1. You have promised to be a good man; you have enlisted under oath; that is the strongest chain which will hold you to a sound understanding. Any man will be but mocking you, if he declares that this is an effeminate and easy kind of soldiering. I will not have you deceived. The word of this most honourable compact are the same as the words of that most disgraceful one, to wit: "Through burning, imprisonment, or death by the sword." 2. From the men who hire out their strength for the arena, who eat and drink what they must pay for with their blood, security is taken that they will endure such trials even though they be unwilling; from you, that you will endure them willingly and with alacrity. The gladiator may lower his weapon and test the pity of the people; but you will neither lower your weapon nor beg for life. You must die erect and unyielding. Moreover, what profit is it to gain a few days or a few years? There is no discharge for us from the moment we are born.
3. "Then how can I [obtain] myself [Quomodo ergo' inquis 'me expediam]?" you ask. You cannot escape necessities, but you can overcome them
By force a way is made.
And this way will be afforded you by philosophy. Betake yourself therefore to philosophy if you would be safe, untroubled, happy, in fine, if you wish to be, – and that is most important, – free. There is no other way to attain this end. 4. Folly is low, abject, mean, slavish, and exposed to many of the cruellest passions. These passions, which are heavy taskmasters, sometimes ruling by turns, and sometimes together, can be banished from you by wisdom, which is the only real freedom. There is but one path leading thither, and it is a straight path; you will not go astray. Proceed with steady step, and if you would have all things under your control, put yourself under the control of reason; if reason becomes your ruler, you will become ruler over many. You will learn from her what you should undertake, and how it should be done; you will not blunder into things. 5. You can show me no man who knows how he began to crave that which he craves. He has not been led to that pass by forethought; he has been driven to it by impulse. Fortune attacks us as often as we attack Fortune. It is disgraceful, instead of proceeding ahead, to be carried along, and then suddenly, amid the whirlpool of events, to ask in a dazed way: "How did I get into this condition?" Farewell--Seneca, Letter 37 (quoted in full), translated by Richard Mott Gummere (with one correction).
According to Seneca wisdom (sapientia) is effective because through reason , an active principle or power, it is capable of ruling (or banishing [dimittit]) the passions. That reason is an active power was famously denied by David Hume (Treatise, 3.1.1.7), who claimed that reason is and should be an instrumental tool, a slave, of the passions (Treatise 2.3.3.4). Famously, Adam Smith responded to Hume by insisting that reason could be an active power (as I document in my book). Of course, the situation is not simple because what 'reason' means may differ among the authors.
But what may escape notice if we focus on these familiar matters is the claim that wisdom is the only (authentic) freedom (sapientia, quae sola libertas est). I add 'authentic' because it is quite clear that for Seneca other things are more usually called 'freedom.' At first sight he seems to anticipate here the view we often find among rationalist-friendly early moderns (certainly in Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz) who claim that acting from reason is freedom (recall this post). And I would not be surprised if Seneca and (Plato-influenced) Stoicism is the source of some such position.
But Seneca's position is not really in the first instance about action.+ In context, Sapientia can be a disposition or an embodied state of affairs that is the consequence or destination of following philosophy's path. And it's that (disposition/embodied state) that is constitutive of freedom. For in that state one has gained oneself because inauthentic desires are purged. Of course, we moderns wouldn't find it authentic at all because for Seneca to be in the state of wisdom, to be free is to lack individuality and personality. Of course, attaining such freedom is manifested in our comportment (lack of fear, lack of cravings) and some of our steadfast actions, so I do not wish to deny it is irrelevant to agency.
This notion of freedom is not altogether uncommon. We do sometime say about some people that they are free souls, by which we do mean that they seem un-peturbed by our ordinary petty concerns (for money, fame, etc.) and anxieties and in virtue of that are capable of meaningful choices. In my view that is, in fact, at the root of Smith's conception of liberty, which, I argued, presupposes a kind of self-ownership that allows one to exercise one's judgment in order to make meaningful choices.
I want to close with a final observation. Seneca also insists that if one is free in this way, ruled by reason, one one may be able to rule over many. This puzzled me because up until now, in his Letters, Seneca had reiterated that the true life of reason, of necessity, turns its back on worldly affairs or, at most, legislates for the future.
But, of course, Seneca is addressing himself to a very particular personality/soul: one that is literally insatiably eager to lord over everything (si vis omnia tibi subicere). To avoid euphemism, this desire to be god-ruler of all is characteristic of an imperial soul. Lucilius is in this sense a generic type. It's hard to avoid thinking of Seneca's failed mentorship of Nero, and not conclude that Seneca shows himself as repeatedly willing to engaging in teaching for extremely high stakes.
+In this post, I ignore Seneca's treatment of the gladiator(s). This deserves more attention (recall Letter 23 and letter 7.)
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