicurus, overcome[s] human nature with the Stoics, exceed[s] it with the Cynics” (Ibid. 335). The philosophers of the past are added to his life, and his to theirs—”the only way of prolonging mortality, nay, of turning it into immortality” (Ibid. 339).

 

Seneca: Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales. Richard M. Gummere translation. 3 volumes. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961.

 

If happiness is liberation from care (XLIV. v.1, 191), and the study of wisdom “gives the soul liberty” (LXXVIII. 2. 349)—liberty is enslavement to philosophy—then philosophy aims at joyful wisdom for the happy few. To be truly well-born is to take the philosophers for your ancestors (XLIV. 1. 289). They are the natural aristocrats.

The liberal arts do not “bestow virtues” upon the student, as any glance around a liberal arts college will demonstrate. But they can “prepare the soul for the reception of virtue” (LXXXVIII. 2. 361). To philosophize, one mustn’t only talk but engage facts and perform acts. Philosophy is a praxis, a way of life (CXI. 2. 279); coherent praxis requires not so much adherence to a theory as cultivation of character. Plato and Aristotle “derived more benefit from the character than from the words of Socrates” (VI. 1. 23). “All study of philosophy and all reading should be applied to the study of philosophy and all reading should be applied to the study of living the happy life” (CVIII. 2. 253). Study is part of that life; thinking and acting are reciprocal events. “Philosophy is the study of virtue, by means, however, of virtue itself, but neither can virtue exist without the study of itself” (LXXXIX. 2. 383).

Syllogisms are verbal proofs, but in practice death is the most rigorous proof. Anyone can speak bravely; Socrates showed philosophers how to die bravely. He proved his philosophic ‘being’ by his philosophic ‘doing.’ A good mind must be developed into a good will (XVI. 1. 103). “A matter not of words, but of facts,” philosophy molds the human soul, ordering the philosopher’s whole life, guiding his conduct, harmonizing inner and outer (XVI. 1. 105). Harmony yields stability: “the primary indication, to my thinking, of a well-ordered mind is a man’s ability to remain in one place and linger in his own company” (II. 1. 7). “Everywhere means nowhere” (II. 1. 7). The perpetual traveler has many acquaintances but no friends, reads many books instead of a few good ones. (Whispered to Aristotle: ‘Sit down, you Peripatetic.’) Standing where you are requires courage; manliness is not boyishness (IV. 1. 15). It requires one identity, not a man of a thousand faces, each of which reflecting some velleity (CXX. 2. 395).

To harmonize inner and outer, shed external superfluities. Externals are not so much goods as advantages; “the essence of goodness is not in them” (LXXIV. 2. 123). Do not chase after them. “Too rich a soil makes the grain fall flat” (XXXIX. 1. 261). The philosopher can offer good counsel, prudent counsel, because he knows nature and therefore can distinguish the needed from the superfluous (XLVIII. 1. 319). Pace Adam Smith, but natural desires are limited. The unlimited desires you mistake for natural ones spring from false opinion (XVI. 1. 109). “The wise man suits his needs to nature” (XVII. 1. 115).

The Stoic life is a joyous quest, but its joys are (famously) austere. Virtue is “the quality of not needing a single day beyond the present” (CXII. 2. 463), as liberation from burdensome desires means liberation from elaborate long-range plans against imagined future failure and for imagined future goods. The truly long life is the full life, the life full of wisdom (CXIII. 3. 7). “One who daily puts the finishing touches on his life is never in want of time” (CI. 2. 163), and seldom in want of money. Wise foresight does not plan; it prepares. “The soul should toughen itself beforehand for occasions of greater stress, and it is while Fortune is kind that it should fortify itself against her violence” (XVIII. 1. 119). Verum gaudium res severa est (XXIII. 1. 161). Seneca prudently appeals to Lucilius’ Romanness while preparing him for philosophy; a mere boy needs maxims but when he becomes a man “it is time to lean on himself” (XXXIII. 1. 237). Begin to write your own maxims.

Stoic joy usually precludes suicide. Seneca praises those “who approach death without any loathing for life, letting death in, so to speak, and not pulling it toward them” (XXX. 1. 221). Suicide makes sense only when pain takes up all of your life, deposing the legitimate rule of wisdom (XCVIII. 3. 129). “He who dies just because he is in pain is a weakling, a coward; but he who lives merely to brave out his pain, is a fool” (LVIII. 2. 59). The wise man will live as long as he ought, not as long as he can” (LXX. 2. 59). He will live and die well, for which activities there is no general rule, only prudence (LXX. 2. 63). The maxims you write are seldom if ever universally generalizable. There is always a counter-maxim; prudence is the umpire.

