This letter of yours I have read rather recently. A friend, Chris Fisher, recommended it to me while I was wallowing in self-pity… I mean, Stoically handling an affliction of gout. I found the letter to be the most helpful thing I’ve read on the subject. This first part we’re reading today is the introduction, but the reminders and advice are timeless.
As I understand it, you too, dear Seneca, were afflicted with gout, so I’m sure you’re aware of the struggles that can provide. Before I had experience that level of pain, I hadn’t quite understood the gravity of the problem. It’s one of those problems that we don’t generally have much sympathy for, give hardly any public notice to, and those who suffer secret their pain away quietly.
Your advice, and now almost-daily cherry juice, has been a great help. I look forward to refreshing the rest of the letter.
The closing of this letter is very a good piece of rhetoric. I don’t mean to diminish it, I’m just noting it’s well composed, and the ferver is appropriate to the corrective nature it.
“Will you not borrow that [Spartan] boy’s courage, and say: “I am no slave!”? Unhappy fellow, you are a slave to men, you are a slave to your business, you are a slave to life. For life, if courage to die be lacking, is slavery.”
I do wonder if Epictetus was familiar at all with Seneca. I always assumed that Epictetus’ calling his students “Slave!” whenever he was making a severe correction was due to his own training under Musonius, and also his life in slave condition before philosophy. I wonder if he might have heard this story about the Spartan boy, too, though?
You are afraid of death; but how can you scorn it in the midst of a mushroom supper?
I’m personally not a fan of mushrooms, so that supper might be more conducive to me to dispise the perils of death… but in all seriousness, this harkens back to the ascetic training which we need to undergo (Link 1, Link 2, Link 3, Link 4). We might talk a good game while living in a palace, but the possibility for self-deception is too high there.
You wish to live; well, do you know how lo live?
That’s the rub, isn’t it? Mostly our worry over life and death is based in a fundamental fear. The fear of the unknown. The fear of missing out. The fear of what’s to come. The fear of nothing. The one thought that recently has been mildly helpful in this regard comes from Marcus, and viewing what came before life as death as also. Such a great span of time in this universe unravelled and unspun while we did not exist. The same void, the same nothing that existed then might exist after. That parallel is oddly comforting. Also from Marcus, if there are gods, and if there is life after death, it will be towards the good. And if there is not, that too is towards the good. This is becoming a better cause of a surcease of those worries for me.
You are afraid to die. But come now: is this life of yours anything but death?
Hmm. There’s an almost Buddhist feel to this question. Life as dukkha.
That is the answer which should be given to men to whom death would come as a relief. “You are afraid to die; what! are you alive now?”
Today’s letter begins a discussion on suicide, a perennial topic in your Letters, dear Seneca. I do rather like the description that ‘philosophy is training to die,’ and this fits well in that vein. A few things stuck out at me.
“Do not torment yourself, my dear Marcellinus, as if the question which you are weighing were a matter of importance. It is not an important matter to live; all your slaves live, and so do all animals; but it is important to die honourably, sensibly, bravely. Reflect how long you have been doing the same thing: food, sleep, lust, – this is one’s daily round. The desire to die may be felt, not only by the sensible man or the brave or unhappy man, but even by the man who is merely surfeited.”
Especially this: Reflect how long you have been doing the same thing: food, sleep, lust, – this is one’s daily round. It’s an interesting tact to take to help frame the question for Marcellinus.
No one is so ignorant as not to know that we must at some time die; nevertheless, when one draws near death, one turns to flight, trembles, and laments.
Well, many have this fret long before the time comes, but still, point well taken.
You were born to be subject to this law; this fate befell your father, your mother, your ancestors, all who came before you; and it will befall all who shall come after you. A sequence which cannot be broken or altered by any power binds all things together and draws all things in its course.
I finished your last letter today, and it had several morsels on which I could chew.
“None of those whom you behold clad in purple is happy… None of those who have been raised to a loftier height by riches and honours is really great. Why then does he seem great to you? It is because you are measuring the pedestal along with the man.”
Despite the fact that we intellectually know what’s valuable, what’s admirable, what’s honorable, and what’s virtuous we make incorrect judgments. We have decades of habit, in action, thought, and intention to overcome. It requires a constant reminder and training to undo what we’ve done thoughtlessly. Whether by accident or intentional volition, we train ourselves and our judgments. It’s far better to train intentionally that thoughtlessly.
“Today it is you who threaten me with these terrors; but I have always threatened myself with them, and have prepared myself as a man to meet man’s destiny.”
Our training in part inoculates us against the loss of apparent-goods. When we know that we can do without the varied and multiple indifferents in life, we’re better able to choose virtue. Choosing virtue when it’s easy is one thing, but when it’s hard, when it puts us at risk, when it goes against our lusting-desires… that’s another thing entirely.
‘We sometimes hear the inexperienced say: “I knew that this was in store for me.” But the wise man knows that all things are in store for him. Whatever happens, he says: “I knew it.” ‘
“If, however, you accept the view that there is anything good besides that which is honourable, all the virtues will suffer. For it will never be possible for any virtue to be won and held, if there is anything outside itself which virtue must take into consideration.”
