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).
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