Prudence and reason generally should ally with the spiritedly irrational part of the soul instead of the appetitively irrational part (XCII. 2. 451). In this Seneca concurs with Plato’s Socrates. Seneca goes further, perhaps for ‘Roman’ rhetorical purposes, associating the good with the honorable, not the useful. He finds Aristotelians too lax in their taming of the emotions (CXVI. 3. 333); like Nietzsche’s democrats, they call moderation what is only mediocrity. To fuse goodness and honor is to take a sterner view; this is what it means to be a citizen-soldier of the universe. Seneca’s apparently apolitical thought is really cosmopolitical (not ‘cosmopolitan’ in the modern, watery, United-Nations sense). The Stoics tend toward natural law rather than natural right, although in Seneca, at least, prudence still rules over explicit regulations.

Contra Machiavelli, “no wall can be erected against Fortune which she cannot take by storm; let us strengthen our inner defenses” (LXXIV. 2. 127). Machiavelli equates nature with Fortuna. Seneca does not. Knowing nature, including our own nature, means knowing what is truly good and bad for us; the conquest of Fortuna is futile and unnecessary. Reason tames desires and calms fears—passions which react to Fortuna’s gifts and blows, not nature’s. Seneca is no less materialistic than Machiavelli. Unlike Machiavelli, however, he despises the body (see LXV) because the finest matter, the matter composing the soul, rules finally but not immediately. This is what Seneca means by ‘Providence.’ Unlike Machiavelli, Seneca formulates a materialism that can account for the life of the mind, the philosophic life.

Materialism also makes it possible for the Stoic to equal ‘God,’ who is also material. The Stoic can have the “true and never-swerving judgment” of ‘God’ (LXXII. 2. 23, 27). Stoic reason resembles Platonic technē. Stoic reason differs from Machiavellian artfulness even as its ‘God’ differs from the Biblical God: Neither Stoic reason nor the Stoic ‘God’ is creative. Nor is he providential. Equality with ‘God’ does not mean control over events (as in Machiavelli) but unperturbed self-sufficiency (XLVIII. 1. 321). Of religious souls Seneca asks: “How long shall we go on making demands upon the gods, as if we were still unable to support ourselves” (LX. 1. 123)? This is the Greek philosophers’ autarchia, translated to Rome. He who requires external good will want to control Fortuna (or nature misdefined as Fortuna) and thus either pray or prey, petition the Creator-God like a Christian or imitate Him like a Machiavellian.

The self-sufficient Stoic can say, after losing children, wife, and country, I have lost nothing (IX. 1. 53). (In contrast, Machiavelli’s Lady of Forli shouts, “I can have more children!”) Stoic self-sufficiency does not require isolation (as does Machiavelli of his prince), although it can tolerate isolation. The philosopher can do without friends, without desiring to do without them (IX. 1. 45). Human nature is social. Friendship rests on the beauty of the soul of the friend, not his utility. Friends are useful to each other only in the noble sense of “giv[ing] practice to the other’s virtues and thus maintain[ing] wisdom at the proper level” (CIX. 2. 255). Philosophic friends may engage in dialogue, oral or written. These letters are written dialogues in two ways. They are addressed to a friend, responding to his letters. They also contain seeming contradictions. In an oral dialogue (or an artful, Platonic dialogue or play) the contradictions are supplied by the dialogic partners. In a monologic work (here we never see even one letter by Lucilius) the author himself must supply the contradictions, rich complexities for the reader to work through, testing his ability to philosophize.

Human sociality does not extend to politics, where contradiction leads to violence and repression, even oppression. Political friends are undesirable. Regimes change; your friends disappear, replace by their enemies—now yours (XIV. 1. 89). More profoundly, wisdom cannot rule, simply. If Wisdom could rub out all our faults “she would be mistress of the universe” (XI. 1. 63). She can’t; she isn’t. Fortuna—randomness, stupidity—has her day. Indeed, many days. A philosopher will settle or second-best; the rule of those who preserve the public peace, the tranquillitas ordinis that will remain Augustine’s best hope for the City of Man. Philosophers particularly esteem such rulers. The more valuable the cargo, the more gratitude the sailor feels towards Neptune, who allows safe passage; the philosophic cargo is the richest treasure (LXXIII).