As far as I know, this focus on what’s honorable is something particular to you letters, dear Seneca. It seems a god metric. It easily illuminates the correct path in a situation. What would an honorable person do? Seem to me to be an easier question to answer quickly than What would a Sage do?
“If anything except the honourable is good, we shall be hounded by greed for life, and by greed for the things which provide life with its furnishings, – an intolerable state, subject to no limits, unstable.”
The above passage seems like curse.
“[W]hithersoever I am led and summoned by honour, I will go.”
“For all other things, which arouse our desires, depress the soul and weaken it, and when we think that they are uplifting the soul, they are merely puffing it up and cheating it with much emptiness. Therefore, that alone is good which will make the soul better.”
While studying philosophy, it seems we have just many things to unlearn as we do to learn. When we are talking about ἐπιθυμία-desire, and the need to irradiate or suspend certain hankerings, that flies in the face of what we have spent a goodly portion of our lives until now doing.
We have hankered after titles, fame, money, power, influence, renown, body-pleasures, and more besides. The bit I’ve quoted at the top, the mere puffing up, a cheating emptiness: this is what ἐπιθυμία-desire promises. And, like a thing true to its nature, it delivers.
It’s difficult to go through one’s life with the fine toothed comb, hunting and picking for these emptinesses. But it’s a necessary thing. I hope my experiment with Camp Seneca helps with this process.
“But in the [philosopher’s hall], where the question discussed is: “What is a good man?” and the lesson which we learn is “How to be a good man,” very few are in attendance, and the majority think that even these few are engaged in no good business; they have the name of being empty-headed idler. I hope I may be blessed with that kind of mockery; for one should listen in an unruffled spirit to the railings of the ignorant; when one is marching toward the goal of honour, one should scorn scorn itself.”
The world is a funny place. Commonly, we admire (at least) two types of people based on differing sets of virtues. For regular folks, let’s call them householders for ease, we admire a strong work ethic, monetary and property-based success, family orientation, forthrightness, and politeness. For marginal persons, (and by this I mean holy people, philosophers, etc) we admire the very opposite. We admire their denial of worldly things, oftentimes a celibate (or at least chaste) lifestyle, community focus, and wisdom. We often except these folks from the decorm of politeness, we allow for behaviors and eccentricities which we do not allow in householders.
What’s funny about this, is that we expect a 100% choice. A person living in the world, but no doing the monetary or property success game is seen as odd. Take for instance, the modern Tiny House movement. The folks often have families, usually work in normal jobs, but they’re set apart.
For the average person, someone dedicating a significant portion of their life to these “non-worldly” pursuits is an outlier. As your letter notes, dear Seneca, they are seen as lazy, or (worse yet!) … poor. It’s a strange thing that what we admire in the most extreme sort: monks, nuns, sadhus, priests, etc., becomes a thing of scorn in lesser amounts.
And with this extra time, we’re asking questions about what it means to be good, the bonds and obligations of social and rational creatures, how we can fulfill our place in the cosmos. No small things, these. Lazy, indeed.
Anyway, thank you for the letter, I look forward to the rest of this one.
I realize I actually read a bit ahead yesterday. Mea culpa.
“There await us, if ever we escape from these low dregs to that sublime and lofty height, peace of mind and, when all error has been driven out, perfect liberty. You ask what this freedom is? It means not fearing either men or gods; it means not craving wickedness or excess; it means possessing supreme power over oneself And it is a priceless good to be master of oneself.”
I set about trying look more into the classification of the προκόπτωντες. I wasn’t quite able to hunt down the reference in Epictetus, other than the general fool/sage distinction. Of course, what the vicissitudes of Fate have given us of Chrysippus is scanty at best.
“[I]t is not sufficient merely to commit these things [of our philosophy] to memory, like other matters; they must be practically tested. He is not happy who only knows them, but he who does them.”
— Seneca, Moral Letters, Letter LXXV On the Diseases of the Soul
In your letter, you make a classification of the types of the προκόπτωντες:
Type 1: Not yet wise, but close to. Will not backslide. Unaware of their state. Escaped the disease of the mind, but not the passions.
Type 2: Escaped diseases of the mind, and passions.
Type 3: Beyond the reach of many vices, but not all; namely the most serious ones are left behind.
It seems that the binary between virtue and vice was seen as problematic anciently as well. Or at least more complicated than it might first seem. In this volume, there are footnotes stating that Epictetus and Chrysippus allowed for only Types 1 and 2. I’ll need to look more into that.
At first, I found this portion of Stoic virtue confusing, until I realized something. It seems to me that once one becomes a Sage, there’s no more backsliding. Before I realized that, the idea that virtue for a day is equal to a lifetime confused me.
“Scale down the honorable life as much as you like from the full hundred years, and reduce it to a single day; it is equally honourable.”
How could that be? If there’s no backsliding, then this idea becomes a beacon of hope. If one person becomes Wise instantly, and lives many decades in that state before dying, and another person trains and makes progress for decades, only becoming Wise on the last day of their life, the “goodness” is equivalent.
It’s the inverse of the “drowning by an inch or a mile” issue of vice. Only when I framed it in the context not of the Sage losing something, but as our end result, did this make sense.
Mountain Stoic 
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