In peace or in civil strife, the philosopher aims for inconspicuousness. “The mere name of philosophy, however quietly pursued, is an object of sufficient scorn; and what would happen if we should begin to separate ourselves from the custom of our fellow men” (V. 1. 21)? They would attempt to rule the philosopher. Imperara sibi maximum imperium est (CXII. 2. 294). If your own soul is a king, not a tyrant, it needs no other kings, except for the very modest sake of preserving from tyranny the body the soul inhabits.

Diogenes Laertius: Lives of Eminent Philosophers. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959. Two volumes.

 

The two most famous philosophic schools formed after Socrates’ death were Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum. Much of what we know about the several other schools and their teaching comes down to us from Diogenes Laertius, who lived in the third century A.D. For Plato’s teachings we have Plato’s writings, preserved intact; for Aristotle’s teachings we have Aristotle’s writings preserved mostly intact. For other ‘post-Socratics’ we have fragments. If we had the same for Plato or Aristotle, would we consider them great philosophers? Diogenes Laertius’ accounts of their thought are much less interesting than their writings. A philosophic life had better be its own reward, inasmuch as literary immortality depends so much upon the vagaries of fortune.

Anisthenes came to Socrates after studying with the rhetorician Gorgias. Rhetoricians teach verbal combat; young philosophers tear at people like puppies. Anisthenes’ doctrine, Cynicism, combines the rhetorician’s combativeness with the open disrespect seen in those new to philosophy. (The Cynics were the philosophers Ambrose Bierce admired.) And so: “Virtue is a weapon that cannot be taken away (VI. i. 13, emphasis added), a weapon that can be acquired or taught (VI. i. 11). The many, the people, preening themselves on their autochthony, not seeing that they share this supposed virtue with snails and locusts (VI. i. 3), very often serve as that weapon’s target: vote that asses are horses as sensibly as you vote untrained men to generalships (VI. i. 9).

Not as politic as Socrates, nor as calculatedly impolitic, Anisthenes nonetheless remains recognizably Socratic, judging from several of his teachings. Do not take notes; remember. The most necessary learning is how to unlearn. “The wise man is self-sufficing, for the goods of all others are his” (VI. i. 13). His sharper-edged, more combative Socratism forms the groundwork of “the most manly section of the Stoic school” (VI. i. 15).

Plato called Anisthenes’ student, Diogenes, “a Socrates gone mad” (VI. ii. 47). Madness isn’t a bad mask for a philosopher. Unlike Socrates, Diogenes “was loved by the Athenians” (VI. vii. 45), perhaps for such wisecracks as the one he delivered upon seeing temple officials leading away a thief who’d stolen a bowl belonging to the treasurers: “The great thieves are leading away the little thief” (VI. ii. 47). The people would have admired such lesé majesté as evidenced in his command to Alexander: “Stand out of my light” (VI. vii. 45). Irreverence toward the gods may be tolerated by the people if it is accompanied by irreverence toward great men, and unaccompanied by irreverence toward the people. Diogenes let his runaway slave go (VI. ii. 57). Diogenes’ madness is the rule of natural right unmitigated by convention (VI. ii. 73). His idea of nature, unlike that of Socrates, may be materialistic or ‘democratic’; “all elements are contained in all things and pervade everything” (VI. ii. 75). If so, no meat is taboo, including human flesh.

Zeno and the other Stoics more nearly resemble ‘philosophers’ as we know them, i.e., philosophy professors. Logic applied to human life aims at “life in agreement with nature”; “life according to reason rightly becomes the natural life,” inasmuch as life according to reason corresponds to the most distinctively human capacity (VII. i. 195). More, right reason rather than the natural elements “pervades all things” (VII. i. 197; see also VII. i. 241). This conformity with nature makes virtue its own reward, so to speak. Right reason may be called ‘Zeus’; such a philosophy begins to earn not hostility, not amused toleration or affection, but respect from the Athenian people, whose religious convictions are left undisturbed, seemingly confirmed, by its pious language.

The root of ‘duty’ means ‘reaching down,’ ‘reaching as far as.’ Duty is the result of right (that is, dialectically tested) reason. The Stoic preference for self-preservation over pleasure rests on this rationalist understanding of the soul.

Stoics emphasize the rationalist aspect of Socrates, tending toward an ethics of logical rule-giving and a strong, non-ironic depreciation of the passions. They are more ‘Euthyphronic’ or universalistic than Socrates, claiming that “the wise man is passionless” (VII. i. 221). Joy, caution, and wishing remain as the only good non-rational conditions of the soul (VII. i. 221). Stoics “will take wine, but not get drunk” (VII. i. 223). They strive for godlikeness and, like much more earnest and rational versions of Euthyphro, they endorse ‘piety.’ Their definition of piety is Socratic/rationalistic; the Stoics combine Socrates and Euthyphro. They avoid Euthyphro’s disrespect for parents (VII. i. 225, 241). Socrates might worry that their ability to sustain their balancing act so might not easily be sustained.

Pyrrho is a radical conventionalist, claiming that the senses are unreliable while denying that reason can correct them. It is he, more than Bishop Berkeley, who would fall to Dr. Johnson’s stone-kicking refutation. The fact that Pyrrho lived to be ninety, supposedly getting by with the help of his friends, undermines his plausibility. No self-immolating Foucault he, as mightily as he claimed to strive against facts. “On being discovered once talking to himself, he answered, when asked the reason, that he was training to be good” (IX. xi. 477). A real philosopher, were he being honest, would say: ‘I can find no better conversation in this city.’

Skeptics generally “laid down nothing definitely, not even the laying down of nothing” (IX. xi. 487)—radicalizing Socratic knowing of knowing nothing. Their refutation of the possibility of knowing (IX. xi. 503) is self-refuting. Their refutation of natural goodness and badness (IX. xi. 513) fails because it assumes that ‘by nature’ must mean ‘uniform’—an un-Socratic error indeed. Such errors were noted by the so-called Dogmatists, impelling the Skeptics to moderate their claims (IX. xi, 513, 515). This brings them closer to common sense, farther from coherence. The feasibility of having any life at all, philosophic or not, triumphed over the beguiling extremism of the doctrines.

Epicurus combined a materialist physics with a philosophic life aiming not at politics but at tranquility savored in private. Hatred, envy, and contempt—thumotic passions—may be overcome by reason. The radical depreciation of thumos comports with the radical depreciation of politics. The Epicureans prefer country to city, garden to assembly or marketplace. The tenth “sovereign maxim” questions the value of fame, that ruling passion of the noblest, most political minds (X. 665). Natural justice is mere expediency and avoidance of harm (Sovereign Maxim #31, X. 675). Epicurean political philosophy is minimally political; although quite different from Hobbesian materialism in most ways, Hobbes’s inclination to restrict political rule to ‘the one,’ and to leave the bulk of mankind to commercial life in civil society with no share in in political rule exercised by the modern state, does have a certain quasi-Epicurean cast to it. Modern liberalism has a certain tendency to veer toward ‘epicurean’ habits and a concomitant hostility to politics.

Despite their hedonic reputation, Epicureans also reject Socratic eroticism. No love, no marriage, no family for the wise man. “He will have regard for his property and to the future” (X. 645). And he will have friends, partners “in the enjoyment of life’s pleasures” (X. 647). True pleasures come from the health of the soul, which is the most refined form of matter. What Epicureans call true pleasures are rather tepid, from the Socratic viewpoint: “the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul” (X. 657). Phronēsis comes to dominate philo-sophia. 

Epicureans are Socratic with respect to death, neither seeking nor fearing it. But, given their depreciation of both thumos  and eros, they must rely upon doctrine to overcome the fear of death. They make much, therefore, of their atomistic materialism and their consequent denial that there is any afterlife to fear. Given their not-strongly philo-sophic psychology they cannot as it were build it into a philosophy of life. Their philosophic doctrine in turn feeds back into the psychology of the one who holds the doctrine (Sovereign Maxim #20, X. 669). Epicurean atomism needs moral doctrines, needs maxims, in order to stabilize a life lived with its potentially nihilistic cosmological doctrine. The Epicurean soul does not so much govern itself as it is governed by maxims, rightly called “sovereign.” This soul seeks something outside of itself to rule it.

Considered as a group, these ‘post-Socratics’ do not quite have the autarchy, the self-ruling, self-sufficient, self-ordering philosophic eros of Socrates. And so they do not go out among the people so much, or, when they do (as with Diogenes) they play the buffoon and the wiseacre, not the questioner. They are less political than Socrates because their philosophic eros is weaker. Or so it seems in the account of Diogenes Laertius.